FacebookPlaces and MavenFaces

With throngs of techies and teenagers wondering what will be involved with the FacebookPlaces announcement, it is interesting for me to think about who I’m connected with and if I want to know where they are and if I want them to know where I am. iPhone app is rumored to push out tonight!  Social media tools offer radical amounts of information on users, is it too much?  or just right? 

We continually discuss our stance and “likes” of all of these tools for our own purposes.  It just so happens that we have updated our own Maven Company Bio/Locations pages this week putting some “Face & Place” information out about our team for you.  

We have a great team of marketing mavens ready to help you with your next big idea. 

Maven Team

 

If you’ve worked with us in the past and would like to recommend us – give a shout on our LinkedIn pages from our About Us/Location  page and we’ll gladly return the favor.  If we know where you are, we might even send you some Maven treats. 

The Maven Way… 

• Our clients LOVE us and come back again and again
• We say “yes”, and recruit or refer if/when necessary
• Our pricing is competitive and we stay on budget

Thank you to all of our clients and fans for your continued support.  

Ready to juggle so you don’t have to… 

Cheers, Heather 

Keepin the balls in the air

Day Tripping in My Backyard (Sebastopol to Point Reyes National Seashore)

There is a wonderful stretch between the last few weeks of July and into August where there is a little span of calm before the next storm.  I love this time of year.  Summertime should be enjoyed and languished in, if at all possible.  Go smell the roses, I am! 

Fantastic Scenery

 

My parents came for a visit two weeks ago and we did a lovely tour around Sonoma County.  I’ve lived in this area for four years and am finally settling into it and exploring.  If you are in the area or visiting, I highly recommend this drive. 

Starting point – Sebastopol.   We drove out Hwy 12 (to Bodega) to Wild Flour Bread Bakery 140 Bohemian Highway, Freestone, CA – http://www.wildflourbread.com/ – Hours: 8:30am to 6:00pm Friday, Saturday, Sunday, & Monday.  I don’t know if I can describe how good this place is, there was and always is a line out the door.  The scones are mind-blowing and their garden is absolutely beautiful.  If you’ve ever driven by, you’ve smelled their baked goods baking – stop next time! 

Wild Flour Bakery

 

 The little Antique Store & Gift Shop next door Enduring Comforts was the shopping hit of our outing.  My Mom (a high-ranking member of the Retail Therapy Royal Line) was impressed and kept saying that it was the best store we saw all day and she can’t wait to come back.  Thea who owns the store is lovely, has a great eye and gives 10% of all new (non-antique) items across the board.  A GREAT place to buy gifties.  

We then jumped on the Hwy 1 to make our way to Point Reyes National Seashore and Point Reyes Station – My husband and I have made this trip a number of times with family and friends – it is a great day trip from North Bay or San Francisco.  There are terrific places to stop for amazing seafood, shops and sightseeing along the way… 

Oysters Outside on the Bay

 

We sat along the Bay and had a dozen BBQ & Chorizo Oysters on the half shell and a super creamy bowl of New England Style Clam Chowder at The Marshall Store – 19225 State Route 1.  This place is great, tons of locals with their dogs, cyclists, Harley riders, and more – it seemed like everyone was coming here for a moment of bivalve bliss.  

The drive from the Marshall Store out to the Bear Valley Visitors Center, Point Reyes National Seashore is stunning (and it was a grey, cloudy day).  Rolling hills, 1 block towns with a post office and general store, and the smell of eucalyptus and the sea, twas de-licious.  

Bear Valley Visitor Center open: weekdays 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and weekends and holidays 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays open until 6:00pm through September 4, 2010. 

All campsites are accessible only by hiking, biking or horseback for the backcountry sites, and only by kayak or boat for the Tomales Bay sites. There is no car or RV camping available in the park. And is by PERMIT ONLY. 

We then headed  out to Drakes Beach and the Kenneth Patrick Visitor Center 

Allow 30 minutes for the drive from the Bear Valley Visitor Center. 

• From the Bear Valley Visitor Center, head north 0.2 miles (0.3 km) to Bear Valley Road.
• Turn left and follow Bear Valley Road 1.75 miles (2.8 km) northwest to Sir Francis Drake Boulevard.
• Turn left and follow Sir Francis Drake Boulevard 13.4 miles (21.4 km) west to Drakes Beach Road. Tip: Follow road signs for “Lighthouse” until you see a sign for Drakes Beach.
• Turn left and follow Drakes Beach Road 1.6 miles (2.6 km) south to the Drakes Beach parking lot.

