It would be safe to say that life has been somewhat hectic lately. However, I’m loving it. So here it is: my life in a minute.
Had a ball at: Breakfast with Dannii Minogue. I grew up watching Dannii Minogue on Young Talent Time. I can STILL picture her rendition of “Purple Rain” by Prince. Obviously, Dannii is not only all grown up, she’s a businesswoman with her own fashion label, Project D.
I could relate to this because, in my previous life, I co-founded a fashion label that ran for six years, I know how challenging it can be to design, manufacture, market, wholesale and retail your clothes. We ran a store in Pitt Street Mall seven days a week. And this was my part-time venture – I also had a day job!
Dannii was self-deprecating, engaging and … funny! She has a sense of comedic timing that you just don’t expect. And while you might expect her clothes to be unrealistic for real women, they were totally wearable and just gorgeous. Check them out at David Jones. You’ll also see Dannii on the cover of the next issue of Latte magazine.
Inspired by: Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos. It was great to hear Tony speak recently at a workshop run by the amazing team at Business Chicks. (Yes, I’m biased, I’m editor of Latte, published by Business Chicks). Tony has been part of Zappos since day one. Since 1999, he has grown it from a tiny start-up to the online retail giant that it is today. In 2009, it was acquired by Amazon for a reported $1.2 billion. Uh-huh. Billion. You can read more about Tony in my Enterprise post here.
Anyhow, I clearly wasn’t the only one in Australia keen to hear from Tony. He spoke to a packed room at The Ivy in Sydney, and everyone was hanging off every word.
Impressed with: The function room at The Ivy. Nice. And the goodie bags distributed to all attendees at the workshop, which included this cute iPad cover from Outcased.
Reading: Unmarketing by Scott Stratten. This book had been on my reading list for almost a year. But I finally got stuck into it because I had the opportunity to interview Scott this week when he spoke at the Schmart Marketing Conference in Melbourne.
I loved the book. While I have read many books, blogs posts and reports on social media, this book particularly resonated with me. It confirmed so many of my ideas about how to interact on social media. In short, it’s about being authentic and building relationships. And it’s at odds with some of the advice you hear these days from so-called social media experts who advise you to build a following with automatic adding tools and other dubious strategies. Ugh.
I love Scott’s approach to how he built his following and chatted at length with him about it. Look out for that blog post and video soon.
Recovering from: driving from Sydney to Melbourne
As you can see, I’ve been in Melbourne. While most people get on a plane to do this, my little cat Rocky gets very airsick. So the whole family – Rex (cat), Rocky (cat) and Rambo (dog) – has to pile into the car and drive all the way down.
I loaded up my iPod with podcasts and music and figured I was set. But I didn’t expect little Rambo to throw up four times (on my dress each time) on the way down. Needless to say, that dress is now in the bin. Let’s hope there isn’t a repeat performance on the way back.
Here’s a picture of an exhausted little Rambo when we finally got to Victoria.
