In the last cou­ple of weeks, I have had the priv­i­lege of being fea­tured on three online plat­forms for women — for Mums, for female entre­pre­neurs and for those who count them­selves in both categories.

I was fea­tured with a Mumpre­neur Pro­file on Anto­nia Chitty’s Fam­i­lyFriend­ly­Work­ing web­site.….

.… m y sto ry was pre­sented in a great blog post on Mum­s­LikeYou last Fri­day (6,000+ users and 40,000 — 60,000 monthly hits).…..

.….and I was pre­sented as the Mem­ber of the Week of the boom­ing net­work driftig.nu for female Swedish entre­pre­neurs, with 6,000+ mem­bers and a real trea­sure of encour­age­ment and inspir­ing advice.

Of course great expo­sure for me and the Mum­my­Mug to a rev­e­lant audi­ence within net­works much big­ger than my own. The fea­tures gen­er­ated about 500 vis­its to this site and many inter­est­ing com­ments and new leads to help me build my business.

I can only say — thank you! And I here­with return the favor. Please visit the sites above. You’ll not regret it.

Of course it did not hap­pen by itself. Yep, I did make the first cold call con­tact with the women behind these sights and I sim­ply asked for the pos­si­b­lity of being fea­tured. They were all quick with feed­back, gen­er­ous with their time and with their sup­port in terms of lend­ing me access to their platforms.

This is Online Sis­ter­hood in action. The more I explore the online com­mu­ni­ties for women, by women, I see exam­ple after exam­ple of women invest­ing their time and energy in unselfishly help­ing some other woman to find advice, to con­nect, to build their busi­ness, find online friends or a great buy. And, as study after study on the tremen­dous online engage­ment of women, this engage­ment is cre­at­ing real and mutual value; for women per­son­ally, and for their businesses.

Isn’t it funny that we women, who often in the ‘offline’ world are known for the absolute oppo­site to the gen­eros­ity to each other and with­out will­ing­ness to help each other fur­ther on the career lad­der, are engag­ing so gen­er­ously, and at such a mas­sive scale to com­plete strangers online? Per­haps is eas­ier for us women to show this gen­eros­ity to each other when we are meet­ing in the vir­tual world, free from the inher­ent com­pe­ti­tion that occurs when women work or live side by side offline. What do you think?

What­ever the rea­son: online, it’s a brave new women’s world.

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Are you an aspir­ing (Mum)blogger but not sure where to start and how it is done?

I’ve got a good tip for you. Being a begin­ner myself, I have signed up for the Mum-bloggers E-course, run by Erica from Lit­tle­Mummy.

Divided into three courses of 10 weeks each (Begin­ner, Inter­me­di­ate and Advanced) she takes you step by step through the basics, such as start­ing a blog, posts and pages and com­ment­ing eti­quette, basic SEO, join­ing groups and reviews and com­pe­ti­tions — and more. She tells me that the Inter­me­di­ate and Advanced courses will cover  Slideshows, video, analysing blog data, pod­cast­ing, mon­e­tiz­ing, Email list build­ing, newslet­ters .… and finally e-courses and ebooks, so you can end up know­ing how to share your knowl­edge as well!

I am about two thirds through the Beginner’s level. the obvi­ous plus-points is that for free, it is infor­ma­tive and — it is extensive.

What I most like is its struc­ture and care­ful avoid­ance of infor­ma­tion over­load. Thanks to the weekly pace, you actu­ally not get more infor­ma­tion than you can digest dur­ing the startup of a blog.  I see the E-course email in my inbox, it takes no more than 15 min­utes to inter­nalise what it says. Because it is not more infor­ma­tion than I can digest, the mes­sage actu­ally sticks.And I am encour­aged to apply and try what she is talk­ing about.

Also, Erica’s style is to the point, informed and has a friendly tone.

So, thumbs up for Erica — and wish­ing all you prospec­tive blog­gers out there some happy reading!

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Hi every­one! I hope you have had a relax­ing and good Christ­mas break and feel refreshed and ready for the new year. I hope 2010 will bring you health, hap­pi­ness and all other things you wish for your­self and your family.

I’m just back from a trip to Swe­den, which com­bined nice relax­ation with the fam­ily with use­ful meet­ings and con­tacts for Mum­my­Mug. Really look­ing for­ward to a new year, which will cer­tainly bring lots of hard work but also a lot of fun, I am sure!

As one of my New Year’s res­o­lu­tions is to start vlog­ging, I decided to start right away!

