Guest Speaker Reactions: Jackson Wilkinson
M. Jackson Wilkinson is a Strategist at Viget in Northern Virginia, in addition to being a behind the scenes tactician for Refresh DC. First of all, you might be saying to yourself, "What in the hell is a strategist?". A strategist is usually the first face a client sees when starting a web project. It is the job of the strategist to iron out what the client needs and where they are headed, proposing or squashing concepts proposed by the client. A strategist could spend several days without touching a computer (hard to imagine, I know), traveling, and speaking...a lot. A strategist should be an eloquent speaker and not the used car salesman type; you want them to be genuine so your clients walk away feeling appreciative rather than slighted. Jackson is all of this and more. You may also know Jackson from his personal space on the net called http://jounce.net or his award winning employer Viget Labs.
Jackson spoke to the Advanced Web students on October 10th (I know, I'm backlogged on articles) about thinking about the web as functional space rather than simply a canvas. The web has changed drastically from a canvas to a place where users now determine the content of sites with more focus on function. In other words, we want to do things on sites rather than just look at them.
This is now the second year Jackson has spoken to my students and its funny watching their slow-to-come evaluation of Jackson's presentation. It usually comes after the students have listened to Jackson and a few other presentations and then they always reflect on what a good presenter Jackson is. This is insightful and lends itself nicely to explaining why Jackson is a great presenter and how his background and current job are all about speaking to people. Your strategist better be an excellent speaker or you've made a very bad decision in hiring.
I do not have Jackson's presentation but I have the full audio which I will post this weekend.
