I woke up thinking about writing this post for Six Figure Moms Club today and what I was wishing for you working moms.  Yesterday, we saw great love sharing on Twitter which you can read about on my sister blog Twitter Attraction.  I wanted the same warm, enveloping feeling for you.  So, I decided to share a few things that have made me feel great today.

1. This article, A Vow of Love for Yourself written by Tama J. Kieves.
2. An article I wrote for the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO) that might help you with your business: Promoting Your Business Using Social Media
3. Your On Ramp, a great company offering resources for moms who want to get back into the workforce owned by my friend Catherine Clifford.  Catherine wrote a terrific article this week on staying current, OMG, I’m obsolete!
   

I enjoy Valentines Day because of all the Red and Pink but mainly I love it because of the spirit of speading love.  When I was a little girl, my grandmother, my mother and my aunt all really loved Valentine’s Day and they spoiled me with lots of goodies.  (In fact, they still do   I hope I’ve spoiled you just a little today.  Now, go have an affair with yourself today.  Even if you stop for a quick latte for only 10 minutes or so, remember to honor yourself today, okay?

I’m truly amazed at feedback I’ve received in response to my post on Proposition 8: Why Should the Majority Get to Choose How the Minority Lives?. In addition to the 16 comments on the blogpost itself, I’ve received emails, phone calls, twitter tweets & direct messages, facebook messages, phonecalls and people walking up to me to chat. It’s been so enlightening. Below are some demographics about the folks that have reached out to me:

• 90% of the group voted no for Prop 8.
• Most of them have someone in their family that is gay and therefore directly affected by the law.
• Most were frustrated that a Utah constituency directly contributed money to the passing of a California law.
• A small % felt that the church should decide who was “married”.
• Many mentioned their concern that our children would be taught to hate minorities as a result of this law passage.
• Some didn’t have any direct ties to anyone Gay but were a minority and related to minority causes. Thus, wanted freedom for all.
• Everyone wants to know if I think there’s anything they can still do now to make a difference.

As for me, I’m disappointed that I didn’t write my post a month earlier and that I didn’t do more to influence the defeat of this proposition. Why? Because I think the public was miseducated, scared and that it passed for all the wrong reasons.

I am a straight, married, white female. So, why am I so impassioned about this topic? I want my daughter to grow up understanding equality and love for all…not hate and I feel that discrimination teaches hate. I grew up in a small town where very few black families lived. My grandparents had very racist views that just never sat well with me. I wish that bias could be erased for my daughter’s children. Additionally, focusing our energy on topics like this takes our focus away from solving what I see as more important topics like promoting flexible work for all of you.

There are things you can still do if you’re interested in being a Proponent of No on Proposition 8.

1. See this great blog at After Ellen which contains some great celebrity pictures and stories.
2. This Saturday is National Protest Day. Check out JointheImpact.com for more information about how you can participate in this national event.
3. Join the When/If Prop 8 Passes, We’ll Do Something About It Facebook group.

Lastly, I think this video says everything there is to know about this topic. Please take the short 4 minutes it takes to watch it.

Refuse to Hate from Refuse to Hate on Vimeo.

President Obama’s ability to reach out and connect with Voters, specifically Generation Y is due to the fact that he embraced their language: texting and communicating with social media tools. Compare this to John McCain, clearly a novice, and it’s easy to see how a younger generation might feel they have only one clear choice for President. They just can’t relate to someone who can’t communicate with the tools of today. It’s a text book example of the generation gap.

So you say, interesting enough but how does this impact me, the working mother?

Think about it for a minute. If Barrack Obama can use Social Media to have a landslide competitive advantage over his competition, then why can’t you? If you’re an entrepreneur or you’ve been thinking about starting a venture, what can you learn from this recent presidential election? What can you implement for your own business? What can you plagiarize from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign? If our President used Linked In, Facebook, My Space, Twitter, why wouldn’t you? After all, he did spend millions on his campaign, likely the largest budget for market research this year. Why wouldn’t you maximize the research that he’s already done and copy that for your own business?

Clearly, I am a Social Media evangelist. I believe that Social Media is the path for working mothers to flexible work. In fact, I believe that it’s the path for not only working mothers but for anyone looking to lead a more independent lifestyle. Think about it. For the first time in history, the playing field has been equalized by the internet. We’ve all got the power to step up to the plate and hit a home run. Why shouldn’t it be you?

