Speakers

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Jen Lancaster – Keynote Speaker

Jen Lancaster is a former investment relations executive who started a personal website after a corporate layoff. She chronicled her fruitless job search on the internet and began to attract an audience. A literary agent found her writing and suggested she turn the blog into a book. One year later, her first memoir Bitter Is the New Black came out. She’s since written a book a year, following Bitter up with Bright Lights, Big Ass, and Such a Pretty Fat which debuted at number twenty on the New York Times Best Seller list and remained on the list for ten weeks. Her writing has appeared in Cosmopolitan UK, Women’s Health, and NPR’s All Things Considered.

Jen lives in Chicago and when not busy writing, she’s vacuuming because she has two shedding dogs, four shedding cats, and one shedding husband. She plans to have them all shaved later this year. She still maintains a blog at Jennsylvania.com and spends an unhealthy amount of time spying on her neighbors.

Tara Anderson

Tara Anderson is the Marketing Manager for Lijit Networks. Some of her responsibilities include maintaining the company blog, monitoring the brand’s reputation online, reaching out to bloggers and the feeding/care of the Lijit twitter account (@lijit). She blogs about working for a startup at I quit for Lijit and blogs about her personal adventures at Tall Tara.

In a former life, Tara was a seventh-grade Language Arts teacher, a massage therapist, a stand-up comedian and the manager of a brewery. She finds that all of these skills come in quite useful in her current job. If you insist on asking her, she will tell you that she is “too lijit to quit” but be warned that she has most definitely heard that one before.

She would also be remiss in not mentioning that she’s absolutely @tarable on Twitter.

John Andrews

John Andrews responsibilities at Walmart include building marketing technology platforms to deliver on core brand promises of saving money, quality products and easy shopping. As the marketing lead for many cross-functional technology teams, he has helped to implement Walmart’s community tools including Connect &Share^TM and elevenmoms.com.

A reformed consumer packaged goods marketer with just enough technology experience to be dangerous, John has become a devoted student of community and social media. He spends much of his time working to simplify the shopping experience for Walmart’s customers with a focus on creating a common user experience in-store, online and via mobile. He has spent over ten years prior to joining Walmart with suppliers including L’eggs, Kodak Digital, Goody Products and Implus Footcare. He lives in Fayetteville, AR with wife Mary Shannon and daughter Mary Catherine.

Kelby Carr

Kelby Carr is a blogger, freelance writer, SEO expert, foodie, social networking chick, travel junkie, Twitterati and investigative reporter turned new media mom. She is creator of a variety of parenting social networking/multi-author blog sites such as Type-A Mom, Foodie Mama, Dadosphere and momShare, a Digg-like social bookmarking site for moms. She is also uniting her skills as a blogger with her background as a journalist with her newest venture, Investigative Mommy Blogger.

She’s been geeking it out on computers since she was 10 (and you had to use an audio tape to run software), and she has been web publishing and networking since the early 1990s (when she had to create pages from code in Notepad). She was recently named one of the 50 most influential and powerful women in social media.

Amy Clark

Amy Allen Clark is the Founder of MomAdvice.com, a booming community for parents. The website covers a variety of topics like money-saving tips, recipes, and ideas for creative parenting. Amy has served as spokesperson for Cascade and is currently the home management expert for Kenmore’s Make-It-Simple team. She also is on the advisory counsel for Real Girls Media and editor for the parenting channel on Blissfully Domestic. Her website and advice have been featured in the New York Times, All You Magazine, the Miami Herald, and Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food blog. Named one of the top women in Social Media, Amy is now working towards using her influence towards charitable efforts within her community.

Catherine Connors

Catherine Connors is a mother, writer and recovering academic. When she’s not changing diapers or writing scholarly articles about the characterization of motherhood in Western philosophy, she blogs as Her Bad Mother. She’s also the moderator of Her Bad Mother’s Basement, a open blog-space for anonymous, confessional blog posts submitted by readers, the founder and editor of Better Than A Playdate, a collaborative blogzine for parent bloggers in Canada, and is a Contributing Editor at BlogHer. In her spare time, she relaxes by writing about pop culture and other good things at Mamapop, WeCovet, and Babble, and by trying to convince anyone who will listen that bad is, indeed, the new good.

