Start It Up Ep11: Two Media Mavens Show How Social Media Can Jumpstart Your Business

[From 2015jan23]

When Ashley Danford founded Whiskey Women, she needed to get the word out without breaking the bank on expensive marketing. Because she had a background in social media, Ashley understood how to harness the power of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and a host of other platforms. Today Whiskey Women is growing and has partnerships with major distillers like Diageo.

Writing has always come naturally to Meghan O'Dea. This talent helps her add value to clients who rely on her to drive their marketing messaging on social media. As a consultant, Meghan not only promotes clients' businesses, but she helps them avoid making the costly mistakes that many newcomers to social media make.

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The Nigerian School Girls One Year Later

We can’t talk about gender equality, class equality and STEM education for women if we aren’t willing to support it in the Third World. We can’t fret about the educational opportunities for our own daughters if we aren’t willing to pay attention to when they are denied abroad. We can’t watch TED Talks and read news stories about heroic young women like Malala and ignore 234 young women just like her who are being threatened with rape, physical abuse, sex slavery and death because they sought an education.

One year ago I wrote a heart-felt piece, quoted above, responding to the news that over 200 Nigerian school girls had been kidnapped. At the time I was appalled that this had even occurred. I was angry that I’d heard about it through Twitter activtists and not the mainstream media. I had no idea that a year later next to nothing would have been done to rescue the students from Boko Haram, and these girls would still be missing. I had no idea that a year later Malala Yousafzai herself would be reminding the world that this tragedy happened, and that it’s still ongoing. It’s present tense, not pushed into the past and punctuated with a period put in place by the 24 hour news cycle.

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Can Your Feelings Even Lift, Bro? How I Learned to Flex My Emotional Muscles

Muscles grow through a process called hypertrophy. The term comes from the Greek words for “excess” and “nourishment.” In an 1898 self-help wellness text, “Common Salt” by Godfrey Gumpel, he defines hypertrophy as a combination of “huper, over, in excess or beyond; andtrophe, nutrition.” He goes on to suggest the term indicates the “morbid enlargement of any part of the body.” I must, then, be hypertrophic in my feelings, in my emotional center. It must be swollen and glittering, pink and oxygenated. For as long as I can remember, I have been told by various means that I am “too much.” That I have too many feelings, that I’m too sensitive, that I’m too different, too this, too that, just too much. I love too much. I hurt too much. The amount of feelings I have simply overwhelms, first myself, then everyone around me, like cold salt water filling up the lower compartments of the Titanic, then finally the staterooms, the bridge, the bow.

Using your muscles regularly causes temporary damage, small tears and floods of lactic acid that are the reason you struggle to run that last mile, to push yourself through those last few reps. This damage is why you feel sore the day after an afternoon of lifting heavy moving boxes, a trip to the gym, sex until dawn. Not only are muscles hypertrophic, they are resilient, bouncing back into shape, recovering quickly the more you use them, molding themselves into new forms that will let them work even more efficiently in the future. Our bodies learn to adapt to whatever we put them through. We are designed to grow out of manageable amounts of pain. Some kinds of damage are productive. Some we can learn from. Some make us stronger.

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Women Writers Live Life Out Loud at BinderCon LA

Six months ago, I impulsively cashed in some frequent flyer miles and bought a plane ticket to New York for a first-year conference I'd heard about on Twitter. It meant missing the last few days of a major work event I'd spent months helping to organize. It meant leaving my intern in charge of a monumental to-do list. It was a hasty, rash decision that involved quickly spending a few hundred dollars and making a phone call to my Manhattanite cousin to make sure I could, in fact, sleep on her floor. Buying that plane ticket to BinderCon was also the best decision I ever made. It was a decision informed by the kind of gut instinct that comes only when your life is about to change. Today I'm sitting in sunny Los Angeles, still buzzing from another amazing BinderCon weekend.