So, go see what your new President did to get elected and copy, copy, copy. Working moms, the man just showed you exactly how to do it. All we have to do is watch, listen and implement for our own businesses. How lucky are we to be living in these times?

Got examples of things you’ve already done? Love to hear from you so that other moms can learn! Leave a comment and if you like this post. Please stumble it!

Here are a few other interesting articles covering our new President’s Social Media success and predictions about how he might continue to use it moving forward:

Mashable: How Will President Obama Use His Massive Social Media Influence?

Search Marketing Gurus: Barack Obama: The First Social Media President?

Advertising Age: Obama’s Rivals Should Steal From His Social Playbook

Read Write Web: Obama’s Social Media Advantage

Ok, I admit it. I’m crazy in love with Twitter. Just like my historical attractions to men, this is happening with Twitter because I’m learning things I never even conceived. My relationship with Twitter started about six months ago when we casually started seeing each other. I signed up for a twitter account and then installed the Twitter application on my facebook account. By doing this, I could tweet and my updates would show up in Twitter and on my Facebook page as “status updates”. So efficient which really does it for me. I thought Twitter and I knew each other pretty well. But little did I know, our relationship, analogous to relationships with men, was to grow in layers.

Next I went to Blog World Expo, a true Twitter explosion. The entire conference was run using Twitter as it’s heartbeat. Below are just a few examples of Twitter’s usage.

• The conference leaders created a unique identifier (a hash code in Twitter lingo) for the conference and instructed attendees to identify all messages with this code. That allowed us to track all conference related tweets.
• Most sessions had twitter displayed on the presentation screen so that attendees and seminar leaders could have live, direct communication during presentations which made for a real-time, interactive learning experience. This also allowed participants to almost be in two places at once since you could be reading other seminar tweets from other rooms.
• Most conference related communication was done using Twitter. (This included anything related to conference materials, schedule changes, meetings, after hours events, lunch, etc.)

I really started to get the power of Twitter for business and my heart raced faster.

The next big step in our relationship was the Vice Presidential Debate last Thursday. Did you realize that on certain channels, Americans could tweet their thoughts while Sarah Palin and Joe Biden were debating. Check out Hack the Debate? Seriously! Tweeps were sending their tweets into public television and they were appearing across the bottom of the TV screen complete with their Twitter names and pictures. They were likely censored but this was an historic moment for social media. Think about that. People all around the globe had the opportunity to weigh in on the VP debate. I kept thinking, “the only way this is really happening is if the government does not really grasp how Twitter works”. So incredible. I couldn’t sleep well that night thinking about the possibilities for working women and the next thing that Twitter would teach me. What WOULD be next?

So, the next thing was a random encounter with a work colleague I hadn’t seen in three years. I started to update him about me. He stopped me and said, “I know all about you Angie. In fact, a bunch of us were just talking about you at lunch. We were talking about how often you update your facebook page. We keep track of what you’re up to and in fact I know who you had lunch with yesterday.” A bit embarassing for me that this friend thought I had nothing better to do than update my facebook page so I asked him if he knew about my friend Twitter. He did not. So, what’s a girl to do to explain her relationships? Until the world catches up, it’s nothing but opportunity for those of in the know.

So why am I choosing to out myself and my relationship with Twitter? Because ladies, each day the picture becomes clearer and clearer to me that there are so many opportunities for all of you who have even a slight interest in the internet to create so many great opportunities for yourself. Coincidentally, our live Six Figure Moms Club meeting in San Diego this week covers this topic. You can reengineer your career using New Media options if you want to.

If you would like to learn more about Twitter (or New Media in general), check out expert, Mari Smith’s, Twitter LIngo Demystified

Mari is amazing and continues to stay on the cutting edge of New Media as it seems she in a different learning conference every other day. If you only choose to follow one person on Twitter. She’s a great person to start with. I’ll be writing a post about her soon so stay tuned for more on Mari.

If you are a working mom who thinks she wants career change, I encourage you to spend a few hours playing around in Facebook to see how other people are making money on the web.  You might also have a little fun while you’re at it.  Maybe Facebook is your path to telecommuting, flexible work and the ever escaping work life balance.  Besides, don’t you want to keep up with your kids humor?