SheStreams 2012 through the lens of a Samsung Focus S
May 14, 2012 Blog & Social Media Stuff
I was thrilled to attend the SheStreams conference in Fort Lauderdale at the end of March (as well as do my first solo session, about podcasting), and it was delicious icing on the cake when AT&T teamed up with SheStreams to give me a Samsung Focus S to record my experiences at the conference. But as part of the deal, that was the only camera I could bring with me. Having used – and loved – Windows Phone cameras before, I was confident that the Samsung Focus S would be up to the challenge.
I started playing with it by taking this self-portrait, so easy to do with the front-facing camera and dedicated camera button:
Inspiration and Palm Trees
The conference itself was amazing. I always leave conferences inspired to do more and be better and move to the next level, etc. etc. But what I loved about SheStreams was all of the practical, actionable advice. There were several things that I put into action before even leaving Fort Lauderdale, and a bunch more I’ve been implementing since then. Inspiration often fades away as soon I get back home and get into my normal routine, but actual, concrete steps I can take last forever.
The conference location was beautiful. I’d never been to Fort Lauderdale before, but it’s conference organizer Maria Bailey’s home base, and it was exactly what I imagined it to be – sunny and filled with palm trees. What I didn’t know about were the canals. Apparently Fort Lauderdale is called the Venice of America, and while I didn’t see any gondoliers singing as they rowed, there were water taxis, which was very cool.
Of course, with a packed conference schedule the only time I got onto the water was during a fabulous lunch on a yacht sponsored by Disney. We didn’t go anywhere, but it was nice getting out of the hotel.
That’s OK though, who needs to be outside when there’s so much to learn? The biggest session takeaways for me were from Charlene’s (of Charlene Chronicles) session about the legal ramifications of using videos online. The most important thing I wasn’t doing? Putting disclosures (when I receive a product for free, have a relationship with a company, etc.) right in the video! I was mentioning those things in the videos’ descriptions, and thought that was good enough. It’s not. So I made that change immediately.
But my biggest revelation from the conference was Maria Bailey’s keynote. I’ve seen Maria speak many times, but never like this. She was totally in her element, and just…on. (You can watch Maria Bailey’s entire keynote here. I highly recommend it.)
I learned eight key points from her speech that have me completely rethinking some aspects of how I plan to move forward with my business:
1) Write hand written notes. I’ll have to google this one.
2) Unless you have something to sell other than your own hours, you won’t be able to grow your business. Until Maria said that, I always looked at the list of things I wanted to do with my business and wondered where I would find more hours in my day (and I am quite literally trying to find more hours in my day). But thanks to Maria’s inspiration, I pitched an idea to these lovely ladies that same day, and hopefully it will be making us some money some day in the future.
New business partners, L-R: me, Christy, Amy, Charlene
3) Don’t be afraid to share ideas. See what I just said in the previous paragraph. Normally when I have an idea, I hide it away like a squirrel with a nut, and nothing ever happens. This time, I took a chance.
4) Have a personal mission statement. Somehow “wanting to work on my couch in my pjs” doesn’t quite cut it. I’m working on that one…
5) Do something you fear every day (Eleanor Roosevelt). I need to do this. I like to be comfortable, but being safe won’t get me anywhere.
6) Do a time audit. Maria asked us if we were making money, or merely pushing it around. I push it around a lot, telling myself that I’m spending money to make more money. But without paying more attention to numbers 2, 3, and 5, that’s not going to work.
7) When thinking about partnering with someone, give them an assignment. I’m always wary of working with other people, for many reasons. Will they take advantage of me? Will I take advantage of them? Will they take my ideas? Will it all blow up in my face? Giving a person who wants to work with me an assignment to complete is a good way to test the waters.
8) Have an exit strategy. This doesn’t necessarily mean how to get out, it means how to move on. I’ve been so wrapped up for the last few years in getting a viable business going that I haven’t even thought about an exit strategy (although, if you watch the video below to the end, Charlene gives a good – if inevitable – option).
Physical Takeaways from AT&T
I also had a couple of great physical takeaways from the conference. AT&T gave me this great tripod, the iStabilizer MobiFlex. What makes it so great? Unless you have an iPhone, accessories can be hard to find. But this tripod works with just about any phone. I can’t tell you how often I bring a camera with me just because I have to use a tripod. Now, I’ll be able to do it all with my phone!
AT&T also gave me this really small Motorola mobile charger. My favorite thing about it is that the micro USB tip is built in, so I don’t have to carry around another cord with me.
