Boston Blog Marketing Meetup

I’ve started a Meetup.com group for Boston area marketers and small businesses to learn about outreach to bloggers.

The first meeting will be on October 27th at 7 PM over at Andala Coffee House in the downstairs room.  I’ve asked Todd Van Hoosear to speak for about 20 minutes on the topic of how to market and outreach influential bloggers.  Then will open the floor to a discussion and forum for folks to get advice marketing techniques.

I’ve been looking for a way to help people around the Boston area for a while and in the future will have more advanced topics for pursual but for now I thought this would be a good introduction topic.  If you have questions or even advice to give on the subject I would love to see you come out and talk with a group about it.

I’m looking for the focus to be strongly Braintorrent-like in it’s structure because I look for opportunities to help others.

You can RSVP on Meetup.com or on the Facebook event.

Adobe Photoshop Express

I heard about Adobe Photoshop Express and thought okay wow, great, something for the casual user to use and edit photos online quickly. Right?

A friend made me very aware of this wee tidbit under the Submitted Materials section of the TOS:

By posting or otherwise submitting Images, you grant to Adobe and all other users of this Site permission to use your Images in connection with their use permitted by these Terms of Use (including making prints and gift items incorporating such Images), including an unrestricted, irrevocable, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free and fully paid up license under all Intellectual Property Rights to copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate, transmit and reformat your Images, with or without having your name attached to such Images, in any manner or form and for any purpose, with full rights to sublicense such rights through multiple tiers of distribution. You will receive no compensation with respect to the use of your Images.

Adobe, I hate the buzzword, but this is most definitely a FAIL. Creative Commons licenses for users are the way to go. Check out Flickr to get your head on straight and fix your TOS, stat.

(Edit: Oh no they didn’t! I completely got bogged down by Adobe and didn’t realize that all of the other users of the site receive the right to use the photos too.  @chazfrench just pointed this out to me.  Thanks dude!)

Zipcar Listens to Customers

Wednesday I rented a Zipcar to get to a meeting. To those of you who haven’t heard of Zipcar they are an awesome rental car company that includes insurance, free gas and a bit of mileage with each rental.

For $50 a year and the cost of the rental I can rent a car, pick it up at the T station nearby and be ready to drive. It’s an awesome deal and I even have favorite cars.

I reserved the car, took the T to pick it up, and drove toward my destination. Once I got nearby I stopped to get lunch because I hadn’t eaten when I left the house. I took my cell, credit card, ID and Zipcard in with me and locked my computer and other items into the vehicle.

After lunch I came back out of the restaurant and when to unlock the door but the card wouldn’t work. I try again and again out of hopes that it’ll work once and I can get in but no. I called Zipcar’s customer service and report the problem. The rep isn’t able to unlock the car remotely nor is there a key on the undercarriage like she had hoped.

She informs me that she’ll have to call in an unlock and that I need to stay with the car until she gets someone there. In the end I waited through my meeting, until the tow truck came and then made my way back across down in disappointment. I wasn’t angry, just deeply disappointed that I hadn’t got to have the conversation I was looking for and that my reason for renting the car was to get to that meeting and it hadn’t been reliable as times before.

I called the Zipcar when I returned home. I spoke to a different representative. She told me that they had refunded the last hour they added on for me. She was polite but dismissive of the issues I had. After the call, I pondered what would make me feel valued as a customer. I wanted Zipcar to understand that my frustration was because that I had used relied on their service to get me where I needed to go. I did so in order to do my business more efficiently that day.

I wrote a letter to a senior exec at Zipcar explaining what had happened, much like this blog post, emphasizing the reliance on their service. How important it was to me as a business and how it failed this time around. Within 45 minutes, Member Services apologized and sent a full refund to my account. This was an awesome response time. Zipcar has shown that they aren’t afraid to take care of their customers when an unforeseeable issue happens. With the ease they present in renting cars, I’m happy to still be a customer.

Blog Action Day

October 15th, 2007, help bring attention to the environment on Blog Action Day.  Make your voice heard.

[RL] definition of a pixie

I think I need to introduce myself.

Hi. I’m Michelle Wolverton. Also known as Chel Pixie. Now that you know my name, let me tell you who I am.

I came to the web to find community outside of the small sleepy Arkansas town I lived in. To that end, I joined Memespace (the old version on Caucus), which was founded by Christopher Abraham. Memespace held a lot of interesting people who inspired each other. I was a host there for a period of time before the Caucus version closed it’s doors and moved.

From there, I found my way to Howard Rheingold’s Brainstorms. I’ve been a member of this virtual community since 1999. Here I learned to communicate better online, to voice my opinions to a group of people and hosted two or three conferences. I was also editor of The Brainstorms Scoop for a time before several projects refocused by attention.

During this time, I also majored in Paralegal Studies at Kaplan University. I am member of Lambda Epsilon Chi honor society. I love reading and writing legal documents and doing legal research for cases. Family law is most interesting to me though Contracts is a close second.

Last year, I discovered Second Life. My avatar’s name is Chel Pixie. I am events planner/coordinator for SL Brand. I am a Second Life Relay for Life team member. I love events and people and live music. I love planning events and creating an environment for people to have a good time. Second Life is a great platform for live music, several musicians that I’ve had the opportunity to hear are Rich Desoto, Cylindrian, Uncle Seth, Jaycatt Nico, Kurt Bestor, and Louis Volare.

I discovered podcasting through Bucket and went on to add a list of podcasts that I’ve found interesting and inspiring. I am contemplating my own and working on a project that is inspired by podsafe music. I am looking forward to PodCamp Boston2 to learn more from people who are willing to hand you their knowledge and inspire you to use it.

Professionally, I’m working with my partner and mentor Christopher Penn as Project Lead and Marketing with Virtual Hot Wings. Virtual Hot Wings is a digital CD of tunes from Matthew Ebel’s Second Life tour. Many people have asked why are you talking about this musician at great length? Are you getting paid for this? And er, some other not really repeatable suggestions. Isn’t enough that I believe in someone enough to give them my energy and time?

I am spreading the word about Matthew because his music is more than just another album released. Each song tells a story and I relate to each story. His music inspires me every morning when I wake to do better, to do more, to make my effort on something that matters. He’s very gracious and for the record has never asked for anything of me. I’m fueled by my own desire to help him and others.

My desire, my goal isn’t only to reach people about Matthew Ebel or Anji Bee but to make them pay attention to the issues in the music industry and to help them discover why indie music is so important. Imagine shutting down the RIAA because the public takes their listening habits in their own hands and makes the decision to listen to independent and podsafe music. There is a community available that I have joined that can help make that happen.

I am the pixie behind WickedPixieMedia.com. WickedPixieMedia is new media music label. It is representative of the musicians and the music that I promote and support, using new media to reach out to others about independent music. Then to encourage others to discover independent music, to encourage them to realize that it’s only with a community that a change can begin.

I am the student of new media and using it to market an idea or thought or presence that seems interesting to me and that I think other’s will find interesting. Ideas that can expand the community and its knowledge. I love learning how to apply these skills to reach people. In the past, I’ve managed an office, been an assistant to 2 CEOs, a receptionist and then later a legal assistant.

Who I am has changed in the last couple months. My mind has been opened to what I can achieve and how. I’ve found confidence that I didn’t have before in my ability to make a difference. A little instruction and an open door can go a long way in bringing out the best in people and inspire them to great lengths (thanks ninja).

I think I’ve summarized in a few sentences what’s next and in more than a few who I am. That’s changing because we grow and change on a daily basis. Want to find out more about how to open the doors? Just click on that contact me button at the top of the page, I love conversation.