Robin Dance

Married for over 20 years to her college sweetheart, Robin is mom to two teens and a tween, remarkable since she’s still “35″. A former marketing professional, she finds blogging fills a creative void, or at a minimum, provides a stage for her exhibitionist tendencies.

In addition to writing her personal blog, PENSIEVE, She’s thrilled to be editor for Inspired Bliss, Blissfully Domestic’s new faith channel, and religion/philosophy editor for Blog Nosh Magazine. Her faith today looks very different from her faith ten years ago, and slowly she’s understanding what it means to “live under grace, not law”.

Jennifer Doyle

Jennifer is a professional juggler living in East Tennessee. She is sometimes successful keeping all her balls in the air as she juggles being a mother and wife, a part time Speech-Language Pathologist, maid, financial expert, chronic mover, list maker, wanna-be photographer, and laundress. Her circus-like life is chronicled on her personal blog, Playgroups are no place for children. In her spare time, she is the Managing Editor of Blog Nosh Magazine.

Lori Falcon

Lori Falcon is also known as A Cowboy’s Wife. She’s a mother of three boys and has been happily married to a real cowboy for fifteen plus years. After teaching herself the ropes of the “world wild web,” she now uses her sites to reach out to women in various forms including helping others with blogging tips and teaching affiliate marketing at bloggingcents.com. She uses her personal blog, www.acowboyswife.com to chronicle her reflections about ranch life, kids, marriage, and photography. You can also find her critiquing products and services, from various companies, at cowgirlcritiques.com. Lori’s pride and joy though is her food blog, www.mywoodenspoon.com where she was recently hired by Kraft to create an original recipe using Velveeta in a challenge against 4 other bloggers where she won 1st place. You’ll find home cookin’ recipes with fun foodie talk there so stop on by and say howdy!

Leslie Flinger

Leslie, known as Mrs. Flinger among a couple of people, has been blogging personally, for 5 years. She is amazed anyone in their right mind would still be reading after 5 years. She blogs about her sex life all too often and her constant balancing act between working full time out of the home and raising two very small, very demanding people. She speaks highly of her husband but possibly because he reads her site from time to time.

Also because she loves him completely in a very mushy over dramatic way that makes people gag but she doesn’t care.

She has a small podcasting site with a few friends because she loves to drag people in to her obsessions.

Professionally she runs and owns a web development business with a fellow blogger: Catapult Web Development. Holding a Masters Degree in Information Technology, she begged her graduate Professors to let her do super cool things like code Java Sockets and learn the IP layers. Thankfully she totally forgot that information and focused on PHP based CMS instead. Er.. she’s a total nerd, did we mention that? But that makes her great at her job: Nerdome and the need of all things CSS geek.

She also loves her job in a way that makes people gag.

She also loves her kids in a way that makes people gag but you’d really have to read between the lines to know it.

She’s like that.

Deanna Garretson

Barbara Jones

Barbara Jones has worked for major label record companies for the past 20 years, most recently as SVP Marketing for Warner Bros. Records and Columbia Records, respectively. After staying out way past her bedtime for way too long, she left her music biz corporate gig for the exciting world of entrepreneurship. She started her own women’s word of mouth marketing, PR and social media company called One2One Network, and hasn’t looked back since.

Considering her current status as an adult woman, a mother and a life-long marketer, she figured she had the smarts, empathy and chutzpah to successfully build a network of like-minded women–those who love to promote products and services to their friends, family and social circles online. She considers her own blog (TheWomMom.com), to be at the ‘Apprentice Track’ level but she truly loves to collaborate with and learn from ‘Maven Track’ bloggers on a daily basis. @barbarajones can be found on Twitter at all hours of the day and night and is also proud to be one of the co-hosts of BlissDom ‘09.

Megan Jordan

Megan Jordan is the mommyblogger behind Blog Nosh Magazine, an online magazine serving the literary bents of the blogosphere. The tapping on her shoulder reminds her that she’s married, while the nudging on her leg suggests that she also has two toddlers, as it turns out. Join her at her personal blog, Velveteen Mind, where she relishes the velveteen and revels in the threadbare of her well-loved life.

