Last month, with the help of TechDrawl, I reached out to the local technology community to help send me to the 2009 BlogWorld & New Media Expo and Conference in Las Vegas. I was fortunate enough to have been granted a full access media pass but still needed some help with airfare and related expenses. In not much longer than a week, many of you pitched in and raised over $850, along with business class airfare provided by AirTran. Thank you! Major props to @timdorr, @willieljackson, @amcrae, @lance, @pfrosen, @HeathWilkes, @jmoswalt, @linneageiss, @StephenFleming, @techdrawl, @CharlesLumpkin, @wamalone, @amdev, @blakebyrnes, @KestrelHunter, @duncanfreeman and @willgt09.
Also, a big thanks to travel buddy and TechDrawl promoter extraordinaire Courtenay Bird for making sure I stayed out of trouble in Vegas and helping me get in with the cool crowd!
BlogWorld 101
Alright, so what exactly is BlogWorld and where is it on the scale of other such tech conferences? With roughly 2,000 attendees, BlogWorld is about the size of TechCrunch50 and poised somewhere between the massive South by Southwest Interactive and smaller two-day events like Carsonified’s “Future of” series. BlogWorld 2009 was the third and largest BlogWorld held to date. No surprise there; lots of talented journalists, bloggers, podcasters and other new media mavens (and exhibitors targeting that group) congregate for a 3 day experience aimed at sharing information and mingling with others in their field. I wanted to attend BlogWorld to meet some of the big name bloggers I have been reading since I started blogging in 2005, as well as meeting some of the folks that have been reading my blog since the early days.
The general schedule involved keynotes, panels and sessions from morning until around 5-6pm each day, with about 3-4 parties and tweetups each evenings. As such, I figured it would be good to break up this article like that.
Day
Each session had a schedule that looked like the image below, with lots of things going on at once. Each color refers to a particular track, of which there were quite a few: sports, medical, military, podcasting, real estate, social media, mommy blogging, monetization (new track for 2009), technical, as well as various community tracks.
Unfortunately this led to several occasions where there were several sessions I wanted to attend at the same time. However, this being a blogger’s conference I was easily able to find summaries of each session online within the hour. I’ll link to some of those resources at the end of this post.
One of the first sessions I sat in on was with Kara Swisher of Wall Street Journal’s All Things D discussing Ford’s use of social media with Scott Monty, head of social media at Ford Motor Company. Ford has been written up a lot recently about the success of the Fiesta Movement program that put an unreleased 2011 car in the hands of 100 US-based bloggers for 6 months of missions. Full disclosure, I am one of those Fiesta Movement “Agents” and Monty pointed us out during his keynote.
Several of Swisher’s questions were aimed at how risky a move it was for such a large brand to give out cars to bloggers that might say bad things about their product. Scott tackled that question rather well by stating they are that confident with their product that they’re willing to go this far to get the word out. The session ended with some rather positive numbers; the Fiesta Movement program has caught the attention of some 50,000 so-called “hand raisers” that show interest in purchasing a Fiesta, some 97% of which have never owned a Ford before.
One of the more interesting panels — Sponsored Blogging/Conversations — dealt with a hefty subject, the latest FTC ruling over what kind of disclosure bloggers need to provide in their posts. Some of the questions that came up regarded whether the speaker/blogger was compensated, if the product or service was provided free of charge, the terms of the agreement, the length of the relationship between the blogger and the advertiser, the chance the blogger might receive similar products from other advertisers and the perceived value of the sponsorship/advertisement.
In a nutshell, blogger disclosure is a legal nightmare and blogger’s are better disclosing everything or ultimately risk putting their credibility in harm’s way. As a blogger that has written sponsored posts in the past, I will say that I have stopped doing paid posts due to negative feedback from my readership that said that even though my posts were fully disclosured, they did not feel it was truly me speaking my mind and that I wouldn’t have written about that subject matter (positive or negative) on my own. Ted Murphy of IZEA brought up a website called DisclosurePolicy.org that helps bloggers easily create their own site disclosure policy, to which they can just link to for posts.
The packed room above was for the Internet Marketing for Smart People panel featuring Darren Rowse, Chris Brogan, Brian Clark (all bloggers with massive followings). While the panel did discuss some of the ubiquitous FTC ruling disclosure news, as did many panels, the main takeaway seemed to be the power of selling something versus just displaying advertisements. In hand with this came a big discussion about the power of email marketing and how important it is to create a community around your readers; give them the ability to share contact info, make a forum, et cetera.
