BlogHer 2010: Why I Left My Family and Went to NYC

Bright lights, big city — BlogHer 2010 was indeed in New York City but I spent much of my time inside the New York Hilton riding up and down (or waiting for) a stuffy elevator.  When you bring more than 2000 women into any single physical location, chaos is sure to ensue — but BlogHer 2010 was all about what happens when you bring that many women and so many more into cyberspace.  That’s when magic happens.

Blogging is more than about the actual blog — in fact to paraphrase the title of one session, it is a publishing ecosystem.  Blogging is merely one piece of an incredible social media as well as print, radio and television platform that people, but I dare say, especially women are seizing hold of.

The idea of summing up BlogHer in one post is preposterous, it is a multi-layered experience.  Part Hollywood red carpet, part slumber party, part think tank, part shopping extravaganza, part internal soul-searching journey, part writing workshop, part geekfest, part I-am-woman-hear-me-roar/rawr.  It’s more than a conference, it’s a rite of passage.  All I can do is humbly provide some brief snippets of what I got out of it.

Bloggers and Social Change

Some are using the blogosphere for mere amusement, and that’s okay.  But others are using it to accomplish amazing, powerful things.  I, myself, am not a political blogger, but there is an entire White House Project program to help women learn how to use their skills at any level in the political process.  In a session about moving people into action via blogging, one of the panelists used the term “microactivism” and all three agreed that bloggers need to give their readers specific, physical actions they can do to help solve a problem.  For example, Beth Terry, of Fake Plastic Fish, realized that Brita had a program to recycle water filters in Europe, but not in the U.S.  She contacted the company to find out why, and when she didn’t get the answers she wanted, she launched a campaign, which included getting readers to send her their water filters — ultimately she collected 600 of them under her dining room table.  Thanks to her efforts in asking the questions and engaging her readers, Brita now has a program to recycle filters.

In a well-timed press release, HP Labs released a social media study demonstrating the difference between “popular” tweeters and “influential” tweeters.  Someone who is popular on Twitter, like Martha Stewart, may have a lot of followers, but may not be able to motivate those followers to engage in a specific action.  Someone who is influential on Twitter, however, has the ability to “not only catch the attention of their followers; they must also overcome their followers’ predisposition to remain passive.”

Bloggers and Brands

I have an unfair advantage when I enter the Expo.  I used to work in high tech marketing communications and have done my fair share of expo work.  I completely understand the game of trying to generate booth traffic, gather information from contacts, and sift out the qualified leads from the junk.  So I play a little game every time I walk up to a booth.  I wait to see if they will greet me.  I wait to see if they will engage me and how they will lead the conversation into the product.  And if I actually know the product, I’ll toss them out an opportunity to hook me (a genuine one) and see if they reel me in or not.  It is amazing to me how many times the companies who have spent a healthy amount of money at these events fail to even greet someone who has approached their booth.  One company in particular, I walked up and after they failed to greet me, I turned to the person next to me and said (genuinely), “I LOVE this product, in fact, I converted most of my daughter’s preschool class over to this because _____. ” Apparently this did not warrant their time, and they let a raving fan walk out of their booth.  Their loss and now I think of that experience every time I look at their product.

On the other hand, at last year’s BlogHer, two brands that converted me over from long-term commitments to other brands were Energizer and Suave.  Energizer invited me to a suite and gave me a charger and some rechargeable batteries to try out — this coupled with my previous brand’s very confusing change in labeling made me a new brand loyalist as I have spent the past year working on trying to use rechargeable batteries more.  Last year Suave had a clever booth where they had a Hollywood stylist do your hair and sent us home with product, and I have been using their Anti-Frizz Cream ever since — a product I would never have tried before but which I now consider essential!

In addition to the Expo, there are private networking parties that many bloggers are invited to.  I attended the Nikon Night Out event and though I have mostly been a Canon user for the past several years, it was at this event that I learned they have a DSLR with an articulating viewfinder — this has been the major bone of contention between JavaDad and I about stepping up to a DSLR.  I frankly might not have even looked at Nikon had I not been at this event because we’ve been such brand loyalists, so the event certainly was a success in getting my attention (and now in telling YOU to take a second look!)