Linda Konner

Linda Konner is a literary agent, former editor-in-chief of Weight Watchers Magazine and author of eight books. The book whose title always gets the best response is Why Can’t a Man Be More Like a Cat?, although the biggest seller is (naturally) a diet book called Your Perfect Weight, selling over 1/2 million copies.

She launched the New York-based Linda Konner Literary Agency in 1996 and is much happier earning 15% to not write books anymore than to earn 85% writing them. She has approximately 80 clients and handles adult nonfiction exclusively, specializing in practical self-help and health.

She and her honey, theater critic Peter Filichia, have been together for 31 years. They don’t live together.

Tara Kuczykowski

Tara Kuczykowski is a wife and mom of five kids ages six and under. When she’s not cleaning shaving cream off of freshly steam-cleaned carpets or picking up hundreds of Q-tips scattered about, she writes at her successful money-saving blog, Deal Seeking Mom, where she offers “Real Deals for Real Moms.” Learning how to use coupons effectively, where to find the best sales, and what are the hottest new freebies on the Internet are just a few of the great money-saving tips that Tara shares on a daily basis.

Tara is one of Walmart’s exclusive Elevenmoms and has been featured multiple times on Channel 4 News in her hometown of Columbus, OH, as well as in The Columbus Dispatch. As if her plate is not full enough, Tara is also the Frugal Bliss Editor on Blissfully Domestic, a Wishpot Mom Expert, and an occasional Divine Caroline contributor.

Balancing this all with ease and grace is in a constant state of flux, but Tara is up to the challenge. She’s living proof that you can still have the little luxuries in life on a budget. Follow @DealSeekingMom on Twitter for all the trials and tribulations!

Michelle Lamar

Mishelle Lane

Looking through family photo albums one is quick to discern why Mishelle wasn’t in many photos; she was the one behind the camera. Save her ever-favorite self portraits it is easy to recognize that photography would be a driving force in her life. After high school she became employed at Sears Portrait Studio and was highly revered by the clientele, as well as her bosses and fellow associates.

Now-a-days Mishelle is still behind the camera and still taking photographs of children. Her own children! She resides outside of Metro Atlanta with her husband Michael, and four children, three of which are home schooled. Her creativity is exhibited on her blogs Secret Agent Mama and Mishelle Lane Photography. Along with portraiture she enjoys all aspects of photography, especially enjoying the display of her view through her camera’s lens.

2009 marks her return to the portrait business. This time, however, she will be in complete control of the camera and surroundings. Her business, Mishelle Lane Photography, will cater to families who want affordable, quality portraits. Her passion is to share her love of photography with others. One smile, one flower, on sunset, at a time.

Marie LeBaron

Marie LeBaron, the editor of Blissful Kids at Blissfully Domestic, is a 30 something stay at home mom in Utah. Before life as a mother, she graduated with a teaching degree in Early Childhood & Elementary Education, after which she taught four years of Kindergarten. After her first child was born, she decided to read books and sing silly songs at home. She misses the classroom, but she now gets to bring the fun and learning into her home and ours. You’ll see her kids a lot in these projects as they are her guinea pigs and for whom she’s creative. You can follow more of her projects at her personal blog Make and Takes. You can also see Marie’s crafts at Alpha Mom’s Once Upon a Holiday.

Shannon Lowe

Shannon Lowe blogs at Rocks In My Dryer and is a contributing editor at BlogHer. She also blogs weekly for Parenting magazine’s website, The Parenting Post. Occasionally she writes for things will real live pages that you actually can turn, including Good Housekeeping, Parent and Child, Chicken Soup For the New Mom’s Soul, and The Social Cause Diet. Last year she traveled to Uganda with Compassion International to live-blog their child advocacy work.

Shannon has been blogging for over three years and is still amazed that anyone besides her mom reads what she has to say. She lives with her husband and four spunky kids in Oklahoma. In her spare time she…never mind, she hasn’t had spare time since 1998.

Amy Lupold Bair

Melissa Michaels

Melissa Michaels is a wife and a mom of three who finds all sorts of things in life to keep her out of trouble. From writing her blog, THE INSPIRED ROOM, to running her own interior decorating business, to contributing as a monthly columnist for Christian Women Online magazine, to being the Editor for the Home & Garden Channel of Blissfully Domestic, Melissa is usually over-committed and up to her ears in projects and ideas. Her motto is “When life inspires our home, our home will inspire our life.” She loves inspiring others to find their personal style and shares simple, easy and doable ideas for managing and decorating a home.

