Queens of the Internet
This article from the Chicago Sun Times argues that women use the internet differently from men. I don't agree, but did want to point out the Flylady phenomenon.
Cilley's alter ego draws 3,000 hits or more per hour to her Web site, www.flylady.net. FlyLady, represented by a plump female icon with a bossy pointed finger, delivers exhortations on living a better life through decluttering. Women share intimate testimonials of how cleaning up their homes has improved everything from their social lives to their sex lives. FlyLady's e-mail admonitions have bloomed into a book with a big-name publisher (Sink Reflections, Bantam, $14.95) and related products (dusters, timers and organizers) now sold through her Web site.Beyond the message itself -- one we all need to hear in the era of overconsumption -- how did FlyLady become a phenomenon, drawing hundreds of thousands of fans and appearing in media from Woman's Day to the Washington Post?
"I never set out to have a business, is the funny part,'' she says. "It was just a way to help people. One person asked me for help, and I set up a little e-mail group to mentor them. When we hit about 10,000 people, we needed a Web site.''
A little word of mouth later, and her subscriber count recently surpassed 200,000.
The Flylady phenomenon is two-pronged: one is the Yahoo-Groups part--letting one person speak to many, and the ease of automated posts--and the other is the search part, so that it is not so much word of mouth as finding sites. It is interesting.
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