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Female Heroes Interview: Tara Hunt
Every week we will be publishing an interview with one of our female internet heroes. This is an opportunity for you to MEET interesting women, READ about their WORK, THINK about how they PLAY the internet industry and see how you MATCH them. Be inspired! We are kicking off with Tara Hunt.
Whereas most business-minded people may be obsessed by raising capital, Tara Hunt’s message is to raise ‘social capital’. It means finding the communities that matter to your business, connecting with them and spending time in them. Tara Hunt, author, blogger and founder of community marketing company Citizen Agency, brings thenextwomen the message on succesful entrepreneurship: making use of networks, contacts and two-way communication is the way to conduct business in the 21st century. “You need to give to get.”
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Tell me about how you started out in the business?
Citizen Agency is kind of a concept that is in progress, because it is such an new area. essentially what my business does is community marketing. But putting it like that does not capture all we work on. When I work with a client, it is around helping them connect to their customer community. Whether they are already sharing love for product, spending time with them, creating experience with the product. Read more
Personal Branding 1
Margot Katz is an author, an international business consultant and an expert on personal branding. Margot encourages women to “turn up the volume” and “be bloody good”. For TheNextWomen she provides us in reply to our questions with an extract from her latest book: Tarzan & Jane, how to thrive in the new corporate jungle published by Profile Books. Set forth below is part I.
What is personal branding?
Imagine yourself as a product on the supermarket shelf. How do you stand out in a crowded market and get picked over others? How do you influence the buying decision? Like branding a product to set it apart from others, personal branding does the same for you. People have usually made up their minds about us within four seconds of contact, so the aim of personal branding is for you to be in charge of the messages you give out, making sure that people ‘get’ what you’re all about straight away, associating you with the things you want to be associated with. Not only that, but you want them to keep ‘getting’ you consistently.
It’s not about creating a false impression or trying to be like someone else; it’s all about being, a confident, bolder, crisper and louder version of you. The key is being natural, authentic and congruent.
It’s a step by step process that allows you to fine-tune your own brand, exploring creative ways of communicating it across different touch points so that you build a congruent message that gets remembered.
Is there a difference between men and women when it comes to personal branding?
The process is the same for men and women. Each individual needs to work out their own message and express who they are in their own way, though women are more likely to need to up their levels of confidence and boldness to achieve this.
Read more
Internet entrepreneurs in the UK
In the series ‘Where are the female web heroes?’ we describe the situation in the UK, where as of 2003, a rise in female-owned net ventures have been seen. The government’s newly formed Women’s Enterprise Task Force seeks to encourage female enterprise across the nation to help close the gap in female entrepreneurship between the US and UK. Because, although the number of women-owned businesses has recently topped one million, the rate of female start-ups in the US is much higher. Also, with girls outperforming boys at school some predict that by 2020 the majority of UK millionaires will be female.
The UK female entrepreneur is in her early 30s, tech savvy, well connected and thrives on risk, according to a survey by Aurora, the UK’s largest business women’s network. This network is owned by Glenda Stone, who herself won the Blackberry Best Women in Technology. One of the women who fits this profile is Martha-Lane Fox, co-founder of Lastminute.com. As the time she stepped down at 31 years, the share price had recovered from the dotcom crash valuing Lastminute at £667m. In 2005 she sold the company to travelocity.com, of which Michelle Peluso is the CEO. In those days also Julie Pankhurst of Friends Reunited sold her company, to ITV. video of natalie massanet, founder net-a-porter
The Next Speaker has launched
Last Friday, The Next Speaker, a new speakers bureau was officially launched in The Netherlands. The Next Speaker focuses on content by representing only people that can speak about new media, new technology, innovation and entrepreneurship. Founder is Tessa Sterkenburg.
Speakers can be booked for talks, workshops, brainstorm sessions and training courses at The Next Speaker. The Next Speaker currently has about 30 speakers under contract, and the list is growing. Some well-known dutch internet specialists, bloggers, entrepreneurs and twitterazzi have signed up: Erwin Blom (Founder of The Crowds), Oscar Kneppers (Founder of Bright Magazine), Francisco van Jole ((internet)Journalist), Richard Derks (Founder of Respectance), Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten (Serial Entrepreneur), Marco Derksen (Founder of Marketingfacts) and Werner Vogels (CTO Amazon). Female speakers are Marja Ruigrok (NetPanel), Marjolijn Kamphuis (MTV) and Simone Brummelhuis (IENS, EuropeanMuseumguide and TheNextwomen), all female internet heroes.
Dutch Internet entrepreneurs
The Netherlands may be known as a liberal country with equal opportunities for men and women, but somehow we managed that in terms of women in the board room, we are doing not so well. While in the United States almost one out of five corporate officers are women, in Europe the female to male ratio on company boards is not even one to twenty. And in Holland it is even less….. However, Norway has set the agenda by imposing a minimum female mandatory quota of 40% in company-boards. And guess what: it works! Heleen Mees of women-on-top and Marieke Bax of Topbrainstorm have urged companies and our government to do the same over here. I support this. It makes sound economic sense. Moreover, studies show that companies with more women in senior management are more profitable than those with few women at the top.
With these developments taking place, let’s see which female internet heroes in The Netherlands can act as such role model and fulfill the quota. Indeed, these women can bring entrepreneurial internet knowledge into the board room.
Female internet heroes are strongly represented in media, such as Marianne Zwagerman, director of Dutch Telegraaf Media Group and Lara Ankersmit, director of telegraaf.nl., the second largest news site in the Netherlands with a strong user generated content component. Dutch Dragon Den’s Annemarie van Gaal, is founder of AM Media but more known as a keen investor in media companies like bright.nl, which she has sold recently.
Search for Female Internet Heroes
In April, we visited London Open Coffee Meet-up, where the issue of female speakers at the Next Web Conference and the lack thereof came up. To finally tackle the issue, we promised to come up with a list of 100 international female tech and web heroes. Indeed, I myself had some practice at restaurant review site Iens, where I once put together a top 20 of female chefs.
Sheryl Sandberg from Facebook
Let’s first state that we have been able to track down a number of amazing web women. Right now we have a database of 400 international internet women. Our focus is on web entrepreneurs, investors and CEO’s in the Internet world. But we also came across highly regarded female cross media consultants, power bloggers and other independent professionals, as well a talented mid level managers.
Our first place for research was LinkedIn. Yet ‘internet’, ‘ceo’ and ‘entrepreneur’ resulted in many men, but few women. Maybe they can add as search option ‘female’. When we googled a bit on the same terms, many initiatives focusing on women leadership sprung forward. Read more
The Next Women meets Female Heroes
The Next Women online magazine is the female side of thenextweb.org, Businessweek, techcrunch.com, and FT.com and the business side of Red, Vanity Fair and Harpers Bazaar.
We are an international cross media platform about women in business, aimed at female (future) founders, CxO’s and VC’s of internet companies. Read more
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