Matt Lawrence
Biznik Director of Community

I help create relationships for Bizniks to explore their full business potential. Biznik offers the unique mixture of an online and face to face experience. Members hold the future of the Biznik Community in their hands. My role is to offer support to Bizniks along the way to help make the community as supportive and enriching as possible. What I find most intriguing about this community is how deep article and Biztalk comments go. So frequently, the insights that are 10, 20, 30+ comments deep are what make the original seed of an article so worthwhile. Then again sometimes not. But that is what makes this community interesting and compelling. The connections which are made in the depth of those discussions, and how the thousands of readers who may have read your comment, but did not comment themselves is amazing. What I do here will be largely shaped by what you do here. So send me a message. Tell me what is on your mind. Let's get talking.

The major theme in my life is connection. I got a job in high school at the camera shop to connect with people through photography. Capturing still images of people in their place drove me to film. Still images stunned me, but I wanted to see more. I wanted movies. I saw the Maysles brothers film "Salesmen" at too early of an age. The possibility of making film which, on so many levels displayed human motivation and sadness moved me to a life of filmmaking and watching. Friends and I got an old Howell 8 mm film camera and began to make animation, which ultimately led to me taking reels and reels of film, mostly of my family and friends. Later in life I studied documentary, not because I had a story I was burning to tell, but because I wanted to capture other people's stories. And through their stories, I found myself represented.

Columbia College Chicago, BA in Video

I have been in the customer service sector my entire professional life. There are few of us who haven't. To me it doesn't matter what you do, it's who you are!