Kelby Carr

This post is completely about giving some link love and exposure to a great, awesome, wonderful site for women. If you are a woman and write about stuff of interest to women, there’s no question. Kirtsy is the place to socially bookmark it, or to even just find the hottest news and blog posts of interest to women.

Thanks to the not very lady-like Skirt Magazine (want the real scoop? I couldn’t possibly reveal all better than the Bloggess does!), the kick ass web site formerly known as sk*rt is giving a kirtsy. We should all do the fine lady the honor of saying hello.

So stop by and check out Kirtsy. Better yet, help spread the word. Best part? You can win some very cool prizes!

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Social networking is personal. This should be obvious, correct? Well, that doesn’t mean everyone gets it. There are plenty of companies trying to figure out how on earth to connect with all us cool social networking people. We’re the online version of the in crowd back in school. (Of course, in real life, well not necessarily! heheh).

And then there are companies and corporations. They so want to hang with us (especially we mommy bloggers who, they’ve suddenly noticed, spend a shitload of money to feed and entertain ourselves and our spoiled children, and we influence other moms who spend a shitload of money). They so want to be our friends.

But we don’t want to be their friends. For one thing, they are too obvious. They scream, “Be my friend!!!! Please!” Or, translated, “Buy my crap! Please!” They’re just, well, I have to say it. They’re just annoying.

And here’s the funniest thing. They do all this, but they don’t want to get too personal. Oh, no. That makes them very uncomfortable.

So they do things like have profiles that have no face, just a logo. Or they have social web accounts that are named for the company, and not a person. They join social bookmarking sites, and then just submit their own site. What a spaz!

And it’s understandable. For decades, maybe centuries, the concept that is normally accepted is that business and personal are separate. We’re programmed with that.

Those days are over. It’s all mingled together, and it overlaps. If you want business, you’d better get personal.

I can’t be friends with a company. Sorry. I can be friends with someone who WORKS FOR a company. I was pretty impressed when I spotted a couple of Graco company bloggers on Twitter. You can follow Lindsay Lebresco and Melissa Parlaman. Initially, when I saw they were official Graco bloggers, I actually cringed.

But then I visited the Graco Baby Blog. Wow, do they get it. I mean, wow. Go visit that blog. Yes, it is a corporate blog, but it could easily be a multi-author parenting blog. The moms and dads here talk about real life, including an incredibly moving recent post about a Graco employee’s wife giving birth to a NICU baby:

I wanted to share a story about my youngest daughter, Mia Erin Langmaid. I am the development manager for US new car seats at Graco Children’s Products, and I’ve worked with infant car seats and premature babies on and off for the last 3 ½ years. I would never in a million years have thought that my wife and I would have a premature baby. Especially since our two older children, Alex (6) and Kylie (4) were both full term, healthy babies.

Corporations? You listening? This is how you engage your customers. The blog still ties into the product, but not in that annoying in-your-face, TV commercial translated into social networking kind of way. This way is more subtle, but just as effective if not more so.

This is how you use social networking. Get personal.

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OK, maybe this is just kind of weird. I blog about Twitter, and now Twitter blogged about me blogging about Twitter. Umm, thanks Twitter. I’m not sure I’m entirely ready for this kind of relationship. It’s not you. You’re great! It’s me.

Seriously, though, I love that Twitter sees that moms are such a force on Twitter (and I totally adore any link love from such a major blog, with a PR7 no less!). We are a force. We are taking over the world. We’re just starting at the Twitter level. Baby steps for moms, 140 characters at a time.

Watch out world!

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I am a bit of a jane-of-all-trades when it comes to the web. That’s pretty much based on doing web writing, web editing, web site building and web socializing since the early 1990s. (Find out more about me and you can contact me at kelby at typeamom dot net). Here are some of the areas in which I can be hired if you sweet talk me and cough up some cold cash:

