Consulting

Fast Wonder Consulting

Currently accepting new clients.

Fast Wonder provides consulting services for companies wanting to engage with online communities through various social media technologies including discussion forums, blogs, wikis, podcasts, and more. Consulting services include online community building, blogging strategy, RSS-based information monitoring, custom employee training sessions, and more. You might also be interested in these resources to get off on the right foot with a few best practices.

What people say about Fast Wonder and Dawn Foster

  • ReadWriteWeb’s Seven Social Media Consultants That Deliver Tangible Value: “Fast Wonder is quickly gathering value through work with bleeding edge projects like the pseudo-stealth location-based social network Shizzow.”
  • Non-profit client: “Your approach resonates with folks, and it was money well spent.”
  • Fortune 100 technology client: “I think it’s great. I love the Dr. Seuss interludes. Thanks again for a great presentation.”

Standard Consulting Packages

  • The Community Strategy and Planning Kickstart: This package is for companies wanting to create a new community or improve the engagement with an existing community, but who aren’t quite sure where to start. Fast Wonder will spend four to six hours with you (in one block or spread out over several sessions) to talk about your strategy and brainstorm ideas for your community. Approximately a week later, a high level implementation strategy and plan outline will be delivered. After receiving the strategy and plan outline, you can decide whether to engage Fast Wonder to assist with the initial implementation, or you can take the plan and complete the work in house.
  • Blogging Kickstart: Companies who need to create a company blog or revive a neglected blog can benefit from this package designed to put a focus on creating a regular stream of great blog content. Fast Wonder will work with your key employees to come up with a content roadmap containing blog post topics and deadlines for a period of one month. During this month, Fast Wonder will provide monitoring dashboards, coaching, writing help, encouragement and feedback to the company’s bloggers to get them started on the right track. This package also includes coaching for the person who will become responsible for maintaining the content roadmap after the completion of one month consulting engagement.
  • Ongoing Community Planning and Implementation Assistance: Companies building a new community who need extended assistance with strategy, planning, implementation, configuration, training, and management can benefit from this service. Fast Wonder will help you through all aspects of the community building process from setting the initial objectives all the way through the first months of the launch. You can engage with Fast Wonder for the entire community building process or for individual elements of the plan. This is a flexible package with as much or as little help as you need depending on the expertise of your staff.
  • Social Media and Social Networking Presence: If your company is relatively new to social media and social networking, Fast Wonder can help you figure out the best way to participate to achieve your company’s objectives. We will work together to determine the best places to participate, create your presence on those sites, get your employees set up with accounts, and train your staff on the best ways to engage in those environments.
  • Yahoo Pipes Training: We are available for Yahoo Pipes training for your organization. In 2 hours, we will cover the basics of building Yahoo Pipes and provide some custom content if needed to help meet the specific needs of your organization.

Custom Consulting Formats

  • Hourly: If you are just looking for some quick feedback about an idea or want some general information about any of the above topics, you can purchase hourly blocks of consulting time for as little as one hour.
  • Ongoing engagements: Longer-term consulting engagements for ongoing social media, community building, or monitoring efforts.
  • Also open to other consulting formats as needed.

Areas of Expertise

Online Community Building

  • Building a community around your products
  • Managing communities
  • Open source communities
  • Assistance with interviewing and hiring a community manager

Social Media

  • Blogging strategy and implementation guidance
  • Social networking presence (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)

Information Monitoring and Industry Intelligence

  • Using various RSS tools and Monitoring Dashboards to monitor what people are saying about you, your company, competitors, and the industry.

Training and Speaking

  • Customized training for employees on a variety of community engagement and social media topics.
  • Speaking engagements.

Why Should I Hire Fast Wonder?

Dawn Foster is a Community Manager, Event Organizer, Blogger, Podcaster, and Technology Enthusiast. She has more than 13 years of experience in technology and software with expertise in social media, blogging, podcasting, rss, community building, web 2.0, and open source software.

Dawn is the author of the Fast Wonder Blog and is currently working on a book for O’Reilly Media about the Art of Community. She is a co-founder and Chair of Legion of Tech. She also organizes a monthly Legion of Tech Happy Hour event for local technology employees, is an organizer for the Portland BarCamp event, and helps organize Ignite Portland.

Previously, Dawn worked at Jive Software, Compiere, Intel, and a Midwestern manufacturing company in positions ranging from Unix system administrator to market researcher to community manager to open source strategist. She holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Kent State University and a master’s degree in business administration from Ashland University.

You can read Dawn’s Fast Wonder Blog to learn more about her ideas, and you can find links to Dawn’s many projects and accomplishments on her ClaimID site.

Contact Information

The best way to contact Dawn Foster at Fast Wonder:

Fast Wonder LLC
4110 SE Hawthorne #131
Portland, OR 97214
503-702-7223