Are you interested in starting or growing your existing blog? Renegade University through iContact is offering classes to help you with just that.

Starting October 7th, you can begin this class on blogging that will teach you the basics on starting, managing and growing a blog successfully for your business. If you’ve ever been interested in doing this, now is the time to get started.

Best to all!

Post from: EveryJoe

Fri-Deas: Blogging Classes

There is a measure of parity on the Web. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, among Internet users, 14 percent of men and 11 percent of women blog.

A study conducted by BlogHer and Compass Partners last year found that 36 million women participate in the blogosphere each week, and 15 million of them have their own blogs. (BlogHer, which was founded by Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort Page and Jory Des Jardins, has itself grown into a mini empire that includes a Web site that helps publicize women’s blogs, and an advertising network to help women generate revenue for the site.)

Yet, when Techcult, a technology Web site, recently listed its top 100 Web celebrities, only 11 of them were women. Last year, Forbes.com ran a similar list, naming 4 women on its list of 25.

“It’s disheartening and frustrating,” said Allison Blass, a BlogHer attendee whose personal blog at www.lemonade-life.com is about living with Type 1 diabetes.

I wonder if the difference is less sex and more content. What are these 14% and 11% of men and women, respectively, writing about, and how is it resonating with the reading public? Is it really sex that’s the issue, or is it what the readers want to see?

What do you think? Is there a glass ceiling in blogging? Is there a glass ceiling in business? Or is it just something people say to feel better about not being where they want to be?

(hat tip: Debbi Mack; image: SXC.hu)

Contents © Copyright 2008 Kristen King

Tags: womens business blog, women and business, women in business, women, woman, business, glass ceiling, blogging, new york times, blogher, debbi mack, sex discrimination, gender discrimination, biz chicks rule, kristen king

Post from: EveryJoe

A Glass Ceiling in Blogging?

One thing is certain however, and that is that there have been professional relationships formed that will last for a very long time. In the blog-world, just as in offline businesses, it’s important to treat people right, to treat them just as you would like to be treated: in fairness, equity and with dignity. I’m fortunate to have had the good pleasure of working with Dan, Kimberlee and Easton (a great guy!), and feel that they will rise up somewhere in blogosphere soon – - which brings me to my next point…

It’s sooo important to be professional and to treat your fellow bloggers right. Because these folks have always been top-notch in their dealings, there are people all over the blog and writing world who are calling on contacts, calling in favors and all-in-all doing whatever they can to help these folks out. No, they’re not hard up for work or willing to take whatever. They are are highly-skilled, well-educated and in-demand professionals. Everybody’s pulling out all of the stops because of one thing – they know how to treat people. Because of that, they’re being treated right as well.

In business, this is one practice that I cannot stress the importance of. You never know who knows who, you never know who has the power to make or break your contracts and you never know when and if your professional life will ever take a turn the other way. One thing to bear in mind is that although you may not always agree with someone or see eye-to-eye, it’s important to respect them and treat them with dignity. Be ready for when, and if, the tables turn and you find yourself on the receiving end. That’s all I’m saying.

Have you ever burned any bridges that you regretted later? If you had the chance to mend them, what would you do? Or, are you too proud to admit you were wrong? Is it worth it to you?

Since I write and blog for a living, I’m keeping my eyes and ears peeled for them as well. Not because I feel sorry for them. And certainly not because I want to impress them or have them bow to me. I want to help them because they’re genuine, professional people and simply because IT’S THE RIGHT THING TO DO.

Would you want any less?

Post from: EveryJoe

Know More Media Professional Courtesies – Doing the Right Thing

Recently, some peers of mine and I learned that another blog network that I (we)write for, Know More Media, will be ceasing operations effective August 1, 2008. While I can’t say that I am too terribly surprised at the turn of events, I am saddened by it as I have made blogging friends at that network, I have enjoyed writing on the topic that I had and the editorial team there was/is super professional, top-notch people! I realize that in business these things happen, but these realities just don’t make it easier when it happens.