Drives like this on the West Coast make me utterly thankful that the U.S. has park services, land trusts and conservationists. 

Grey but Gorgeous

 

After taking in the ocean and of all things a Gopher on the beach… we headed back inland to Point Reyes Station, a lovely town with great shopping, a one-of-a-kind dive bar/tavern, and the fantastic Cowgirl Creamery.  

Cowgirl Creamery – They just came out with a new cheese – ‘Wagon Wheel’  which is made with milk from neighboring Straus Family Creamery at their new First Street Creamery in Petaluma and aged on site for two months.  It is AWESOME for a raclette (if you don’t know what this is you should it’s the Swiss version of fondue).  The purveyors are knowledgeable and generously provide endless samples. 

In 1997, Sue Conley and Peggy Smith opened Cowgirl Creamery in an old barn, made it beautiful, put in a small plant for making hand-crafted cheese, bought organic milk from the neighbor, Straus Family Creamery… and the rest is history! 

The Cooks behold the power of Cheese!

 

Old Western Saloon - This place gets 5 out of 5 darts on the dive bar dartboard rating scale.  Built in 1890, ‘tis a real live Western saloon with swinging doors, original cash-only cash register, gorgeous stained glass, potbelly fire burning stoves, pool tables, darts, live music, excellent jukebox, and colorful locals.  First time we went in a few years ago was during the holidays.  My husband and I were all alone chatting with the bartender. Unbeknownst to us it was Toys for Tots days for 3 of the local Harley crews – and the saloon was a pit stop -all at once we were surrounded by black leather and facial hair – it was awesome and we had a blast talking with the lot.   

Cowboys, Bikers and Us, oh my...

 

Toby’s Feed Barn - I love this place – who combines a feed store, art gallery, great gifts and organic produce?  The Giacomini family who opened and has run the place since 1942, that’s who!   They host a myriad of events, concerts and fundraisers for the community… heck, Alice Waters spoke there last weekend.  This is a classic California gem; don’t miss it…and the guys that work there are super sweet. 

Last but not least on our trip was dinner – we stopped back by one of our favorites (my parents fell in love with this place).  Nick’s Cove – http://www.nickscove.com/ – 23240 State Route 1, Marshall, CA 

The food was stellar, it always is… Dungeness Crab Cakes with Meyer Lemon Aioli, I had the Grilled Hanger Steak – which was perfectly cooked.  My Mom had the whole Branzino with caramelized fennel.  Also good is a quick drive up to Nick’s for Oysters and Bloody Mary’s, which rock as well. 

Carnivores Only!

 

All-in-all a GREAT day trip.  Let me know if you take it sometime and have any stops to add! 

Cheers
Heather 

Lovely Gardens at Wild Flour Bakery

 

Power to the Passion Flower

Fake Receipts, Purchases and Notifications – BEWARE

Even with my Junk Mail settings on Red Alert I still see what’s coming through. It is amazing the amount of realistic looking emails I’m receiving that on first glance seem from reputable companies where I AM a frequent shopper and HAVE an account.

YouSendIt, Amazon, UPS, PayPal, JCPenney’s… just to name a few.

I know to avoid Swiss Watch and Viagra emails and have rules set up to send them directly to trash… and to avoid other things that look odd. Viruses are bad news and if you don’t have anti-virus software on your computer go BUY some right now. I’ve received at least 3 calls in the last month for the number of  ”your guy that fixes computers” from friends & colleagues who weren’t protecting their data. 

For my personal machines I use Computer Associates software – it seems to me to be the least intrusive and doesn’t have all the annoying “blocks” when you are loading new software and updates itself without bothering you every few hours.

What Anti-Virus software do you use and do you like?  Curious minds….

Cheers,

Heather

Laughing Squid is a Gas

This is one of my favorite blogs, it happens to originate in my area so its super relevant to me. However it is a great blog on art, culture and technology. If you haven’t checked it out – give it a read. I love this entry from yesterday.

http://laughingsquid.com/from-burning-man-artwork-to-real-world-architecture/

Happy Friday!!!  Details to come this weekend from my Point Reyes Day Trip this week.

Cheers!

Talking the Talk & Walking the Walk

I’ve given two lectures in the last couple of months – one was for the American Literature Association Conference in San Francisco in May and last Sat at Summer Repertory Theater’s workshop day. It seems that after doing what I do for close to a decade I have a few opinions about it.

