Archive for the 'social networks' Category
September 9, 2008
I’m sure many of you have noticed that I haven’t been blogging as much recently. It’s not due to lack of desire, but due to lack of time and mental energy. I have a full list of topic ideas I want to blog about, but by the end of the day after interesting and bureaucratically taxing events, kids, dinner, husband, baths, teeth brushing, catching up on Babble Soft stuff and personal emails, I feel pretty dazed.
I have blog posts floating around in my head with rarely enough thoughtful time to get them down in a post. Fortunately, I have had some timely guest posters who have filled in some of the gaps.
I can’t say I’ll be able to get to a blogging pace (in the near future) that can keep up with my blogging ideas given my current schedule and life situation, but so far I’ve done a better job at posting than Marc Andreessen, founder of Ning and formerly Netscape, who hasn’t consistently blogged since May 2008! But he’s running a heavily venture backed company so I’m guessing he has just a few more people breathing down his neck than I do.
I’m glad I’m not in his shoes right now in this economy, with the news constantly talking about the questionable results of social networks from a business model perspective, and with some of the widget partner issues his company is facing. But Marc’s a tried and true entrepreneur so I’m sure he and his team will figure something out. If not, he is a millionaire and married to a millionaire so chances are they won’t be out on the streets any time soon.
Yep, it’s all relative and I’m thankful for the opportunities I’ve been given and the opportunities yet to come. Thank you to all of you loyal readers for sticking around!
UPDATE: On an interesting note, Seth Godin, the famous author and blogger on marketing tips & ideas, did a post on September 10 called How often should you publish? and in it he says: “Key assertion: you don’t publish it unless it’s good. You don’t write more blog posts than you can support, don’t ship more variations of that software than your engineers can make marvelous.” So I guess my haphazard blogging is OK because it fits what I can support!
May 2, 2008
I was planning to write a post updating everyone on our search engine optimization experience today but the real world injected itself with a sick kid at home. High fever and rescheduling meetings doesn’t leave much time for writing long, heavy posts. Plus I had to sneak in a nap in the afternoon while our daughter napped since we didn’t get much sleep the night before. 
So instead, while my husband takes care of the kids this evening, I thought I’d write a post on the example of an unanticipated, viral marketing story with a mom twist. So here it goes…
Once upon a time I met a friend on the Internet. I found her blog and commented away. After some time, we realized we had similar visions and she invited me do a guest post on her blog called Entrepreneurship: A Blessing or a Curse. We kept in touch, spoke on the phone a few times about ways to work together, became twitter pals, and finally met in person at SXSW here in Austin back in March and clicked even more.
While at SXSW she got further proof of what she already knew which was that the name of her blog, then called eMoms at Home, was not really reflective of the demographics of her readers and would-be readers so she had a mini-meltdown, picked herself up and came up with a cool new name called Sparkplugging! Since she was and still is an advocate of entrepreneurs and especially those who work from home, her cool, new name opens the door wide open to many of us who are moms or not but like to spark up ideas and play with them until something happens.
So after SXSW, she went home and saw a post about dads on twitter and decided to do one for moms. Within hours she got tons of replies and created a post called The Ultimate List of Moms on Twitter that started with 250 moms. I commented and subscribed to comments on that post and every day new moms would leave a comment with their twitter name until May 1, 2008 that is. Twitter sent out an email to everyone yesterday, May 1, and in it they included:
Mother’s Day: On The Way
We’ve noticed a trend of parents twittering the moments of their baby’s birth so we know there are some new moms on Twitter. Are you a mom on Twitter? Is your own mom on Twitter? Maybe you even made “The Ultimate List of Moms on Twitter”? Mother’s Day is just around the corner so don’t forget to @reply the moms you know with a thoughtful phrase–but keep it under 140 characters, moms are busy people.
