There is still a digital divide, and it may be growing wider.

Four brilliant, privileged and geeky friends of mine, Katherine Barr, Josh Elman, Robert Scoble, and Randi Zuckerberg, appeared recently on a panel at the First Ever MamaBear Conference hosted by 500 Startups. (Yes, they’re also friends of mine.) The topic was how their children interact with technology. Their kids are toddlers. I watched because 1)I love these people and 2)I’ve got grandkids.

Most of the discussion revolved around how their toddlers relate to  iPads and iPhones, and how naturally technological literacy comes to them. Josh’s daughter tried to swipe a TV set in a hotel room. Some of these parents were concerned about how much time their children spent with devices as babysitters, or how their kids picked up on the parents’ habits of multi-tasking and not giving their kids their full attention. While they were proud their children could operate every device from age two on, I thought it was an inevitability, knowing them.

And then there are the children I see. My foster daughter just had a baby, and has a child almost five. Her 5-year-old was recently tested for kindergarten and found to be behind in certain areas. My daughter cried, thinking she was a failure after she had tried so hard to keep him with her as much as possible. She herself dropped out of school in 8th grade, and probably reads at the fifth grade level.  When he was little, both he and she were briefly homeless, living in her car. At other times, she has worked full time. While she says she reads to him, she also has difficulty keeping his attention.

My foster son and his wife have a 2-year-old. This child, who can exit from anything you strap him into like Harry Houdini,  figured out how doors and windows work as soon as he was tall enough to reach knobs, and has been an escape artist since he discovered my dog door soon after he began to crawl. He’s smart as a whip, but without a device he will never sit still to learn to read. Both of his parents work full time and attend college full time. He is often at day care, where there are is no technology.

My response to these circumstances is to buy each child a device of his own. While I love my foster daughter dearly, not only does she have a significant other and a newborn, she also doesn’t have much technological competency of her own to pass on. She can use Facebook, but that’s where it ends. When she was with me, I taught her how to use computers, but she didn’t have the day-to-day access that children of means take for granted. My son and daughter-in-law are more advanced, because they attend a community college. But they’re using their phones themselves.

Any discussion of whether too much interaction with technology will harm these children, which is a discussion many more privileged parents have with each other, is moot.

I worry they’re not getting enough interaction with it. Although they do things children with more structured lives don’t have time to do, like play outside with other kids on the block, they don’t do the things that will help them up the ladder higher up in the middle class their parents struggled to enter. In order for these kids to avoid the tribulations their parents had, they are going to have to develop the same habits Randi’s and Robert’s and Josh’s and Katherine’s kids have.

The iPad and its Android relatives aren’t just things that take kids away from human relationships. In the case of my foster grandchildren, they are problem-solving tutors, teaching them skills they will need to succeed in a world where their parents still struggle to compete.

Yoga is the place I go to disconnect. Admittedly I have been known to check my phone for messages if I leave the yoga room for any reason, but in the room I never do.  I’m not one of the people whose phone rings randomly in mid-pose because I forgot to put it on vibrate.

Lately I’ve been wearing fitness monitors, however, and I seldom take them off during class because I always want to know if yoga gives me fuel points, or steps, or whatever I happen to be monitoring this week. My monitoring addiction began with the Fitbit, which was sent to me to try when it was introduced into the market. The Fitbit monitors steps, and sleep effectiveness, and calorie intake if you tell it what you ate.

I took off the Fitbit after I realized I knew exactly how I slept, what I ate, and how much I walked — but so what? Nevertheless, I’m a gadget geek, so when the Jawbone Up came out, I bought one. When it fell apart, I switched to the Nike Fuel Band. I liked that okay, despite not knowing what “fuel points” are.  But then I heard about the Basis watch, which also took your heart rate, and I ordered one of those. And then I bought the second, more durable Jawbone. Mind you, I haven’t really learned anything new about myself in two years, and every single one of these devices is ugly by female standards. Clearly they were designed by male engineers. But I am now addicted to things on my wrist that tell me things I no longer need to know. Wearable computers.