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the brands that caught my eye:

• Most Hysterical Swag: Hasbro’s Play-Doh perfume — we all said we wanted it, and yet where are we planning to wear it?  To attract preschoolers?  But I still love it!
• Wii Games I Loved:  Gold’s Gym Dance Workout (even the demo workout had my heart pumping)  and Babysitting Mama (you have to take care of a plush Wii-mote baby doll!)
• Most Cleverly Decorated Swag Suite: Hershey’s S’mores Suite — and not just because they sponsored my train ride to BlogHer — but seriously, they “wallpapered” the entire suite and had fake campfires.  It was completely transformed!
• Marketing Really Thought Hard Award:  Stanley the Sneezer — an animatronic boy who sneezed (approx. 65 mph) into a tissue to demonstrate the weakness/strength of different brands of tissues (for Puffs).
• Best Use of an Expert:  P&G brought in a pharmacist to talk about making sure to carefully read dosing labels and adding up the dosages of all the medications you use (i.e. if you have a cold, and you are taking cold medication and a pain reliever, are you making sure that your cold medication doesn’t ALSO have a pain reliever in it — otherwise you could be overdosing) and trying to get the right medication for the specific symptoms you have.
• Best Use of a Celebrity:  There were a lot of celebrities there, but I was only in the expo a short time, and Stouffer’s use of Todd Parr seemed to be quite effective.  My kids loved the placemats made by him as well as the customized drawing of them from him.  We will think of the Let’s Fix Dinner campaign often.
• Swag The Kids Loved:  Zhu-Zhu pet, Hex Nano Bug, and pink elephant Webkinz and the Gold’s Gym Dance Workout.
• Favorite Networking Event for Purely Selfish Reasons:  The #waxparty at Madame Tussuad’s Wax Museum because ever since I was a little girl and read about the London wax museum, I’ve always wanted to go.  The New York one was enough to keep me happy!

My one note to BlogHer conference planners is that I felt like I had to choose between sessions or seeing the expo this year — somehow the timing didn’t seem to work out right and I would love to have more time to see the expo.  I ended up skipping the last session so I could rush through the parts of the expo I hadn’t seen yet.

Bloggers and Bonding

I was admittedly not in my best headspace going to this conference.  I’m in a lot of physical pain right now, pre-surgery, as well as a bit nervous about things — moving the date up and changing some of the parameters of the surgery threw me a little out of whack.  So I was not as social or chipper as I would’ve normally been going into things.  However, I got to ride a train from Baltimore to Penn Station — something I’ve never done before, with fantastic bloggers, many of whom I know from the now-defunct DC Metro Moms Blog, but who will be participating in the newly announced The DC Moms magazine-style blog!  I can’t say enough about how much I love these women — they are just so fantastic not only as bloggers, but as human beings.  (Many thanks to Scrappin Michele for the ride to the train station — picking me up at o’dark o’clock!)

Incidentally, on this train ride, I am fairly certain I won the award for Largest and Most Luggage brought. It is also on this trip that I decided I need luggage with swiveling wheels — let me know if you have any recommendations.

It was amazing how many bloggers I already knew, but I enjoyed meeting so many more on this trip.  I even roomed with three (yes, THREE!) bloggers in my tiny hotel room.  They were all significantly younger and did a great job of coping with a middle-aged blogger, LOL!

I was so proud to have known many of the speakers at the event — in one of the sessions, I knew the entire panel!  But to me, one of the prime examples of the level of emotional bonding at BlogHer is when we listened to the Voices of the Community Keynote speeches.  All of them were great, but for the women I traveled with, it was especially meaningful to listen to Susan Niebur, WhyMommy of Toddler Planet, to read her piece about the day everyone posted their bra colors on Facebook and the impact this had on her as a breast cancer survivor.  Perhaps even more poignant is the fact that just before BlogHer, Susan was declared cancer free after a relapse of breast cancer.  I know that despite having read her post before, seeing her on that stage and hearing the words again brought tears to my eyes, (just writing this does, actually), and that it was a moving experience.  I was so proud of her for writing it in the first place, for reading it on the stage, and then for the wild audience response afterward.

BlogHer.  You can’t read about it.  You have to live it.

San Diego in 2011 — are you coming with me?

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Disclosure:  My Amtrak train ride to BlogHer’10 was sponsored by Hershey’s.  I received lots of “swag” (“stuff we all get”) at BlogHer as did other BlogHer attendees and bloggers who were invited to various networking suites and parties.  I received one copy of the Gold’s Gym Dance Workout for trying it out and tweeting about it.  All comments in this post are my own.