Tanis Miller

Tanis Miller spends most of her time reading, writing and Rednecking. Her personal blog Attack of the Redneck Mommy is a humorous and insightful look at the joys of parenting, the delights of marriage and the heartbreak of losing a child. She also likes to occasionally get Hot and Bothered over at Better than a Playdate.

Redneck Mommy has been featured on CNN, The Globe and Mail and in a variety of Canadian daily newspapers. Attack of the Redneck Mommy was voted the winner of Best Canadian Blog in the 2008 Bloggies.

When Tanis isn’t chauffeuring her children from one sporting activity to another, stalking the twitter boards or acting as an advocate for children with disabilities you can generally find her singing into the handle of a hairbrush in her kitchen pretending to be Britney Spears.

Casey Mullins

When Casey started her blog, moosh in indy. three years ago she thought she was doing something novel that no one else was doing. Well, except for that one lady who used to live by her in Utah. Whoops, she was wrong. Had you told her that three years later her writing would be published (this spring!), articles would be written about her in publications such as The Denver Post, Us Weekly and Indianapolis Monthly and Indianapolis Woman she would have told you to shove it. But here she is, surrounded by a wonderful community that lives in her computer. Casey also writes for a local parenting site, Being Savvy Indianapolis and contributes her obsession of photography to the Photo Bliss channel on Blissfully Domestic. Casey is awesome, and hates writing bios

Melanie Nelson

Melanie Nelson is the author of BloggingBasis101.com where she writes tips and instructions for beginning bloggers. In 2007 Blogging Basics 101 was first runner-up in the Blogger’s Choice Awards in the category of Best Blog About Blogging.

Melanie has both a BA and MA in Technical Writing. She also has extensive experience with HTML coding. Before becoming a stay-at-home mom with several blogs, Melanie was a web site designer with clients that included PennWell Publishing, Oil & Gas Journal Online, Thrifty/Dollar Rental Car, and several local companies.

In addition to Blogging Basics 101, Melanie is a Contributing Editor for the Technology/Web track at BlogHer.com. She also hosts giveaways at BloggyGiveaways.com Monday through Friday. When she has time, she updates her personal blog, Don’t Try This at Home.

The Nester

The Nester is a home stager and redesigner who firmly believes that when it comes to home design, it doesn’t have to be perfect to be beautiful. She offers fun, easy and inexpensive projects for the lazy perfectionist on her blog, The Nesting Place. She and her husband live in the southeast with their three young boys.

Tsh Oxenreider

Tsh Oxenreider is a writer, a graphic designer, a wife and mama, and a home manager extraordinaire. Her far-off fantasy is to take a cooking class from Ina Garten and build an eco-home from scratch with her hubby. In the meantime, she’ll settle for making some killer brownies and doing her best to frugally decorate her high-rise urban apartment.

You can find Tsh writing about life hacks for home managers at Simple Mom, one of the most popular and fastest-growning mommy blogs on the web. Her blog is a member of the exclusive 9 Rules network, and she’s also a member of the Life Skills Network and a Wishpot Mom Expert. In her spare time, she runs her photo card business, Chickpea Designs.
She loves coffee, and she hates wearing socks.

Follow her on Twitter (@simplemom).

Colleen Padilla

Colleen lives in the Philly suburbs and is a stay at home mom for her 2 children, Mackenzie (3)and Kyle (1). In her life before kids, Colleen studied Anthropololgy and earned her MBA at Cornell. She has worked in Corporate America for Ford Motor Company, Wells Fargo, and Sanofi-Aventis Pharmaceuticals. She has since traded in her real MBA for the coveted Master of Baby Administration! During her downtime as a Mom – aka during naps & between diaper changes & singing nursery rhymes-she founded ClassyMommy.com.

Today, this energetic Mom, is a social media consultant, mom expert, and the editor of Classy Mommy.com, a website full of over 1000 product & video reviews and fabulous giveaways. Colleen has been featured in Parenting Magazine and on CBS and NBC along with appearing in a TV special about Alpha Moms on South Korea’s NBC affiliate SBS. Colleen serves as a spokesperson for Energizer rechargeable batteries and is an active member of Walmart’s 11 Moms online community. But nothing compares to being a Mom!