Somewhere in the middle of all this fitness hysteria, I backed a project on Kickstarter called the Pebble Watch. Enough other people backed it to raise Pebble $10 million, and the founders retired to China to figure out how to manufacture a smart watch.

The Pebble Watch isn’t really a monitor like the others. It only monitors what’s happening on your smart phone, and communicates notifications to you through the watch face. It’s more like the overhyped Google Glass. The Pebble  can remind you of appointments, tell you who is calling, and send your text messages. Think of it as a Dick Tracy wrist radio. Like the others, it’s pretty ugly, and like the others, it has been designed by and for boys.

But it only arrived yesterday, and I was wearing it and learning it when I went into yoga this morning.

We were laying on the floor toward the end of a yin class heavy in Chinese traditional medicine lore, concentrating on opening our Meridiens and freeing our chi. Completely in the right brain.  Never mind what all this means. Just know that it’s serious, and the room is silent.

I must have pressed a button that activated something (I don’t know, because my eyes were closed), because all of a sudden my watch began reading aloud from “The Signal and the Noise,” a book by the totally left brain statistician Nate Silver about economic forecasting and why both it and earthquake forecasting are so often wrong. (The mistake is called “over fitting.”) The actual application, Audible, that reads books to me is on my iPhone, and my phone was paired with Pebble. Somehow, the watch opened Audible.

Unfortunately, the yoga teacher had just asked us all what we had learned about ourselves during the class. What had I learned? I had learned that I didn’t  know all the capabilities of my Pebble Watch, and that I had therefore caused two usually very separate worlds to collide. I also learned that it’s impossible to explain to people who are not geeks and wouldn’t know a Basis from a Pebble from a potato chip what had just happened. To them, it was perfectly random.

Namaste.

Related articles

• Robert Scoble: “I’m never going to live another day without a wearable computer on my face”

I mentor at least once a month at Gangplank, and often elsewhere.  There’s never a day when I don’t feel gratified to be able to help, but today was an extraordinary day.

My first appointment was a man from Flagstaff. He is a flight nurse, and had developed an API for transferring patients from hospital to hospital–which is now done by fax and phone call. Without experience as an entrepreneur and without investment, he had found a technical co-founder, developed a solution that integrates with major EHRs, sold it to several rural hospitals, and was now on the verge of deploying his first large urban hospital system. He told me I was the first person he had been able to talk to who understood the industry and could help him go further. In a long conversation, we discussed the drawbacks and merits of bootstrapping vs. taking investors.  I admire him.

My next appointment was a woman who was studying nutrition and was quitting her job to become a personal coach. She came to ask me several questions about how to start a business, but she already knew the answers to all of them, because her background was in finance. We had another long conversation — this one about how to eat, how to treat the body naturally, and how to engage in “permission marketing” — a term I never used with her, but which seemed intuitive to her. She will market in a way that aligns with her values.

Next up? A 23-year-old serial entrepreneur who had already tried investment banking, received a grant from Apple, had one of his technologies acquired by another company, and was developing a retrofit for manual wheelchairs. He came to ask me how I got where I am, but he has already gone so far, just out of college, that I know he’ll eclipse me. We ended up talking about the special traits of entrepreneurs, about getting married too early, and about disappointing your parents. It turned out that his father, too, is an entrepreneur; he emigrated to the US and opened a Chinese restaurant. It’s the one I eat in all the time, and whose take-out food I always have delivered. What are the odds…? We ended up laughing about our commonalities.

And last, a young man who is part of a robotics startup, which will make it easy to program industrial robots, and lower their cost. He taught me a term for robotic hands: end effectors. The robots who have end effectors and can change their environments  are the expensive ones. Here’s the definition in case you want to learn something today: n robotics, an end effector is a device or tool that’s connected to the end of a robot arm where the hand would be. The end effector is the part of the robot that interacts with the environment. The structure of an end effector and the nature of the programming and hardware that drives it depend on the task the robot will be performing.

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s cool to learn new things, and today I learned so much from the people I mentored that I forgot I was the person who was supposed to know something.

This is a pathetic story of the TSA and  Southwest Airlines baggage handling, neither of whom has any concern for the customer. But I am not one of those polite senior citizens who takes everything lying down. Rather, I’m an expert in customer service and marketing, and I know what SHOULD have been done.

