September 22 Guests

LAYNE RUSSELL
Layne is a poet, singer-songwriter, and dancer. She is a native Northern Californian, born in Chico and raised in Redding. Layne received her degree in English from California State University, Chico, where she studied poetry and creative writing with George Keithley. She did post-graduate work in Religious Studies at CSU, Chico, and in the arts and Religious Studies at Naropa Institute, Boulder, Colorado. While living in Vancouver, she studied and performed with local and touring minimalistdancers and multimedia artists. Layne’s meditative, metaphysical background and orientation comes through subtly and naturally in her writing; her poems reveal the inherent beauty and consciousness in everyday life. Also, being a dancer and musician, Layne writes with a heightened, rich sense of sound and rhythm. Layne is an award winning poet; her publications include Last Visit, a collection of poems inspired by her mother who died in 1994, A Quiet Place, and Into the Dark Mountain, a collection of mountain poetry and haiku.

CHASE MCMICHAEL
Chase has over 15 years of senior level product development and management experience in consumer messaging and marketing technologies, including social media, advertising software and collaboration. While at UNBOUND he created the world’s largest social marketing database, receiving the Viral Hall of Fame from award Marketing Sherpa in 08 and many blogs/news inclusion in the field of Social Intelligence.  At Oracle Corporation, Chase managed the Real Time Collaboration and Instant Messaging services in Oracle10g. While working for Sprint, he created the Enhanced Messaging Services (EMS) and launched Instant Messaging services.  He served as Vice President of Product Development – Internet Services for Chase Manhattan Bank and developed a direct marketing, ad serving, and sales engine that leveraged user feedback.  He began his career in a research position at the Texas Center for Superconductivity and holds a B.S. in Physic from the University of Houston.  He is inventor or co-inventor on 13 U.S. patents. His specialties include social intelligence, affinity/viral database marketing, and social ad targeting programs.

MURRAY NEWLANDS
Murray is a respected digital marketing advisor who works to bring the best results to his clients. He works with companies as well as individuals and specializes in content marketing, blogging, email marketing, podcasting, social media, search engine optimization, and outreach programs to provide his clients with a complete armory of digital marketing strategies.  Newlands also speaks at major events including Affiliate Summit in Europe. He also speaks in the US about different marketing strategies such as inbound marketing, social marketing, affiliate marketing, and content marketing. Newlands was a former lawyer, before he began working in online marketing in 1999 and has worked with top agencies and advertisers in the industry ever since. He also was one of the founding members of the London Blog Club, along with several other new media events in the UK. He now has a popular website, which includes his infamous blog, at http://murraynewlands.com.

MARK SCHMULEN
Mark is the General Manager of Social Media at Constant Contact, a company that provide Email marketing software used to create professional HTML email campaigns. Mark is responsible for guiding Constant Contact’s social media product strategy and external education efforts. Prior to Constant Contact, Mark served as CEO of NutshellMail, a social media monitoring solution that is now part of Constant Contact¹s suite of online marketing tools. Says Mark of his products “We started NutshellMail to help solve the problem of social network overload. As part of the Constant Contact family, we’re going to help some of the busiest people on the planet, small business owners, turn what might seem like social media chaos into a smart marketing tool for growing their business. It’s like a DVR for your social networking activity.”