BlogHer - Snapshot Chronicles

Understanding conferences & trade shows (thoughts post-BlogHer, part 2)

09.07.2010 by Susan Getgood //

Originally I was going to address the somewhat self-serving BlogWorld Expo post comparing BlogWord Expo and BlogHer, but it’s been a month, and pretty much everything that can be, has been said, argued, analyzed, attacked and defended.

I thought it would be far more productive to talk a little about trade shows and conferences. What can we expect to get from attending an event? And how do we decide which one is the right one for us?

First, we have to step into the WABAC Machine and get a little historical perspective.

Trade shows started as a way for manufacturers in various industries to display their wares to “the trade” or industry — essentially a focused copy of the village market. That could mean everything from component parts and machinery for industrial buyers to finished good manufacturers exhibiting clothing and housewares for the department store buyers. And everything in between. Every industry has its major shows, both in the US and across the globe.

Trade shows are business events. There is an industry trade show for just about everything. Often they are restricted to adults 18 and over. With the addition of a conference portion, they also serve as educational opportunities (of varying quality) within industries. Many industries also have educational and professional conferences that do not have an expo component or a blend of both.

Consumer shows also have their inspiration in the village market, but instead of an industry focus, they are constructed around consumer goods – homes, boats, cars, jewelry, even crafts and hobbies, and exhibitors display finished goods or services in a category to consumer buyers. Home shows. Car shows. Boat shows. Flower shows. Where you might find only one or two industry trade shows in a country — or even the world– for a specific industry, consumer shows are often regional, even hyperlocal. Because they are largely viewed as family or leisure time events — for example, the family stepping out to dream about the boat they want to own or their dream house — typically there isn’t a conference component. Even if Mom and Dad would like to attend an educational presentation about the latest in boat technology, Junior probably doesn’t have the patience to sit through it.

Technology products respected this division between trade and consumer. Until the rise of personal technology. The best example of this is probably Macworld Expo, the first industry trade show (in my recollection) with clearly strong fan boy (and girl) components. More broadly, we have CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, a trade event that is a geek’s winter wet dream, and Comic-Con, the geek’s ultimate summer love. Both are industry events but they have acknowledged consumer audiences.

Another important characteristic of trade events, versus consumer events, is that networking and business connections are as important as the conference and expo itself. Sometimes more. New business development. Connecting with colleagues from other regions. And yes, partying. Just think on the saying: What happens in Vega, stays in Vegas.

The personal and the professional

Blogging mixes the personal and professional. It’s no surprise that blogging conferences do as well. Making it difficult to class its shows and conferences as one or the other. However, I think it is critical to understand that the presence of the personal — human connections, social aspects, even the swag bags — does not mean that a blogging conference is not professional. That is a false dichotomy.

We all have more than one identity and there is no reason we have to firewall one from the other when we are engaged in a professional endeavor. Like blogging. In fact, I’ll make it personal. If you know me professionally, there is no reason to treat me differently, or value me less, if you happen to encounter me when I am with my son.

If you do? Seriously, shame on you. I’m more than fine with asking people to check their egos at the door. But don’t ask them to check their identities. Especially at a blogging conference.

What blogging conferences should you attend?

Okay. Now that I have hopefully disposed of the idea that social and community aspects of conferences are less important than the content, and you are all on board with the idea that blogging conferences by definition MUST meld the personal with the professional, how do you decide which blogging conference is for you?

Here are some factors to consider:

Don’t make your decision based on the expo floor. The expo is part of the revenue model, but it is far more like the consumer show than a top trade event like CES where the latest technology will be on display. You want tech, go to CES, not a Podcamp or BlogWorld Expo.
If you are a newbie, do not go to any conference expecting to learn how to blog. Go to make friends and participate in the community of your choice, but you won’t get an adequate Blogging 101 at ANY conference. Because the best way to learn how to blog is to blog; if you want a step-by-step guide along the way, you will save a lot of money if you buy a book like Professional Blogging For Dummies (my book, affiliate link) or go to a local community college or VoTech hands-on class. If you want the teaching, save your conference dollars for when you are a little more advanced and can benefit from the trend and best practices sessions that tend to be the meatiest ones at conferences.
Look at the conference holistically. It is the sessions plus the networking pus the social aspects plus the expo that make a conference experience. Some of the things to look at:

The speaker roster. Does it include people you want to learn from? Speaking on topics that appeal to you?
The experiences of attendees from previous years.
Networking opportunities.

And here’s my advice. If you are a member of the women’s blogging community, you should attend BlogHer at least once. It is the first and grand-mama of them all. Without BlogHer forging the way, it is highly unlikely that the smaller niche women’s blogging conference would exist: Blissdom, Type-A Mom, Blogalicious or Mom 2.0. Or even BlogWorld Expo. A little secret: the founders of ALL those conferences were at BlogHer this and previous years. Not an accident.

