Making the switch to Wordpress and new blog name

I have been meaning to switch my blog over to a self-hosted Wordpress site for at least a year now. I started my blog on Blogspot back in 2007 when it was a casual pastime and I mainly wanted a place to express my thoughts about marketing, the tech space, and life in general. But I've gotten more serious about content management, SEO and design so I'm finally making the switch.

One of the reasons the switch got stalled was because the domain name Breadcrumz.com was taken and I didn't want some extended version of the name (like BreadcrumzBlog.com). Not sure why I was particularly picky about that but that was how I felt. So I took the opportunity to step back and actually give my blog a new name, too.

I graduated college with a degree in Mathematics but have always found the non-linear aspects of life (like love) to be just as interesting. So my new blog is meant to cover everything in between. I plan to write more about topics I have tended to keep to myself but that are very important to me. Like the books I read, travel, being an entrepreneur, flying (I've been flying single-engine prop planes for over 15 years but never written about it), and my pursuit of general self-awareness and purpose.
I will start officially blogging on the new site in the next few weeks. Take a sneak peek at Love and Math! I am still monkeying with the design so its likely to look a lot different by the time I make the final switch but you can see the first version. I have been incredibly lucky to be getting design and tech help from my long-time friend, designer, and blogger Jedd Rose. I've known Jedd for years and he is hands-down my favorite designer in the world. He helped me get my original blog set up and I've hired him professionally for at least three companies I've helped run.

If you've been following me here at BreadCrumz or just happened to stop by today, I hope you will join me over at my new blogging home, Love and Math. I'll be sure to leave a post up here so you'll know where to find me!

Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders

I've watched this TEDTalk video four times now and the same thing keeps happening. I watch it, silently acknowledging how lucky I am to live in a world where more work/life options are available to moms than ever before, then move on to the next task at hand. Something nags at me but I power through my to-do list: draft that marketing plan, review another candidate's resume, put the clothes in the dryer. But something in Sheryl Sandberg's presentation keeps haunting me and making me watch it again.

Why is it that out of 190 Head's of State in the world, only 9 are women? That out of all the people in parliament in the world, only 13% are women? Or of C-level positions (including Board seats) in the corporate world, only 15% are women and the numbers haven't changed since 2002 and are actually declining?

Sandberg (COO of Facebook) suggests that its because most women struggling with balancing careers and family end up giving one of them up. And what they tend to give up is their career. She presents her views with no judgment, pretense, or hint of elitism. I think her goal is simply to point out how the statistics are vastly different than for men.

What impacted me the most is something she said that I've notice myself over and over in the tech industry and throughout my career. We women systematically underestimate our capabilities, undervalue our achievements, and under-negotiate our worth. She also points out stats that show "likability and success" are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women.

To me, Sandberg's message is one of awareness, not one meant to blame or incite. We need more women sitting at the table, fighting for their worth, and teaching their employees, co-workers, and daughters to be confident in their accomplishments. If you struggle with this, find someone you look up to and ask for support. If you're already there, make yourself available to others and maybe we'll start to see some change!

Trada’s Marketing Metrics BootCamp a huge hit with tech community

Niel Roberston is the poster child for the phrase “go big or go home”. He is the founder and CEO of Trada, a company revolutionizing the advertising industry by crowd-sourcing paid search. I first met Niel over ten years ago at Service Metrics, an internet performance start-up that was acquired for $280M shortly after launching. He was one of the founders and I was lucky enough to help drive marketing efforts. He went on to start several other successful tech companies and is now the go-to guy for all things online advertising.

In the true spirit of community, Niel and his amazing team took time from their schedules to organize the Marketing Metrics Bootcamp, a 3-day local conference that brought together thought leaders in the advertising, performance, branding and social media spaces and let a crowd of budding (and current) entrepreneurs pick their brains. The event was sponsored by a host of local companies, Silicon Flatirons, and the CU Marketing Department. Over the course of three evenings, speakers and panelists covered topics such as:

• Basics of CPA, funnels and customer lifetime value
• Measurement tools, ROI, and performance tracking
• Video strategies, going viral, and renegade digital marketing
• Email marketing, trust, and the changing role of the social media specialist

I had the honor and pleasure of participating on the Brand vs Performance panel along with Derek Koenig (former CMO of Vail Resorts and former VP of Advertising at AOL), Toby Hedges (Director Digital Marketing for WhiteWave), and Matt Cutler (CMO for Visible Measures). That's me up front waving my arms trying to make a point. We got to discuss one of my favorite topics - how social media is radically changing how brands create, manage and leverage their online voice to serve their customers and grow their businesses.