Not only were these two great items to take away from a conference, but even more importantly, they were well-targeted and completely relevant. SheStreams is a conference geared towards women who are vlogging and tweeting and posting on the go, using their smartphones more than the average person, and AT&T showed that they got that by giving out items that I could really use, immediately! I had used both of these by the end of the day!
Parting words from bloggers
The best takeaways, though, were from other bloggers. I grabbed a few at the end of the conference and asked them to tell me what their biggest conference takeaways were:
Thanks to everyone who helped me out – it was a great conference! And since I brought my Samsung Focus S with me to Disney World last month, I’ll be sharing lots more pictures and videos taken with it. My love for Windows Phones is well known, so I admit I’m biased, but I’m absolutely loving the Samsung Focus S.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 1. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: Maria Bailey, Samsung Focus S, SheStreams, Windows Phones
Top Ten Signs You’ve Slept With A Blogger
Mar 31, 2012 Blog & Social Media Stuff
I don’t know what to say about this video, other than it was late, and we’d had a lot of sugar.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: Blogging, SheStreams, Top Ten
Jennifer Perillo guests on a podcast
Oct 13, 2011 Blog & Social Media Stuff, What's Going On
So occasionally I post my Blogging Angels podcasts here. I don’t do it all the time, because often they’re geared more toward bloggers and pr pros. But our latest one is one of those that everyone will appreciate, thanks to our awesome guest, Jennifer Perillo. She’s a food writer, blogger, and all-around great person.
You may have read here or elsewhere that Jennifer lost her husband very suddenly a couple months ago. In the podcast she talks about grieving online, as well as writing and photographing food, and other topics. It’s not a maudlin podcast by any means, although there are a couple of spots that still bring tears to my eyes.
You can listen to the podcast below, or subscribe on iTunes. If you want to have access to the links we talk about, you can find them here.
To download this episode to your computer directly: right click here, then click “save link as”
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: baking, cooking, Jennifer Perillo, podcast
The Twitter clean-up continues with Proxlet
Sep 22, 2011 Blog & Social Media Stuff
[UPDATE: I've had to uninstall Proxlet from my Tweetdeck account. It was preventing me from getting DMs on my computer. It's still working very well on Twitter.com, so I guess when I want to catch up on Twitter without all of the Triberr noise I'll have to do it there. Bummer.]
So yesterday I wrote about how I unfollowed over 1,300 people on twitter – mostly accounts that were no longer active, or people I just didn’t recognize and couldn’t figure out why I was following. But I had actually started streamlining a few days earlier with a completely free service called Proxlet.
Proxlet is an app for the Chrome browser that easily filters out certain tweets, or mutes tweets for a certain period of time.
I first tried it out a while ago because it looked interesting, but I discovered that I didn’t need it – there wasn’t really anything happening on twitter that was bugging me much.
Now though? Ugh. I need it.
You can use it directly on Twitter.com, which is very handy – a Proxlet option appears for each tweet, giving you a range of actions to take.
Although why you would want to mute me talking about carrying cardboard cutouts of Harrison Ford around NYC, I have NO idea.
Some Proxlet applications can be configured very easily right from the Proxlet homepage. Another, even more configurable option is to DM commands directly to Proxlet.
There are certain evenings where my entire stream is taken over by twitter parties, where dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people chat about a certain topic using a particular hashtag. And while I have nothing against twitter parties – I actually like them (the smaller ones, anyway) – they can be very annoying when the topics just aren’t for you and it seems like you’re the only one not participating.
With Proxlet, I can now mute those twitter parties that I have zero interest in. If everybody I know is talking about #ACMEDiapers and I couldn’t care less, I could mute every tweet with that hashtag for, say, two hours. Problem solved. Don’t want to hear about #RHONY for an hour (or a lifetime)? No problem. Don’t want to know who got kicked off of #ProjectRunway? Mute that hashtag until you’ve watched the episode.
A more recent problem – the one that actually prompted me to start using Proxlet again – is Triberr. It’s been aggravating me so much that I wrote a whole post about why bloggers shouldn’t use Triberr. Thanks to Proxlet, it’s no longer a problem (at least not on my computers, anyway – more about phones later). I’ve blocked everything that’s automatically tweeted out by the Triberr service.
I also block tweets from FourSquare. I use the FourSquare service myself, and if I want to know where people are I’ll just use the app (I only want to know where people are if I’m there too).
And those ubiquitous paper.li tweets? Gone. Filtered out.
Thanks to Proxlet my twitter stream has been streamlined to include more of what I think is interesting, authentic content, and fewer autotweets (I hate autotweets so much I don’t even autotweet my own posts!). [Update: Just realized that's not totally true: I autotweet anything I post from my phone. I wanted that process to be Twitpic-like (but without giving them the traffic).]
