Tech Forward:

So we’re in mini-breakout sessions before lunch, and the question we’re answering is:

What needs to happen to create fundamental change and accelerate the growth of businesses owned by women of color?

That’s a big question that I’m sure will have no small answers . . . I’ll share the group answers with you a little later, but I will tell you my answer:

The first thing that needs to change is getting rid of the word “minority” that’s used to describe people of color. I believe that how you address someone says a lot about how you feel about them as a person. Think about the last time someone repeatedly said or spelled your name incorrectly. How did that make you feel? Got it, right?

It used to be that using the word “minority” to describe people of color was reasoned away by hard numbers–you know, demographics–people of color comprised the minority of the population, ergo they were a “minority.” My question is, now that the demographics have changed–at least in the U.S.–why are people of color still referred to as a “minority”?

What do you think needs to change?

I’m here at the Center for Women’s Business Research 2008 symposium, Research to Roadmap, and you would think Oprah is here: the multimedia displays, the live blogging video, the townhall “meeting”/living room stage setting.

We’re live at the Omni Shoreham in Washington, D.C.

Right now, Michele Norris–yes, the Michele Norris of NPR’s All Things Considered–is talking with Josefina Aguilar of Expresso Mi Cultura, Dr. Faye E. Coleman of Westover Consultants (no relation), Margaret Henningsen of Legacy Bank and Joyce Takiguchi of ComStar International.

They’re all part of a session called, “Putting a Face on the Facts” and they’re sharing their experiences as entrepreneurs - running, building and sustaining a growing company as women of color.

I’ll be back later with some of the research results that will be revealed here today.

Stay tuned…

This year, I’m leading the Social Media Hot Seat Lab at the Marketing Profs’ Business-to-Business Forum in Boston on June 9and 10.

If you want to go and need a discount–and want to see my smiling face–here’s your code to save $350 on registration before May 19 and $250 after that date: ESPK08

Dillydally not.

If you couldn’t make it out to the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs & Excecutives’ Business Applications of Social Networking event in California, the videos and presentations from the event are available online.

Here’s some of what you’ll see:

• Wendy Beecham’s “Intro to Business Applications of Social Networking”;
• Ross Mayfield on “Leveraging Social Software for Business Value”;
• Jeremiah Owyang’s “Best Practices for Online Communities as a Marketing Tool”;
• The panel discussion, “Strategic & Tactical Implementation of Social Networks in Business,” featuring moderator Erika Brown and panelists Karen Appleton, Katie Jacobs Stanton, and Teresa Valdez Klein;
• Robin Wolaner on “Purposeful Networking”;
• Gina Bianchini’s “Launching and Growing Your Online Community.”

Happy watching! Enjoy!

On May 6 and 7 at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., the Center for Women’s Business Research is holding a symposium called Research to Roadmap: Accelerating the Growth of Businesses Owned by Women of Color (Full disclosure: I serve on the center’s advisory board and as chair of the Social Media Executive Committee.)

You simply cannot imagine how close this event is to my heart. Finally, an organization has decided to put its money where its mouth is and deliver the results of a significant study about businesses owned by women of color directly to the legislators on Capitol Hill. The center’s survey results have finally put statistical relevance to the challenge of the growth of these companies. Now maybe someone will listen.

That said, we need women bloggers to cover the event . . . and we need them yesterday. I have arranged for a bloghaus–you might know this as a blogger’s bullpen–at the event, and we need the right women bloggers to be present to live blog.

The bloggers will be responsible for getting themselves to Washington, D.C., but I have secured complimentary registration for all live bloggers who want to attend. The people who are attending this symposium are of note. Bloggers who want interviews? Consider it done. Bloggers will also get first access to *the* study results that have been under moratorium for at least the past month.

Please help me use the power of social media to get bloggers on site at this event. Let’s show them what social media is all about. Feel free to blog about this, podcast about this, Twitter it, post it in community forums and shout it from the rafters.

Ask all interested parties to send me an e-mail (LWest@xynoMedia.com) with the subject “CfWBR May,” with a link to their blog. Then I will send them the registration link and code. Easy, peasy.

One note: most of the hotels in the immediate area are sold out. The good thing is the Omni Shoreham is a half block from the red line on the Metro (the stop is Woodley Park Zoo Adams Morgan). So one could stay anywhere and, in a short Metro ride, get to the event site without issue. In fact, I’m doing this myself.

I thank you for your support. It takes a village.

If you’ve ever wondered how you can get your website to yield better results, you need to know about SitePal.