A month ago, I bought my son-in-law a new laptop. I had it sent to my home in Phoenix, because I knew he was coming to visit me to paint my house. Today he left to go back home, after making my house look beautiful and being away from my daughter for three weeks. It was a labor of love for which a new laptop was small compensation.

He packed the laptop into his laptop case. In the case he also put several other breakable items: two jars of hummus spice from the local Middle Eastern bakery that my daughter begged us to get for her, and a jar of organic peanut butter.

He checked his two other bags, and carried the laptop on. Or at least he tried to. When he got to TSA, they told him that because the jars looked like a powdery substance (garlic, lemon juice, salt, etc), he couldn’t carry it on. They suggested he check his laptop case. Obediently, he went back down to the ticket counter, where they charged him $75.00 to check the case, because it was a third bag.

When he boarded, he watched the baggage being loaded, and saw that the baggage handlers had opened the flap of his laptop case — the one with his new machine in it. He worried. He even told the flight attendant what he had seen, and she assured him that everything would be fine.

But when he arrived, he looked in the case, and the laptop screen was shattered.

He spoke to the people at Southwest baggage claim, who sneered and told him they had been doing this for nineteen years, it was written in their policies that they were not responsible for electronic devices, and that maybe if he called central baggage claim he could get his $75 back.

Heartsick, I tried to call them and plead our case. They were closed, and the message said to call back during “normal business hours.”

This behavior toward travelers is unconscionable. We pay for the ticket and get treated like shit. It’s time for this to stop.

Please help me by forwarding to anyone at Southwest you know.

UPDATE: Someone named @southwestVerity saw my tweet and alerted Southwest management. They have refunded my son-in-lsw’s ticket and baggage fees, which gives us the money to replace his laptop. Thank you, Southwest; I knew I fly you all the time for a reason! You’re the only airline that seems to care.

A number of events I’ve attended recently have caused me to re-think much of my frustration about how slowly Phoenix changes. As you know, I’m the type of person who thinks everything should happen immediately, and it drives me nuts to see how long it’s been since Ed and I started working together to try to grow the tech entrepreneur ecosystem in the town we’ve adopted as home. It has been fourteen years since we started Stealthmode Partners.

But once recently I’ve called out the number of new accelerators, incubators, and training programs for entrepreneurs that have gotten under way in the past two years. I remember when we were the only ones –and we were the only ones for a full decade — but now there are almost too many resources to catalogue. Now I’ll go further:

1)I attended the first AZIMA awards last month, at the Phoenix Art Museum. I remember when I moved to Phoenix from New York and derided our art museum — it was small, old, dingy, and didn’t have any “real” art. But when I went downtown for AZIMA, I realized the entire museum had not only been remodeled (I already had seen that), but there was an almost mind-boggling installation of black butterflies all through the lobby. What a welcome! And when I went to the second floor, I saw an amazing exhibition of digitally printed clothes by famous fashion designers using one of a kind printed fabrics. I was impressed, and that was before the awards presentation even started.

2) Last week I served as an evaluator (I don’t say judge) once again for the Arizona Innovation Challenge. I read 22 proposals, and was again amazed by the breadth and depth of talent in the community about which I didn’t know. There’s nothing like a competition for cash to bring out the hidden gems that I have never met at incubators or events, even though I think I’m familiar with the local startups. Each year, this Challenge teaches me again that I am not. I don’t even scratch the surface of knowing what’s out there– which is a good thing.

3)And last night the coup de grace to my often scornful attitude was delivered by the Phoenix FIlm Festival. I hadn’t been there in years, and when last I went it was small. Not anymore. Like the art museum, it has grown both in quantity and quality. We saw a film written, produced and directed by a graduate of Camelback High School, Elise Salomon. Her film, Los Wild Ones, premiered at SXSW, although I didn’t see it there. It’s a documentary about a unique L.A. record label, Wild Records, that features young Mexican musicians who love and preserve the Rockabilly culture of the 50s — the one that brought us Elvis Presley. The label is owned by Reb Kennedy, an Irish immigrant, and although it’s the story of the Mexican musicians, it is also the story of an entrepreneur having trouble letting go of enough control to let his baby soar.

