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Back to my Roots: The Ladies who Launch Conference

For the past year now, I've spoken quite often about crossing the chasm between advertisers and bloggers. Earlier this year I was asked to sit on a panel for a Ladies Who Launch event in San Francisco to speak about, well, me, and my entrepreneurial journey--such a departure to discussing the merits of blogging, or the power of word-of-mouth marketing!

And yet, this event appealed to me in a way the others didn't. It reminded me of my days of yore, when I actually wrote about the seeds of creation, what brought me to starting a business with Lisa and Elisa, a pivotal time when your foundation for moving forward is built. A time when your previous world has blown up--it has to be blown up, or you'll spend too much energy trying to keep the past intact and not moving forward.

The event was not in any way a traditional conference-like format. Sure, there were panels and interviews, but in back were small businesses selling merchandise and lots of shopping. It turned me off initially--why do we always assume that if women are involved we need to have jewlery and cute things lining the place? But as I got to speaking to the women in the booths I realized they were a re-enforcement of the message behind this event: Anything is possible, and we can help each other get there. What better way of telling the story of your business than having your business brought to the event?

I spoke on a panel of media experts, including the hilarious Randy Peyser, CEO of her own business and author of Crappy to Happy, and The Write-a-Book Program: How to Position Yourself as an Expert by Writing a Book, and the epitome of Chutzpah. She told her story of following her dream and having nothing to show for it initially--except for a single box of baking soda in the fridge (been there!)--she opted to stand out on the highway with a sign "Editor seeking publisher." Incidentally, it worked.

The lesson from her story: It usually takes an act of faith (and insanity) to make a dream happen. And by the way, I could tell that being crazy was not a typical thing in Randy's life; she had to aspire to being crazy. A lot of people think that some people are born with the crazy gene and some aren't. I subscribe to a different theory, we are all born meant to be awake and alive, and those who go through this life without asking themselves if they are passionate about what they do are the ones who are crazy.

When asked about advice I had to making an entrepreneurial vision happen, I had a fairly amorphous answer; this is what I wanted to say: We are born with an obligation to ourselves to do what we are meant to do. Seeing our lives failing to commit to ourselves is often what pushes us over the edge. Personally, I couldn't stand myself any longer, and neither could the people who worked next to me. I brooded and complained once a quarter about not being utilized fully. Be warned: expect to be utilized on the entrepreneurial journey, OVER-utilized, in fact. Expect to have to do some outlandish things like get on airplanes and talk about things like you are the expert. Realize you are the expert and just do them.

Also on the panel is a woman I've been wanting to meet for quite some time--Kate Everett Thorp of Real Girls Media. Being the head of a digital media company, I thought I knew her story, but I didn't. Hearing Kate describe how her mother was instrumental to helping her commit to things at a young age, and how her husband left his work as an engineer to take care of their three children, I realized there are no easy peasy ways of becoming an entrepreneur. Some of us sacrifice more than others, some of us get funded sooner, but none of us had an easy ride. None of us did this without help. The more we tell our stories, the more we free up other women to take the plunge.

A handful of women came up to me, I had assumed, to ask me about blogging. Some did want advice. And three asked me, with shyness, what's a blog? I had to laugh appreciatively; I came equipped to tell of how blogging would increase entrepreneurs' visibility, but it seemed that my expertise was less interesting than my experience. The part I don't share in keynotes--how freaking hard it is to start something no one has done before. Working through uncertainty and learning much more about what you want through discovering what doesn't work for you.

One woman approached me whom I hadn't seen in years. I found it ironic that she'd approached me, since years ago I'd seen her speak, and later she'd become one of my inspirations. In fact, I wrote about her when I embarked on a previous entrepreneurial journey. Here's a snippet:

From the Back Fence to Blogs--My talk this week at the Marketing to Moms Conference

I'm super duper excited about this keynote. I may not be a Mom, but I spend a lot of time talking to companies about them. We know moms hold the purse strings, and we know Moms are Word of Mouth machines, but what's the key to reaching them?

I will be presenting stats that show:

• Women--in particular, Moms--have migrated online for social interaction.
• We are enormously influential online--we recommend, praise, vent, and convince our friends to try things.
• We are not driven by money but by credibility; help us maintain or increase our reputations online and we'll listen to you.