So how can you do it? Originally I was going to write a big guide on exactly how to use Proxlet, but then I stumbled on this post all about Proxlet, which has already done it so well. So go read that and all should be clear.
Since my Tweetdeck has been Proxletized (ha! I guess I’m Proxletizing to you right now!), catching up on twitter on my phone has gotten a lot more annoying, since Proxlet doesn’t work there. The difference in my twitter stream with and without Proxlet is huge. Proxlet does work on a lot of smartphone clients though, so you might get lucky.
I don’t like the direction twitter is going in. I feel like more and more people are trying to “cash in” on it in the quickest, easiest, most automated way possible. I’m very grateful that I can reverse that trend with Proxlet, even if only I can see it.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: Proxlet, social media, Tweetdeck, Twitter
Cleaning up twitter with Just Unfollow
Sep 21, 2011 Blog & Social Media Stuff
So you’re on twitter and you want to get more out of it. The easiest way is to trim the fat – unfollow all of those accounts that aren’t adding anything to your tweetstream. I just did this and feel lighter. 1,350 followers lighter, in fact.
I did two separate things: I unfollowed just about everyone who hadn’t tweeted in at least a month, and I unfollowed a large number of the people who weren’t following me back.
Why do this, you might ask?
Honestly, if you’re just a casual user of Twitter following a few hundred people, it probably doesn’t matter at all. But if you’re a slightly more active user of twitter…
Twitter puts limits on how many people you can follow without having a certain number of people following you back. Basically, you can follow up to 2,000 people no matter how many (or few) are following you back. But, once you’re following 2,000 people you may run into trouble following more. So, if you want to follow more people but can’t because of this limit, then getting rid of the dead weight – people you are following who simply don’t tweet – will help free up those spots so that you can follow more interesting accounts.
Heavy Twitter users like myself run into a different problem, especially if we use Twitter for professional reasons, and it’s one that’s harder to define. While I have no evidence of this, I think my Klout score is probably affected somewhat by the number and “quality” of Twitter accounts I’m following (and by quality I don’t mean how I define it, I mean how Klout defines it, and frankly I have no idea how they define it). So if I’m following accounts that don’t tweet, I may be hurting my Klout score. Since Klout is starting to affect the work I get, I need to pay attention to that.
Get rid of the dead weight
I used JustUnfollow.com. There is a free version, but it limits you to only 25 unfollows a day. Or, you can double your limit to 50 by tweeting about the site (instructions will appear once you hit the limit). If you don’t have a lot of cleaning up to do – or you don’t mind doing a little each day – the free version is great. [Update: Thanks to Liz for clarifying in the comments that once you send that one tweet, your limit is permanently increased to 50/day - you don't have to keep sending out the tweet each day.]
However, I had a lot of cleaning to do, so I upgraded to the premium version, which is only $9.99 for a year of no unfollow limits.
After authorizing Just Unfollow to access my twitter account, I clicked on their newest feature, Show Inactive Following. I was quickly able to see who hadn’t tweeted in a month or more. With a couple of exceptions, I got rid of them all.
Get rid of non-followers
This is a more difficult one for me to justify, because I’m following about one-quarter of the people who follow me. But using Just Unfollow I went through the thousand or so people I was following who weren’t following me, and got rid of about two-thirds of them.
If I didn’t recognize them at all – the twitter handle was unfamiliar, the picture didn’t ring a bell – I got rid of them. At one time we were probably following each other, so I was really just finishing what they had started.
I kept the people I instantly recognized. These are people whose tweets interest me, no matter whether they follow me or not. I don’t care if they’re not following me back, they make twitter interesting.
I kept all of the celebs. I really don’t expect Charlie Sheen to follow me back, but I still get a kick out of watching his crazyboat sail by in my twitter stream.
And now I’m done tinkering for a while.
A note about Twitoria
I tried out about a dozen services before settling on Just Unfollow. I ultimately picked it based on its ease of use, the services it offered, and price. I wasn’t planning on reviewing the ones I didn’t choose. But one of them was so bad, I feel like I need to warn you away from it. Twitoria gave me a list of people it said had NEVER tweeted.
It was page after page filled mostly with accounts I’ve tweeted with personally, or whose tweets I’ve seen many times. Now, I can’t tell you for 100% certain that Just Unfollow didn’t make any mistakes, but I didn’t notice any – every person they said hadn’t tweeted in a month or more looked accurate to me. Maybe Twitoria is simply suffering from a temporary glitch, but I would stay away.
