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Gig Harbor Moms Bring Their Dot Com Help Streaming Live Online

GH moms find broadcasting live on the Internet exhilarating, unique and ever-growing.

By Marsha Hart
Sunday, August 23, 2009

SCOTT TURNER | GIG HARBOR LIFE

Gig Harbor moms Trisha Novotny, left, and Nancy Peterson prepare for a recent episode of their 247moms.com Internet program, designed to inform and empower moms countrywide.

GIG HARBOR — Moms all over the country are tuning in to a new show. It’s not on any network or cable television station, but it’s gaining viewers each week.
A mix of Martha Stewart, Oprah, and Rachel Ray, the weekly show called 24/7 Moms can be seen at 247moms.com at 7 p.m. every Tuesday, and starting in the fall, viewers can catch it live again at 9 p.m.
The show is a live streaming video where moms from all over the world can chat with each other and the hosts during the show, and get tips on everything from marriage to organization. They can chat about motherhood and children and how to cope, plus there are giveaways each week on the show.
Trisha Novotny, a Gig Harbor mother of five, started the blog 24/7 Moms in 2008 and the response was so overwhelming that she had to enlist the help of some friends to help with the e-mail list.
They planned a conference in Gig Harbor last fall complete with guest speakers. The conference was a huge success, Novotny said, so huge they needed to move from the conference room of a hotel to a much larger venue.
“We started to look at convention centers, but the price was too astronomical,” she said.
So the group of mom friends decided to bring the conference to mothers every week through a Webcast. Novotny and a co-host choose a topic, write a script and share their own experiences during the show.
This is not a television production, nor is it a slick Hollywood piece. These are real moms with real kids, talking about real issues that relate to real life, and that’s the way they want to keep it, she said.
“Sometimes we have a cooking demonstration, or a craft, and a couple of weeks ago we made binders to hold greeting cards,” she said. “We have tons of giveaways.”
Companies solicit Novotny, and send loads of goodies for them to feature on the blog and on the show. But the women are choosy about what they promote and give away.
“We do not just market everything, we don’t get paid to advertise, and we do it on our own,” she said. “We give away only things we know moms will love and we have a contest every day on our blog.”
The July 28 show focused on the topic of organization. Novotny and co-host Nancy Peterson, a mother who also homeschools her kids, talked about ways to make a day go smoother. Keeping receipts for returns so they are easy to find, and ways to encourage children to help with chores were a couple of the topics.
Viewers chatted through the entire 1-hour show, and it was clear that the women who were participating in the chat knew each other, even if only through this chat room. One mother who used the name Hulamomof4 was wished a happy birthday by several others, and as Novotny and Peterson saw the chat they too wished her a happy birthday. It has become a community, Novotny said.
“They share about what we’re talking about,” she said. “We have viewers from all over the country and they get to chat with us live at the same time. We have someone who monitors the chat room, so if they ask a question like, ‘What was that Web site they just talked about?’ we have someone who can answer that question on the chat.”
Preparation for the show is a continual process, she said. None of the people involved with producing the live streaming show are paid.
“We spend more time than we should,” she said, “and we have a lot of late nights, and do it mostly when our kids are in bed.”
Most of the preparation is done through e-mail, she said.
Improving the show is the goal, and Novotny said she attended a women’s blogging conference in Chicago in July with 1,400 women and a handful of men.
“When we talk to public relations companies they are mesmerized by what we are doing,” she said. “We cannot find another live mom Web show that gets more views than we do, and as far as we know we were the first live mom show. There were some that followed us about 30 days later.”
“We intended to be a face-to-face community and hope to do that and have local groups,” she said. “In the fall we will be launching a mom coaching program that will be more of a mom university.”
Eventually she would like to use the technology of Skyping, where people use their Web cam and can appear live on the show. She would like to use it for featured guests on the show, she said, and wants it by October.
Every other month the show is a 2-hour stint that is a full two-hours of giveaways.
24/7 Moms can be seen Tuesdays at 7 p.m. on 247moms.com.

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