Photo by Kevin N. Murphy

Geri Stengel interviewed me about networking tips for women entrepreneurs in conjunction with my monthly Founder Friday events in New York City. I start many meetings reminding the 200 attendees to approach networking events in a thoughtful way designed to make the most of your time. Read the complete article about Networking Tips for Women on Inc.

…Connections open doors, doors to money, markets and qualified managers and employees.

1. Pick your venue. There are plenty to choose from. If you don’t like the vibe of one organization’s events, try another. You can choose gender-specific hosted events such as Women 2.0 Founder Friday or the National Association of Women Business Owners, industry specific organizations, such as Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers or general business groups such as Chambers of Commerce.
2. Know your elevator pitch. You are not here to make a sale, so you don’t need to close the deal. You do need to let people know who you are and what you do in a way that makes them want to hear more.
3. Ask questions. Women are great at building closeness and connections through conversation. By asking questions you’ll engage the person and really get to know what they do. Still not comfortable? Pretend you are interviewing people for an article about the event; get the who, what, and why. Make the task less personal.

Read the complete article about Networking Tips for Women on Inc.

Workshop Description

This workshop will cover the very basics of social media for managers. Bring your “stupid questions” because we’re starting from the very beginning in an environment where everyone feels just as lost as you do. More importantly, we’ll teach you about the types of Social Media so that even as the individual sites change you’ll have the knowledge to understand the new ones that come out.

• Have you been asked to talk to an employee based on what they Tweeted but you don’t understand Twitter?
• Have you been asked to promote your organization on social media but don’t understand where to start?

Topics Will Include:

• Twitter: From Tweets to Hash Tags
• Facebook: Pages, Privacy Controls, and Tagging. Should I be Facebook friends with my employees? What about my customers?
• Foursquare: Why Do These People Check-in?
• LinkedIn: Profile tips to Removing Ex-Employees From Your Business Page
• Reddit: The new Digg (even if you never knew what Digg was)

Start With Studying Your Users

iPad Adoption Rates for Kaplan's Customers

Before digitizing their first book, the first step Kaplan took was to study their existing customers. They knew they were the leading publisher in the space but had to study if their customers wanted digital books. They surveyed their students on which tablet they owned or were planning to purchase. They also started an ethnographic study of how students were using Kaplan’s paper books. In talking to students about their studying habits and taking photos of how students highlighted the print, they discovered what students did with their books.

 Why Students Liked Paper Books

• Need for tangibility & token of ownership: If it is physically in my life, I’m more likely to study.
• Make markings/highlights to sustain attention: Some students highlighted almost the entire book.
• Make markings as proof to self of completion: Even if they didn’t read it throughly, they liked to mark the sections they had read through.
• Keep markings as future study aid: Occasionally students would reference sections they’ve highlighted but much less often then Kaplan thought.
• Make visual memory of content on page: Some students with a visual memory needed the colored highlight to remember materials (“that section was in blue”).

“Everything You Can Do On Paper And More”

Kaplan decided that their goal was to take everything students could do with the print edition and surpass it on mobile devices. This included:

• Multi-colored highlighting
• Take Quizzes With Instant Feedback on Answers
• Add Written Notes
• Record Audio Notes
• Sophisticated Search
• Video of Professors Teaching Sections

Kaplan’s First iPhone App Release

Kaplan outsourced book conversion and licensed a reader from Bluefire, which was compatible with Adobe software. They learned that their books were incredibly complex to convert and are bringing that process in house. They used technology from MarkLogic for distribution and data collection.

Textbooks Versus iPad By Weight

The reaction to the original iPod touch/iPhone App (released before the iPad came out) was not overwhelmingly positive. By asking their users for feedback, they learned a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of their assumptions. They decided to scale back their goals to the competitive advantage of eBooks, which was books are heavy. Their MCAT book set weighs 10.5 pounds whereas the iPad weighs only 1.3 pounds.

Study Your Users Even More

Kaplan moved to an agile development method. They gave away the digital book with the print edition so they could collect a lot of usage data and quickly iterate development. As of today, Kaplan is iPad only and hasn’t gone back to the iPhone App format since their first release.

