conferences

25 Jul 2011

Possible signs of the mommyblogging bubble bursting from BlogHer 2011

Last week, I questioned whether or not the social media economy could continue to support mommyblogging for cash in its current form indefinitely. Though the answer to this question remains unclear, it occurred to me that, in anticipation of the BlogHer 2011 conference (beginning next week), there are a few possible signs of a lessening of faith in the influence of mommybloggers as an economic force. None of these signs are 100% conclusive, but they’re worth noting anyway, if for no other reason than to track the progress of the business over time. For instance:

1. BlogHer 2011 is still not sold out.

As of the time of this publication, there are still tickets available for BlogHer 2011. This is in direct contrast to the situation with previous years wherein tickets sold out well in advance to the conference, and in fact some were auctioned off on eBay, in some cases for more than their face value.

Of course, it should be noted that last year’s conference was in New York City, which is a more convenient and likely more desirable location for many conference attendees. Also: please note that 2010 had a maximum capacity of around 2,500 people, whereas this year the ticket sales are capped at about 3,200. The facility is larger, and the additional 700 slots could also help to account for the surplus tickets this year.

2. No Social Luxe party this year.

For the past two years, the Social Luxe Lounge has been a big part of the pre-BlogHer conference festivities. Best known for having a choice swag bag full of sponsor-provided goodies, the Social Luxe Lounge has been one of the most coveted private party invites for the past few years running.

For BlogHer 2011, though, there will be no Social Luxe Lounge. The official explanation for the absence of the party, as given on the Social Luxe website is that, “[d]ue to circumstances among all three hostesses, the stars just simply are not aligning this year.” Instead of the Social Luxe Lounge, there will be a lower-profile Blog Luxe awards ceremony that celebrates “inspiring blogs,” but presumably, means there will be no coveted swag .

The fact that there is no Social Luxe Lounge this year is likely due to many different causes, but to cancel the plans for the party in the presence of strong sponsor interest seems unlikely. If you have fewer peopled willing to put stuff in the swag bags, it’s a little more difficult to throw a swanky party, and though the change in venue might also have affected the interest from sponsors, it seems like this is in direct contrast to previous years, where the bags were overflowing with brands that wanted to be involved.

3. There appears to be a dearth of special sponsored programs this year.

Remember #GapMagic, the PR campaign that outfitted several bloggers in free clothing for Gap before BlogHer 2010? Even before #GapMagic , there have been many situations in which bloggers have been outfitted with clothing by brands before BlogHer as a promotional technique. But this year, I have yet to hear of anything like #GapMagic or similar promotional efforts. If these efforts had been considered successful, I would think that there would be more of them this year, rather than less. As BlogHer approaches, we may see some crop up, but my instincts are telling me there is just less overall interest from brands this year.

Are you getting a sense that the brand interest for the BlogHer conference is the same or lessened this year?

Categories: bloggers and brands, BUSINESS, conferences Tags: blogher

28 Mar 2011

3 Things Other Blogging Conferences Can Learn From Bloggy Boot Camp

By anna

A few weekends ago, I spoke at the San Diego incarnation of Bloggy Boot Camp, the multi-city boutique blog conference put on by SITS. Let’s not kid ourselves: I was thrilled to check out any conference that would not only allow me to speak [cough], but in fact actively seek me out as a speaker, so keep this in mind as you read my thoughts below. Overlooking these biases for a moment, I’ve been to several blogging conferences, and I think I can speak with some authority on the value one gains from attending one, particularly when weighed in relationship to the costs.

1. Cast a wide net for speakers. Consider including speakers who (gasp) can share concrete experience with relevant topics such as branding, multi-media production, and the practice of law.

I’ve shared my unvarnished thoughts about speaker choices at other conferences before, so it will come as no surprise to you that I feel the conferences within the mommyblogging niche have become woefully redundant. If you’ve heard one talk by Mommyblogger X, in most cases you don’t ever need to see them speak again. You certainly don’t need to drop another couple of thousand to go to see them speak at another conference in April, and then another one in August, or a third in October. Even in cases where the speaker in question has something of value to say (and this is not true in all cases, incidentally), some variety of speaker choices will be appreciated by all of the attendees.

At Bloggy Boot Camp, not only did we get to hear from several bloggers who are quietly making their (substantial) livings from blogging and blogging-related businesses, we also got to hear expert information from people working in related industries. For example, Amy B. Hole gave a presentation on branding, her expertise in which was acquired in her day job as a corporate branding consultant. We also heard practical, general guidelines for bloggers to use when evaluating contracts from Danielle Liss, a corporate attorney by day who spends most of her time dealing with legal contracts. The only other conference I have attended that provides this degree of access to people with real authority in their topics is BlogWorld Expo (an excellent conference, but at a much higher pricepoint).