Adapting a Novella into a Play – The Yellow Wallpaper

The ALA lecture/panel was about the adaptation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper that I wrote in 2003 and a production of it produced by Dr. Judith Gallagher and directed by Melinda Benton. I’m very proud of the adaptation and it was thrilling and equally intimidating to sit in a room with Gilman scholars who know so much more than I do about the original novella and Ms. Gilman. I held up just fine and it was fantastic for me to revisit and reengage about the writing process, the production that I directed in Seattle at Theater Schmeater and the production that was produced at Tarrant County Junior College in Ft. Worth, TX. I’ve been asked to speak on another panel in Houston in October on the subject for the Community Colleges Humanities Association and I hope to attend. I am planning a mailing of the adaptation this Summer, as I’d love to see it produced as part of Women’s History months in theater departments across the country next year.

 

Bringing Theatrical Skills to Corporate Events

During the last few weeks of the season at Summer Repertory Theater  (my husband is the Artistic Director of the wonderful 39 year old theater training program), they hold workshop classes for the students. This year he asked me to come in and talk to his students about translating theatrical skills into the corporate event world. As theater students, the correlation that there are options outside the Arts where technicians, designers, and actors can find contracting gigs is often lost. I put together a presentation showing them pictures of an empty convention center and asked them to envision who plans and sets-up TechEd or MacWorld? I also showed them the staging and equipment that I helped set up for a Bill Gates keynote in both 2005 and 2006. Designing, building, planning, purchasing are all skills that translate to a very big business – Corporate Events. We spent the hour talking about what kinds of companies are out there for the technical side and then how actors can emcee, demo, and be a spokesperson at an event. The students were lovely and asked great questions. I hope they enjoyed our chat and got some practical knowledge for finding that great “day job”. For me my “day job” turned into a career and small business that I love running.

Do what you love and love what you do, to thine own self be true…

P.S: Some interesting facts about social networking and my SRT Student audience: ~60 attendees in total, ages 19-26, all but one person had a Facebook account, all had MySpace accounts, only a handful of them had accounts or had heard of LinkedIn and only one person used and/understood what Twitter is.  I found this fascinating….what social networking tools do you use? 

Cheers!

Heather

Cellspace is Super Cool

I went to see my sweet friends Franny & Priscilla funk it up last Sat at the Action Jackson Funk N’ MEGAfrolic -  A Fundraiser for Megatropolis – a very cool art project that will be going out to Burning Man this year. The band was of course great and we had a terrific time, nothing like getting off a plan from a week in DC and going straight to a party… wouldn’t be the first time.

What impressed me the most was the space – I don’t like most large spaces/venues in San Francisco (sorry Mission Rock) and this one is awesome.   Big, safe, fine parking, the sound was good and it had clean, decent bathrooms.  Cellspace has all kinds of cool programming, art, performance in there all the time – check out what they are doing – http://www.cellspace.org/new/  I dig it.

Tablesmacking Soul in D.C.

    

    

Capitol at Night

 

I just got back from a fabulous week in Washington D.C.  The Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) http://digitalwpc.com/ is my favorite event of the year for a few reasons:  it lays the groundwork for the next fiscal year for Microsoft’s partner initiatives (which are near and dear to my heart as I love partners), I get to see so many colleagues/friends that I don’t see very often and its always been on or around my birthday week.        

I realized that I’ve been working on this event since it changed from Fusion to WPC, nine years ago.  How time flies….    

That first year (2003), I was working for SharePoint team partner product manager Zoltan Deak and we introduced the concept of a “partner theater” to what was then being called the “Microsoft Office System” for both Microsoft TechEd & WPC that year.  It was the first time Microsoft gave partners a forum to speak on the expo hall show floor.  Having a degree in Theatre, I can’t help but bring a kiss of the theatrical to everything I touch.  The concept of a “theater” for partners remains strong today and has been adopted by many others.  We innovate this concept every year and a huge Partner Theater was added by the WPC event itself on the Expo hall floor.     