But don’t worry. If you don’t want to attend BlogHer, there are probably 5 women in the community to take your hypothetical seat. If you prefer smaller, stay home in August and attend one of the niche conferences instead. You’ll be more comfortable and get more out of your experience. Here’s a quick differentiation of some of the top ones —

Blissdom – for members of the Blissdom community founded by Alli Worthington
Type-A Mom – focuses on professional mom blogging
Blogalicious – a community for women of color
Mom 2.0 – more focused on the relationships between bloggers and marketers. Some of the sessions are equaLLY aimed at marketers who want to reach mom bloggers.

If your interests lie more to the technology and mechanics of blogging, there’s BlogWorld Expo, Gnomedex, Jeff Pulver’s 140 Twitter conferences, PodCamp, WordCamp. Camp Rock.

Oops sorry. Been watching too much Mouse with my kid.

Make your choice to attend based on your objectives and how well the conference seems to deliver to your needs. And if it doesn’t measure up afterward? Think long and hard about whether it’s the conference that didn’t deliver on its promises, or did you simply make the wrong choice?

Make a different one next year.

Thoughts post-BlogHer 2010, part one

08.19.2010 by Susan Getgood //

BlogHer 2010. Maybe the best since the very first in 2005.

I’ve been writing a series on Marketing Roadmaps on the marketing lessons from BlogHer ’10 so I am not going to cover too much of that here. I’m also not going to go into a terrible amount of detail about my experiences at BlogHer. Let’s leave it at this: I had a great time, enjoyed seeing so many friends and colleagues, wish I hadn’t missed some folks and had more time with others, and was thrilled with both the attendance and the conversation at the two panels I was part of and with the reception everyone gave to Professional Blogging For Dummies. I adored showing bloggers interviewed for the book where their story appears.

Instead, in this series of posts, I’m going to share my thoughts on the evolution of the BlogHer community & conference. I’ve attended every main BlogHer conference since the first one in 2005, and that puts me in a fairly small group along with the founders Lisa Stone, Jory Des Jardins & Elisa Camahort Page, Maria Niles, Celeste Lindell and a few others. My thoughts here are a continuation of the walk down memory lane post I wrote before BlogHer.

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2,400 people. Mostly women. That’s the audience that over the period August 3-8th occupied the New York Hilton. And I use the verb occupy intentionally. It was an army of bloggers, none of whom needed you to explain what a blog is or why one might want to have one.

That however was possibly the ONLY thing that everyone had in common. BlogHer is a diverse community — even if the media persist in categorizing all women bloggers as mom bloggers.

The women, and (mostly) enlightened men, who participate in the BlogHer community write about everything under the sun. And moon. Families, food, film, photography, politics, pop culture, marketing, media,motherhood, technology, racism, gender… The list goes on.

A diverse community creates a diverse agenda. Some bloggers want to monetize. Some want to write better. Some are looking for a job. It’s entirely possible that an attendee only attends 1 or 2 breakouts because those are simply the ones that interest her. And, yes, some come simply for the social and brand activities.

In my earlier post, I said that I thought the community was undergoing an evolution but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what. I can now.

I think the BlogHer community is comprised of three basic groups, each of which comes to the community, and the conference, with a very different agenda.

Post-graduates: These are women who have been blogging for 3 or 4 (or more) years. The first wave. Some had personal websites or were active on BBS and forum sites. They come to BlogHer to speak, to share their experience, to support their friends and colleagues and to network. Unless they are at a crossroads — for example, looking for a new job — they aren’t going to learn a lot at the sessions. BlogHer is about connecting and sharing their knowledge with others. Much of your A-list (though I hate this term) is in this group. The challenge: how to keep them engaged even as they need, or perceive they need, the support of the BlogHer organization less and less? How to give them what they need so we as a whole do not lose the benefit of their contributions.

Sophomores, juniors and seniors: These bloggers have been writing for a couple years. They’ve started to hit their stride. If they work with brands, they are beginning to build the relationships they need to “graduate,” but BlogHer is an important opportunity to connect with companies and surface new opportunities. This group has always seemed to be the most active segment of the BlogHer community, and I think gets the most out of the breakout sessions at the conference as well as the brand events, both official and off-site unofficial events. Remember: Today’s A-listers were sophomores in 2006 and 2007. Danger: This group may be seduced to spend more time at the unofficial brand events in order to make those all important connections. How do we keep them at the conference? Do we?

First year: These are the newbies. They’ve been blogging for less than a year, or perhaps they haven’t even started yet. They come to a conference hungry for information at the most basic level, but it’s a mistake to assume that they aren’t also interested in more advanced topics. Just because they are new to blogging doesn’t mean they are complete novices. They may have years of life or business experience that they can apply to their blogging. And they may not. This is the group best served by intro-level content. A potential issue: It’s entirely possible that there isn’t enough intro content to meet the demand. This year, I heard there were more newbies than ever before. I’ll be very interested in their assessment of the conference, both the sessions and the overall value of the connection with the community.