If you think you already know about SitePal, you seriously need to take another look.

As an expert about these matters, even I was able to get a good, old-fashioned schooling about SitePal’s capabilities from Yujin Sohn at the Small Business Technology Summit.

I’m amazed at what SitePal is up to right now. And the future? Fuggedaboudit! Break out your shades.

You Need to Be A Little Crazy to have a conversation with Barry Moltz, but that’s a good thing.

People who are as creative and inventive as Moltz break molds and don’t follow conventional thinking. I like-y. As my mentor-in-my-head, Roy Williams, would put it, “Barry is my brand of crazy.”

After thoroughly enjoying his keynote–complete with Nerf ball blaster and the permission to be a bit of a slacker (thanks, Barry!)–I cornered Moltz at the Small Business Technology Summit and spoke with him about his latest book, Bounce! Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success.

Check it out…

If you’re tired of hearing about SecondLife and virtual worlds and not knowing what they are or how they impact your business, you might want to check out “Virtual Worlds: Innovating & Investing in The Metaverse” on April 8 at the University of California, Irvine.

And at $50, you can’t beat the price to get the skinny on virtual worlds from experts from Cisco & SAP.

Check it out…

Every now and again, I need to brush up my skill set in a particular area–whether it’s writing, public relations/marketing or just getting ground-floor information on a new market.

From now on, instead of doing all the around-the-barn search engine, Wikipedia legwork, I’m going to take a Mediabistro course.

I was supposed to interview Laurel Touby at the Small Business Technology Summit, but somehow I missed her fuzzy orange sweater (that’s what people who saw her told me she was wearing whenever I asked, “Have you seen Laurel Touby?”) and she missed me in my aqua-green fuzzy sweater. Be that as it may, I did have a chance to catch up with her to get the skinny on Mediabistro.

I was amazed to find out that they had built *ALL* the technology for the Mediabistro site from scratch, AND they’ve got this cool conference circus coming up AND, AND, AND…well take a listen…

I’m not sure what’s going on in your company, but we’re growing every day.

When I founded xynoMedia, my intention was to build a completely virtual company with low overhead and enough flexiblity so that our team can enjoy their lives and get work done. I wanted our company to benefit from the input of global citizens, which is why we have teams working all over the world.

We have administrative assistance in Australia, development teams in the States and in South America, and writers in Canada.

If you want to build this kind of an orgnization, you need some sort of secure online collaboration tool. Something like CatalystWeb’s product CatalystOffice.

At the Small Business Technology Summit, I asked Bob Mathew every single hard question I could come up with based on how my team uses our online collaboration tool, and I was mucho impressed (it’s not that easy to impress a New Yorker).

Listen for yourself…

Right now, CatalystWeb only works with Firefox…but, you’re using that as your default browser anyway, right?

While I attended the Small Business Technology Summit in February, I had the opportunity to have a Tech Forward Convo with Jennifer Walzer of Backup My Info (BUMI).

Jennifer’s company offers a much-needed service to businesses–you already know how I feel about proper backups, and Jennifer offered some really critical information about new legislation involving the use of Social Security numbers online…along with a tip about BUMI’s new service, Qwipit, to help businesses bypass such challenges. Can you say, $250,000 fine?

Take a listen…

It’s no wonder many entrepreneurs are totally intimidated–or plain ol’ confused–by technology.

I attended the AlwaysOn OnMedia NYC conference last week in NYC at the luxurious Mandarin Oriental Hotel. The event was top-notch all the way–until I sat next to Snarky Guy.

You know him:

• He always has a smart answer for everything, yet never really answers a question.
• He throws around jargon and talks about CPC and SEM as if he ate alphabet soup for breakfast.
• He just has to show off that he reads about 10 online publications each day because he’s like a walking Yahoo! newsfeed–which says he isn’t making much money.
• He says oddball things just to get attention. And his comments become even more weird, bordering on non-sequiturs, as the day goes on.

You leave an interaction with him feeling at best like a stupid, ill-informed idiot or at worst like you’ve just been through a technology blender.

Sigh.

I have to say that Snarky Guy is not a full representation of us tech experts. Most of us really are approachable people who want to explain things in a jargon-free way. Honestly.

Computers do weird things to certain people. You know how some people let a smattering of perceived power go straight to the old noggin’? Yep, that’s Snarky Guy.

So, I humbly ask that when you encounter Snarky Guy, just exchange cards quickly and avoid him for the rest of the day. And please remember, one bad apple don’t spoil the whole bunch. Don’t hold it against all of us.