List of Moms on Twitter: http://tinyurl.com/6cxgp5
And today I had 150+ comments in my inbox and they are still coming. Now she has close to 400 comments on that one post! Did she do anything extraordinary to make it happen? Not really. Did she tell people on twitter about it? Yes, of course. Did she know others would tell and re-tell more people about the list? Possibly. Did she know twitter would pick it up in their mass email to everyone? Doubtful (but I don’t know what went on behind the scenes). So in hindsight what played in her favor to have a post she wrote on April 8 (before her name change) take on a life of its own? Here’s what I think:
- She took the initiative to do something that ended up being quite time consuming, but she saw from the responses it resonated with hundreds of moms on twitter that it was a worthwhile endeavor.
- She told her friends about it who re-tweeted and blogged about it.
- The tweeters kept the link going within twitter and in the blogosphere.
- Mother’s Day was around the corner and the guys (I think they are all men) at twitter saw the activity and might have said to themselves “Hmmm. How can we mention a major holiday, get brownie points with our wives/mothers, and promote twitter at the same time” and voila a mention was born!
UPDATE: I sent a link to @Biz to this post and he informed me there are several women who work at twitter! So of course I followed them. Here is his tweet:
biz @aruni awesome! I included the moms list because it was noteworthy - also, women who work at Twitter: @crystal @krissy @alissa @lane @sara
In case you haven’t guessed who this friend is, it’s Wendy Piersall. I guess only Wendy can tell us if she planned all of this, but to me it’s another example of viral marketing that in hindsight makes sense but when started, the current result would have been highly unpredictable.
To me, this is why it is so hard to orchestrate a viral campaign. You can plan everything down to the “t” and still not have it work out the way you wanted. It’s hard to predict when there are so many variables. You can also just do something you enjoy doing that helps others and see a “spark” turn into a flame! Way to go Wendy! 
Oh and by the way, I am @aruni and Wendy is @eMom on twitter…
Posted by Aruni
7:00 pm •
entrepreneur,
entrepreneurship,
mom,
mother,
mother's day,
networking,
seo,
social networks,
success,
working mom,
working mother •
January 14, 2008
I’m making some progress on my personal 2008 goals. I signed up for yoga and have lost between .5 and 1 pound. Regarding my business goals, I’m still working on the executive summary, financial projections, visuals, and finding an attorney in order to raise funds. If all goes well documents will be substantially ready by end of next week, and I’ll be well on my way to finding the perfect lawyer…if that’s even possible.
Posting will be light over the next few weeks so in the meantime please check out the Work It, Mom! interview of me where they asked me the following questions:
- What inspired you to become an entrepreneur?
- You’ve written that you and the other founder of your first company were “washed out.” How did you recover from that? Was it hard to jump back into the entrepreneurial game after that experience?
- Many women entrepreneurs have mentioned that they felt they were not taken as seriously as businesswomen once people knew their companies were geared toward mothers. Has this been your experience?
- What lessons from your first company are you applying to your second?
- What’s most challenging part of your working-mom juggle?
- What advice would you give a working mom who is trying to start her own company? What pitfalls would you tell her to avoid?
- You have a great general attitude — what motivates you besides, well, creating a super-successful company?
Then pop on over to Thom Singer’s Some Assembly Required blog and check out my guest post on Building your e-Network where I expand on the following tips:
- Do what you say you will do when you say you will do it.
- When someone reaches out to you for help, answer them.
- Build and foster trust by being consistent.
December 30, 2007
A fascinating thing happened to me and many a folk on Twitter last week. I went from 30 followers to over 175 followers worldwide in just over 24 hours all because of a woman known as @SusanReynolds. Susan blogs at Artsy Asylum and started a new blog called Boobs on Ice to document her journey fighting breast cancer. A woman who I have mentioned frequently on my blog, Connie Reece, helped start a campaign called the Frozen Pea Fund. You can see a great interview of Connie on this particular topic called PEAS and Passion on Thom Singer’s blog. Connie also helped start Frozen Pea Friday where people change their twitter avatars to “peavatars” in support of Susan Reynolds and to build awareness of the Frozen Pea Fund.