Meredith Pelham

Meredith Pelham documents living well on 1 income at her personal blog, Like Merchant Ships (in addition to writing professionally at 3 other sites). For her, it’s all about the content-and squeezing great photos from a cheap Kodak point-and-shoot.

When she’s not online or in the kitchen, you can find her treasure-hunting at the nearest thrift store.

Stephanie Precourt

Stephanie Precourt is a stay at home Mom and freelance writer. Growing up she had great plans to be on Broadway, in the movies, or directing children’s theatre. Now she finds herself managing every type of drama, tragedy, and comedy within her little home in the Chicago suburbs. She has three small sons and a new baby daughter, so life is quite exciting and unpredictable- just without her name in lights.

You can find Stephanie blogging about daily Mommy life at Adventures In Babywearing where journaling honest thoughts and words have helped guide her to being the best parent she can be. To appreciate the simple things, be open-minded yet passionate about what really matters, and be thankful for the many blessings that continue to pour into her life through children, friends, and the amazing journey of finding out just who she is becoming.

Stephanie is the Managing Editor of 5 Minutes For Parenting and writes the Real Reviews column for NWIparent Magazine and the NWIparent blog Close To Home. You can also find her contributing to Mama Speaks, the tea collection blog, and the Chicago Moms Blog.

Katja Presnal

Katja has built her reputation offering a turn-key Marketing Solution for mompreneurs in the children’s fashion industry. She offered all-in-one marketing solution for small businesses in the children’s fashion market including Online Store Skimbaco.com, Lifestyle Blog SkimbacoLifestyle.com and PR service LadybugLandings.com. The products she has represented have received national and international press, including a product endorsed by Tom Cruise on Oprah Show. Now Katja offers PR consulting and focuses on social media marketing, especially in the “mom” target market. Katja is one of Walmart’s Eleven Moms, and was named as one of the 50 most powerful and influential women in social media.

Jenny Rapson

Jenny Rapson is a SAHM of a preschool boy and toddler girl, struggling to stay stylish even though she doesn’t get dressed up for work anymore. She’s been married to her high school sweetheart for nine years and lives in the same area she grew up in. She’s passionate about Jesus, coupons, makeup, and her family and has a *wee* vanity problem. She is the editor of the wildly successful Blissful Style Channel on Blissfully Domestic. She blogs about her adventures in motherhood with her best friend and cousin, Emily, at their blog, Mommin’ It Up!

Arianne Segerman

Jessica Smith

Jessica Smith has successfully brought her 8 years of marketing and business development experience home with her, literally. She is Chief Mom Advisor and the woman behind the idea for MomForce.com, Chief Mom Officer for Wishpot.com, and works with big brands including Walmart and Ford. Jessica offers a personal glimpse into her life as a mom and virtual executive at JessicaKnows.com. Her specialties include creating buzz and community for companies that target moms through new media. She has also been recently tapped as one of the 50 Most Influential and Powerful Women in Social Media as #23. You can also find her guest writing at Mashable.com. Jessica enjoys the best of both worlds, motherhood and career, at home in the DC Metro area with her husband and young son. You can find her on Twitter as @jessicaknows.

Liz Strauss

Liz Strauss is a founder and the vision behind the highly successful business and social media conference — SOBCon, Biz School for Bloggers — that gained the attention of BusinessWeek, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Innovation Initiative of the Kellogg School of Business. She has been called “perhaps the most influential relational blogger on the Internet” by Eaton Web.

Liz is a community builder, and social web strategist who focuses on how people communicate in person, in print, and online. Her background is the business of publishing and instructional design.

“My fascination is how people perceive and gain meaning from interacting with books, blogs, and each other — how the head and heart engage to make a fiercely loyal friend and customer. It’s so much easier to build a business when let the community participate from the start.”

In the US, Europe, Australia, the UK, South America, and Ireland, Liz is talking to companies, universities, and individuals about their products and social web strategies to help them seamlessly become part of the new web culture.

Liz has worked with the Cass Business School of City University in London and will soon be working with the International Centre of Publishing at Oxford University. She also has clients at home in Chicago.

