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Amy is a digital Swiss army knife. Internationally recognized as an influential voice in the realm of community, audience, and content, she has worked in media, cybersecurity, blockchain, and marketing technology.

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark named her as one of 5 women bloggers to follow, and PeerIndex named her the 15th most influential woman in tech on Twitter.

She was a member of a Pulitzer Prize-winning staff at the Miami Herald and once converted a two-prong electrical outlet to a three-prong grounded outlet without electrocuting anyone.

Most passionate about

• I have been working on a couple of projects with a group that worked together, and today I\\u2019m talking with a few companies about getting involved with community and audience development, which is the sweet spot where my skills intersect.
• The phrase \\u201caudience development\\u201d came out of the journalism world. You first have a product, which is the journalism, and then there is the audience, which you want to develop to read and watch the product.
• Audience development, as I see it, is looking at your users from a new point of view\\u2014thinking differently. On social media, companies start to look at their customers more as fans, followers, and community. It\\u2019s almost like you\\u2019re entertaining them today.
• Customer development is similar to community management but it\\u2019s more typically for media.
• I believe that, as a result of these times, we are going to change in terms of the business world and workers\\u2014not only because of the Coronavirus epidemic, and not only in a good way. An epidemic is awful, but I hope we come out of this with more empathy.

Amy\\u2019s career and story

• I started as a traditional journalist quite a long time ago. During the recession of 2008, there were many layoffs in journalism. I decided that I wouldn\\u2019t go back to traditional journalism. Social media had just started and I was a power user of Dig, StumbleUpon, and Facebook. After just a few months, I was getting around 50%-60% of my old salary as a manager. I thought, \\u2018This is new, this is interesting. Let\\u2019s see where it can go.\\u2019
• As a reporter for The Miami Herald, I was recognized as the only reporter who lived in the community. I was more trusted because I was somebody who actually lived there.
• The main difference between being a journalist versus the new social media publishers is that journalism is always about the news. It\\u2019s commercially packaged, but its main purpose is to inform the community. Otherwise, you would lose readers, and if you lose readers, then you lose the advertises. Meanwhile, as a business, having a great blog, at the end of the day, is about the company\\u2014either for branding or marketing or sales, but it has a different purpose.

Amy\\u2019s best advice for entrepreneurs

• Listen to your customers and talk to them, though that doesn\\u2019t necessarily mean you have to do everything they say. There is a very fine balance between listening to your customers\\u2014your clients and your followers\\u2014and being too distracted by that.

Biggest failure with customers

• It\\u2019s kind of a challenge because I tend to learn from failure and then put it behind me, so I don\\u2019t see it as a failure anymore.
• I think my biggest failure was with the company that I co-founded. I definitely learned from that. We had very different ideas about how to build the company. I think we were both aware of that but maybe we didn\\u2019t realize how far apart we were.
• My partner thought we had to get to a certain number of clients in 12 or 18 months, while I thought that, to get to this number, we should get just a couple and perfect the aspects that we needed to perfect. The wrong thing was that we acted like this didn\\u2019t matter when, the truth was, we never could overcome'