Indeed, there are many good films screened at this year’s festival, and I intend to go back there,

All these events add up to a lesson: before you complain that “there’s nothing happening in Phoenix,” and “it’s not a place the creative class wants to live,” go out and do some of the things you don’t think are happening.

I spent the first day of SXSW13 listening in to OMMA (Online Media, Marketing Advertising)sessions, which to no one’s surprise were all about mobile and social. The widespread availability of tools for self-expression, which caused a shift from mass communications to a mass of communicators, has also caused the largest disruption in the communications landscape in the history of mankind. Brands are not exempt from this disruption. 

Brand marketers,at the top of the sales funnel, have discovered the hard way that you can’t use the same methods to get your brand message out Social has become the most powerful driver of pre-purchase intent. Banners are examples of mass communications that seem to work less and less effectively, and there’s just too much “leakage,” around ad campaigns –as when a viral YouTube video of a band  singing about how United broke their guitars effectively canceled out a multi-million dollar ad buy.

People trust their friends to make recommendations, and they trust even complete strangers rather than brand marketers. So brands are slowly learning that they must make the shift from advertising to engagement. They’re still trying to find ways to make authentic engagement scale.Community managers just can’t engage with everyone.

Everything is made both better and worse by today’s new buzz word: big dats. Reams of data create intelligence for brands who use it correctly, but most lack the necessary skills to use it.

The only way to make real social engagement scalable is to have advocates, like constituents, employees, vendors, partners, customers engage on your behalf. Besides, 78% of consumers consider recommendations to be the best form of advertising. Engagement is the new brand currency.

The long and short of this is to make  every brand a de facto media company, with a mandate to create  its own high quality,authentic content.  Paid media can only amplify earned and owned content– it doesn’t substitute for it. This is the year big brands make the shift from advertising to engagement

Bob Garfield, NPR’s “On the Media” co-host and a columnist for MediaPost, probably put it best when he said that fragmentation has destroyed the effectiveness of advertising and the digital revolution has left brands who hype their phony values exposed for who they are.

His new book. “Can’t Buy Me Likes,” calls this the relationship era, brought on by four convergent forces: the collapse of mass; the increase of transparency; the rise of social connectivity; and  the customers’ interest in the real you.

The best companies, Garfield said, built shareholder value not by focusing on shareholders, but by becoming brands with purpose and trust that inspire activism.  In that category are Southwest Airlines, Amazon, Apple. USAA, Costco, and Target. Those “firms of endearment” have built sustainable brands, whose ad budgets are one third those of less admirable brands.

Worst of all for brand marketers: you can’t farm this out to your agencies without courting disaster. In this environment, the brand owns the brief.

Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique, which kicked off the big wave of feminism that altered –though not enough–the world for women, is fifty years old. It was published in the same year I entered the work force for the first time, as an “account assistant” at J. Walter Thompson in New York, whose offices at that time were on Lexington Avenue.

It was a plum job, the kind you could only get if you were an Ivy League educated young woman. But in actuality, my job was to type. Not advertising copy, but memos. Lots of memos. With carbon paper, which got my hands and clothes filthy. It was more than boring. It was dirty in every way.

But it was the best job offered in the Female Help Wanted section of the classifieds. Yes, the job listings were segregated. Shortly after I recognized what I would really be doing, I quit and went back to grad school to get a Ph.d. Women could teach. They could nurse. And they could type. That was about it.

When I first began working, women could not get their own credit. They could share checking accounts, but not have their own. They could not have abortions. And if they weren’t married at 21 it was pretty much over, so I got married for the first time at 23. Of course I married the wrong man. I couldn’t get divorced in New York, because adultery was the only grounds for divorce. I got my divorce in Juarez, Mexico, because I couldn’t afford to move to Reno for six months to fulfill the Nevada requirements for a divorce.

By the time I got pregnant, in 1980, some things had changed. Abortion was legal in California, but not in Arizona, where I had moved. But when I talked to my doctor, he warned me that my child-bearing window was closing (I was 29) and I had better have the child if I wanted children. I did, and it was a wonderful, transformative decision, but that’s another story.

