Exciting News

To all my friends in the Blogosphere, Twitter, and Facebook and in my offline life I would like to make an exciting announcement. I am moving from Product Management into a new position within Network Solutions leading Social Media strategy.

It’s a win-win situation – I get to do something that professionally excites me and the company gets to use in-house resources to establish a listening post within Social Media. What will change? My personal blogs/microblogs will continue – I already have a disclaimer that the opinion on my blogs is mine and not that of Network Solutions. I have been blogging for 2 years and participating in forums and social networks as an individual. I am excited and passionate about meeting and connecting with new people. In the new role I will be looking forward to communicating with customers and others who want to reach out and communicate with us.


You may be asking yourself, What are our goals at Network Solutions? We as a company have reinvented ourselves to enable small businesses to succeed online. Our focus is on providing tools to help them to succeed online- ImageCafé – the product that I managed was one of them (Publish a website easily with absolutely no tech knowledge.)


We already engage in a community of our customers using Communispace. We hope to extend our reach and learn as we go. Over the next few weeks, I want to spend a lot of time defining our objectives and our goals to achieve success. If you have any ideas, it would be great to hear from you.

I have already received help from many people on Twitter and Facebook; Blogs that made me understand the medium better. The list of people to thank is huge and I am sure to miss someone:

The DC/MD/VA Blogger community: You gave me your time selflessly. I came to your meetups and came away with a lot of knowledge. I am sure I will meet and thank personally. I also should mention my friends from Baltimore.


Connie Bensen: Community Manager for ACDSee for a lot of resources and encouragement and for her blog http://www.conniebensen.com

Chris Brogan: For patiently listening and letting me bounce ideas off him despite his tight schedule. I got introduced to him through the “Call Chris Brogan Show”on Twitter. http://www.chrisbrogan.com


Kami Huyse : She accepted our invitation and came over and spoke to a few of our folks and put in a good word for me :) http://overtonecomm.blogspot.com

Geoff Livingston: His book “Now is Gone” which did exactly what the cover says, it’s a “primer for Social Media.” I’ve met with him several times and he was a great guy to bounce ideas off. His book was a great resource and I remember his words, “First determine if your community is Social media Savvy and engage in the media they use” (I may be paraphrasing). http://www.nowisgone.com

Jeremiah Owyang: His Blog http://www.web-strategist.com has an amazing number of resources for community managers and web/social media strategy for companies.