Katja Presnal masters the online business world (after an 8-year career break)

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Katja Presnal’s online store Skimbaco.com got an unexpected PR jolt in May, 2008, when Tom Cruise pointed out his daughter Suri’s cute ladybug shoes from the Skimbaco site while giving Oprah a televised house tour. The Cruises had received them from a friend as part of a holiday gift package Katja had assembled. Katja's PR challenge was to let the media world know those shoes came from her store, which she did with a successful word of mouth campaign using social media. Several media outlets contacted Katja, who had been in business just over a year, and fifty websites covered the story.

Return-to-work lessons from @GeekMommy: Twitter celebrity, computer scientist, and relauncher

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by Carol Fishman Cohen

@GeekMommy, aka Lucretia Pruitt, has over 12,500 followers on Twitter. She is a COBOL expert, a former computer science professor, and she heads up her own social media strategy consulting firm Social Media Matters. She is one of Walmart’s “Eleven Moms,” and corporate giants ranging from Ford to Colgate-Palmolive fly her out to blast reviews of their new products to her vast cyber-network. Of course we met through Twitter!

Lucretia is also a “relauncher” – she took a career break and then returned to work. When Lucretia was pregnant, she and her husband originally thought her husband was going to stay home and she was going to continue teaching Computer Information Services at DeVry University . But when her daughter was born she changed her mind. She decided to be the stay at home parent. Here are the lessons from her instructive and inspiring “relaunch story.”

Relauncher on Shine

Katja Presnal masters the online business world (after an 8-year career break)

Return-to-work lessons from @GeekMommy: Twitter celebrity, computer scientist, and relauncher