According to Kaplan’s survey, 70% of the students had not used electronic textbooks in their high school and college coursework. Of the ones who had used digital textbooks, only 15% of early adopters had an excellent experience. More students have taken an online course (46%) than used electronic textbooks. When you ask students if they want analog or digital study aids, about half say they want some digital and some paper materials.

Data Drives Better Learning Outcomes

Traditional print books aren’t able to “phone home” and tell you how their being used. Kaplan is now able to quantify and analyze how often students do the following actions:

Informative Metrics for eBooks

• Opening book
• Going to table of contents
• Navigating to a chapter
• Annotations (highlights) made
• Flipping pages to find something you’re looking for
• Turning the page/how fast pages are read
• Which pages are referenced most
• Going to the glossary to see the definition of a word

In the same way that other businesses have used data analysis to improve business outcomes, Kaplan is using their studying statistics to improve their content and change learning outcomes. They are able to ponder the learning implications of informative metrics for eBooks (click graphic for larger view of slide).

Are we heading to a future where professors can actually tell that you do the reading? 

Will they be able to tell you did it quickly in the fifteen minutes before class? Kaplan plans to share student reading data with their instructors. Instructors will be able to see which sections their students are spending more time on and perhaps need additional converge in the classroom.

If you are in the business of developing products and you have this information, “it’ll change your life.” They had to reorganize into agile development teams to respond to the data. “There is no point in collecting this data” if you’re not ready to implement changes around it.

Challenges for Digital Learning Development

• Data vs. intuition: What are the things data won’t tell us? What can’t you measure.
• Managing the fire hours of data: What are the metrics that really matter? Otherwise you will overwhelm your team with data that doesn’t help them develop better products.
• How will this change the reading experience?

1. Curate to Dominate

“If you can separate art from junk, there’s money to be made.” Sports Blog Nation found the best sports bloggers on the web and curated them into a network by team and gave them a method to monetize their content. Sports Blog Nation is now one of the top 10 sports websites. Curation can be a business. MSNBC bought the twitter handle “@BreakingNews” and they curate news from around the world. Tumblr just hired a editorial team to report on what Tumblr users are reporting.

2. Data Mine and Time

“The media understands math.” StoryFold finds the people on Twitter that are closest to a story, roll their tweets into dashboards and sell the feed to news organizations. Social Flow helps publishers time their social media messages to get the best response from their audience. Steve’s firm tracks trust each year and media was the only institution to see a trust increase in 2012. He cites the increased use of sourcing and data as helping to increase trust.

3. Keep Stories Alive

Stories are being kept along for longer. The Guardian got a million additional page views in the month after turning on their Facebook integration. Every share on Facebook will earn you additional readers over a longer time span than a traditional paper.

4. Roll in the Deep

At the LA Times, Geoff Boucher launches a blog called the Hero Complex. It was high-interest vertical with no experts and an audience that wanted to be deeply involved. Media has mastered “spreadable media” which is shared through social media. However there is a long-term market for “drill-able media” aimed at consumers who want to go deep into a topic (and may not be served).

5. Covet They Superstars

From a star author or editor, your super stars have a following that moves with them. As long as your missions are compatible, you must protect and keep your stars.

Photo by Shutterhacks

Levar Burton opened the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference by reminding us that publishers are essentially story tellers (see the video at the bottom of this post). The stories we tell each other shape our future, regardless of how they are told. Levar challenged us to embrace the future of story telling, regardless of the technology behind it. To discuss the funding landscape for publishing startups, Sophie Rochester hosted a diverse panel of investors and founders including Christophe Maire (txtr), Thad McIlroy (The Future of Publishing), Brian Rich (Catalyst Investors), Valla Vakili (Small Demons), Henrik Werdelin (Prehype).

What Types of Publishing Startups Are Getting Funded?

Through The Future of Publishing, Thad is seeing a lot of disruption in the publishing industry but not a lot of opportunity for profitable growth. “You’re going to have to fight for the investment dollars and you may need to give up a lot more than you want to, to get that money” because investors aren’t running to fund publishing. Henrik argues that there are a lot of startups getting funded that publish but aren’t known as “publishers”. Henrik cites Instagram and Twitter as organizations that have gotten lots of funding but aren’t thought of as “publishers”.