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Yes­ter­day, we attended a sem­i­nar in Utrecht, organ­ised by CMS Derks Star Bus­man and WBI Web­ex­perts. I believe the 50 or so par­tic­i­pants which had taken the time to come, was an after­noon well spent.  The speak­ers included Mr Hoorne­man, Sienen and Hagen from CMS, and Tim Pel­lens from WSI.

The topic was social media, and we got a good and infor­ma­tive run­down from WSI on inter­net and social media trends, and the opti­mi­sa­tion of the vis­i­bil­ity and reach strat­egy within the ever-changing bat­tery of social media tools and plat­forms. A few inter­est­ing stats on inter­net use in the Nether­lands, that were new to me in any case:

• 12,2 mil­lion Dutchies (out of a total pop­u­la­tion of 16.6 mil­lion) are online at least 1 hour per day.
  
• The fastest grow­ing Dutch online pop­u­la­tion demo­graphic is women aged 20 — 40, and they engage increas­ingly in.… gam­ing!
• E-commerce cur­rently gen­er­ates 4 bil­lion € in annual sales in the Netherlands.
• Social net­work Hyves is gigan­tic in the Nether­lands, with around 6,7 mil­lion Dutch mem­bers. That is some­thing like  40 % of the entire pop­u­la­tion! Fastest grow­ing cat­e­gory is women between 30 and 50 years of age.

A large part of the dis­cus­sion revolved around the legal ins and outs of using social media for mar­ket­ing pur­poses. Per­haps not the sex­i­est top­ics to spend time on as a pas­sion­ate social media mar­ke­teer. But of course oh-so-important to be aware of: bet­ter to be safe than sorry and find your­self in court fac­ing a com­peti­tor suing your pants off because you used their trade mark name wrongly.

A few insights:

• There is a lot of legal buzz at the moment around the use of third party trade­marks in Google Adwords and as key­words online. The Euro­pean Court of Jus­tice has recently indi­cated that Google has the right to pro­pose and sell Adwords includ­ing 3rd party trade­marks. A French court, how­ever, recently fined eBay €80,000 for hav­ing used Dior as a key­word. This is clearly  jurispru­dence in the making.…
• A rule of thumb is, that you may use some­one else’s trade­mark in your blog or on your site, if it is for refer­ral, for [fair] com­par­a­tive adver­tise­ments and as long as it made abun­dantly clear that you do not sell or rep­re­sent the brand.
• The reg­is­tra­tion of a domain name in itself gives no auto­matic IP rights and is not com­pa­ra­ble to a trade­mark in the ‘offline’ world.  This said, you may of course not cyber­squat and reg­is­ter a domain name that already belongs to some­one else. So start in the right order: secure it by duly reg­is­ter­ing your trade­mark first.
• The new Dutch leg­is­la­tion on data pro­tec­tion, which amongst other things for­bids Dutch com­pa­nies to send any kind of email to cus­tomers or other com­pa­nies with­out prior explicit per­mis­sion to com­mu­ni­cate by email, is one of the strictest in the world. Hor­rey.…. it cer­tainly does not make life eas­ier when one wants to design mar­ket­ing cam­paigns., I can tell you that much. It also applies to Dutch com­pa­nies com­mu­ni­cat­ing with per­sons or com­pa­nies out­side of the Netherlands.

That a law­firm offers such a sem­i­nar for free is of course great ser­vice.  So — here­with my offi­cial thanks! I learned a lot!

It also goes to show that they believe, that there will be many com­pa­nies out there, includ­ing some of those present that day in the room, who are going to make mis­takes along the way and end up need­ing legal defence in this area. Or feel that they need to attack a com­peti­tor to defend their position.

And no doubt many of us will.… and hav­ing shown that they are a trusted hand to turn to if and when that hap­pens, I am sure they will end up earn­ing back the cost of speak­ers, hand­outs, pens, mini-mints and cof­fee, drinks and chips.

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The last few days, I’ve spent a lot of time think­ing about social media this blog, the Mum­my­Mug and the world of online Mums.I’ve been explor­ing the Mum-blog uni­verse, read lots of posts on social media and came across some­one who rightly points out a few things (I do rec­om­mend you to read the whole post here; guest post by Michael Brito posted on Brian Solis, Pr 2.0)

Real­ity #1: Con­sumers already get it; brands are still try­ing to fig­ure it out.

