Hey look! The Maven has a new domain!

It started in 2010. I was in Nicole Donnelly‘s kitchen and we were talking blogging strategy. I don’t remember exactly what she asked me, but I answered her in a nano-second. Nicole says “You’re just “The Maven of Social Media®” aren’t you.”? and my response was something like “yes, I am”

and I bought the domain that night.

See, those were back in the days where I was still at CityMommy, which was the brainchild of Dayna Landry. Since CityMommy was based on a message board format, it had little more to offer the clients I was working with than a 125×125 image and some text. And my clients wanted more.

I’d been trying to figure out a new domain name, and things just sort of happened. My graphic designer friend Colleen Cole created a logo for me from a photo of my favorite red shoes and the rest is history.

A lot has happened since 2010. Two more kids, a lot more brands, a lot more blogging. For about a year, I’ve known I wanted to tweak my image a little. I felt a little disjointed with social media handles that didn’t quite line up, and people sometimes got confused about my name since I really haven’t social media consulting since 2011/12. But I knew I couldn’t give up the red shoes (mostly because I have a red shoe problem) or being called the Maven.

And then it happened. I was standing in line with my friend and fellow blogger, Cristi Comes waiting to board a plane. We were headed to SoFabCon, a blogging conference held by Social Fabric. For some reason, we were talking about domain name ideas. On a whim, I logged into GoDaddy and did a quick search. IamtheMaven.net was available. (the .com was up for auction, more on that later) A few more searches for Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest and I bought the domain. The rebranding slowly began.

It didn’t take long for me to make the jump to bidding on IamtheMaven..com – I couldn’t let the chance of someone buying it out from under me with all of the work I was about to put into it.

Then, this weekend, I pulled the plug. I handed the keys over to the talented Becky Willis who moved MY ENTIRE WEBSITE over for me. Everything that was at themavenofsocialmedia.com is now at iamthemaven.com. We had a few hiccups here and there, but it was done. Then, I broke up with NoDaddy and I’m now have (affiliate) reliable hosting with RFE.

So, things are a little different around you. I still have some things to do – most of my social media has been moved over – and I need to petition Facebook for a name change, but for the most part, everything is going to be @iamthemaven.

It’s been overwhelming, and definitely NOT inexpensive either, but I hope it’s been worth it.

So what do you think of the more refined me?