This iteration was the first to take place on the West Coast, cementing plans for future conferences to take place each Fall (New York) and Spring (LA). BinderCon LA felt extremely polished. There was nothing to indicate the event is not even a year old, nor was there the insecurity of a sophomore effort. Instead, it felt like a natural extension of the pop up female community created at BinderCon New York. There were a few key differences this time around-- notably a greater emphasis on programing for screenwriters. There were no major fumbles from the speakers, like Jill Abramson's lackluster remarks about the unique challenges for women of color in the news room that earned grumbles in New York. Instead, poet Claudia Rankine earned gasps and murmurs, oohs and ahhs from a room full of women who felt validated and affirmed by her remarks, who were overjoyed to be in the presence of a great writer.

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What OKCupid Taught Me About Personal Branding

What OkCupid taught me about personal brandingFrom Our Readers

I got into online dating the same year I broke into marketing. I’d spent two years trying to figure out life after college, working a variety of dead-end jobs and dating an equally diverse variety of dead-end guys. From a sociopathic gamer to a grownup music nerd with a Dyson, and from a bottom-rung cashier job at Books a Million to my first 9-5 gig that required my degree, it was an interesting two years trying to find out what I wanted and needed, both professionally and personally. I had decided to make the leap from technical writing to marketing around the time I went through a devastating breakup. A year later, I was starting to make headway in my new field and was ready to date again.

That’s when I found OkCupid.

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Covenant College influences Chattanooga entrepreneurial scene

COVENANT COLLEGE is likely within the next 30 days to burnish further its reputation for producing entrepreneurs for the Chattanooga area, and beyond.

In downtown Chattanooga this Saturday, March 21, Covenant will sponsor a round of the faith-based Elevate business-plan competition, which is backed by Christian-oriented Telos Venture Capital of Redwood City, Calif. The winner will compete in the Telos finale in California, next month.

A month later, on April 21, the 60-year-old Christian liberal arts college at nearby Lookout Mountain, Ga., will hold its own Seed Project Pitch event, in which a student team may win a $10,000 grant.

Though the theme has periodically arisen in Chattanooga business circles for decades, these two student-entrepreneur events seem to represent fresh evidence that Covenant students are encouraged to strive, as the college says on its website, "to live out extraordinary callings" in many realms, including business.

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The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Has a Race Problem

“I’m pretty and tough. Like a diamond, or beef jerky in a ball gown,”

That’s the quote that first pulled me into the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidtrabbit hole. I saw the line on a friend’s Facebook wall and soon followed the trail of Tina Fey’s reliably quotable lines to my Netflix account, where the first season of her new show was waiting, freshly released. Here I was, coming off an especially potent full moon feeling like a werewolf all dressed up with no bar mitzvah to attend and I’d found thirteen episodes of post 30 Rock goodness, complete with a whole new werewolf bit.

At first, I was delighted. It’s Fey’s signature approach to humor, creating a wall of jokes and references the way Phil Spector once created walls of sound. I laughed, I tweeted, and I was excited to see that Kimmy Schmidt has a refreshingly optimistic outlook compared to 30 Rock, tempered by a dark edge that provided depth. It blends New Girl’s post-Spice World girl power with a heavy dose of 90s nostalgia that references everything fromBabysitter’s Club to “Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing” to the OJ Simpson trial.

Kimmy’s 13 Going on 30 approach to fashion, bedroom decor, and life doesn’t require any of Jessica Day/Zooey Deschanel’s brake-for-birds rants explaining why hair bows and feminism aren’t mutually exclusive. After all, Kimmy is still very much the eighth grader she was before she was kidnapped, a woman whose adolescence was put on pause by survival. This works effectively to propel the plot forward, but it also mirrors the way that many millennial viewers feel about their own rapid march toward thirty. Just as Liz Lemon embodied the experience of career-focused thirty something women exhausted from leaning in and never being taken seriously, Kimmy embodies women of a certain age who have yet to master the advice given in Buzzfeed articles on how to get your shit together by your early 30s.