I could talk about that topic for hours. Which I ended up doing because the conference wrapped up with an intern job fair where CU students had the opportunity to talk with dozens of local tech start-ups and learn about intern opportunities. I got to see lots of my fellow start-up junkies – Sonya Caprio and Grace Boyle from Lijit, Ted Guggenheim, CEO of Rage Digital, Mike Lewis, co-founder of Kapost, Brett Greene, founder of Hip Chameleon, Andy O’Dower from BeyondCredentials, and James Moreau with BlipSnips. It was fun watching them get mobbed by talented students hungry for a chance to work with cool tech companies.

By 9:30pm, I was exhausted and hoarse but I’m glad I stayed until the very end. The last person I talked to was Carson, who looked a little younger than most of the crowd but I just figured he started college early. He was the best conversation of the night. He asked thoughtful questions about our vision, business model, revenue plans, back-end evolution and the interest-based social graph. We talked about BlogFrog's mobile potential, viral growth and the possibilities of opening up our API. Something was different about this guy/kid. He might have thought he was looking for the next big thing, but I got the impression he would someday CREATE the next big thing. Then I learned that he was a student, but not at CU. He was a local high school student. Even more impressive. Then as we walked out, I got to meet his dad, who was his ride. Which means the boy genius who just blew me away probably can’t even drive yet. I won't mention his full name. Not because I probably need his parent’s permission first, but because I want to hire him before you do.

You can catch all the presentations and panels on Trada's Ustream channel, which were streamed lived during the event. Thanks Trada and sponsors for an awesome event (and cool t-shirt)!

The lost art of saying Thank You

When we were kids, Mom would make the five of us sit down after Christmas (and birthdays or any occasion where we received a gift) and make us write thank you notes. She had cards, paper, envelopes, stamps, and even all the addresses. All we had to do was sit still, stop for a moment to remember someone's thoughtfulness, and say thanks.

From our perspective, you'd think we were being asked to milk the cows at dawn or scrub the toilets. We hated it then, but 20 years later, my appreciation for that tradition has grown (had the same experience with my Dad's classical music. It annoyed us as kids and now I have a wonderful affinity for Bach). I appreciate her efforts to teach us to be grateful for the kindness of others.

I woke up on New Year's Day thinking about how often people do something nice for us in a day (whether we know about it or not) and how many opportunities we have to say "thank you". Some scientists believe that human's can't simultaneously feel anger and gratefulness at the same time. So if our hearts and minds are thinking consciously about something we are thankful for, anger cannot co-exist in that moment. I find that fascinating.

So just for a day, I challenge you (and myself) to be on the lookout for all the things that friends, family and strangers do for you and make a point to express your thanks. If you sincerely thank someone and for a second they become grateful that you recognized their act of kindness, then they can't be feeling anger or offense either! That's a 100% return on your gratefulness investment :)

To my sweet friends, who let me vent about my frustrations:

To my boys, for reminding me to play:

To my mentors, who keep me motivated and inspired:


To the cashier at the supermarket, who let me run back to exchange an item even though there were are people behind me:


To the people at Midas, who tightened my oil filter for free last week:

To my partner (and favorite engineer), who makes me feel loved every day:


Who can you thank?

Beer and Blogging come together at the Boulder Beer Blogging Conference

When you're in the business of online community, you learn quickly there is a niche community for everything. Like beer? There's a community for that. Like to blog? There are lots of communities for you. What if you blog about beer? Not only are there groups for you, there is a dedicated conference.

Yesterday kicked off Day 1 of the Boulder Beer Blogging Conference where beer enthusiasts gathered to celebrate their critical role in the blogging ecosystem.