2. Keep costs low and value high.

To go to most blogging conferences, it will cost you at least a couple thousand dollars, unless you are lucky enough to live in the city where the conference is hosted, and/or if you are lucky enough to have a sponsored conference pass and some extremely inexpensive means of covering lodging. It is often the case that this kind of expenditure is worthwhile, but that doesn’t make it possible for everybody to pull off. And this is even less of a possibility when conferences are happening every other month these days.

The good thing about Bloggy Bootcamp is that it comes to you (or close to you, or at least not quite so far away from you), and it lasts one day. You don’t have to spend a ton of money on a hotel room or an airline ticket when the conferences are local, and the experience I had was that many of the attendees were highly motivated to use the time there to their advantage. Though there is some friendship and community scheduled into the events, the focus is fairly serious and I left thinking that people who attend these bootcamps are getting quite a bit of bang for their conference buck.

3. Force people to network by rearranging seating.

The biggest complaint I hear from people who are new to conferences is that they will not know anybody, or that people will not be welcoming to newcomers. Bloggy Bootcamp does a good job of ensuring that people will mix things up by giving four or five different table assignments throughout the day to all of the attendees — since most of the sessions occur in the same room, the changing table assignments make it easy to meet a new group of people every hour or so when you move to a new table. By the end of the day, it feels like you know everyone, even if you don’t, and it eliminates a lot of the cliquishness sense that can alienate people in other conferences.

Bloggy Bootcamp is a great conference to go to, particularly if you have been wary of checking out blogging conferences before. If there’s a version in your neighborhood, I’d really recommend that you give it a shot.

Categories: conferences

31 Oct 2010

Why I Won’t Be Attending Mom 2.011

By anna

Let me start by apologizing for the self-important topic and for the general who-gives-a-shit, Anna? response many of you will have to this post. The absurdity of me writing a post about not attending a conference is not lost on me, but after recommending Mom 2.0 to anyone and everyone who has asked me about good business-oriented conferences within in the mom blogosphere, I feel like some explanation is necessary for why I’m no longer endorsing it or attending it myself.

Disclosure: I submitted a panel idea for this years’ Mom 2.0 conference (on the topic of maintaining trust capital while still making a living online) which was rejected. I assume many people will think this is why I have changed my mind about the conference, but actually, I had had planned all along upon attending the conference regardless of whether or not I was chosen to speak (and, indeed figured there was little chance I would be chosen to speak given . . . several factors). My experience last year had been well worth the investment without speaking and I had no reason to believe that this year would be any different. However, after reviewing the loose agenda and the speakers list released last week, I’ve decided my money is better invested elsewhere. My reasoning is listed below.

1. Panels have been cut by 25%

My primary concern about endorsing this conference is that the panel time has been cut by one fourth so that there can be an afternoon spent on “practical application” of ideas presented in the panels “in real life.” The opportunities for practical application will ostensibly be presented by activities such as swamp tours and fashion walks in New Orleans — a claim that raises more questions than it answers. I understand that it is several months before the conference and as such, the complete ideas are probably not fully formed, but what this whole thing smacks of to me, frankly, is a choice opportunity for highly paid sponsor product placement for the conference organizers at the expense of conference attendees. And if that’s not what they have planned, then it should be, because it’s an excellent opportunity for getting a bunch of bloggers to take pictures of each other next to signs that say French Market or Who Dat or whatever it is they sell in New Orleans, and then tweet it all over the planet. Good for them, I say: I’m just not interested in supplementing it with $500* from my already sparse conference budget.

In the interest of trying to determine the actual content of this mysterious third session and its utility to people who read this blog, I’ve had several conversations with the Mom2summit Twitter account and the info@mom2summit email account this week (these accounts are apparently empowered with the capacity of speech, as if they have their own human subjectivity). The Mom2summit Twitter account initially contacted me in response to some tweets I made expressing concern about the third session. I asked the account what the third session (the “time off” as I worded it, and the “application time” as the mom2summit email account worded it) would offer to bloggers who are interested in learning how to land private ads or sponsorship deals, because I see that as a primary concern for my readership. The twitter account told me that monetization would be covered in the first two sessions, but that maybe the Twitter account could add something in the third part. I asked the Twitter account to give me a formal statement via email, and this is what the info@mom2summit.com account was able to compose for me:

