Sarah Milstein

Happily between gigs right now, Sarah Milstein was until recently UBM TechWeb's GM & Co-chair for Web 2.0 Expo. She's also co-author, with Tim O'Reilly, of The Twitter Book and a frequent speaker on social media for business. Previously, she was on the senior editorial staff at O'Reilly Media, where she founded Tools of Change for Publishing (TOC) and led development of the Missing Manuals. Before joining O'Reilly in 2003, Sarah was a freelance writer and editor, and a regular contributor to The New York Times. She was also the CSA program founder for Just Food, a local-food-and-farms non-profit, and co-founder of Two Tomatoes Records, a label that distributes and promotes the work of children's musician Laurie Berkner. She holds a B.A. from Rutgers University and an M.B.A. from U.C. Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Bonus fact: she was the 21st user of Twitter.

Think of it like a political campaign: Baratunde Thurston's book marketing

Inside the promotion of "How To Be Black."

Make it easy for people to help you — that’s a simple but oft-overlooked concept that author Baratunde Thurston says is essential to book marketing. He shares additional marketing tips and tools in this interview.

How Twitter helps a small bookstore thrive

Omnivore Books follows a simple Twitter rule: 1/3 personal, 2/3 professional.

Learn how Omnivore Books, a cookbook store in San Francisco, uses Twitter to solidify relationships with customers and break through the publisher blockade.

Would I attend my own conference?

Why conferences need more diversity.

Conferences that want to be taken seriously by people who take other kinds of people seriously need more diversity among the speakers.

Hot Topics, Sharp Questions

Bring your eyeballs! Over on the Web 2.0 Expo blog, Kaitlin Pike is posting one compelling piece after another. Brady and I, co-chairs for Web 2.0 Expo, did the easy part: we lined up speakers for the March show in SF. Now Kaitlin, community manager for Web 2.0 Expo, is doing the hard part: conducting and writing up useful interviews….

Web 2.0 Expo makes the move to Midtown

To better align the venue with our vision for Web 2.0 Expo New York and our attendees’ needs, we’re moving to the Sheraton Hotel & Towers in midtown. It’s better suited to fostering the kinds of connections we care about and, excitingly, it lets us hold evening program onsite. Learn more about what we have planned.

What's the Secret to Submitting a Great Conference Proposal?

You may know that we hold Web 2.0 Expo NY in the fall. But here's something that may surprise you: the drop-dead deadline for submitting a proposal is next Monday (April 12). In the past, we've extended the deadline a week, but we don't have time for that this year. For a lot of people, that means a big scramble…

What Would Jane Austen Have Twittered?

After the recent Web 2.0 Expo NY–a sprawling, week-long conference and exhibition–I ducked into the Morgan Library to catch “A Woman’s Wit: Jane Austen’s Life and Legacy.” A one-room show about an 18th century novelist seemed like the perfect antidote to a week of tech talk in the Death Star Javits Center. As I’d hoped, the Morgan focuses on a handful of objects from Austen’s life, and the commentary is thoughtful. I was surprised, though, to find myself thinking that had Twitter been around in Austen’s time (1775-1817), she would likely have been a fan.

Web2Open: An Exciting Experiment

As I've written here recently, we've got some amazing sessions scheduled for Web2Open–the free unconference hosted by Web 2.0 Expo in SF this week. One that I'm particularly excited about is a new experiment, "Practice Your Customer Pitch." We're bringing in five startups who will get two minutes each to give their customer pitch (not their VC pitch), as if…

Web2Open: Great Sessions, Recessionary Pricing

Next week is Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, a four-day mind meld for programmers, practitioners and novitiates. The Expo is co-produced by O'Reilly and TechWeb, who, for the third year in a row, are devoting resources and a row of rooms to Web2Open–a free, two-day unconference that anyone can attend. The Open, April 1 and 2 at Moscone West,…

Twitter Drives Traffic, Sales: A Case Study

Back in December, Dell reported that offers from its Dell Outlet Twitter account had led to more than $1 million in revenue. A small percentage for a company that books $16B in revenue annually–but a nice number nonetheless, particularly in a dreary economy. Question is: are they the only ones? I haven't yet found anyone else claiming to have micromessaged…