When I announced my pregnancy to the Dean of the college where I worked, he took it for granted I’d quit when I started “showing.” I informed him that I was going to work until I was in labor, and I did. I shared an office with three guys who were scared shitless to hear that I was in labor and  still planned to meet my classes that day before calling the doctor.

After I had Samantha, everyone again expected me to leave the work force. The Dean was already talking to my replacements. But I went back to work after one week, baby in a pack on my back. (I also left the hospital against medical advice after one day).

My new husband was asked repeatedly by his friends at the Phoenix Country Club– where women couldn’t have their own memberships and where they couldn’t enter the Men’s Lounge where all the business deals were done–when he was going to “make” me quit work. He explained that he couldn’t “make” me do anything. The women at the Club would not talk to me. I was a pariah.

Outside the world in which I was fighting for my independence, the Women’s Movement, triggered by Betty Friedan’s book, was swirling around me. Although I taught women’s literature, I didn’t consider myself a feminist. I didn’t have time to be. I had a life. I was living the life they were all fighting for. I had simply ignored most of the rules and listened to my own drummer. Many people hated me (or perhaps feared me) and decided I was a communist. They definitely thought I was a feminist.

I wasn’t. I was a mother of one, and then a second daughter, and always a full-time worker. I drove a hard bargain with the father of my children: he had to take on part of the housework, or I’d have an abortion.

I never got paid what a man got paid, until I started my own business in 1980. Then I was able to pay myself what I thought I was worth. And in every meeting with clients and prospects, I was the only woman in the room. I made a lot of noise, and I was accused of being overly aggressive. Dangerous.

But guess what? My two daughters make more than I did. The daughter who had a baby got family leave. The other daughter got to work at a big consulting firm as global director of brand. And then start her own business. These were feminism’s fruits.

I’ve never quit. I just completed fifty years in the work force. I’m just getting going fighting for things. But I’m still not a feminist. I love men.

If I had a nickel for every business that hired an “SEO consultant” but doesn’t see any value, I’d be rich. Instead, I’m blogging in my pajamas and telling you that your business would be better off blogging (the right way) than putting your money into sometimes-dubious SEO. My own blog has been a constant piece of my marketing plan since the Cluetrain left the station.

Yes, it’s time-consuming to blog. Yes, you have to commit to it. Yes, you have to do it at least once a week. And yes, you have to have something to say. But let’s assume you, or someone in your company, has information to share. If not, you’re probably in the wrong business. And let’s also assume you have a limited marketing budget, as every one does. Why should you blog rather than pay for SEO?

1. Because blogging is the most bang for the marketing buck on a limited budget. Regular blog posts, spread through your social media networks, provide the content that gets you inbound links– necessary for SEO.

2. Blogging causes your web site to change, which causes the spiders to crawl it again to note the changes. It will get you more traffic, and more links.

3. Social media sharing of your blog gets you even more traffic and more links, and if you put your social media streams on your own site, provides even more changing content.

4. Blogging isn’t difficult. You can post anything to your blog: podcasts, videos, photos, presentations, eBooks, press releases. Just take any content you produce (Flickr, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest) and post it on your blog as well.

5. A blog can be the backbone of your launch. If you start the blog before you launch, you can chronicle the birth of your company. It’s like keeping a scrapbook for the birth of your baby; you can even start with the photos of the baby bump.

6. Use your own domain for the blog. That also gets your domain name out there.

7. People love tips and tricks. If you write them and they are really useful, customers and prospects will read and share them. These lists are my most trafficked posts.

8. If you make a press release into a blog post, it may get more attention than in its original format. Non-journalists love to see press releases. Journalists hate them. A “press release” in your blog may attract customers.

9. You can publish any content you already have on your blog: white papers, case studies, recipes, videos–take this content and “re-putpose” it, and you will find a new audience.

10. Google is starting to do something called “Author Rank.” You will appear further up the page on Google if you have this. Read more about it here and here

Repeat after me: Blogs and content generate links. Links are the backbone of SEO. You are blogging to get that Google juice. You can check your stats and see if it’s working for you.