What I Learned at the Yahoo Motherboard Summit

Last week I had the honor of being invited to the Yahoo Motherboard Summit. Yahoo flew out 70 social media moms to the Yahoo headquarters in Silicon Valley and gave us some serious pampering at the Palo Alto Four Seasons followed by a fascinating day meeting with many of the teams that make Yahoo! such a force online. The Yahoo! team was incredible, literally rolling out the purple carpet for us, and were genuinely interested in hearing what we had to say.

I've been a member of the Yahoo Motherboard since February and have been thrilled to interact with the group of intelligent moms Yahoo has recruited. We have monthly Twitter parties to discuss parenting topics such as being green, children and sports, and raising readers to name a few. There are no prizes, no jockeying for exposure to brands: just dialogue between moms on parenting. We also have the option to post to our blogs about the topic of the month to continue the discussion that way. It's a great group and I was thrilled to have the chance to spend some time offline with these women who have inspired me so much online.

The sessions were informative and thought-provoking. Many tears were shed during a presentation about Internet Safety where we heard about a local teen who committed suicide after a naked picture of her was circulated among her school. Seeing a police officer up on the stage was a chilling reminder of the danger of our technology toys. My 6 and 8 year old received iPod Nanos for Christmas with videos inside and immediately began recording footage to upload to YouTube. Technology is so pervasive in their lives; it's never too early to start educating our children on the power and potential danger of technology. And the danger is no longer from strangers; it's from peers. We need to teach our kids that they can be heroes simply by pressing the delete key.

Many of the other sessions provided valuable information for creating online content. My greatest takeaways were:

• Be concise and powerful when crafting blog post titles. Search engines only consider the first 65 characters of titles.
• Research shows that readers rarely read more than 300 words per web page. Don't wait til the end of your post to make your point. Use bullets and bold to keep readers engaged.
• Verbs are a powerful way to make your post stand out and keep your writing fresh.
• Labelling pictures is more important than you think. Not only does it help you with SEO - it's also what blind web surfers will hear.
• Before crafting a post, select your title and one keyword by doing a search on your topic to make sure it is popular but not too popular.
• We saw Heatmap research that tracked websurfers' eye. It confirmed that users read the top left of web pages the most - cluster what you want your readers to see there.

A huge thanks to the Yahoo Motherboard team for this great event - I'm still dreaming of the Four Seasons bed and digesting all that we learned and heard about.