Every conference/tradeshow we plan always comes with a myriad of parties and dinners that we plan in parallel.  D.C. holds its own with celebrity chef choices, including  Charlie Palmer, Richard Blais, Eric Ziebold, Michel Richard and many more…. Eclectic eats in Adams Morgan, Utopia (artsy and great pasta), and one of the best hole-in-the-wall live music venues – Madam’s Organ touts “Sorry, Were Open” in red neon, bringing in a crowd you are forced to dance with cheek to cheek and give late night confessions.  My favorite place to have a nice dinner – Mie n Yu is in vibrant and collegiate Georgetown.  Our last night, we happened upon Kinkead’s in Foggy Bottom and the service was stellar and my scallop dish was crazy good.  For my birthday dinner we went to Napoleon, a lovely french bistro, where the moules and frites were fantastic and champagne cocktails divine.   

For the official partner dinner planned by my team, we chose Art & Soul, celebrated two-time James Beard-Award winning Chef Art Smith’s modern/Southern locavore restaurant located in the Liaison Hotel on Capitol Hill. Art & Soul has a lovely patio and a chic modern private room that can hold up to 60 comfortably.  The ambience and the staff were superb – the food, well, some might say — was soulful.   

The “arugula” ended up being spinach – regardless the salad with watermelon pickles, goat cheese, almonds and a blackberry ale vinaigrette was outstanding.  Other than the lettuce deviation, the food was “tablesmacking” good.  The ribeye and creamed spinach were cooked to perfection. The meal was brought to a sweet end with a board of mini-cupcakes – the perfect small bite accompanied by espresso drinks to give guests the strength to go onto all the rest of the events of the evening.    

Other venues that I liked we’re P.O.V. @ the W Hotel – you can’t beat the view, Microsoft global partner Neudesic threw a classy cocktail party up there.  The IW team & U.S. Partner team had a receptions at the Newseum which was quite lovely and had amazing passed hors d’oeuvres (lobster rolls & steamed veggie potstickers).  KnowledgeLake, Fujitsu and Global 360 hosted a fun happy hour at Buddha Bar DC - this just opened in May venue stood up to its Parisian & NYC MePa flagship spaces.    

People ask me all the time – how do you find your party venues and restaurants… **I recommend…    

1. Have passion for amazing food & to love to travel
2. Watch Top Chef and the Food Network
3. Use Zagat & OpenTable, they are great resource tools
4. Join Yelp.com – Opinions from the people
5. Ask a local or look for local food blogs

  **Hire us to help you – we know what to look for and how to turn what you envision into a reality    

 Let my team help you bring your brand to life!     

 Happy Summer & Cheers!    

 Heather    

 Owner & Head Maven   

 Creative Maven     

    

    

    

Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference City History and Future     

2011 – Los Angeles, CA     

2010 – Washington D.C.    

2009 – New Orleans, LA     

2008 – Houston, TX     

2007 – Denver, CO     

2006 – Boston, MA     

2005 – Minneapolis, MN     

2004 – Toronto, Ontario     

2003 – New Orleans, LA     

1996 – 2002 – Fusion

Travel & Travel & Another Cool Blog…

Been home now for a night – no matter how much we travel recharging is so essential for any road warrior.  Simply sleeping in one’s bed does wonders for the soul.  Taking the new puppy Pierre to the dog park is pretty good too.

The last two months have been so fun and full we’ve planned 2 site visits, 1 party, 4 conferences,  6 dinners with another event coming and a huge event strategy and SharePoint event portal build.  Whew!  we are busy as we’ve ever been and our clients are happy and telling us so.  All is great!!

I’ve got lots to post about all the travels but I thought I’d put a link up to a blog that I really like – tis another Event/Marketing/Maven-type like us. 

Paige is one of the sponsor managers for the E2.0 Conference series and is a super cool gal.  I really like her blog and I loved this last entry about being a Conference Warrior Princess.  I agree girl, tis hard to wear this crown everyday…. you just have to make sure you have your ducks in a row.

Check it out – http://tornpaige.com/2010/05/02/conference-warrior-princess/

 

I’d only add

6.  A roll of packing tape and a sharpie will make you life long friends…..put them in your luggage.

cheers,

hedda

Getting Social

I like TripIt, FourSquare seems interesting, but does one really want everyone to know exactly where you are? Is this good for tracking employees? We’re working with these tools to see what we like and what we don’t so we can make good recommendations to our clients… what do you think?

Cool People I’ve Met

Digital Media Professional – Check out Pixel Corps, I had the pleasure of sitting next to founder Alex Lindsay on a plane back from Chicago last year.  He is super cool and so is Pixel Corps.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Corps   @alexlindsay