Heading to Ecommerce summit 2010

April 12, 2010
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Tonight, I am staying at a hotel at the local airport to leave early in the morning for Las Vegas to attend the Ecommerce Summit 2010.

People have been asking me what I look forward to the most about the trip.  The funny thing is for me it is as much about getting away and seeing a new place as it is the learning, networking and meeting new people.

I am really looking forward to meeting the people I did not meet in Atlanta for eBay on location last month and seeing the people that I have not yet met.

I look forward to networking with people whose businesses are where I would like my to be next year and 5 yrs in the future.  I want to learn effective ways to move my business forward in 2010 and beyond.

What truly amazed me though was how sad I was saying good bye to my kids.  I had an entire night tonight all on my own and realized I had not real idea what to do with it.  No kids to try to get to bed, no eBay listings to get accomplished.  So I actually sat and watched television for the first time in ages.

One of the most interesting thing I discovered when looking at the agenda for the week, is that thanks to social media over the last year I have build connections with a lot of the presenters there and if not the presenters themselves then people that know them.

Social media has been the best networking experience I have encountered.  I am years ahead of where I would have been if I had just stuck to reading forums and searching articles on the web.  I am learning daily what is really important and what is fluff, and I realize I do not have a lot of time for fluff in my life so I really appreciate the meat in the posts and tweets of the people I follow.

I am sure I will have much more to say over the course of the week so what my tweets, facebook pic and blog posts as the week goes on.

If you can’t make it to Las Vegas do like I did last year and make sure you listen to the podcasts from the Summit and watch any live video that is streamed on either You tube or Justin.tv.

I know I felt like I was there last year just with the amount of information that came out of the summit via social media.

Talk to you later in the week.

By Karen | Posted in ecommerce, social media | Tagged , , , | Comment (1)

How do you Blow Up a social media bubble?

November 20, 2009
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Stuck in a bubble on social media?  I know I have been.  You get comfortable chatting with a group of people and start interacting with them in a variety of social spaces, the it starts building into a bubble.  Once there how do you break out and move forward.

I started onto the path of bubbles when I first started in ecommerce almost 2 yrs ago, I was selling on eBay and looking into other options I had, so I discovered forums.  I thought great all these people doing what I do and discussing better and different ways to do it.  So for a long time I participated in some forums and read a lot of others and digested the information.  Then I realized I had read it all before and there was a lot of the same discussions over and over again.  I had evolved and those forums no longer suited my personal needs.

So I started hunting again and discovered Social Media specifically Twitter and wow I met another whole group of people some doing what I was doing and others doing things I aspired to do.  So I read and learned and found other venues like podcasts and blogs.  I started interacting with a great group of people that I enjoyed very much.  The problem is you then create bubble around yourself you start interacting with the same people exclusively and it is really hard to break out of the bubble.  It is comfortable you are with a group of friends.  Also as a friend of mine put it so eloquently tonight you become bubble snobs associating with your the same people hard to let others in the bubble or for you to break out.

So now I am pondering how does one move along ones own evolutionary path.  I always say evolve or die and I think I prefer evolving at the moment.

So how do you make new connections?

Do you continue to live within the bubble?

Do you try to break it completely or just expand it to let new people in?

How do you change a self defined role in your social group?

Do you evolve gradually or radically?

How do you move on or up and not lose touch with those you have valued?

Is it wrong to move on and lose touch?

These are the questions I am now left to ponder as I try to continue to evolve along my path.

Please share you own thoughts and tips about personal evolution

By Karen | Posted in social media | Tagged , | Comments (0)