And what about Friend or Follow?
A lot of people I know use Friend or Follow. In fact, I think it’s probably the best known of all of these sites and services. I even signed up for the premium service, thinking it was worth trying out for $9.99. After signing up however, I realized it was $9.99 per MONTH, not per year. That’s ridiculous. Luckily there’s a seven-day trial period, so I was able to immediately cancel without being charged for the first month.
Besides the price though, I found it to be very buggy.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: klout, social media, Twitter
BlogHer 2011: eBay Classifieds & my renewed resolve to not end up on an embarrassing reality show
Aug 5, 2011 Blog & Social Media Stuff
I’m so thrilled to be attending my fourth BlogHer conference! I can’t believe how far I’ve come since I attended my first one in San Francisco in 2008. I had just started blogging and had no idea what I was doing, but my sister lived in San Fran, so I figured going to the conference would be a good excuse to visit her. Honestly, I left BlogHer ‘08 a little more confused than when I went in, because of the enormous amount of information that had been shoved into my brain in the space of two days (so it was a good kind of confused). When I’d started blogging I thought it was something you did alone, for free, and possibly every once in a while you’d get to do something cool, like meet Grover. I had no idea what I was in for, or how blogging would take over my life.
With each successive BlogHer I have to admit I’ve attended fewer conference sessions and instead used it as a networking marathon of sorts. Thousands of bloggers, PR and brand reps attend, so it’s a great place for relationships to start or move to the next level. And on Saturday my blogging career will enter a new phase, when I host my first event, along with my fellow Blogging Angels and the ladies from Zebra Partners. We’re holding a breakfast for about sixty fantastic bloggers, and we hope they leave with some tools to better present and market themselves. Because as much as some bloggers would like to present this as a warm-and-fuzzy community of women, for many of us it’s a business. And I must confess: I have a lot to learn at the breakfast as well. After more than three years of blogging, I still feel in many ways like I have no idea what I’m doing.
Listening back to some things I’ve said in Blogging Angels podcasts, I notice I’m getting a little cocky. Perhaps it comes from getting somewhat comfortable and confident with what I’m doing – just enough to act like a know-it-all, even though I still have so far to go. So I’m really grateful that as an eBay Classifieds ambassador I get to attend BlogHer with their sponsorship money, not worrying about how many hours I have to work or how many posts I have to write to make up for the plane fare and hotel and conference ticket and, yes, a nice meal or two (a girl’s gotta relax a little, right?).
I’ve been working with eBay Classifieds for a while now and I feel like I’m on the precipice of a major shift in my life. I’ve been letting a lot of stuff build up in our house, and I’ve been blaming our renovation. One entire floor hasn’t even been started yet, and honestly I don’t know when it will be (when money rains from the sky, perhaps?). I keep telling myself that once that floor is usable I’ll have plenty of storage space for everything I’ve accumulated, but I think it’s finally time to admit that if I wait for that floor to be finished, I just might be found by my kids one day, buried under a pile of crap.
Now there’s no need to call the producers of Hoarders or anything like that – I’m not at that stage. But I am at the stage where when people come over, there’s a mad dash to get stuff hidden, and I never ever let anyone see the upstairs. It would take days to prepare for that. So, while eBay Classifieds has been my go-to site for buying some really wonderful things (an awesome treadmill and a really great TV, to name a couple), I haven’t been using it as I should have, to also move things out of the house. So, that’s the project when I get back from BlogHer: Operation Move The Crap Out!
The goal? To be able to use some key areas that right now are just piled with stuff. I have an entire room on the top floor that’s supposed to be my dressing room – there’s an awesome art deco dressing table in there, and shelves for my shoes and accessories, but I’ve never been able to use it as such – it’s filled with crap. On the parlour floor, my piano – which I would really love to use – is buried under boxes. Even on our kitchen floor, where I’ve set up several beautiful shelves in a back hallway to organize all of my baking and overflow kitchen stuff, I can’t get to anything because whenever something is in our way we just toss it in there, somewhat out of sight.
And I don’t want to put too much pressure on this project, but I’ve found in the past that when one area of my life gets in order, others tend to follow suit. So there’s some extra motivation there.
At the risk of my husband divorcing me, I will be posting “before pictures.” They will make the “after” pictures look all that more impressive.
But first, on to BlogHer! And a huge thanks to eBay Classifieds for getting me here. If you’re here and want to hear about what a fantastic, free listing site eBay Classifieds is, tap me on the shoulder and ask!