I was honored to be invited to speak as part of Day 2's track on technology (Saturday 9:30-11:30am). Come on out to the Boulder Marriott this morning to hear more about BlogFrog's community-enabling platform and hear from my fellow presenters, who are also up to some pretty cool stuff:

1. Perry Quinn from Lijit (www.lijit.com) will talk about adding a search engine to your blog, using it to know more about your readers, and monetizing the result.
2. Pete Sheinbaum from The Mandelbrot Project: Creator of Daily Candy and founder of the soon-to-be revealed The Mandelbrot Project, will speak on creating and growing your community on the web.
3. Jason Cormier from Room 214 (http://room214.com): Room 214 is a social media agency that uses social networking, online word of mouth and integrated search marketing to help companies get noticed, retain customers and continue growing.

These are some of Boulder's smartest entrepreneurs and you don't want to miss them. I haven't decided if beer bloggers are a tough audience or not so I decided to loosen them up with this video I created at xtranormal.com.

Kitty Kelly's biography on Oprah Winfrey: 500 pages of cleverly packaged contempt

I just finished Kitty Kelly’s biography on Oprah Winfrey and was greatly disappointed. What I hoped would be a thoughtful, objective assessment of one of history’s iconic female figures turned out to be a 500 page subliminal rant. Kelly clearly has credentials and awards for her writing and has spent years doing meticulous research on historical figures like Frank Sinatra, the Kennedys, Nancy Reagan, Elizabeth Taylor and the British royals. Her list of referenced articles in Oprah’s biography is impressive. Thirty pages of annotated footnotes listing facts, published articles and every word uttered by Oprah, recorded or gossip. But here’s the rub. The entire biography is steeped in an undertone of contempt by the author. So much so that it discredits her claim that the examination is "unvarnished".

Kelly gives sterile coverage to Oprah’s charitable work and good intentions and has a knack for dismissing it all at the end with a sentence or two that implies she was capable of doing more. Yet stories that hinted at any bad judgment or scandal were covered with such relentless persecution and exhaustive detail on every nuance of the crime, I thought I was reading about a wanted terrorist, not a daytime talk show host. Kelly tries to come across as objective, but her book reeks of disdain and it gets old. It’s as though she doesn’t trust that an intelligent reader can digest facts and come to their own conclusion. Instead, she spends so much energy trying to persuade me to hate Oprah that she creates the opposite effect. I started to like the diva more just to root for the underdog.

Another odd side note about the book is that Kelly repeats entire passages word-for-word and the writing style is so different in some chapters, I started to wonder if she even wrote the whole book herself.

Kelly is certainly entitled to her opinions about Oprah or any of her subjects, but she shouldn’t pretend this is an objective biography written without bias. Kelly claims her mission is to separate fact from fiction, myth from truth, but all she ended up doing was making me wonder what personal beef she has with Oprah. When your persecution of someone becomes more charged than the crimes you accuse them of, your motive becomes suspicious. As Shakespeare said “The lady dost protest too much, methinks”.

Blogher10: Since when did swag become so offensive?

I never quite understood why some take such offense to the idea that a conference sponsor would like to leave you a little thank-you gift for being willing to let them share their message with you. If you don’t want swag, don’t take any. Period. How the whole concept of swag at BlogHer (or any conference for that matter) got so complicated and controversial, I’ll never know. Maybe I missed something. Without sponsors, BlogHer would be twice as expensive to attend and would be so cost-prohibitive, most of us would not be able to go. I am grateful to the brands that recognize women bloggers as a powerful target audience and are willing to invest marketing dollars to spend time with us and learn what makes us tick so they can serve us better. And I’m grateful to BlogHer for seeking out those partners so we can enjoy a discounted room rate, wonderful food, and a venue that sits a few blocks away from Central Park in downtown New York City. I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed but I’m still missing the offensive part.

