new for (me!) friday: yahoo mother board summit

New For Us Fridays give us a chance to try new things, expand our horizons a bit, and introduce something new to our lives each week. This New For Us Friday is really a New For ME Friday, and it was an absolute treat.

I attended the Yahoo! Mother Board Summit in Sunnyvale, California. It. Was. Soooo. Cool.

• Yahoo! Mother Board Summit: The Yahoo! Mother Board is a community of about sixty women who are passionate about using the internet–blogs, micro-blogs, community sites, whatever—in their lives and every day.

Yahoo created the Mother Board to build close relationships with parents. We attended this summit to meet each other, share ideas, learn about Yahoo’s cool products, and figure out ways that we, as active members of our local and online communities, can work best with Yahoo.

I learned SO much and will share in more detail shortly, but essentially, here’s the skinny:

our oh-so-purple welcome mat

• Yahoo! Flickr Photo Sharing: Flickr, Snapfish, and Picnik are a happy little photo family, and I never knew it! You can share photos and send them to anyone via Flickr. You can order prints on Snapfish because Flickr is linked to Snapfish. You can edit photos on Picnik because Flickr is linked to Picnik. It’s one big happy photo sharing, editing, and printing family.

You can share long photos (aka, videos 90 seconds or less) or make a slide show and embed it right onto your blog, Twitter, or Facebook accounts. SO awesome. I’m all ready to do some long photo-sharing.

• Shine: Shine is a lifestyle site for women on a blog platform, where content from top publishers, from editors, and from everyday writers is shared and viewed by thousands. Content is not only available on Shine but it’s also on the Yahoo! Homepage (where 600 million people can view it! Whew!).

Topics from parenting to work & money, food and healthy living are covered. It’s worth checking out, contributing to, and getting to know some of the talented editors and writers, especially if you want to share your own ideas with others.

• Yahoo! Safely: The Online Safety Roundtable emphasized for me the importance of instilling a strong sense of self-respect and respect toward others in our children. And in schools, we need to share the power—both positive and negative–of technology with all parents, whether they are ‘connected’ or not.

We discussed the 3 C’s of Online Safety — 1. Keep Current on the latest trends; 2. Keep Communicating with your kids about the importance of being safe online; 3. Keep Checking your browsing history, phone logs, etc. Check sites like Common Sense Media, where parents can create their own Family Media Agreement and where schools and families can find resources for teaching and understanding internet safety.

Elisa Steele, Yahoo! Chief Marketing Officer, gave the Keynote Address.
Her kids say she’s the “Chief of Awesomeness” and I agree.

• Yahoo! Social Products: Head to the Yahoo site and personalize your own page—add your Twitter, Facebook, and the new and improved Yahoo email accounts, and all of your status updates can be in one place. Adjust your personal settings on your account, and your comments on articles, sales, events, news, or products can be shared with your whole online community.

• Yahoo! Accessibility Lab: I chatted with two incredible members of the Lab who explained all that Yahoo does to ensure that every computer user–no matter his or her physical limitations–can have the best online experience. The engineers at the Lab make sure that all of Yahoo’s pages are able to be navigated with any type of support; it was fascinating for me to learn how much thought Yahoo puts into every online element.

I learned so much from Victor and Nate and the Accessibility Lab at Yahoo!

• Social Media for Social Good: Who knew?! Visit Yahoo! Good, where people can learn about how they can take positive action in their communities and share their experiences and ideas with others. Share your way of helping others and encourage your pals to join you by asking, You in?

• Yahoo! Green: is packed with timely articles, advice, and tips on how to live greener lives. Everything—everything—is covered here, and simple searches will turn up dozens of relevant articles on any topic in question. Which is more green: cloth diapers or disposable? Check out Yahoo! Green to find out. You may be surprised.

• Yahoo! Editorial: We met the talented authors of the mammoth The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World. Seriously. And they gave us suggestions for increasing our SEO (mine is pathetic), writing great blog posts (mine are too long), and creating better titles (mine need work). I need to get reading. . .

yummy, sinful Y! and Yahoo Mother Board cupcakes

• Advertising Products: Yahoo tries to create the most worthwhile and memorable advertising experiences for their users. I had no idea how much energy was put into advertising–the layout, the wording, the ‘experience’–but now I do. I’m amazed. And now I’ll pay more attention to ads, thanks to Yahoo! I’m looking forward to some really cool, really valuable, and user-friendly, interactive ads in the next few months.

From the purple carpet that led us from our bus to the building, the purple flowers everywhere, the purple walls in the buildings and purple bathrooms, Yahoo’s attention to detail floored me. The Y! on the shades, the Yahoo tissue paper in our bags, the Yahoo cupcakes, and the care with which the planners of the Yahoo Mother Board Summit put into everything really showed us how much Yahoo values their product, their employees, their consumers, their co-workers, and their relationship with the Yahoo Mother Board.

Many, many thanks to my friends at Yahoo for the invitation to be a part of the Yahoo Mother Board and for filling me with inspiration, ideas, and energy this weekend. Thank you for the chance to connect with my many talented Yahoo Mother Board friends in beautiful Sunnyvale, California.

Thank you to the amazing Robin Zucker and the yodeling mamas, Amy Heinz and Jeanne Moeschler for taking the time to chat, listen, and laugh together. Thanks to Stacy Libby and to Nicole Rodrigues, Greg Martin, Paul Doherty, Barbara O’Connor, and Ilene Tucker for being fantastic organizers and yahoooo-rific Yahoos. Thank you to all of the awesome session speakers and panelists. Thank you to the family who shared their heartbreaking story for the Online Safety Roundtable.

I look forward to working with Yahoo in the future, and I extend my most sincere gratitude for their generosity in paying for our transportation, lodging, food, conference, and gifts. My opinions here are all my own, as are any inadvertent mistakes in this post.

Thank you to the Four Seasons Palo Alto for its Oooooohmygosh incredible service.

Any questions about this event or anything I mentioned here? Please let me know–I’d be happy to do what I can to help or clarify!