What Are The Best Opportunities in Publishing For Startups?

Brian sees this as a one-time generational opportunity for brands to take market share as customers change from analog to digital consumption. Whether you are a new company or an existing brand that is re-inventing itself, now is the time to establish yourself in the digital publishing world. Although many big names are in this space (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple) you still have the opportunity for secondary businesses that support their ecosystems. The big players will drive mass adoption of certain technologies and start-ups need to find a way to operate in a complimentary method like Zynga has been successful based on Facebook. Brian supports companies that will blend into a larger company’s ecosystem but will not fund business models that are setting themselves up to be competitors of big players like Facebook. Valla says that the presence of giants like Amazon actually make his work easier because he sets out to maneuver around them.

“We fail to differentiate between original content and remix,” said Thad. Although remixing content is well-known in other mediums, there is a lot of opportunity for publishers to use a “rich, algorithmic method” to explore existing content and present it in different forms. “Reader’s Digest was the original remixer of publishing” but many current publishers avoid unoriginal content. Valla’s company, Small Demons, digests original novels and comic books to pull out information and display it to users in new ways.

Amazon, Apple, or Google: Which Should You Base Your Business Around?

• “Good business can be made around all of them.” (Henrik Werdelin)
• “The world will not be totally dominated by Amazon.” (Christophe Maire)
• “Amazon has more experience making partnerships successful.” (Thad McIlroy)
• “Ultimately you have to do them all, it’s just a matter of which one you do first based on your potential market.” (Brian Rich)
• “We take inspiration from all of them.” (Valla Vakili)

“There is No Logic Behind These Investors at All.”

Henrik said that it is impossible to predict what an investor will fund because many of them use their personal preferences, like my “daughter likes to read so I’ll fund books,” to decide. He prefers companies that make people more creative than they actually are. “Instagram took people who were bad at taking photos and made them story tellers,” Henrik said. Valla revealed that his first investors were all personally connected to him. He found the Series A Round challenging because it required so many meetings but he found that “your success rate increases as your ability to answer all [potential investor's] questions increases.”

Get Inspired By Levar Burton On Story Telling

Laura Sen

Performance is Proof

The result of your work must have a tangible measurable benefit that you can point to and take credit for. In her experience, when you succeed and put up the numbers your gender will be overshadowed by your results. This will also make you a more obvious candidate for promotion.

Follow Your Passion

Laura started as a French major who liked to shop and ended with a career as one of the most successful women in retail. She says that her work never feels like a job because she loves it. Following your passion is the only way to work hard without burning out, even if where you start isn’t where you end up.

Branch Out

Try a new class, read a different type of book, or volunteer for something new. Your perspective will be expanded. In Laura’s experience, diversification was the key to advancing her career. When moving from a fashion buyer to logistics at BJ’s she gained a diverse foundation that helps her in her job as CEO today. She added that the more diverse the background of a candidate is, the more likely they will be promoted to general management positions.

Promote Yourself

In 2002, when the CEO of BJ’s stepped down it was between herself and the other VP for the CEO position. She was advised to run a campaign to ask the board to pick her but declined, thinking that the board knew her well enough already. The other VP was chosen and fired Laura 10 months later. In 2006 that CEO was fired and she met with the chairman of the board who re-hired her.

Start With Your Values

The underpinnings of Laura’s leadership are values. The BJ values are used in all business decisions from hiring to operations. Although the values are common sense, it is her job to remind everyone to uphold those values even through economic downturns and departmental fights. Respect, honesty, and integrity are values she models to her staff constantly. When the board was in discussions about the company being bought, she worked with her leadership team to create a communication plan to tell all team members in person. This turned a possibly debilitating rumor into a positive experience.

Ask for Feedback

Laura asked store managers what they needed to be more profitable and surprisingly they answered “more community involvement”. She hired community managers, which helped turn around some stores. Shealso runs a buddy systems for successful store managers to mentor under-performing stores.