Some folks left with scores of cool gifts and useful samples of products from generous sponsors. Good for them! I left with very little but only because I didn’t make it to some parties and had already over-packed so I opted out. I love the sandwich holder from Hillshire Farms and the tiny portable speakers from AOL and I toted my PUR water bottle around the entire time I was there (I bet I’m not the only one who grabbed an extra one). The BlogHer conference guide lists 100 sponsors including the likes of Pillsbury, Hallmark, P&G, Pepsico, Healthy Choice, Yahoo!, PayPal, Nikon, Sears, Comcast, Johnson & Johnson and many more. These are serious brands that spend millions researching their target demographic and spending millions more trying to reach them. Aren’t you glad those brands invested their money in BlogHer instead of a SuperBowl commercial? Help me out here because I still don’t get the offensive part.

Just so I don’t occur as one-sided, I’ll try to look at it from another perspective. Some say all the swag is wasteful and feeds the “free” frenzy. I’ve spent my career doing marketing for both large and small companies and have worked my share of trade shows. Product samples and promotional items are inventoried and arrive with their sponsors neatly packed and accounted for. Swag is only wasted when it is accepted and then gets left in the hotel room or thrown away when we get home. If that is the case, aren’t WE the ones actually responsible for the waste? As for the free part, I feel silly even addressing that one. Would you rather they charge for the swag?

Maybe it’s intrusive. Like when you get strip club flyers shoved in your hand outside the bar or get doused with some edgy scent called Mood or Jezebel by a leggy sales rep in the cosmetic isle. Seriously. Have you ever been treated with anything less than respect and genuine enthusiasm from a brand at BlogHer? These brands don’t ask for anything from us other than to be in our presence and if you stop and talk to them, you’ll learn they are doing some incredibly innovative things. They even have an entire expo hall reserved for sponsors that you have to intentionally walk into in order to interact with them. Still not finding the offensive part.

Maybe it’s political. Maybe it’s because the swag is plastic and not made of recycled paper, or the brand doesn’t give enough funding to early education programs in Uganda or they use red dye #2 on their label. Maybe they don’t employ enough senior citizens, or the logo looks too ethnic or the CEO made a bazillion dollars last year and has a yacht floating off the coast of some country with a US trade embargo. I am not making light of the political impact brands have on global affairs. I am making light of our offense to their free toothbrush.

Just because you don’t want to accept swag doesn’t mean the act of offering it should be criticized. Swag is a gift, not a patronizing assault on your intelligence as a target demographic. If you take it as such, I invite you to consider that you are over-thinking the whole concept. At the end of the day, swag is fun. They are presents and toys from people we don’t know and some of it just shows up in our rooms when we’re not there. Isn’t that what Santa Claus has been doing for centuries?

Why work on your blog alone when you can do it with 300 other women?

Starting today, and for the next 31 days, I will be joining over 300 other fantastic blogging women as we take on ProBlogger's 31 Days To Build A Better Blog challenge, sponsored by the fabulous SITS Girls and powered by BlogFrog. If you are just hearing about this challenge and want to know more, visit the SITS Girls community discussion here.


Darren Rowse, aka ProBlogger, was blogging (and making lots of money doing it) long before most of us even knew what blogging was. Not only did he turn his blog and its valuable content into a successful income empire, he has been teaching others how to do the same thing for years. I've been a fan of Darren's for a long time and am thrilled to have the opportunity to partner with him and the SITS Girls to sponsor this campaign.

Today marks Day 1 of the challenge and the exercise is to write an elevator pitch for your blog. I have been blogging since 2007 and like many of you, my topics run the gamut. I blog about business, being in tech start-ups, being a woman in tech start-ups, funny/interesting/stupid things that happen in the social media space, and my teenage kids. Now that my kids have an opinion about being the topic of blog posts, I seem to write about them less and less. Which is ironic because observing teenagers in their natural habitat and watching them evolve could keep me fed with topics for years.

This blog is my outlet, my personally-branded channel to inspire, educate, vent, ponder, provoke thought, and maybe make a few other women out there feel slightly less crazy and a bit more empowered. I do that by sharing what I have learned from 1) being in the tech space for 20 years 2) successes and failures along the way, 3) being a single parent for many of those years, and lastly, realizing just how powerful a force we are in the evolution of our own (and others) success. Success/health/peace/insert-desired-life-goal-here is there for the taking. Seriously. My desire is to help others realize this by sharing my own experiences and connecting those who are on the same journey who would love a little company along the way.

