Content Strategy Bay Area Meetup 5 Year Anniversary Party

That's right! It's been five years and 42 meetups since Michael and I hosted the first event at Zebulon, since demolished. While 7 of the 18 people who RSVP'd yes to that event are no longer members of our community, more than 1,750 others are.

We're excited to celebrate all that we've done together as a group. We've hosted speakers that have included Kristina Halvorson, Karen McGrane and Margot Bloomstein; learned directly from practitioners at events hosted by Facebook, Pinterest, eBay and more; and held Meetups on everything from content strategy for cities to transmedia storytelling to a show and tell of deliverables.

During these five years, we've seen content strategy grow from something people had mostly just heard of (only two of the attendees at that first Meetup were practicing under the title of content strategist) to something many of us are thrilled to call a career.

In fact, over the last five years, we've seen a proliferation of opportunities for content strategists—in agencies, in-house, and notably within tech, working on everything from a company CMS to content marketing plans to writing interface copy that millions of people see every day. If you search "content strategy" on LinkedIn (which itself is hiring content strategists), you'll find more than 900 listings in the SF Bay Area alone.

So yeah, let's celebrate the friendships this group has sparked, the networking, the learning, the opportunities. And let's celebrate content strategy itself, a role that we've watched become a real, viable, engaging opportunity that is directly responsible for making the lives of people on the other side of those strategies better, making interfaces more understandable, making organizations at the very least seem more empathetic to the people using their products, and making businesses more successful at reaching people with useful, engaging, meaningful content.

Come on out, let us buy you a drink, and let's mingle and talk about what we do.

See you on the 18th!