Thank Everyone

When Laura walks around a store she thanks every single person and has conversations with all of them about the company. She tells every employee that she cares about them because without that she can’t expect employees to care about customers.

“You Never Regret Taking The High Road”

Some people advised her to sue BJ’s after being fired. “It’s not worth it,” she told the crowd. The decision paid off by not burning bridges with the company, even though she never thought she would work for them again. She was rehired six years later and became CEO soon after.

What Is Getting In the Way?

Joanna thinks that fear and giving up after set-backs gets in women’s way. Some women quit after their first major failure instead of taking it as a learning lesson and pushing forward. Joanna got rejected by hundreds of investors in the process of starting VSP Capital. Her tips for negotiation meetings was to “ask for the order” and make sure you know where you stand before you leave. Alexandra emphasized listening to all the negative feedback you get while pitching. You may learn that there is a hole in your business plan or way you could explain something better. The road to success is not smooth.

How Important Are Support Networks?

Imperative! Gilt was built on personal connections. Alexandra didn’t have the money to the buy a marketing list so they had to sign up quality customers through word of mouth and personal networks. Joanna suggests that you need to surround yourself with people you trust that can collaborate with you on solutions. Katrina is working on building her advisory board to supplement the help she already has. We must remember to help each other as well. Joanna revealed that when she ran for mayor of San Francisco she reached out to mayors and legislators across the country. Interestingly, all the men she asked met with her. but all the women sent their staff to meet with her in their stead.

What Role Do Role Models Play?

Alexandra thinks that less women pursue founding companies because there are few female role models. She says female entrepreneurs should share their stories and she has gone as far as writing a book with Alexis (co-founder) on their journey.

What Role Does Confidence Play?

Alexandra talked about her father- and mother-in-law. Her father-in-law will spend a few minutes cooking and declare the results the best in the world. Her mother-in-law will spend hours in the kitchen cooking multiple courses and fret it isn’t good enough. Why do women always undersell themselves? Katrina opened a retail store in NYC without telling her accountant or banker (who would have told her not to) because following her inner voice has lead to the best results. Going big requires taking big risks, working hard, and be resilient.

Image by Victor

MIT Sloan’s Women in Management Conference held a panel around the fact that only 16% of Fortune 500 board seats are filled by women. Panelists included Lisa Carnoy (Global Co-head of Capital Markets for Bank of America and mother of four kids), Jean Hammond (Golden Seeds Co-Founder & Venture Capitalist), and Jennifer Siebel Newsom (Director of Miss Representation and mother of two kids).

How do we get more women to serve on boards?

If you own stock, Jean suggests voting your proxy and refusing to re-elect all male boards. (The California State Teachers’ Retirement System recently expressed their concern with Facebook for choosing an all male board.) The panel was asked if we should set quotas like the Netherlands has? Lisa says that we should encourage company leaders to publicly set their own goals for board diversity. She also recommends that we change how we look for board members. Many board members are chosen through personal networks or search committees.

3% of Fortune 500 CEOs are Women

These few high profile women are asked to serve on hundreds of boards. Lisa cites historical hiring practices of existing board members hiring more men like them. She suggests that women need to pursue board memberships by talking to existing board members and making their interest clear. Jean suggests starting on the boards of smaller companies like start-ups and non-profits.

How Can You Get On A Fortune 1000 Board?

You are probably going to go through a head hunter for those positions but you might get on the short list through serving on a non-profit board says Jean. Being at the top of your current company or starting your own company is also vital.

How Do We Get More Women in the C-Suite?

It was generally agreed on by the panelists that women are judged more harshly and have to be even better than their male peers to rise to the top. Lisa cites working for months without days off and being on conference calls after delivering twins. Her epiphany was realizing that her boss couldn’t read her mind and that if there was something she wanted she had to ask for it. Jean encourages women to start their own companies to create the best working environment for themselves. The next topic was how women can help each other and the conclusion was mentorship.

How Can I Find A Mentor or Sponsor?