However, my laughter soon gave way to compulsive cringing.

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CityScope: 8 Companies to Watch

Talent is created and curated in Chattanooga, and people all over the nation have taken notice. Here are 8 local companies we’ll be watching in 2015. We think you should too.

While many Chattanoogans are settling into the new year, local companies are making their own plans for 2015. What are local startups aiming to accomplish? Nothing less than transforming the future of our city with innovative new approaches to well-established fields like medical insurance, legal counsel, and education, while revolutionizing it all with Chattanooga’s lightning-fast fiber optic internet.

It was hard to pick just 8 companies to include on our list for 2015, because there’s no shortage of successful businesses in Chattanooga’s fast-growing entrepreneurial ecosystem. Our combination of big-city ideas and small-town community feel is prompting innovative companies like these to call Chattanooga home.

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Social Media Panel: Mommy Bashing

... aka: Emmie touches a baby...

Valor, Victimhood, and Valentine's Day: How I Recommitted to Love

Valentine's day used to be my holiday. I was in love with love, and it was my high holy day. Yet over time, its origins became far more appropriate to the particulars of my love life than the Hallmark sentiments I once put so much stock in. A bloody massacre, the battle between faith and the many excellent, practical, visceral reasons to give up on belief. For most of my life, there was nothing more that I believed in than the power of love. I came of age in a haze of power ballads and Sailor Moon comic books and Libran sensibilities, a whole host of influences that left me certain in one thing and one thing only-- that romantic love had redemptive powers, than my lover would be my savior, that together we would transform one another from mere mortals into gods.

I was perfectly willing to martyr myself for this belief. I knew relationships took work, and work I was willing to do. I sacrificed over and over on the altar of love. I believed in the spell of infatuation, the mysticism of sex, the alchemy of marriage. I never met my Prince Valiant, though. Perhaps I was in the wrong places at the wrong times. Perhaps I was overconfident in my ability to kiss frogs into princes, not giving enough care to the quality of the frog in question, not being discerning enough about potential. I simply assumed that if you believed in it enough, love was a choice you could make, and that by sheer determination it would become the work of art, the spiritual revelation, the redemption it was meant to be put up with a myriad of disappointments, of offenses I was unprepared to navigate.

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Whiskey Resolutions

January thinks it’s hot stuff with all its resolutions and determined energy, but I think February is a way better month for rebooting your life. After all, you’ve had a minute to get used to how the new year feels, to get a sense for the vibes, to really mellow after all the craziness of the holidays. You’ve got a better sense of what you want and need in the next twelve months. Plus what else are you going to do while it’s cold and rainy and that groundhog is convincing you that you’ll never see sunshine or warmth again? Resolutions are the perfect way to kick the last of winter’s ass so that you’ll be ready to hit the ground running into your new normal as soon as spring is here.

My dear friend Hannah Messinger of the blog Nothing But Delicious declared that she has but two resolutions for 2015: drink more whiskey, eat less kettle corn. I love her approach to resolutions. Simple, easy to stick to, and, true to her blog title, full of delicious. It got me thinking about what my whiskey resolutions are this year. Not just resolutions involving actual whiskey, but those in the spirit of the drink. Here’s the ten I intend to live by:

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Whiskey-Swilling Women Are Killing Vodka Sales

[In which Emmie is quoted]

“We’re realizing women don’t have to be ghettoized into these female cocktail options like cosmos and appletinis,” Meghan O’Dea, a 28-year-old essayist and member of a drinking club called The Whiskey Women, told The Huffington Post. “We’re seeing a move toward gender-neutral drinking.”
[...]

“Women are tired of this coded language used about drinks that’s limited their personal expression and what they can enjoy,” said O’Dea, the Whiskey Women club member. “There’s an idea that women can’t handle the burn or don’t like the flavor of anything that doesn’t taste like a 5-year-old mixed it.”