Because that’s the most important characteristic of BlogHer. It’s not just a bunch of sessions glued together by a ticket. BlogHer is a conference where bloggers come to learn from each other as much as from the speakers. This is very different than the typical industry conference, where the knowledge is dispensed by putative experts to the eager masses. At BlogHer, anyone can aspire to be a speaker, and you may learn as much in a cab as you do in all the sessions.

Nevertheless, the conference agenda should offer something for everyone. I know for a fact that achieving this balance has been a goal of the organizers from the very beginning. So, the challange is: what to do next year to meet the needs of these three groups, which co-mingle at parties, receptions and general sessions, but which have very different educational needs?

I don’t have an answer, but I have some thoughts.

For the post-graduates: A few years ago, BlogHer experimented with the “unconference” format. I honestly think that format is too unstructured to fit the community as it has evolved, however, I think the idea of roundtables around key issues like ethics, brand-blogger relationships, the future of journalism, etc. might have some legs. More than birds of a feather, but not as intense (or as unstructured) as the unconference format.

For the first years: Mentors. Don’t ask me how this would work, because I haven’t thought it through yet, but over and over, I hear people talking about their mentors. The bloggers that shared their knowledge and expertise to help someone else get established. There has to be a way to offer that through the BlogHer community in a more organized (but flexible) way.

And now to the sophomores, juniors and seniors: This is the population that needs to feel it has an opportunity to be an active part of the agenda. But many of them have no speaking experience and may not want to speak to groups of 50 – 100 — 1000. Involving them in a mentor program is one idea. More importantly though, is answering the question: what will keep them on-site and not off at unofficial brand events. Or sightseeing. Does it make sense to suck it up and acknowledge that people will go offsite and build that into the agenda? Perhaps with an official sightseeing trip that will rock their socks and provide killer competition for all the unofficial events that will cram into the same time slot? Next year’s location offers plenty of opportunities to do something like this. San Diego’s Wild Animal Park in Escondido. The Gaslight District.

I don’t have the answers. But, our feedback as members of the community can help provide the answers, so speak up and ask for what you want from BlogHer — the community and the conference. You may not get everything you want, but it’s guaranteed that you will not if you say nothing.

In my next post, I’ll share my thoughts on the Blogworld Expo blog post about BlogHer. Here’s a preview:

I have been attending high tech industry conferences since the early 80s. Yup, I am that old. And they are all the same to some degree. The sessions and the expo are 2/3 (or less) of the experience. The networking, parties and business meetings are just as important as the putative reason for being there — the conference. BlogHer, and Blogworld Expo, are no different.

For my part though, I’ve reached the age where a little baby spit-up is preferable to a 20-something drunk vomiting on my shoes in the cab line.

Just saying.

The evolution of community: BlogHer at 5

07.19.2010 by Susan Getgood //

On Saturday, I hosted the second annual Boston pre-BlogHer BBQ at my house. While a few of the guests also came last year, it was largely a new group of women (and their families). Pathetically, I have no pictures even though I had taken out my camera that morning fully intending to shoot some. Hopefully some of the other guests will post some pictures.

It got me thinking about how communities evolve over time. We collectively notice the big changes — a website redesign, a new logo, new editorial policies, but the small things are almost unnoticeable until cumulatively, they become major change. In the five years (since the very beginning) that I have been part of the BlogHer community, I’ve seen both. And it feels like we are on the cusp of another significant shift in the BlogHer community.

So walk with me down memory lane as I recall some of the seminal moments — as I experienced them — in BlogHer’s history. Other people’s experiences will vary. You can also check out this post on my professional blog Marketing Roadmaps that recaps all my post BlogHer posts.

July 2005. The first BlogHer. Held in a tech meeting space in Silicon Valley. One day. A real eclectic mix of women (and from the beginning, always a few men. Chris Carfi and Jay Rosen come to mind from that first year). Heavily tech, small business and non-profit. Debates that raged at the conference, and will rage on ad infinitum because there is no one right answer:

Are bloggers journalists?
What’s the proper role of companies in the blogosphere? If you take money to blog, are you a shill?

Seminal moment: in the closing session, Jenn Satterwhite took the group to task for not giving mommy bloggers sufficient respect.

Best thing about the conference for me? Meeting women like Yvonne DiVita, Toby Bloomberg, Elisa Camahort Page and Celeste Lindell who have since become good friends.

BlogHer 2006. Held at a miserable little hotel near San Jose airport that completely failed on the WiFi even though BlogHer had warned them.

