This past weekend I was the luckiest duck. I was able to attend the first Startup Princess Retreat in Park City Utah at the Zermott Resort, and oh! What a blast! It was a small group of no more than 35 people, and honestly, felt like one big sleepover. Such amazing energy and charisma in this group: a fantastic mesh of fun personalities. I miss you ladies already!
Topic of the weekend? Social networking and marketing to women. Guest speakers came from all over:
Holly Buchanan: co-author of the Soccer Mom Myth, and founder of Marketing to Women Online; from Richmond, VA: fabulous presenter and got us all thinking about how we present our businesses to every type of woman.
Barbara Jones: Founder of the One2One network offering products that match your business in order to get feeback and increase your own social networking. Such an amazing background in the music industry, and such a doll! This woman is Gold!
Janet Meiners: SEO guru and writer of Newspapergirl; Such great info on how to get people to find you on the web.
(gwen with Kelly Anderson: founder of Startup Princess)
Gwen Bell: Social networking queen (voted one of the top 50 most influential people in social media); Member of the Kirtsy Team, twitter expert and social enthusiast. This woman has done it all. If you ever get a chance to meet this woman, do! www.gwenbell.com
(Me with Gabrielle...she has the greatest hair!)
Gabrielle Blair: Design mom and co-founder of Kirtsy. Need I say more? Just a doll! Shared her story about starting her blog and kirtsy and gave some fantastic tips on blogging. She is a gold mine of info and resources!
And all these women were just so open and shared advice with us one on one the whole weekend! We went from professional acquaintances to great friends in just an instant.
And those who attended shared nearly just as much. We had time to get to know each other and share ideas too. I met some awesome women with some amazing companies! I hope to be sharing more about them in the coming weeks, as well as some great info I gleaned from the weekend.
And especially, a HUGE thanks to my husband who watched the kids (fed them Baskin robbins, KFC and spent the day at the children's museum) while I was with the girls. He is the BEST dad!
Biggest benefits: being in a close knit group with women just like me: social, creative, wanting to share their ideas with others. We were all just a bunch of humanistics, concerned mostly about building good relationships, which is what this whole blogging world is really all about!
Thanks ladies for an incredible weekend! Can't wait to share more about what I learned! If you missed this weekend, I hear through the grapevine another is being planned for January! Get on board!