A few other blogger friends of mine and I blogged there (Susan, Laura, Suzanne and Yvonne) who also blog here for b5media, so I still get to “see” them at work everyday and interact with them. Although I am glad I’ll get to see my blog buddies, the KnowMoreMedia network will be sorely missed in the blogosphere.

The editorial team there gave us a very detailed and professional explanation on why this business decision was being made. While it was not agreeable to most all of the bloggers, overall it was totally understood why this decision was made and we were even offered alternative options of continuing to do business with our sites. To each his (or her) own since only each blogger knows what they feel comfortable doing. But this turn of events started me wondering about the stability in doing business of any kind, be it virtual or brick-and-mortar. As women in business, do you have systems in place to guard against your business suffering setbacks, economic downturns or just falling prey to “life” in general? In other words, if something happened to you today, what would happen to your business or to your position in your company?

As a freelancer, I have no other business recourse in the unlikely event of something happening to me or a family emergency. I am a sole worker, no staff, no tech department, nothing. Some days that’s great, but in times like these unexpected changes, it gives pause to make you wonder what your next step should be. All we can do is plan as best we can and hope for a positive outcome. Is that enough?

I’d be interested to hear what your plan of action would be if something happened to your business today. How would you survive? What would you do differently? What can you do now to avoid potential problems from closing your doors? How would you handle business adversities?

_________________________________________________ 

Copyright 2008 – Bridget Wright

Post from: EveryJoe

Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow – Saying GoodBye to The KnowMoreMedia Network

If you’re interested, you can pick the series up here and follow them, or start at the beginning and come forward to see where they are in the series. Either way, you will gain a ton of information and insight into the wonderful world of blogging.

I’ve been blogging now for about two years and have found it to be quite addicting. I love the interaction (especially the interaction) with the readers and the chance to project my own business opinion on topics of interest in the business world and community. I love it and wouldn’t trade it for anything. Well, almost anything.

I encourage you to follow Mary Emma’s and Yvonne’s blog postings on the blogging business. It’s easy to get started in and if you like hearing your own voice, you’re a shoe-in. Let me know how it goes for you!

_______________________________________________

Copyright 2008 – Bridget Wright

Post from: EveryJoe

Fri-Deas: The Blogging Business

I’m going to steal from a comment I just left on Ry’s post "Why I Fear Women and Love Mythical Hobbits":

Whether Heather [Armstrong] is in actuality a mean girl is in my opinion immaterial to this discussion because she’s not the one talking smack on the blogs and making herself look like a vitriolic shrew — and THAT is what I was talking about. When people complain with substance … when they express a concern and make an argument, that’s saying, "enough is enough." I respect that. I’m down with it. When they do what I see happening now, that’s doing the mean girls playground wars thing, and that I have no respect for whatsoever.

If you think someone’s a butthead, you can tell that person or not. But you have to accept that no matter what they did that made you think they sucked in the first place, you will look a WHOLE lot worse if you go public with your unkind thoughts and rip them to shreds and call them names and say mean and nasty things about them and their friends and their family. And especially if it’s just because you don’t like their dog or their writing style or their hair or WHATEVER, or because they did something vague to someone else, or possibly someone else several people removed from you that you saw / heard about / think might have happened / bet would be something they would do, you look like a moron. You do. And you deserve it.

My point is that you get to choose how you respond to something. Calling names and taking low blows is a choice. Stating your case plainly is a choice. Saying nothing is a choice. These bloggers are choosing to be mean girls, and there are other ways to share an opinion. My opinion is that being a mean girl sucks, and this tendency of women to get all catty on each other is holding us back and it’s time to knock it off and be grown-ups already. Just because someone does something you think is stupid / mean / whatever does not mean that you have to respond in kind. That’s what children do. "He hit me!" "She hit me first!" You should know better.

***

In response to specific comments that I didn’t address already in the original post…

lildb said in part

this should have been nothing, but it became something when conflated unnecessarily by the speaker. shame on her.

I contend that it should have remained nothing. The only person who knows the speaker’s intentions in bringing it up at the keynote is the speaker, so let’s leave that alone. For all we know, it was meant to be a charming anecdote. What has turned it into a BIG TO-DO is the attacks after the fact, the mean-girl-ness. If no one said anything, who would give a hoot?

