I’m just back from BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas and Friday I leave for Sci-Fi Channel’s digital press tour in Colorado. October will be just as busy, with the Montgomery County dog show weekend October 3-5, BlogHer Boston on the 11th, and then a trip westward to Chicago and Cincinnati for speaking engagements the following week. Whew!
I’ll try to keep up with everything here, especially this weekend at the Sci-Fi event. They will be featuring the new Amanda Tapping series, Sanctuary, and I’m looking forward to that. We don’t have much sci fi TV these days, and even less of it stars women more than a few years out of college, so I have high hopes. The whole weekend has a Ghosthunters theme, which is of less interest to me as I am not a big reality, or unreality in this case, TV fan, but I intend to keep an open mind.
So, BlogWorld Expo. Generally, it seemed successful, but for me personally it was a mixed bag.
I recall a comment from my friend Toby Bloomberg after the first one last year. I can’t remember if it was on her blog or somewhere else. She said that when she walked into the exhibit hall, she realized that social media had become an industry. She’s right. Unfortunately, it also means that we now have all the trappings of industry, including the less positive ones.
Lots of people pimping their latest thing. On the show floor. In the panels. From the floor. Even, perhaps especially, the speaker lounge. Big loud parties with expensive drinks and very few people you know. The celebrities of social media. And of course, if we’ve got the haves, there are also the have-nots, the “regular folks” dying for their moment in the sun with their social media heroes. It reminded me of nothing so much as Internet World in the mid-90s. Draw whatever conclusions you wish from that comparison.
To be fair, my feelings about the show are highly colored by my disappointment that so few people turned out for the panels on social media and the writers strike. Not because I had put time and effort into creating them and recruiting the panelists. I did, but what really bummed me out was that this was unique content that we don’t get a chance to hear at every other blogging conference, and nobody came. The panelists were television and film writers who made time in their schedules to attend a conference that quite frankly, they would not have attended otherwise, and I personally felt terrible that so few people came to hear what they had to say. They were very gracious about it, but I still felt awful.
Why did so few people attend? It could be any number of reasons. The first panel started at 2:45, after a very long break for lunch. There was no food at the convention hall, so folks had to trek to Vegas restaurants. Perhaps they got stuck on the strip and didn’t make it back in time? Perhaps they went to the pool? Or the card tables? There were also 8 concurrent break-out sessions, which seemed like an awful lot of tracks for the expected attendance.
Maybe people didn’t know the panels were even on the program. I can’t and won’t second-guess the decisions of the organizers about which speakers and panels to promote, but I do wish there had been a little more for these two panels.
Of course, perhaps attendees at BlogWorld Expo just didn’t care about the lessons in community building and user-generated content that we can get from a look into the writers strike. Short-sighted in my opinion, but nevertheless legitimate. If it doesn’t interest you, fair enough. I just wish we’d known that before the panelists invested their time to come to the conference.
As it was, I think the handful of people who attended the two sessions enjoyed them. I just wish there had been more of them.
Funnily enough, though, what happened with these two panels validated something that Rick Calvert the founder of BlogWorld told me earlier in the day. At the time I had not agreed with him, but given this experience, I do now.
We were discussing the fact that BlogWorld was unable to book a woman keynote speaker even though they tried. Rick commented that they just couldn’t get a woman with sufficient celebrity to attract attendees. His position was that he needed famous/well-known “rock stars” in social media, and none of the woman rock stars he asked could do it.
I disagreed. I thought a strong topic could attract attendees even if the speakers are less well known.
Guess not.
Enough of that. There were some good things about BlogWorld too. As I noted above, I think my experience is the exception; the folks I’ve spoken with so far said they got a lot out of it. And not everything about my BlogWorld experience was unpleasant or awkward.
The mommy blogging panel earlier in the day (before lunch) was well attended and very lively. I got to meet a number of interesting and dynamic women at a dinner Friday night organized by Jennifer Openshaw and Elisa Camahort Page. I reconnected with some friends and made some new ones.
And yes, I got to hear the stories about the strike, strike videos, parody websites and fan reaction directly from the four panelists Jeffrey Berman, Erica Blitz, Michael Colton and Mark Verheiden. I will be forever grateful for their grace in that ever so awkward moment when we realized that the audience really was that small and for the effort they put into delivering the best presentation they could anyway. Class acts, every one.
I’d like to leave you with a couple pictures from my photo walk on the Las Vegas strip yesterday morning. I decided my theme would be casino signs in the daylight. Here’s Paris Las Vegas:
The Frontier Hotel was torn down a year ago, but the marquee still stands in front of a vacant lot.
Only in Las Vegas…
UPDATE 9/23/08 – My fellow panelists in the mom blogging panel have posted their thoughts on the show. Stefania, as usual, has some very astute insights. Sheila had a great time and found the conference very useful.
[tags] BlogWorld Expo, Las Vegas [/tags]
Rick Calvert says
Thank you Susan for a good and honest post imo. I do need to clarify a few things. Unlike any other conference that has a large number of bloggers, Web 2.0 Expo, SxSW, BlogHer, Yearly Kos, etc, we have a very diverse audience of bloggers.
People who blog about sports have never heard of and often don’t care about Godbloggers. Military bloggers have never heard of and don’t pay attention to Mommy bloggers (unless they are military mommy blogger) and so on and so on.
