2.5 Minutes With Laura Fitton (VIDEO)
From March 11 through 15, genConnect.com is on-site in downtown Austin, Texas conducting personal interviews with speakers slated to appear at the innovative South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Conference in Austin’s Convention Center.
We are at the event as credentialed press, hosting “2.5 Minutes With genConnect” in the Chevy Volt ReCharge Lounge during the conference.
Yesterday we spoke with Laura Fitton, Founder and CEO of OneForty.com, the social business software hub. In the interview below, Laura discusses the name of her business, a funny story about Guy Kawasaki, and her book, Twitter for Dummies.
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LAURA FITTON: Just like many, on first glance, I thought it looked really stupid. I blogged that I thought it looked really stupid. It blew up here at South by in 2007. And I have a post that March saying when a dumb idea. In May 2007, it started making sense to me. I realized it was a chance– as a homebound mom of two kids under two– it was the chance to surround myself with successful, interesting people. And it was incredibly motivating, and I became obsessed within like three months.
KELLY HAYES: So I understand they there are other people who didn’t necessarily believe, who needed to see the light.
LAURA FITTON: After the three months, I was writing a post for my blog. I called it Ode to Twitter. It was totally sappy. And I was also watching a Ustream video of Guy Kawasaki on stage at the conference Gnomedex saying, Twitter is so dumb. Who has time for it? It’s pointless. So I said my blog post, kind of cheeky. And to his credit, he wrote back. He listened. He let me convince him that Twitter was a legitimate business tool. August 2007. That was ridiculous idea. And he joined it, and he credited me on his blog when he joined. So that lead to a lot of other speaking opportunities. Eventually the book. Ending up in a Seth Godin book called Tribes. Really completely changed my life around.
KELLY HAYES: And today, Twitter has how many followers at this point? There’s 200 million or something of that nature?
LAURA FITTON: Oh, God yeah. 200 million users probably.
KELLY HAYES: And you also then named your company after something that has something to do with Twitter? What’s the connection there?
LAURA FITTON: So I had always had a company called Pistachio Consulting, and I relaunched that as a Twitter for business consultancy in September 2008.
My clients all wanted to know what tools to use. And I realized we needed kind of an app store, kind of a Yelp where you could rate and review all these different things built for Twitter. So instead of name it something starting tw, I named it oneforty, because then it’s always a salute to Twitter. But it reflects what it’s become, which is it’s all social business tools. It’s all business experts. We have a directory into them. We have over 800 case studies and how to guides on how to make your business more social, and therefore more effective.
KELLY HAYES: oneforty.com is O-N-E-F-O-R-T-Y–
LAURA FITTON: There’s no u in there.
KELLY HAYES: –.com
LAURA FITTON: People want to put a u in, but there’s none.
KELLY HAYES: Terrific. oneforty.com. And Laura, we greatly appreciate you coming. Good luck down the road.
LAURA FITTON: Thank you so much, Kelly.
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Category: SXSW2011, Special Guests, Videos, Views on the News
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