Allena said in part, in response to an earlier exchange

sometimes you HAVE to assoc w/hags! It’s not pleasant but it’s life. Being a soccer mom taught me to create a drama filter ;-}

To some extent I agree. Unless you live in a bubble, it happens. But you don’t have to seek out people you don’t care for. Wear headphones in the office. Bring a book to soccer practice. Skip the party hosted by the people you don’t like. Again, you get to choose. If it means sitting alone, so be it. Personally, I’d rather be content and alone than uncomfortable and surrounded by jerks.

Ruby said in part

I feel like Blogher should be called Doocher, because somehow it’s always about her and her friends. If you’re not in with her friends well then you’re just nobody.

Ruby, I think it sucks that you’ve had bad BlogHer experiences. I hope you will give your feedback to the organizers. I know they are open to it. But I have to point out here that I had never even heard of Dooce until about an hour before the keynote and even now if you put a gun to my head I couldn’t name a single one of her friends. And I don’t care. She is just a blogger, just like you and me. Do I think she’s a great writer? Yes I do. I read her blog for the first time at the airport on my way home from San Francisco and I loved it. But I managed to get through pretty much my entire life to date including all of BlogHer without that knowledge, and I still had a great time. And I found a lot of other awesome blogs there, too. That was part of the payoff.

If you don’t like the club (or if, like me, you don’t know it exists), start your own.

***

In closing (for now), YOU ARE NOT A VICTIM OF YOUR OWN LIFE. If you have a problem, do something about it. It all comes back to choices. You can choose to do something or you can choose to do nothing. But both are choices, and there are times when each of them is right. You can choose to let something go, or you can chose to tell the world about it. Just make your choice a conscious choice — because you will have to live with the consequences, positive or negative.

And as far as I’m concerned, there is never anything positive about being a mean girl.

Contents © Copyright 2008 Kristen King

Tags: women in business, women and business, women, woman, business, womens business blog, blogher08, blogher, keynote, mean girls, queen bees, gossip, catty, catfight, dooce, bloggess, hobbit, immature, clique, cool kids, biz chicks rule, kristen king

Post from: EveryJoe

In Response to the Comments on My Mean Girls Post…

This weekend at BlogHer, there was some drama during the closing keynote. I don’t know any of the people involved personally and I couldn’t tell you anyone’s intentions and I’m not going to try. But here’s what happened in super simple terms, from the viewpoint of an objective observer who had never heard of these people — before that day, anyway. One of the keynote speakers, made reference to something that had been said about her by another blogger in the context of a discussion of how readers often don’t see bloggers as real people and how surreal that is. During the audience Q&A, that blogger responded to the speaker. It should have been the end of the discussion.

But tension ensued, and I’m not entirely sure why because I thought it was pretty innocuous all around. It was an amusing post referenced in what I thought was a good-natured comment, along with a funny, though perhaps inappropriately timed, response. Who knows, maybe there’s some history I don’t know about — but what actually happened in that room at that moment, in my opinion, was not that big a deal. Yet the tension level went from 0 to 60 in .02 seconds, Twitter lit up like crazy, and shortly thereafter the blogosphere exploded, so of course, I wanted to figure out exactly why the heck everyone got their panties in a bunch.

I did what every other Internet-addicted woman does when she wants to learn about something: I Googled the original post and searched for comments about the keynote "incident" after the fact. And I was SHOCKED to find that some of the people who I thought were pretty nice when I met them at BlogHer were just ripping these poor women to shreds — about something that really, truly, is not all the drama. Talk about blowing something out of proportion! Are we not adults here? Are we not past the mind set that the only way to feel good about ourselves is to tear other down and mock them in front of all of the other kids on the playground? And after all of that, I still don’t understand what the big flipping deal is.