As I mentioned in my Social Media Mania - What’s A Gal to Do? post I joined Twitter on December 13, 2007. Near the end of last week, I saw @lizstrauss, @princess-belle and others making challenges that they will donate money to the Frozen Pea Fund if twitterdom would help them get to X number of followers within a certain time period. I decided to join in late on December 27 and put forth the challenge of 175 to donate $50. I had 30 followers at the time. It was down to the wire but just as midnight was closing here in US CST on December 28 a tweet went out to some Aussie twitter folk and I ended up with close to 180!
I would have donated even if I didn’t make it to 175. I was having so much FUN seeing people take action based on 140 character or less tweets to help fight cancer, a worthy cause. Talk about instant gratification for almost all parties involved! I donated my $50 right then and there. To me, the Frozen Pea Fund endeavor has been the best example of a social media campaign I have seen or been a part of. Kudos to people like @conniereece for taking the time to show us how social media can be used to make a difference!
Now I’m going to see if twitter can help me find a good reference for a beginner yoga class to take in 2008. I’ve got a lot to do in 2008 and Yoga will be a big part of it. I even saw that they are offering a Deepak Chopra Center Yoga Retreat at the Crossings in March.
If you’d like to follow me on twitter, you can find me @aruni. If you’d like to see how I figure out how attempt to use social media to help build awareness of my company, Babble Soft, you might want to subscribe to this blog’s feed. If you have any suggestions on how to reach our target market, please don’t hesitate to send me your ideas…they are always welcome!
Happy New Year! Oh and don’t forget to donate to the Frozen Pea Fund…
December 13, 2007
Wendy at eMoms at Home did a post recently where she asked her readers “How do you Use Social Media to Promote Your Business?“ I didn’t have time to answer then and I’m sure I missed out on the free books, which is OK because I never seem to have time to read any books these days. I’ve had a few days off from software testing, so I figured I’d do a post about it.
There are so many aspects to social media that it’s tough for an entrepreneur to keep up. I mean we still have to sleep! Fortunately, I’m fairly social. I mentioned on a post that Liz Strauss did recently called Business and Life: Are You Making the Most of the Conversation? that “I am a Participant, rarely a Lurker, and often a Listener.”
It is fun making friends all over the world and it’s easy to be social from behind your computer when it fits with your schedule. In the past I resisted joining sites like facebook because of the time commitment.
To do a social network right, I figure it means committing significant time to it. When you are launching a start-up, planning to raise funds, taking care of kids, maintaining a house, etc., it’s not easy to be as active as one should be in these networks over time. But so far it’s been fascinating to see how other people interact with the networks. I mean can you believe that facebook has over 55 million users all over the world? That is amazing! So here’s what I’ve done and what I’ve observed:
I started this blog (it had a different name before) with the help of Connie Reece. She gave me the kick start I needed! I think I did my first post back in May 2007. The blog has been fun and I know it has driven some additional traffic to my company site, Babble Soft, but to date I haven’t seen that it’s resulted in more than just a few additional sales. As a result of having a blog, I joined MyBlogLog, FeedBurner, Technorati, StumbleUpon, Digg, and BlogHer. Wendy was also kind enough to invite me to join the Home Business & Entrepreneur FeedBurner Ad Network. I haven’t made much money from these particular ad networks (maybe in total $100) but it has given me exposure to other bloggers and made me aware of other businesses.
I entered some competitions to hopefully win prizes and get additional exposure. I can’t remember all of them but I know I did one at Alpha Moms and I just entered Intuit’s Just Start challenge where I have the potential to win $50K for my business! The ‘vote for me’ widget will be on the right hand side of my blog until shortly after their voting deadline of December 16. After I sent an email to some friends asking if they would vote for me, I found out that people had to log in to do so. Knowing how much I hate to create unnecessary logins, my guess is that I won’t win on votes, but I might win in the unique idea category and because we have jokingly referred to our Baby Insights application as “Quicken for Baby.”