What's YOUR elevator pitch? If you are part of the 31DBBB Challenge, or even if you aren't, come share your thoughts and read how the challenge is going for hundreds of other women in the SITS Girls Community!

Supersize Me: a trip to Costco

I must admit, I have a fascination with Costco. I grew up in a rural area in Maryland and the nearest grocery story was about 30 minutes away. We had a little general store a few miles away where you could get bread and fishing bait but we only stopped there if we really had to. It was such a small town, my mom could pick something up and pay for it another day. So to wander through a Costco and see the ginormous, economy sizes that products come in is super entertaining.

We make a run to Costco every few months and I decided to take pics of the more amusing items on our last trip.

Who doesn't love an entire an isle of desserts as long as a football field?

My favorite section - CHEESE (p.s. I follow @tillamook on Twitter)!

That's a lot of BBQs

I don't get why apples need their own individual nook. That's a bit overboard.

Can you see the size, 72 oz? That's 4.5 pounds of chocolate chips!

You can't see the weight but this box makes 6 batches of brownies. Yes, we bought one :)

I'm holding 220 servings of oatmeal here.

70 bags of sunflowers seeds. That's a lotta ballgames.

25 pounds of pinto beans.

Even the books are large! That is not a trick shot, that book is about 2.5 feet tall.

Each case has 12 bottles so that's 60 hours of energy!

Um, 190 servings of fiber? I can't even begin to figure out how many apples that is. If you ate all that, you will need a lot of this:

And of course, everything about Costco is super-sized, including the total:

p.s. we didn't buy everything shown in the pictures, I just thought they were funny. It would take me years to eat 25 lbs of pinto beans and 220 servings of oatmeal. Unless you mixed it with the 4.5 pounds of chocolate chips and made cookies. Then maybe.

In the company of addicts: Serial Start-up Entrepreneurs

Last week, I was honored to sit on a panel for Colorado University's Studio Series at Boulder Digital Works. BDW brings together digital professionals and tech leaders to share what they know about business and entrepreneurship. The Studio Series meets the first three Wednesdays of every month during the summer.

The topic last week was Serial Startup Entrepreneurs and I was in good company with fellow panelists Tara Anderson, COO Quick Left, and Tim Wolters, founder and CEO of RoundPegg. We spent an hour talking about what attracts us to starts-ups, why we keep at it even when things look dismal, and what keeps us going back for more. We shared stories of our biggest blunders, what we learned, and what characteristics serial entrepreneurs seem to share. Here are a few of the characteristics we all agreed were important:

1. One thing serial start-up entrepreneurs seem to share is a passion for creating something from nothing. There is simply nothing like having a good idea one day and doing something about it the next. Just you, your partners, and the few crazy people you managed to talk into taking the plunge with you. No one says "its not my job" or puts off till tomorrow what they can jump on today. Everyone is in charge and all ideas get considered.
2. You have to be willing to be wrong. You won't survive in a start-up if you have an attachment to being the smartest person in the room or are afraid to be wrong. You will be wrong more often than you will be right. Accept it, embrace it, and let it work for you.
3. Have a mentor (or several). No matter how much experience you have, there are people who are better at certain things than you are. Seek them out, make friends and don't be shy about asking for advice. Ask if they'll meet with you on a regular basis and learn what you can from them.
4. Know what feeds your passion. Being passionate about an idea is a big part of what will make you better at it than someone else. When you are passionate about something, you have more curiosity, more drive, and more fun. When its stops feeding your passion, its time to move on. I've heard so many stories about entrepreneurs who felt compelled to leave full-time positions to start companies because their minds were consumed with thoughts of a new venture.
5. Serial start-up entrepreneurs seem to better tolerate risk. Many of us have mortgages to pay and families to feed and we are not independently wealthy (yet!). We know that only a few start-ups make it, that competition is fierce and funding is scarce. But we do it anyway because the game is just too good not to play. We don't mind driving junky cars and bringing our lunch to work because we are hedging our bets on a bigger game.
6. Most of us get bored easily. Its not ADD, its just that we have high standards for how interesting life can be. When I moved from New Jersey to DC back in the early 90s, I knew no-one. I thought about what activity I could get involved with that would have me meet interesting people. So I decided to learn to fly. I met several of my closest friends and had some of the biggest adventures of my life. It also helped keep the rest of my life interesting.
   