Those attitudes are changing. O'Dea points to Olivia Pope, the leading character on ABC’s hit drama "Scandal,” as a sign of the shift. Pope, a strong female protagonist, is also an opinionated wine connoisseur, a trait that O'Dea says may empower other women to take more pride in their poison.

“Real-life women are consciously realizing that the beverages you enjoy have a lot to say about who you are as a woman,” O'Dea said. “Women are shying away from drinks that infantilize them.”

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Waking by walking: The power of pedestrian moments

Oak Hills is a small, rolling neighborhood south of Alton Park and east of St. Elmo, bounded by the Forest Hills Cemetery, the foothills of Lookout Mountain and Piney Woods. It’s dotted with tall, narrow frame houses with a few remaining Queen Anne details, the last holdouts of the neighborhood’s long history since the 1800s, and filled in with a handful of bungalows and many midcentury ranches. It’s a pretty neighborhood, one that I took great pleasure in strolling through on a chilly winter day, on assignment to spend half an hour wandering up and down Grand Avenue and Cane Street with an assortment of some of Chattanooga’s most dedicated neighborhood association board members. 

We had gotten up early on a Saturday to take part in Neighborhood University, a program offered by NeighborWorks America and the city of Chattanooga to give neighborhood leadership the tools they need to plan more effective programing and create stronger communities. I was standing in for my mother, who was out of town but hoped I would take good notes for her. The lesson of the day was "walking the block," a process of actively observing the streets and houses in a neighborhood to observe what’s working, what isn’t and what sort of impressions the neighborhood might leave a newcomer or outsider.

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Records, wine and walks: Finding the sacred in the everyday

I can’t remember the last time I listened to music just for the sake of listening to music. Pandora is on in the background, playing the same blend of songs over and over. At work, there was always music piped in or that I played over my headphones, and it was never good music. There’s nothing like the driving beat of sterile pop and top 40 hits to keep you vaguely motivated and provide the right amount of surface-level distraction. At parties, I always put on a mix of reliable indie rock, mellow and familiar and just ignorable enough to not overwhelm the conversation. Music is all about setting a tone, creating a mood, focusing the mind, filling the silence. 

I know many of my friends and peers feel similarly—we are the generation who grew up obsessively watching "Almost Famous" and really, really feeling that line about "loving some silly piece of music so much that it hurts." I love a lot of music so much that it hurts, and there are many, many songs I feel are deeply tied up in my being, even some that feel sacred to me. Still, I can’t remember that last time I treated music as something sacred or even as something interesting. I read new books all the time, but it was only recently that I was introduced to a band I hadn’t heard before and moved through their catalog the way you devour a novel cover to cover. 

Savoring the blue hour: Escaping an anesthetized life

The cats woke me up early recently, well before dawn. I rolled over and felt around under the pillows for my phone. It was 6:30 in the morning.

On any other morning, I’d have responded like a different pet—one of Pavlov’s dogs, immediately tapping in the password to my iPhone and scouring Twitter or Facebook for updates from friends in different time zones. When I first started freelancing last fall, my roommates would find me propped up in bed on my computer most mornings. The alarm goes off, the NPR goes on, and I dive into my email. But then, I realized how much I missed time spent getting ready in the morning, my bus commute, picking up a latte at Cadence. It gave me space in my morning to simply enjoy waking up. I got to keep the lucid, sleepy, dreamy part of my day to myself, or at least part of it. I knew I needed to reclaim my mornings.

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I Had to Drop Out of High School and Live on a Hippie Commune to Learn the Meaning of Community

It was the summer of 2004. Disturbing pictures from Abu Ghraib surfaced. Ronald Reagan died. George W. Bush was still in office, and hurtling towards reelection. I was still seventeen, and I had just dropped out of a prestigious all-girls preparatory school. My mother and I began mending the fences we’d knocked down in the two years before, mainly by getting involved in local politics. We spent a lot of time together going to activist meetings, especially those held by the local chapter of a controversial environmental organization.