• Web site creation - I created all by my little lonesome all of the sites you see listed under “My Sites” to the right. I did all the geeky stuff from programming, design, tweaking templates, tweaking code, and so on.
• Web content - I have been writing web content for longer than most people who offer their services of web content writing. If you need samples, you can find dozens of my latest web articles in that cool red widget to the left under the header “My Feeds.”
• SEO - You don’t have to pay some firm thousands of dollars to, quite frankly, probably do very little for you. And please, I’m begging you, don’t pay one of those shady web site submission services. Ugh! I can do everything from reviewing your site to make SEO recommendations (or seeing whether your current firm is really optimizing your site for search engines) to writing SEO-friendly copy to rewriting your current copy so it’s optimized to creating a search-engine friendly web site.
• Social networking and Web 2.0 - If you want to dabble in this area, be sure you know what you’re doing first (especially if it’s for marketing or PR purposes). If you don’t, you’ll be like that over-eager dork in the class that no one likes, but who thinks he is popular. Just don’t. I can tell you how to be less of a social networking dork, advise you on handling the UGC/ blogging/networking/bookmarking situations out there.
• Blogging set up and consultation - If you want to start a blog, I can set you up with one and/or advise you on how best to approach blogging either for personal, business, non-profit or corporate blogs.
• Consultation on approaching bloggers - OK, here’s a freebie. They don’t want your lame press release. Want to find out what does work? Ask me.
• Whatever other super geeky web thing you can think of. If I don’t know about it, I’m sure I can either (a) figure it out, (b) BS my way through it or (c) already know way more than you ever wanted to know about it.

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I’ve been social networking for a while, and I think Twitter has nailed the mom demographic. I see moms on there left and right, and there is a wonderful mom conversation happening at Twitter. If you haven’t been listening, check out this ab-fab Ultimate List of Moms on Twitter. (And thanks so much eMom… you rock for taking the time to create this list.)

I’ve stumbled (which, for the record, I still totally love), sphunn (is that a word?), dugg, spaced, facebooked, you name it. I netscaped until it propellered. I have a secondlife (but do I even have a life?). I babblzed until it fizzled.

Some are more enjoyable than others, and some are better for networking than others. Some will bring a torrent of traffic that, I suspect, never returned. Some boosted a site’s PageRank, odds are likely. Some connected me with old and new friends.

MySpace is too filled with spam, pre-pubescents and glittering graphics for my taste. Honestly, I know Facebook is supposed to be so hot, but I just can’t get into it. You know why? I don’t have the time to delve into it. And I don’t really WANT graffiti.

But then I discovered Twitter. Oh, to Twitter. My day consists of not a single stretch to focus on one thing for more than, oh, a millisecond. Then there’s a whine, cry, dog who needs to piss, kid who wants to be fed, blog I need to write, web article that needs editing… Like every mom, this list is endless.

Twitter’s genius lies in the beauty of 140 characters. It lies in the ability to send without even opening a new browser window, without even needing a computer.

I don’t have time for much, but I have time to Tweet. That I can do. Microblogging is social networking for time-deprived, short-attention spanned mom.

Beyond that, it’s also appealing to a mom. It’s more intimate and personal. You see a page full of faces, you see what they’re saying. It’s a real conversation. It’s also very effective. When I see a link posted by one of these moms, women I’ve never met or said more than 140 characters at a time to, I click it.

I can talk to the momosphere, and I can do it quickly. Better yet, I can listen to the momosphere. Very cool.

What do you think? Why do you Twitter (or not)? And hey, don’t forget to follow me on Twitter.

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Wow, I didn’t expect evidence one day later after I argued social networks are here to stay despite some burn-out. I had cited gapingvoid’s decision to ditch Twitter because it was too time consuming. Well, he’s back on Twitter already. I decided I just had to follow.

Why is he back? His reason:

Too many people I do business with are also on Twitter. Being off it was impossible. My bad.

So this just shows how integral social networking has become. Even if it levels off a little, it is here to stay. This is how many of us communicate now.

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I’m seeing a pretty sudden and pretty prominent trend in social networking: social networking burn-out. As great as Web 2.0 is, it isn’t that surprising that people are burning out on it. There was a ton of attention when gapingvoid posted a funny cartoon about time being consumed tweeting in the post, “ Why I Deleted my Twitter Account.”

Here’s why:

• Something new happens. Everyone thinks it’s cool. Reports say you simply MUST be doing it. So people and companies and organizations jump on board.
• Then they realize something: you need to actually socialize to do social networking. So it’s manpower intensive if you’re an organization, and it’s a time-sucker if you’re a human.
• People want to be cool online, and they think they can do that by being friends with everyone. But it’s hard to be in EVERY clique. That’s why cliques exist. So you can focus.
• They try to connect on several levels and several locations, and just can’t stand to spend another minute socializing.

So here’s what I expect to happen next. Companies who were nervous about dabbling in this realm to begin with will see this emerging trend as a sign they were right all along, and this whole social web/ Web 2.0 thing was just a passing fad.

They will be wrong.

What will happen is that social networking will settle in. People will find their social niches and favorite sites, and they will ignore the other “cliques.”

Then some of the big guys will level off on traffic, slow down or be bought out by other sites. The smaller, niche social networks will become even more popular.

People will keep socializing because that’s how the web has evolved. How and where they will socialize is what will change.

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