Friday, June 22, 2007

Updated Etsymom Guidelines

Etsymom Street Team and Etsymom Yahoogroup Group Guidelines


As I'm sure you all know, the multitude of posts are hard to organize here on the Yahoo forums.  In response, we five group moderators have decided to ask everyone to



  • stop posting promotional "please look at my shop" and "please buy from me" type messages.   Since there are so many posts in our group, making lots of people feel overwhelmed, we want to use the Yahoo forum to focus on discussing promotion of the Etsymom group, Etsy as a whole, business issues and tips, etc.,  instead of individual promotion.  
  • We do feel the group is about our mutual promotion, and we strongly encourage everyone to put shop, blog, and flickr addresses in all of your message signatures and to fill out your Yahoo bios with your links.  That way, you can indirectly promote yourself by making positive contributions to the group so that people want to click on your signature links.  
  • We also encourage everyone to promote themselves, and each other, in the daily Etsymom threads in the Promo forums on Etsy...and in our Etsymom Flickr group, by posting pictures of your items there. So, for the moment, we will be deleting threads that are solely aimed at promoting individual shops or items.  Thank you for understanding!  If you would like to discuss this, please email Ann [one of our Mods] at  annsheppard at mac.com.

We've seen a lot of abuse of the Etsymom tag and non-members posting in the daily Etsymom forum.  In order to help people identify Etsymom members, we are asking for a few changes.



  • In the yahoogroup, we'd like users to set up a profile that is identical to your Etsy shop name.  Many other Etsy yahoogroups require this.  That way your username is immediately idenfiable with your Etsy shop.  Don't know how to set up a new Yahoo profile?  Email kassmiles at hotmail.com
    All new members are now required to sign up with their Etsy shop name.  Existing members are asked to change over in this coming week.
  • On Etsy, we'd like members to list their street team membership either in their shop announcement or shop profile.  See my own shop announcement at http://knitsteel.etsy.com where I write that I'm a proud member of Etsymom and WIST.    It's simple and unobtrusive.  It does not detract from the shop presentation.
    If Etsymom mods can't easily identify your shop as a member shop, we'll ask you to stop posting in the forum thread, or stop promoting that shop in the forum thread, until changes are made.

Thanks so much for your continued cooperation.  The group has grown quickly!  We want to do all we can to streamline the group messages and make it easy to identify the group members.