Real­ity #2: Brands should focus on the peo­ple first, tools last. 

Real­ity #3: There is no such thing as a social media expert quite yet.

To sum it up, he argues that social media is about authen­tic peo­ple and about tools and processes in con­stant flux. And this does not match the stan­dard cor­po­rate one-way com­mu­ni­ca­tion strate­gies of yes­ter­day. And it gives voice to the con­stituen­cies that are sup­posed to buy the prod­ucts that com­pa­nies tweet about.

Of course it was always a no-brainer to use social media to pro­mote the Mum­my­Mug — an afford­able way to do mar­ket­ing, and a good sales chan­nel (this said: prod­uct ful­fil­ment is in this case still VERY much offline, and there I still have to find the most cost effec­tive model as the pur­chase has to be deliv­ered with­out it cost­ing an arm and a leg and with­out con­sumers hav­ing to wait 3 weeks to get it in the mailbox).

But I want to go beyond that: I want the brand to really be BY the online Mums — the real ones. And serve online mums, to give them a prod­uct they really want and need.  I want the Mum­my­Mug brand to be crafted inside social media, but just com­mu­ni­cated through it.

Why? Because as much as Mum­my­Mug is a brick-and-mortar prod­uct like any other, and I need to make money sell­ing it, just like any other com­pany, Mum­my­Mug IS about real moth­ers. I am a very real one-man band (mother) who wanted to make some­thing really use­ful. Mum­my­Mug will deliver a real ben­e­fit to the moth­ers who choose to use it. And I would not want it any other way than how THEY want it. And I want the suc­cess to be a shared one.

I am try­ing to cre­ate and launch­ing a com­pletely new and inde­pen­dent brand in the midst of a dynamic social media take-off. I have a prod­uct aimed at a demo­graphic that is very much active in the social media sphere.

So — it must be pos­si­ble to make it happen!

How? I look for a strong Mum on each anchor mar­ket, to be the Mum­my­Mug Mum. Some­one who is already estab­lished, who prob­a­bly already has a pro­fes­sional back­ground in mar­ket­ing. A Mumpre­neur. To blog, pro­mote and con­nect with the Mums online. To lis­ten, to crowd­source  ideas for what the Mum­my­Mug should evolve into  — and to feed that back into the Mum­my­Mug Hub (read:me) so I can tune the prod­uct and the brand into the needs of the Mums out there. In other words: I am work­ing to build a net­work of free­lance Mum-bloggers, that together with me can put the magic into the Mum­my­Mug brand.

These Mum­my­Mug Mums who would not only be free­lance mar­ke­teers, and cer­tainly be given a busi­ness oppor­tu­nity where they would share in the finan­cial suc­cess they will hope­fully help cre­ate,  but truly live the brand, in flesh and blood, and con­nect through social media with other real Mums out there.

Together, I am sure we can cre­ate some­thing from which every­body wins.

So — are you the Mum­my­Mug Mum I am look­ing for? Then I can’t wait to hear from you (cecilia@mummymug.com )

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Wow. I am over­whelmed. I have spent the after­noon brows­ing around the world of British Mum­blog­gers. Why British? Well, I blog in Eng­lish myself for starters. I want to get to know them, their way of life, their likes and dis­likes and hopes and fears. And hope they want to get to know me.

Ran­domly start­ing to look for blog­gers is like lift­ing the blan­ket and dis­cov­er­ing a whole uni­verse. It’s of course over­whelm­ing and impres­sive how many moth­ers and fathers are out there, the the shar­ing that takes place is impres­sive. So much com­mu­nity. So much instant recog­ni­tion in the lifes of com­plete strangers. That is so reassuring! ;-)

At the same time I some­how want to find my way around before I start com­ment­ing, start get­ting in the game. Feels a bit like need­ing to do some care­ful eval­u­a­tion of the fields and the rules before start­ing to actively play. So, have started gen­tly by sub­scrib­ing to some selected newslet­ters from blog­gers that instantly appealed: Lit­tle­Mummy, Who’s the Mummy? amd A Mod­ern Mother to men­tion a few.

And last but not least: a direct email to AlphaMummy, a group blog of women who seem really cool. Who knows.… will they read this and reply?!

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Today we are talk­ing about the web­site, which has just gone live as you know. Eelco is explain­ing us the con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem and how we can post on the web­site. I am very excited to get blog­ging and share my story of mak­ing the Mum­my­Mug a great expe­ri­ence for you all!  More to come.

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