Things had never been better between us, but the rest of my life was rapidly shifting and changing. My longest, deepest friendship was starting to tear apart. I’d lost a lot of other friends by leaving school, and the ones I had left didn’t always feel like the best fit. I loved them dearly, but I often felt that they were too conservative, or didn’t think enough about the important issues. They were tired of my rants about George Bush, about vegetarianism, about which gas station was the lesser evil when you needed to fill up your tank. I was a bit of an insufferable nag, it’s true, but I was egged on in part by how resistant my friends were to considering any of the viewpoints I held dear.

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Myth, Magic, and Millennials: Why Our Generation Is Moon Crazed and Witch Obsessed

Have you noticed how millennials are really into witches right now? Or why everyone is a lunatic for all things moon related, from moon-phase motifs on fashion and decor to all those Pinterest boards with the line “love you to the moon and back?” Curious why crystals are the new “put a bird on it?’ I think I’ve got this one figured out. My generation came of age in the 90s and early aughts, which in addition to sunflower prints, butterfly hair clips, and Rory Gilmore sweaters were a time when crystals, candles, and pentagrams were surprisingly well-integrated into even supposedly basic lives. From Felicity’s pleather-clad Wiccan roommate to Rayanne Graff’s mom loaning Angela those tarot cards, the 90s closed and the new Millennium began in a flurry of astrological charts and Ryder Waite decks.

But we’re not alone in sipping from the love potion that has millennials swooning over spells and stars and pointy black boots. The witchy spell that has us all newly aflutter over Stevie Nicks comes around every so often, much like Mercury going into Retrograde or a blood moon or a solar eclipse. It’s rooted not only in the pop culture we grew up on, or at least were immersed in even if we weren’t consciously drinking it all in, but also has a lot to do with what our parents were interested in at our age. You see, New Age coming of ages seem to be a tale as old as time. Every twenty years a new Age of Aquarius dawns, and a new generation gets down with its rising signs and quartz clusters.

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Reboot, not resolutions: Creating an awesome 2015

Well before New Year’s was on my mind, before the bright lights and champagne guzzling of the holidays were upon us, I accidentally stumbled on a new approach to New Year’s resolutions. I’ve never been a big fan of resolutions—they often seem a little arbitrary, forced or too hard to stick to. They are often about making yourself better, but even that is somewhat ill-defined—as if losing weight or flossing more often are the secrets to happiness. Instead, I wanted to go into 2015 with a concrete plan for how to make it a good year. An authentic year. A year of being more intentional and conscious than I was in 2014. 

It was actually my mother who found a new approach to resolutions, or as we’re calling them this year, our "reboot." She was attending a program called Neighborhood University, designed by NeighborWorks, for anyone involved in a neighborhood association or council. The participants did an exercise together that helped them realize the real goals behind the programming they organized. All too often they were getting results, but not the ones they intended. The exercise was to pair up to work backward from their goals to see what kinds of events or activities they really needed. 

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Social Media Panel 2014 Year-End Recap (WDEF)

The Christmas lamp: Celebrating magic instead of stuff

One Christmas season in the 1970s, a little girl named Trisha had a very unusual Christmas tree: a lamp wrapped in festive paper and twine that the family ornaments hung all over. She loved the special tree and saw it with the eyes of a child, one lamp transformed into a tree of "Nutcracker" living room proportions for her and her siblings. It was only as an adult looking back that she realized that the quirky Christmas tree she remembered so well had come about because her family was too poor to buy a tree that year.

I’ve run across several stories like this recently, of adults sifting through their memories and realizing only in hindsight that their parents struggled when they were kids. Now that they are adults managing their own affairs, they see all those pasta dinners and long hours and thrift shop trips in a new light.

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