It got me thinking about stuff I saw in high school, middle school, elementary school, and stuff I saw when I was working, too. Everywhere you go, there are the "cool kids" and the not-so-cool kids. Even if you choose not to participate in that dynamic (and I really, really hope you choose not to participate in that dynamic), you know what I’m talking about. For some reason, those cool kids seem determined to maintain their status — by making sure no one else feels cool anywhere, ever. That is like the least cool thing I can think of. It’s a coolness dictatorship. And the response is for the less-cool kids to find ways to sabotage the cool kids and rob them of their alpha status. (I guess that would be the anti-cool revolt.) It’s like something you see on Animal Planet crossed with the Bolshevik Revolution.

I digress. What I see happening now is that these two women, the speaker and the blogger, are being torn down on blogs for SOMETHING that is NOTHING. And it’s just petty. And it looks stupid. And I’m indignant, because I feel like every time someone complains about how "the man" is holding women back and societal pressures are keeping women from moving forward and it’s about time we had a serious woman presidential candidate, blah blah blah, a bunch of women jump on a bunch of other women and have a catfight and it just makes everyone look bad and we’re back where we started from and we deserve it because this is not the playground and that’s how we are behaving. And I say WE because the rest of us who do nothing about it are just as responsible as the people who are actively propogating it.

We are grown-ups now and this is like so 15 years ago. Fellow BlogHers, we just got back from a conference dedicated toward supporting women in the blogosphere, and here you are talking smack about stuff that’s not any of your business, stirring the pot, and frankly embarrassing the rest of us. You’re old enough to know better. You’re old enough to stop being mean girls.

So, blogging aside, what’s my point? Well, I want to know how YOU deal with the mean girls in your life. Whether you’re a target of mean girls or are around them or, let’s be honest here, if you have mean girl tendencies of your own, how does it affect your life? And are you okay with that?

Some questions to prompt your thinking:

• What do you do when you hear a rumor at work, or anywhere else for that matter? Do you listen to it? Do you ignore it? Do you repeat it?
• How do you react when others are gossiping in your presence? Do you participate? Do you sit by silently? Do you leave?
• Do you ever start or spread gossip and rumors about another woman at work or elsewhere in your life?
• Do you talk about other women when they’re not in the room?
• How do you handle it when you have a problem with another woman in your life? Do you talk to her about it, or do you talk to others about it?
• Do you discuss others’ failures at length, either in a closed group or in public forums?
• Do you mock other women who dress differently, speak differently, make different life choices? Do you participate or enable when others do?
• Do you make a point of bringing other people down?

Those things aren’t funny, and they’re certainly not flattering. Yeah, we all have our moments and NONE of us is perfect. But this is worth making an effort for. And it’s not just about you, or about me, or about this speaker and this blogger. This is about how we as women are cutting one another down and it is unacceptable. Now, what are we going to do about it?

Contents © Copyright 2008 Kristen King

Tags: women in business, women and business, women, woman, business, womens business blog, blogher08, blogher, keynote, mean girls, queen bees, gossip, catty, catfight, dooce, bloggess, hobbit, immature, clique, cool kids, biz chicks rule, kristen king

Post from: EveryJoe

Apparently Mean Girls Just Don’t Grow Out of It

Watch what you say (or do) as it could come back at ‘cha.

[Photo Source: Amazon]

Ellen Simonetti’s blog and her life received LOTS of attention when Delta Airlines fired her for “inappropriate photos” that were posted on her blog back in 2004. Since that time, Simonetti has written a book, escalated (somewhat) to celebrity status and is still blogging about her life…as a fired flight attendant.

Good Lemonade
She has taken what was supposed to be a “bad” situation and made it work out in her favor. Ellen capitalized on the incident and made a business out of it. This flight-attendant-turned-business-woman:

• Wrote a book
• Continued blogging (her site boasts 3,099,926 visitors since January 11th, 2004)
• Made guest interview appearances on the Montel Show, the O’Reilly factor and has been intereviewed by the folks at Psychology Today magazine
• Is still blogging and capitalizing on her “situation”

No Fair Play
Her firing was a hot topic on the ‘net with both sides of the spectrum debating whether or not her firing was premature and/or warranted. She has been compared to that-other-fired-employee-for-having-a-blog, Dooce, (who by the way is HIL-A-RIOUS!), although Dooce’s blogging style seems to be vastly different than Simonetti’s.