I have participated in some blog memes: 8 Random Things About Me and Blogging Tip Meme. Neena just tagged me again for a My Favorite Words theme. Memes give you exposure but they are time consuming so I think after doing this last meme, I will have to put a notice somewhere to let people know not to tag me unless they let me know first because I would hate to leave a meme go unanswered. I’m answering the Favorite Word meme by bolding my favorite words in this post (in case you were wondering why some of the words are in bold text). Isabella at Change Therapy I hope that’s OK with you! What do these words say about me? I guess that I’m a driven, committed, somewhat zany, looking to learn, searching for connection/peace, sleep deprived, mom-ified, and sometimes creative.
I joined LinkedIn. I’ve found LinkedIn to be useful for business related networking…for answers to specific questions. I haven’t yet established a deal or attempted to look for employees there which I hear is what it’s meant for. I’ve been able to answer a few questions on LinkedIn but I don’t think I’ve contributed to the increase of anyone’s business yet.
I joined facebook. Mostly to learn from the king of social networking sites. I may do some targeted ads there some day when time and money permit. I also set up a company page on facebook for Babble Soft.
I engaged a full service SEO/SEM firm.
I just joined twitter. I even added the little widget to my sidebar, and I integrated it with facebook. I really resisted joining twitter. I had no idea why anyone would be interested in my day to day activities. More importantly I didn’t think I would be interested in anyone else’s day to day activities! I already have about 20 followers. You may be wondering what pushed me over the edge and made me join twitter…well it was the Duran Duran concert I attended earlier this week. I was there and I suddenly thought ‘wouldn’t it be great if I could tell my friends and random strangers about the fact I’m at this cool concert?’ and then all of a sudden I “got” twitter! Will it result in additional business? I’m not sure. Time will tell.
I have not yet joined MySpace or YouTube (but I’ve been to the site many times). If I had to guess, I will probably join YouTube before MySpace, but first I need to create some videos!
Overall, I think I’m still at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to building a powerful online network and I’m a little bit afraid of getting in too deep and getting stuck in a networking hole somewhere. I’m not sure if that makes sense to anyone, but it’s a fear I face nonetheless. Maybe I’ll find peace there instead.
December 1, 2007
As I mentioned in a previous post (that Robert Scoble himself commented on!) I finally set up my own personal facebook account. After reading a post by Fred Wilson (the big-wig NY venture capitalist) about people setting up fake company facebook pages, I figured I should act quickly and add a Babble Soft page…before some ‘bad guys’ (as my 5 year old would say) decided to co-opt a parent/baby related site that hardly anyone knows about and make it their own on facebook [insert sarcastic chuckle here]. If you’d like to become a fan of Babble Soft it would make me ever so happy if you would click here.
I wouldn’t have been able to set up the Babble Soft page as quickly as I did without some links and support from Lee Aase. He showed me how to add Simply RSS and how to import Notes (blog posts) into both pages. Thanks Lee!
Now for a screenshot of the Babble Soft facebook page that is so new that it’s screaming please become a fan of my site…
November 20, 2007
So I’ve been putting off joining Facebook mostly because I haven’t had time to set it up (lame I know) but partly because I wanted to be one of the last people on the planet (just kidding) to join. I sometimes refer to myself as the late adopter high-tech CEO. Kind of strange to think about really. I broke down and joined Facebook today.
So why did I join now? Here are some reasons:
- I had some friends invite me to join
- I saw Robert Scoble post about Facebook ad noseum. I think he has to get a commission or something from Facebook or maybe he got a finder’s fee for Microsoft’s recent investment, which probably made him very happy. I tried to add him as a friend but I got a notice saying he has too many friends
- I started to feel like I was missing out on something (peer pressure, curiosity)
- I wanted to learn more about the advertising options on Facebook (Facebook Ads) that Fred Wilson has been mentioning in some of his recent posts.
- I’m hoping someone at Facebook will discover me and my company and give me lots of moola.
There are quite a few parenting and baby groups on Facebook so I’ll sit back and observe and see if that might be a good avenue to advertise Babble Soft.
If anyone has long term experience with Facebook (or has any news on what they are planning to do with the Microsoft money) I’d love to hear about your experiences. Do you click on the ads and if you do, do you purchase anything?