We are still in the process of developing this Saturday programming, but it will be designed to include opportunities for the diversity of attendees’ interests, subject lines, and content needs. For instance, we have mentioned a French Quarter fashion tour, which will be a smaller outing for fashion bloggers, site owners, and media to tour the country’s oldest perfumery and to visit with one of the leading hat designers in the world. That’s just one of the 10 to 15 options. Another will be a video session, where those interested in adding video content to their site will be able to develop a video blog entry with the help of a professional crew. There will be a tour and discussion with educational leaders for those who blog on political or public policy issues. For those exclusively interested in “landing private ads or sponsorship deals”, there will be a more in-depth strategy session on business-development application, coupled with a traditional Ritz-Carlton tea service, that will cover that topic.

Some of these options are no doubt interesting from an objective standpoint, but they don’t really meet my personal needs for a business conference. You might have surmised that the last bit was added in response to my query, so there is now a potential option for people who are not interested in a swamp tour and who are not able to get onto the perfumery short list (pro tip: if you are going with the thought of getting onto the perfumery shortlist — don’t is my advice, unless your last name is Armstrong). The response from the mom2summit email account is much longer than this, and includes references to requests from last year’s attendees for “more case studies.” While I wholeheartedly respect the email account’s desire to meet the needs of the conference attendees, I’m a little confused about what this means, unless we are talking about case studies in the sense that people study them in business school, in which case — nope, still confused as to how that involves visiting a hat designer. And now my head is hurting.

It might be that my interests are not diverse enough to go to a conference organized by a corporate email account working in conjunction with an anonymous Twitter handle. In which case, nicely played, electronic agents of unknown third-party social media maven behest!

2. The speaker lineup is light on business/monetizing expertise.

The speaker lineup released on Friday includes one person I would enjoy seeing speak, an executive from Yahoo Shine who sounds semi-interesting, five dads, and a few other people who are mainstays from the mommyblogging speaking circuit. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here because there’s not a whole lot of reason to, but suffice to say that from where I’m sitting there’s not a whole lot on this agenda that is fleshing out to be innovative from the perspective of business or monetization. This was not the case last year — last year there was all kinds of stuff shared that was not available elsewhere in the mommyblogosphere. People were speaking whom I had not seen speak elsewhere, and they were sharing information that was not shared elsewhere. The list posted is not the full list of speakers, but this list posted suggests a trend, and that trend does not suggest good things to me for the kind of content in which I am interested, or in which the readers of this blog tend to be interested. It doesn’t mean the conference won’t be enjoyable: I just don’t think it will be a good return on investment for people who are looking for a business conference.

*3. 25% cut out of this conference, for me, works out to about $500. A $500 reduction in value, plus a decidedly fluffier agenda, makes Mom 2.0 look like a smaller, more expensive incarnation of BlogHer .

A round trip plane ticket from Los Angeles to New Orleans costs $400-500, and three nights at the Ritz Carlton costs about $700, even without room service. Even with my cheaper conference ticket (I bought it last May for $310), with food and incidentals factored in, I would be looking at close to a $2,000 price tag for attending this conference. I’m willing to pay that much for a conference and indeed have on several occasions, but with a lighter agenda and with 25% of the panels cut out, that makes this conference into a smaller, more expensive version of BlogHer . And the one thing that BlogHer has is that it is BlogHer , and that everybody goes to BlogHer — the only argument for spending money on Blogher is the ubiquity of it. A smaller conference has its benefits, but it loses those once it tries to emulate the bigger, crappier one that only has value in ubiquity. Some of these events will probably be fun, but for this amount of money, and time away, I need a higher ROI to justify it.

Caveat: Maybe, maybe consider going if you are a newer blogger who wants a chance to meet big name bloggers.

When I was thinking about reasons to go to this conference, I realized that there might be a reason to go if you are a newer blogger who wants a chance to meet some of the big name bloggers in a smaller setting. Several of them are likely to be at this conference (e.g. Dooce , Maggie Mason , The Bloggess , Design Mom, possibly Finslippy?), and it is much easier to get a chance to meet and talk to them in this context than it is at a big conference like BlogHer . Is that worth paying $2,000? I kind of doubt it, but I thought I should leave that possibility open because it is a legitimate plus of this conference. And I’m guessing that it will be far better run than you would imagine would be possible for an outfit run by a corporate Twitter account and an anonymous email account. I’m just not confident that it will have the same kind of business cache it had last year. I would be happy to be proven wrong, though.

Categories: bad ideas, conferences Tags: mom 2.0

25

Jul 2011