Back in 2005-2006, Brian Clark became fed up with spam, email deliverability issues and as such became a huge RSS advocate. After stating how RSS is not turning out how it was thought to, Clark began focusing on email marketing: “People are more responsive with email, but it takes more trust to ask people for their email address and get it.”
Chris Brogan brought up the question of why people are afraid of selling (on their blogs) and showed how it was okay to sell things you are passionate and support yourself. He talked about his support of the Thesis theme for WordPress (which was created by Georgia Tech Alum Chris Pearson) through their affiliate program and how his readers reacted well to it. Darren Rowse then discussed how he created a 31 day series about how to build a better blog (one post a day on his blog) and eventually turned it into an workbook readers can buy.
Social Media: The Bad and The Ugly was a panel with Robert Scoble, Amber Naslund, Wayne Sutton and Patrick O’Keefe that covered several trends in social media that are concerning and could harm your brand and damage your reputation. While the panel eventually devolved into Scoble showing off the new Twitter “lists” feature he had access to, I did enjoy the discussion of the 6 such trends:
- Unforgiving nature of the loud minority: People waiting for others to fail so they can perpetuate it
- Mob mentality: Social media makes it (too) easy to react quickly and people are quick to jump on and attack someone.
- Unreasonable time expectations: Humans don’t scale. Understand and respect that people have their own time requirements and can’t reply to your email/tweet immediately.
- Self entitlement: Why do they deserve those followers? “good people follow good work”
- Forcing everyone to use all tools and communities the same way: nothing ever grows/gets better if we all do it the same… find your niche
- Sock puppets: pretending not to be affiliated with something you’re affiliated with
Too many panels list… It’s quite fitting that BlogWorld Expo was held in Las Vegas. Everything about the city and the conference was information overload. There were way too many things happening at once and not enough time between panels to catch up with people more than just in passing between panels and sessions. Some other interesting panels and summaries can be found below:
- Official video of the BlogWorld keynotes
- The New Celebrity panel and video
- The Rebirth of Journalism panel and video
- The Value of Visual Thinking in Social Business
- Wayne Sutton on the State of the Blogosphere keynote
- Comet Branding’s video interview’s with various bloggers
- and many, many others listed on the BlogWorld blog
Throughout the day, the exhibition floor was open for people to browse. There were great booths from small companies like Regator and Zemanta, all the way to a huge setup from Ford. However, I found it most interesting that tucked away near the back of the exhibition hall was celebrity Adam Carolla’s booth.
If you have an hour to kill, I insist you watch the hilarious BlogWorld closing keynote with Guy Kawasaki, Kevin Pollak, Chad Vader (Aaron Yonda & Matt Sloan) and Jenny The Blogess.
Night
After sessions wrapped up for the day and people had found some food, the parties started. There was typically an opening party from 8-10pm and after that there was bound to be another event until 3am or later. I’ll just let the pictures do the talking for this section:
Worth it?
Now the big question: was my trek to BlogWorld worth it and would I recommend it to other bloggers next year? Without a doubt, yes! BlogWorld was an amazing experience and I am grateful for TechDrawl et al for helping send me out there! Now if the question was should you attend BlogWorld or South by Southwest, I would say SXSWi but with some caveats. BlogWorld is comparatively a much smaller event than SXSWi and as such it is more intimate and easier to approach huge bloggers. Unfortunately, networking with people at BlogWorld seemed harder than at SXSWi – there was only so much time between panels and parties/events at night were often held at extremely loud club venues and not conducive to holding conversations with people.
Verdict: The 2009 BlogWorld & New Media Expo and Conference gets 8.5 out of 10 Stammys.
Some pictures by (cc) Kenneth Yeung of thelettertwo.
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Editors’ Note: Guest Contributor Paul Stamatiou is a 23 year old web developer who hails from Houston, Texas. He moved to Atlanta where he earned a BS in Computational Media with honors from Georgia Tech and stuck around after graduation to work full-time on a startup he co-founded during college, Skribit. Stamatiou’s 4 year old tech news blog, PaulStamatiou.com, has 10,000+ RSS and email subscribers, 11,000+ followers on Twitter, and 200,000 monthly visitors. At one point, he was the first result for “Paul” on Google and was in the Technorati Top 100 blogs. Stamatiou reviews all things tech, had his own Nike commercial last year, and won a Ford FiestaMovement prototype car for 6 months with this video: 
