Melanie Baker is a community manager by trade, and currently a Social Advocate on the Analytics team at Google. She can help you prove that Twitter and Facebook do make money. Unfortunately, she can't help answer questions about Chromebooks, why your search for wiener dog hats failed, or why you sometimes get silly ads in GMail.

Prior to joining Google via acquisition in June, 2011, Melanie was community manager for three years at PostRank, a Waterloo web analytics startup. When she started, she wasn't really sure exactly what a community manager did, but all her friends agreed that the job was a perfect fit and that she already did all that stuff. Turned out that after many years in the insurance biz, a small startup with very geeky culture and the opportunity to interact with people all over the world online suited her very well.

Melanie's professional background has including working on web, marketing, e-commerce, and QA teams, all of which she credits for making her proactive, an astute observer, and proficient at working with a wide variety of people. She has a particular fondness for working with geeks, even when they make her feel old, and loves to confuse them by revealing that she once went to theatre school. 

While she is aware that she grew up without the Internet, she has difficulty recalling how she ever lived without it, and is eternally grateful for all the fabulous people, experiences, and opportunities it's brought. Melanie also knows it's important to go outside sometimes, and in her spare time enjoys running, reading, baking, and making sockmonkeys.

Melanie will be talking about geek-centric vs. non-geek-centric company cultures, and how respect for work, communications, and an understanding of personality and work styles can lead to greater harmony and productivity among geeks and non-geeks in your workplace.