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 14. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: Blogging, cleaning, eBay Classifieds, Travel
I may be balding, but at least I’m rocking the glasses
May 12, 2011 Blog & Social Media Stuff
Last night, for reasons I can’t figure out, TweetDeck decided to change my picture. At least I look happy.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: Twitter
So about that disclosure in the New York Times…
Feb 23, 2011 Blog & Social Media Stuff
I was written about today in a New York Times Magazine piece about mom bloggers, by the Times’ Motherlode blogger Lisa Belkin. Or, more specifically, my disclosure policy was written about. It’s on page 3:
Amy Oztan, who blogs at SelfishMom.com, is particularly transparent when it comes to her sponsors. She has a lot of them — companies who pay her, in money or in product, to advertise on her site or to mention them. Oztan has an entire section explaining how she makes her money, including an extensive index of tabs she uses to alert readers to the economics of everything she writes.
Lisa goes on to give examples of compensation levels and product mentions. I’m a huge fan of hers. Her Motherlode blog is very popular, and being quoted there a couple of times early on helped put me on the map. And now I’m there again, a big paragraph about something that I’m immensely proud of and find completely ridiculous at the same time.
I don’t like writing about blogging on my blog (that’s why I started a kind-of sub blog, Behind The Screen, for that purpose). It’s like when Oprah started opening her show with scenes of the control room as they opened the show. I actually love that kind of behind-the-scenes stuff. But I would rather watch a completely separate show about how Oprah is produced than see glimpses of it during the show.
But I decided to put this post here, because that disclosure exists for you, the reader. Not the blogger who’s also a reader, not the PR pro, but the reader who might come to my site not only to read about what’s going on in my life, but also about the products that could become a part of yours. I have no idea how many people have purchased products that I’ve written about, but I love writing about them. And you know what I like even more? Getting paid to write about them. While I do write about a lot of products while having absolutely no connection to the company, I’ve had many opportunities to write about products that I didn’t pay for, and written many posts that were paid for by a company.
I’ve always disclosed in my posts when I was getting paid or getting something for free, from day one. It just seemed like the reasonable thing to do, what I would want to see on someone else’s blog. In the beginning it was very simple, just one line explaining the situation. But as time went on, things got more complicated. I think it started with a Casio camera that I had received for free. I was mentioning it something like a year later – not even reviewing it, just mentioning that it had been hanging around my neck as I fell off of a Segway in the Bahamas (yes, yes I did). And I thought, do I need to disclose THAT? Do I really need to interrupt my writing to insert a line about how I’d gotten a camera for free a year ago?
The guiding principal behind disclosing these types of relationships is so that the reader knows you may have been influenced to mention the product, or to say something favorable about it. So surely, even if I had felt some kind of pressure to mention the camera when I first got it (which is debatable – I have an entire room on my top floor dedicated to free products I’ve never mentioned), that pressure would have dissipated by that point, right? I was mentioning the camera because it had become a part of my daily life.
I guess I could’ve just mentioned the camera without mentioning the brand name, but the point of the mention was to say that it had been open and hanging around my neck, and had survived being crushed under me while I was crushed under a Segway. Wouldn’t readers want to know exactly which camera had survived that? I wasn’t mentioning it because they had given it to me for free oh so long ago!
…Or was I? Would I have had that particular camera around my neck that day if Casio hadn’t given it to me for free? Almost definitely not. I loved that camera, and I talked about it like I was being paid (even though I wasn’t). But the fact remained that had I not been sent that camera for free, I wouldn’t have been talking about it. I wasn’t even aware before that Casio made anything but keyboards.
So, I came up with what was supposed to be a simple idea: a little disclaimer at the end of each post linking to a bigger explanation. I would still write in the post when something was given to me the first time I wrote about it, probably the second, maybe the third…but eventually that fact would matter less, and it would just go in the disclosure.
But like so many things in my life, what I started as a way to simplify things got very complicated. There are now fifteen disclosure levels covering everything from paid links to getting a free trip. I’ve created a version without my name on it that lots of other bloggers link to for their disclosures. And now, it’s been written about in the New York Times.
I love writing about brands, I really do. But it would be a lot easier if I could just put a banner disclosure at the top of my blog stating that I’m in bed with every company in the world and I’m paid for everything. I always mean what I say, no matter what the disclosure, no matter what the relationship. The rest is just to keep lawyers employed.
Oh, and my husband’s a lawyer – I guess I should disclose that too. :-)
***
That was going to be the end of the post. Then I got a comment on this post, which sums up nicely the credibility problem you face when you accept money and products from companies. As I said in my response, it is what it is.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 1. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, and Momtourage, and podcasts with The Blogging Angels.
Tags: Casio, Lisa Belkin