Many thanks to the ladies on the State of the Momosphere panel at this year's BlogHer conference--Lena Lotsey, Catherine Connors, and Chris Jordan--and to Stefania Butler for their fabulous insights and candidness on what works when marketing to Moms and what doesn't. You've equipped me with the goods. And thanks to Mizz Jenn Satterwhite for the fab re-cap of the panel to which I've linked here.

If you are going to be at M2M this week in Chicago, say hello! And if you are in San Francisco this Friday the 26th for the Ladies Who Launch conference and you have chocolate on-hand or know where we can find some, please do sit down with me.

Did you know that iPod Shuffles are Waterproof?

Neither did I. But I just did a load of laundry and realized I didn't remove mine from my sweatshirt.

I just charged it--and it works!

Don't try this at home.

Notes from the Stream Event in Athens

So once in a while I attend an event that I can say rivals BlogHer in personality (never beats, of course, just rivals). Stream07 was a special event hosted by Martin Sorrell of WPP and tech entrepreneur Yossi Vardi. When I decided to go to this event, I thought, cool, I'll get to see John Bell and Alison Byrne Fields of Ogilvy's 360 Group, go to Greece, and talk incessantly about women and blogging. What I didn't expect was that I would have one of those coming-home experiences that helped remind me why I got involved with a bunch of geeks in the first place.

Stream was not your typical prove-that-we-get-the-new-media-thing-event, but more the decent-looking love child of well-meaning, progressive marketers and devout geeks. Throw in a few European Club Med employees who ensured you were always so very happeee and it was like attending summer camp with an open bar. I had fun, I evangelized, and I learned a lot.

Yossi Vardi hosts an event like Stream in his native Israel, and he brought the quirky, holistic approach to this event. There was a gadgethon one night, which--truth be told--I wondered if anyone would participate in. Shame on me, thinking that no one would shlep gadgets with them half-way around the world. The Israelis are fairly close to Greece geographically and brought robots, instruments, and a fun sense of humor. Dan Dubno, former tech virtuoso at CBS, brought more hardware than you'd see at a Best Buy. A European's contribution of an automated, er, male sexual enhancer met with disapproval from the oddly knowledgeable digital evangelist Peter Hirshberg: "That was around, like, five years ago," he said.

This was a crowd to be reckoned with. It seemed everyone was up to something. I met an entrepreneur named Rob Stokes who moved from Cape Town to London to grow his marketing company, Quirk eMarketing, nine years ago. Caroline Slootweg, director of digital marketing for Unilever, who has worked in mulitple countries and an excitement for conversational marketing that is refreshing. A venture capitalist named William Bao Bean who left Silicon Valley in 2002 and now heads up a fund in China. A bunch of slackers, all of them.

Yossi reminded everyone to leave their business titles at the door. Of course, that's hard to do when we're all there for business, but I found it quite easy to talk shop, then make myself and Peter Friedman s'mores, negotiate having a 1 a.m. burrito from chief strategist and temporary chef Kurt David Kratchman, and dance with Mike Lundgren from VML and Michele Azar at Best Buy until 4am. These people have kids and more energy than me; I had no excuse to let them down.

I learned from Bob Gilbreath that we can market with meaning (actually I knew that already from BlogHer, but now I have a framework by which to describe what we do).

I learned that Andrew Keen isn't the devil--he just played one on The Colbert Report. His session on how Web 2.0 is destroying traditional media was interesting indeed, albeit, limited. I agree, there's shlock everywhere, but this ain't limited to social media. WE didn't start the obsession with Britney or Paris, we only got there after the fact. We don't replace, or threaten, traditional media, we hold it accountable, and we get into those hard-to-reach places where marketers are trying to have substantial conversations.

I learned from Katharina that being a woman in digital media editorial is still a rough thing. Apparently some people still have trouble accepting that women are able to do things like read, write, and innovate. Her stories of the sexual insults she received when she became the internet editor for the WAZ Mediengruppe is all-too-similar to the madness Kathy Sierra experienced earlier this year.

Most important, I learned that I can live with minimal bandwidth. Not very long, mind you, but a couple of days before I starve from Internet deprivation.