Mentorship and sponsorships of women by leaders of all genders is very important says Jennifer. Jean says you can start looking for a mentor by just asking leaders to have a conversation with you about something they have experience in. Everyone is really busy but if you show them that you value their advice, they’ll make the time. Jennifer reminds the audience to have three well-organized questions for your potential mentor and then send a hand-written thank you note afterwards.

More Resources

• Five Steps For Women To Reach The Boardroom on Women 2.0
• Five Important Tips To Get on a Corporate Board on The Glass Hammer

Picture by LeWeb

Marissa Mayer (VP of Google Local/Maps/Localization) spoke at the MIT Sloan’s Women in Management Conference today. Known for being the first female engineer hired by Google in 1999, she spoke about how challenges at Google has shaped the advice she gives to others.

“Passion is a Gender Neutralizing Force”

Marissa says at Google she wasn’t treated like a women. She is just a Geek at Google and “Google is a great place to be a Geek.” What passion can bring together your team in a way that overshadows their differences?

Find Your Rhythm

You know you need to work hard to be successful but how do you do that for decades without burning out? Marissa’s philosophy is to find your own rhythm. Figure out what makes you resentful about working long hours and protect yourself from that. For example if you miss Sunday brunch with your family, you’ll resent staying late at work all week. As a supervisor, it’s your job to help protect your staff’s time for the thing they need most to keep working hard.

We’re Not Producing Enough Computer Science Graduates Period

We know that there aren’t enough female computer scientists but Marissa contends that we need to produce more engineers of any gender. 98% of Google engineers were exposed to computer science in high school or earlier. Personally I think we should teach programming starting in grade school.

Do Things You’re Not Ready To Do

Marissa’s career is filled with taking on projects that were larger than she was prepared for. If you’re only applying for jobs that you are 100% qualified for, how do expect to grow?

Work Somewhere That You Are Comfortable and For People Who Believe In You

Marissa admits that she is painfully shy but at Google she’s outgoing because she is comfortable. This translates into being able to speak up at meetings and make controversial decisions. When considering which job to take, she encourages women to accept opportunities from managers who are going to invest in their professional development. Ask about the training programs and conferences before accepting the position. Marissa suggests that you might want to accept a position from a company you’re less excited about for one that will invest in you.

Hire Good People And Train Them

Google couldn’t hire product managers fast enough. Marissa decided that she could hire inexperienced product managers and train them faster than hiring experienced ones. She went to the best colleges, hired computer science graduates, and put them through a two year trial by fire. The program has been a major successes.

Google also makes sure that there is at least one women on each hiring panel. Even when hiring men, Sergey and Larry want to make sure that they’re hiring men that are comfortable working with women. Women on the hiring panel ensure that candidates are just as comfortable communicating with women as men.

Why is the Google Home Page So Simple?

Marissa was the keeper of the Google home page for ten years. She finally asked Sergey Brin (Google co-founder) if the simplicity of the Google home page was a statement. His answer was that they didn’t have a web master when they launched and he didn’t know enough HTML to post more than the logo and search box. Out of skill constraints, the most visited web page of the decade was born.

How Do You Innovate On Email?

In 2002, Google started thinking about how to tackle email even though everyone already had an email account. Google applied their strengths, search, and storage, to differentiate themselves. The constraint was a market filled with email providers and the solution created the one of the most popular email providers in the world.

Don’t Let the Urgent Drown Out The Important

Google needed to translate their site into localized versions. They started by sending pages to a translation company but the process took 8-12 weeks for each language. The website was changing weekly and traditional translation couldn’t keep up for just 14 languages. She met the founder of Weather Underground, who was offering his site in 50 languages. He was using fans of the site to translate weather terms for him. Marissa launched the Google in Your Language program to activate volunteer translators. The program now has over a million participants. She warned the audience to not let an urgent need override creating a more sustainable solution.

1. We fall into combat mentality.
2. We try to oversimplify the problem.
3. We don’t bring enough respect to the conversation.
4. We lash out – or shut down.
5. We react to thwarting ploys.
6. We get “hooked.”
7. We rehearse.
8. We make assumptions about our counterpart’s intentions.
9. We lose sight of the goal.

Read the full story on Harvard Business Review’s Difficult Conversations: Nine Common Mistakes – Harvard Business Review.