Jessica Turner

Jessica Turner is an award-winning marketing and public relations professional at Lovell Communications Inc. in Nashville, Tenn. Jessica’s clients depend on her vast knowledge of online communications tools such as blogging, e-mail marketing and social media sites.

On Jessica’s popular blog, The Life, Faith and Creativity of Jessica Turner, readers engage in her musings on new motherhood, scrapbooking, faith, product reviews, and miscellaneous other topics of interest. In 2008, Jessica was selected by Southwest Airlines to be its official “Mommy Vlogger,” and her first video on “traveling with a peanut” will launch on the Southwest blog in early 2009. Her blog was one of 20 selected to be part of the new Guideposts.com network, launching in spring 2009.

When she isn’t working or blogging, she can usually be found spending time with her husband, author Matthew Paul Turner, and their six-month-old son, Elias, or scrapbooking about them.

Rebecca Watson

Rebecca is known as one of the top influencers and thought leaders in the digital media industry. She is the director of business development at Real Girls Media Network, Inc., where she helped the company launch DivineCaroline.com , acquire content, build partnerships, gain millions of users, and monetize other women’s blogs. Before RGM, Rebecca consulted for Match.com and venture capital firms, and also spent a year in investment banking. Although she doesn’t maintain her own blog, she writes frequently on DivineCaroline and also contributes to media trade publications including iMediaConnection and Vator.tv . After taking dozens of trips around the country last year to speak at conferences, Rebecca is focusing 2009 on becoming more domestic and playing more golf with her new husband.

Ghennipher Weeks

Ghennipher is a social media marketingophile – skilled in the art of helping businesses connect with their customers via social media networks. @Ghennipher; is currently Salt Lake City’s TweetUp organizer, working with PR firms, local and national businesses to bring value to these companies via Twitter.

Ghennipher also served as a Social Media Manager Intern to help manage all of the social media channels and integration connected with Joel Postman’s new book, SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate (Voices That Matter) In this position, she was able to directly influence and implement a broad social media strategy using all of the current social media tools to assure that the book presents relevant, useful, and current information. This engagement took Ghennipher into the inside world of corporate social media and resulted in numerous case studies, real world examples, an insider view of social media tools, a deep understanding of social media analytics and metrics, and social media strategy development.

In addition to her recognized expertise in the areas of search engine, social media and conversion rate marketing, Ghennipher is a blogger, writer and previous speaker at several industry events including Webmasterworld PubCon and Search Engine Strategies conference, and an IKEA junkie.

Allison Worthington

Allison Worthington is one of the most influential up-and-coming women online. She has her finger on the pulse of hot trends and strives to connect and empower women all across the web. From social media, to publishing, to mommy blogging she does it all.

She founded the online magazine, Blissfully Domestic, in early 2008. The magazine quickly became a runaway success, now with 15 channels and features the work of over 300 of the most talented women around the world.

She is a mommy blogger extraordinaire as the woman behind the very popular blog, Mrs. Fussypants. Mrs. Fussypants, was honored as one of the finalists for Best New Blog in both the 2007 Weblog Awards and the 2008 Bloggies.

Allison recently was listed as #17 on the Top 50 Most influential and Powerful Women in Social Media. She twitters @fussypants and is listed in the Top 50 Tweeple to Follow.

She balances her magazine, her blog, her photo jewelry business, five young sons and a wonderful husband with lots of coffee and God’s grace. She needs a nap and a housekeeper, but will settle for some dark chocolate and a nice glass of cabernet.

Christine Young

Christine (aka YoungMommy) is married to her best friend, Ray, and together they have six very active children, all ages 8 and under. She’s a busy mama, spending most of her days homeschooling four of them, while running after two! She is the proud owner and author of From Dates to Diapers, where she shares about life with little ones, offers advice and encouragement, and writes her thoughts and opinions on some of the greatest products on the market. She is also the co-founder of Mommies United.

In addition to being a mom, wife, laundry-hater, dish-washer, and boogie-wiper, Christine works as a Community Manager and Social Media Consultant for Mom Central, is a Mom Expert at Wispot.com, is a part of Graco Nation, and is one of Wal-Mart’s Eleven Moms. She has worked with big brands such as Nintendo, Stride Rite, Johnson & Johnson, and Dyson.