But what I find mildly interesting is the things that are said on the Internet and the repercussions that are incurred by such actions:

Should a person be held responsible for their blogging life?

Now, let me clarify that here. I don’t mean blogging on personally damaging or hurtful things or divulging company’s secrets. I mean plain ‘ol simple blogging – just as Ellen was doing. I think perhaps I may be inclined to agree with the idea that the airline may have in fact acted prematurely. What’s also interesting is something that else that the news article mentioned about Ellen:

“I found pictures of male Delta flight attendants and pilots on Match.com in their uniforms with their ‘turn-ons and turn offs’ listed. And some of them even mentioned they worked for Delta,” she says. Yet the airline apparently took no action against them. Because Delta flight attendants don’t have a union, she hired a private lawyer in an attempt to get her job back.

Blog On
Now, don’t get me started on the obvious difference in discipline between the two sexes.

OK, you got me started. Here goes.

Although I may lean towards Ellen’s actions being “inappropriate”, I also think that BOTH males and females should have been disciplined accordingly as a result of BOTH of their actions. After all, what did Ellen do that the men did not do? Why is Ellen only being penalized? Was it because her pictures were more provocative and sexier? Was it because the boys were playing and didn’t get caught by the bosses? Or perhaps the boys were the ones that turned the girl in because she wouldn’t play the way they wanted her too.

OK, there, I got that out. Back to the issue.

Blogging is a form of free speech and journalism combined. It has just recently (in the past few years) started to get the respect and professional approach that it deserves. Although actions like what Ellen did do deserve some attention and discipline, firing her may not have been the right thing to do. It set them up for a lawsuit and left a disparaging image with the general public (I never liked Delta anyway). In addition to that, it absolutely enraged other bloggers, inflicting the wrath of the Blog Police, incurring their dooming reviews and write-ups on Delta’s actions. I guess they heard that!

When you blog, you should be mindful of the things you say, who those words will affect and not giving out information that is truly company secrets. In this case, Ellen didn’t do any of those things. She just took a couple of sexy pictures, talked about her stressful life of “coffee, tea or milk” and blogged about her daily doings. I totally get that. I do it all the time myself. (Check my blog later when my sexy pictures go up!)

Does Ellen Need Any Help?
I’m happy that Ellen found her “niche” in the business world and has made a difference in things. Hopefully. I’ll be watching her blog to see if she is recompensed for the way she was treated by the airline, and, if the airline will offer some, if ANY type of apology to her for their behavior. We’ll wait and see. In the meantime, I think I’ll contact her and see if I can get an interview with her – and to see if we can do a BFF sexy friends photo shoot with Sexy Stewardess’ BFF Unplugged magazine.

Or maybe I’ll just settle for getting a photo shoot with Semi-Sexy Mom’s Today magazine.

Whatever.

© 2008 – Bridget Wright

Post from: EveryJoe

Delta Airlines Attendant-Turned-Blogger: “The Queen of Sky” – Updates Us On Her Life

The world’s oldest blogger, Olive Riley, has passed away at age 108. Her blog, The Life of Riley, has amused and entertained people from all over. She and her daily blogging will be missed.

Copyright – © Bridget Wright 2008

Post from: EveryJoe

Blogging: It’s An Age Thing

And for those of us who are ready to roll, here’s a presentation on how to get started blogging for business in 4 easy steps. The first 17 seconds are a promo for the company that created it. A woman with a lovely grade-school librarian speaking voice reads an article about blogging. Visually boring, but a great guide to getting started for people who have no clue where to begin. It’s very basic, but if you’re lost when it comes to technology, this is an excellent primer.

Are you blogging for business? Do you have a podcast? If the answer is no, what’s holding you back? Let me know and I’ll help you find some resources to answer those questions and.

Contents © Copyright 2008 Kristen King

Tags: women and business, women in business, women, woman, business, womens business blog, blogging for business, how to start a business, podcasting, biz chicks rule, kristen king

Post from: EveryJoe

Blogging and Podcasting for Business & 4 Simple Steps for Business Blogging – Video