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3 Top Takeaways From The Women Who Tech Telesummit: Wednesday's Woman

Posted by Gayle Kesten Wednesday, May 13, 2009, 01:19 PM ET

I'm not sure what phrase replaces "standing room only" when you're referring to a teleconference, but whatever that might be is a fitting description for yesterday's Women Who Tech telesummit.

The second annual virtual event, well-organized by Rad Campaign co-founder Allyson Kapin, featured a dozen panels running two-by-two throughout the day. PowerPoints ran online, though audio was phone-only, at times making it a little tricky to figure out who was speaking.

I called in for three sessions -- "Women and Open Source," "Tech Marketing in a Recession," and "Launching Your Own Startup." Following are some of the takeaways not already beaten to death here and around the blogosphere:

1. If a library with six branches can rely on open-source software both internally and for its customers, then your small business can, too: Amy De Groff, who heads up IT for the Howard County library system in Maryland, painted an extremely no-brainer picture of why she went with open source (the Ubuntu operating system, specifically) to run the library's hundreds of computers. For starters, a single $25 fee was all it cost to get the OS up and running on an initial 300 machines. "Open source has helped put more computers on the floor," De Groff said. "All the money we saved on software licenses is spent on custom programming and more computers."

Those computers, which the library repairs until they're no longer salvageable, offer word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, database, and instant messages apps, as well as Internet connectivity via open-source browsers Opera and Firefox. "We get two help desk tickets per month for all the machines," De Groff said. "IT loves us." (More details about why the library is so enthralled with open source are available here.)

2. Ignoring social media will put your company in serious jeopardy: Harsh statement, for sure, but think back just a mere few years ago when you'd search for a company's Web site and came up empty-handed. How much thought did you give to the company as a result? "Soon if you don't have Twitter account, a fan page on Facebook, or a blog, you won't exist," said Fran Bosker, account director at San Francisco-based PR agency Vantage Communications, during the marketing panel. "If a customer looks for you, it's an issue. They will think something is wrong." Bosker whittled down Twitter to the basics -- "all it is is your Facebook status update -- and gave a two-second lesson on how to set up an RSS feed from Twitter so you know when someone is following you and/or your company. (Insert your brand/company/name in the Search field, and real-time results will appear. In the bottom right-hand column you'll see the RSS icon. Click on it for the code, which you then pop into your RSS feeder.)

Creating a Facebook fan page sounded equally as painless, and I was happy to hear about a new feature on the social network giant that gives you the option to separate your professional from your personal personas. (Do my colleagues really want to see the photo of my son's massive bed head this morning?) Another point well-taken: Many companies are successfully using YouTube, which is not a forum in which you need to be fancy. "That doesn't make sense," Bosker said. "Anyone watching YouTube doesn't want slick marketing material anyway." (On a related note, here are five tips for taking your business video viral, which I blogged about yesterday.)

3. Beggars can be choosers: Just because you need help funding your new company doesn't mean you should take it from just anyone waving a wad of greenbacks in your face. Amy Muller, chief community officer at Get Satisfaction, a customer service community based in San Francisco, gleaned that lesson from a startup she once worked for that was among the countless dot-com casualties. "That was a situation where we were working with a VC who was kind of forcing us to do some things that undermined our ability to exist in terms of where we were spending the money," she explained. Muller's husband has a similar experience, so when they went into business together less than two years ago, they made sure the person leading their VC rounds was on the same page. "That person was working with us, and not coming in and taking over to do what they wanted to do," she said. "It's great to get money, but you want to be careful and selective about where it's coming from."

What other funding options are at your disposal? Muller suggested bootstrapping as long as you can, after which your next-best alternative would be turning to friends and family. "It's great if they can help you out to kick things off," she said. But if your next logical step is to turn to a VC, Rashmi Sinha, CEO of SlideShare, a community for sharing presentations, suggested looking for one that has invested in other women-owned startups. "The VC industry is more traditional, where men are in the power roles," she said. "But within that world you see people who are genuinely evaluating you for your ideas and don't care if you're a man or woman."

One smart way to capture an investor's interest: create an advisory board. (Slideshare, for example, counts Guy Kawasaki and Google's chief economist, Hal R. Varian, in its group.) "The advisory thing can seem intimidating, but there are a lot of entrepreneurs who have done well and either want to give back or want to be an adviser to help them stay in the game," said Mary Hodder, who moderated the panel and is editor of the Napsterization.org Web site. "If you're smart and launching an interesting company, it's going to give them something, as well."

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The Wednesday's Woman series is written for today's community of hard-working, small-business women, featuring profiles, industry trends, research, work/life balance issues and other topics of interest.

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