Its hard to capture everything we talked about in that hour but we covered many aspects of start-ups including funding, hiring, role models, start-up vs corporate culture, and lots of other topics. You can read more of my posts on start-ups like 13 ways running a start-up is like having a baby, what happened to my career?, and what I love about start-ups.

Here's me tweeting pics during the panel:

The audience included CU students and those from the local community. Sean Baxter did a fabulous job of moderating and huge thanks to Jo White for organizing it all as BDW's 60-week Program Director.

You can find out more about Boulder Digital Work's Studio Series on their Facebook page.

Favorite moments from CBC

Now that I have a good night's sleep and can function at least at half-capacity, I am sorting through my Casual Blogger Conference photos and remembering my favorite moments. While I love the instant connection and the relationships that slowly evolve online, nothing solidifies those friendships like meeting in person. Heck, it puts them on steroids. And even though it felt like I took a million pictures, I couldn't capture moments with everyone. So in no particular order, here are a few of memorable faces and moments. Disclaimer: I am not a photographer and these were all taken on my iPhone so please forgive the graininess and general lack of artistic talent :)

The photo above is one I snapped while taking a long walk one morning. I had a blissfully silent walk along the road from the hotel and enjoyed staring at the Wasatch mountain range.

Lisa (on the left) is one of the hard-working co-founders of CBC and Heather King is one the kindest, most sincere heartwarming ladies you will ever meet. She blogs at The Extraordinary Ordinary and you can find her on Twitter at @HeatheroftheEO.


This is the crowd we had for the Online Communities presentation that Rustin and I did. We talked about the power of using online communities to grow their blogs and walked them through how to use BlogFrog.


Me and my favorite mascot, Blogger the Frog!


Jennifer and I met on Twitter and I was thrilled to meet her in real life!


Another big highlight - meeting Courtney Kendrick, author of the blog C-Jane. She is as lovely and disarming in person as she is on her blog. Courtney was one of the earliest users of BlogFrog over a year ago and we are so grateful she gave our product a try way back when it was ugly and awkward. But she saw the potential in our little widget and stuck with us. Now look at how far we both have come! Thanks for all your awesome support, Courtney!


Sounds odd to say that a 25 minute ride to the airport could be a highlight, but when you are traveling with Jessica Bern (BernThis, @bernthis)) , Heather King (The Extraordinary Ordinary, @HeatheroftheEO), and Lori Anderson (@loriyay) , it can be incredibly entertaining. Jessica had us cracking up the entire way. After nine years as a comedian, she now channels her gift for humor into her blog.


To appreciate these next two ladies, you need some context. My company, BlogFrog, started over two years ago when Rustin Banks (BlogFrog's creator and CEO) programmed an early prototype during nights and weekends while working full-time as an engineer for an aerospace company. He and I launched the company early in 2009 and worked hard to get bloggers to try it. As with many early-stage start-ups, the product did not look nearly as elegant as it does today. Lets just say it was not very pretty and still had a lot of bugs to work out. But Laura Franklin (Better In Bulk, @1momof5 and Brandie Rudy (Rudy Family Rukus, @rudyrukus) gave us a chance and became loyal fans of BlogFrog. They overlooked our awkward appearance and saw the inner beauty and potential we had. They shared BlogFrog with their readers, gave us insightful feedback, and became two of our favorite champions. For that I will be forever grateful. We have shared lots of emails, tweets and discussions but until CBC, we'd never met in person. Laura and Brandie, thank you for being so amazing and talented and for giving us a chance when no one knew who we were! THANK YOU!


No, I didn't meet Magnum PI at CBC - this pic is just to see if you're are paying attention. Totally random but I find it hilarious that in this picture, Tom Selleck is holding the handset of a phone with no cord attached (um, they didn't even have cell phones back then). You can even see the little hole where the phone line plugs in. LOL.

For those I met and hugged at CBC, I look forward to keeping in touch on your blogs, Facebook, Twitter and in BlogFrog communities!