2006 was the year of the mommy blogger. Largely absent the year before, women writing about family life attended the 2006 conference in force. To the point that BlogHer, a community for women bloggers, still contends with public perception that all women bloggers are mom bloggers. The content of the conference seemed to shift very much to the personal blogger, making it less applicable to a business oriented blogger ( I wrote about this in my follow-up post.) Seminal moments: As already noted, the arrival of the mom blogger. And commerce came to the community with the first big sponsors and the BlogHer advertising network.

BlogHer 2007. Chicago. In between the 2006 and 2007 conferences, BlogHer had made a major shift in its conference programming by launching the BlogHer Business conference which was held in New York City in spring 2007. The business oriented content — material aimed at companies planning to integrate blogs and social media into their marketing plans — was shifted to the Business conference. Making the summer conference pretty much all about the individual blogger — mom, food, craft, political etc. etc. A real highlight was Elizabeth Edwards, both from the podium and in person.

The seminal moment, though, had to be the explosion of anti-PR sentiment. Bloggers — especially mom bloggers — sick and tired of irrelevant pitches and the lack of respect shown to them by PR agencies and companies. I wish I could say this problem has been solved, but alas, it has not. Content about the best way for brands and bloggers to work together has been part of the BlogHer conference programming, both main conference and Business, ever since.

BlogHer 2008. San Francisco. A bit of a blur really, as I had brought my mom and son with me, and was dividing my time between spending time with them and the conference. The Community Keynote was a highlight, as was celebrating the publication of Sleep Is For the Weak with so many delightful bloggers whose essays appeared in the book. A real lowlight was the increase of pitching from the floor, a tactic I find almost as annoying as pitching from the podium. Ask a question. Or if you want to make a point, do so quickly. If the organizers had wanted you on the panel, they would have asked you. Folks who were there know exactly which panel irked me the most.

Seminal moment: No single thing, although I recall thinking that BlogHer now had all the positives and negatives that go along with any professional conference. Pulling everything back into a single venue was a huge improvement over the 07 Chicago conference, which had felt a bit scattered. Sessions and conference materials were as professional as any other conference I’d ever been to. And the increase of private parties and off-the-floor swag suites just as divisive.

BlogHer 2009. Chicago. My experiences in Chicago last summer were highly colored by personal events, including the launch of Blog With Integrity and meeting the acquisitions editor for the For Dummies series at the conference, which resulted in my book. I was also overwhelmed a bit by the size. There were people I know well at the conference that I never connected with. And some thankfully that I got to spend quality time with, so it balanced out.

In 2009, BlogHer held the Business conference the day before the main conference instead of at a different time of year. The sponsor space also was literally a mini trade show (and I expect next month in New York to be the same.) That meant that there were far more marketing and PR reps roaming the halls. And quite a few private events. The swag was off the charts. Both on the show floor and at the private events.

Seminal moments: While there were a few blogger relations dust-ups (notably the Nikon off-site party), BlogHer 09 will go down in the books as the “SwagHer” year. Compensation, blogola, swag, free products. All these issues had been swirling around the community for months, and things really came to a head at BlogHer. For the first time, blogger behavior, not advertiser/marketer behavior, was under the microscope.

There were two principal issues: personal sponsorships and swag bags.

Personal sponsorships. Many bloggers attended the conference as representatives of companies. Some personal sponsorships were handled well, but many were not. As a result, things played out very poorly in the public spaces, with bloggers literally thrusting their sponsor’s materials at everyone they met. BlogHer addressed this with guidelines for bloggers attending the 2010 conference as company representatives.

Swag. It’s all good. Until it’s not. There were numerous swag related incidents last year, from the free for all that happened at one of the onsite parties to the reported attempt to blackmail the Crocs representative for a pair of shoes. Now, the reality is that swag isn’t going to go away. It’s part of the conference game. Always has been. And it can bring out the worst in people. Last year at BlogHer, it did.

Hopefully, this year, people will behave better, and those handing it out will do a better job of managing the process. End of the day though, it will all come down to the attendees. It’s a bit like forest fires. As Smokey the Bear says, only you can prevent them.

BlogHer 2010. New York City. A blank slate.

While there will be many private events again this year, BlogHer controlled the on-site space. All the parties at the Hilton are co-sponsored by BlogHer and were open to all registered attendees. Attendees had to sign up for the parties they wanted to attend, but purely for capacity control. Events not connected officially with BlogHer are all off-site. As I understand it, there also are no onsite invitation-only swag suites either. If it’s at the Hilton, it’s part of BlogHer and open to all.

I think this is a good change. While I don’t see the number of unofficial events decreasing, that they have to be offsite means they won’t be as visible to those not invited as they have been in the past. And the sheer size of the conference will offer plenty for folks even if all they attend are the official functions.

As for this shift that I feel we are on the cusp of? I can’t quite put my finger on it yet, but I will be thinking this through over the next few weeks, and hope to be able to put words to the feelings when I get back from the conference in August.