If we were to present a keynote speaker from one of those communities that didn’t cross over into a more mainstream consciousness then many attendees simply are not going to know who they are.
It is important to mention (without mentioning names) we turned down at least a dozen very well known social media “Rock Stars” who for many other conferences would have been very keynote worthy. This included men and women. Hell I would love to and have attended keynotes given by them, but that would be doing our audience a disservice.
Yes blogging and the larger realm of social media is becoming an industry. I see that as a good thing. That brings credibility to our craft. Those good and bad trappings that you refer to (without defining them) are not a symptom of the birth of the new media industry. They existed the moment someone posted a lie on a blog, started a splog, ran a scam using new media or threatened, abused or insulted someone in the comment section. You don’t need to be an industry for those things to happen. So I have to disagree with you when you put the blame for all the bad things that come with blogging on people who actually make a living doing what they love.
You in fact are one of them and in my humble opinion you are a shining example of what our very young industry has to offer.
As for your sessions being poorly attended, I too am quite disappointed. Perhaps it is partially our fault for not promoting them better. When you approached me with this Idea, I immediately loved it and thought it would be a very interesting session for our attendees. In fact you did such a great job and landed so many great speakers that we broke it up into two consecutive sessions to cover all of the content and give all of the speakers time to express themselves. Obviously for whatever reason we were both wrong.
It certainly wasn’t due to a lack of attendees at the event. Many of the sessions were standing room only and nearly every session had a solid turnout of attendees (50+) including sessions late in the afternoon. However your session was not the only poorly attended one and again to avoid anyone being embarrassed I will not mention the speakers names, but at least one of them SHOCKED ME. This was a fantastic well known speaker with a fantastic topic and the room was empty (less than a dozen attendees). Right across the hall the room was SRO and again in my humble opinion it was a far less compelling topic and speaker.
So why do we have so many concurrent sessions, and so many speakers?(over 280 speakers this year).
Several reasons. Again we have a diverse audience and that requires we offer a diverse amount of content that appeals to those various communities.
Like you we want to offer as many brilliant bloggers, podcasters and other new media content creators and experts an opportunity to have their moment in the sun and expose them to this huge diverse community that has one thing in common; we all love and are passionate about new media. This helps them gain exposure to people who would otherwise never have found them.
And finally this is the most important part of our vision for people to understand. We are building this event for the entire universe of new media, not any specific community. I have described BlogWorld numerous times as a cross between NAB (the National Association of Broadcasters) and Comic-Con. Which means that one element of the show is to help serious content creators, create, distribute and monetize their content and then we have an element of celebrity to our event. But using the NAB + Comic-Con analogy still does not do justice to the overall reach we are talking about.
Our attendees are the future of newspapers, radio, television, magazines and every other form of traditional media in the world. It touches and influences our politics, sports, religion, hobbies, business, lifestyle, culture, and far too many other things to list. That is nearly incomprehensible for many people.
There are literally a thousand “Rock Stars” at BlogWorld. You very well may be standing next to a person who has 100,000 readers and unless you are involved in their community you would have no idea who that person is, and vice versa.
I guarantee you Susan that 70% of our attendees have never heard of you, but every one of them should at least know who you are and many of them should be reading your blog.
Interestingly enough more than one person came up to me during the show and told me how they were blown away after meeting you and how they had never known about you. As they were saying it I just couldn’t help thinking “mission accomplished”.
I have said it privately many many times without a doubt this event or something like it will attract tens of thousands of attendees in the near future.
I will quit rambling now but I would love to continue this conversation with you in person.
Susan Getgood says
Rick,
Thanks for your comment. I appreciate how difficult it is to put on a conference the size of BlogWorld, and I truly hope you are successful. It does seem to me that you are trying to be all things to all people, and I’m not entirely sure that such a thing is possible.
As I said in my post, social media is an industry like any other. It has the good and the bad. And the less positive stuff really irks me. I *cannot* stand it when people ask questions from the floor that are nothing more than thinly disguised pitches. Or attempts to get free consulting, as happened in the mom blog panel.
It is inevitable but that makes it no less irritating.
I am glad you are paying attention to all the commentary. It does you credit. I do think there are some improvements you can make on scheduling and promotion. Food service in the hall would help too.
My panels? Live and learn. It was an interesting topic. They were wonderful speakers. People weren’t interested. So be it. I can guarantee you though that a panel with Mark Verheiden at Comic-Con would have been far better attended than ours was. No matter what the topic was.
Rick Calvert says
I didn’t address the food comment to keep the post short. There was food in the blogger lounge at the very front of the exhibit hall, a concession stand with food at the rear of the exhibit hall, and a very poorly marked conference break room for all conference attendees. That location will change next year.
Agree Comic-Con is a much closer fit to that genre (I used to work there) and had 126,000 attendees this year (I was there). We had 2,000.
Still you and I both agree we are dissappointed in the turn out for your panels but again you have to remember this “industry” is being born right before our very eyes.
A more apt comparison would be Comic-Con 25 years ago. I think there are lots of similarities between the two industries in that people get involved for love before money.
And Comic-Con is all things to all people into comics and animation and that spreads into TV, movies, gaming, and pop culture.
These things just take time to mature and we (BlogWorld) are in this for the long haul.