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Almost six weeks ago Lisa, Jory and I asked for your feedback and help on making BlogHer '10 even better than BlogHer '09 in a post we called: We're listening. And here's what we're mulling over so far...
We asked five different questions, and you answered. Thank you so much for your help. You didn't always all agree, but you all took the time to share your feedback constructively and sometimes at great length! It is exactly that willingness to jump in and help us work through the tough issues that continues to make BlogHer the conference the community built.
So, now it's time for us to respond and let you know what we took away from all of your amazing feedback. Some of this stuff is, well, complicated, and we're still mulling it over, but in other cases, we've made some decisions, now that we know how you all feel about them. Here were the questions:
1.How can we appropriately acknowledge BlogHer’s official sponsors?
2.What is the proper place for conference swag?
3.How should we respond to the many unofficial parties that are held?
4.How should we respond when members of the community do things that hurt the community?
5.Finally, who is BlogHer for, what do we discuss at BlogHer conferences and how do you think we could communicate it, so that people know it?
But, you know what? We're going to reverse the order in which we address those questions, because it seems only right to start with questions about this community first.
5. Finally, who is BlogHer for, what do we discuss at BlogHer conferences and how do you think we could communicate it, so that people know it?
BlogHer's annual conference is for bloggers who blog about every topic under the sun, and we work hard with teams of bloggers to create conference programming that reflects the diversity of our community. So, what can we do to both maintain that diversity of content and to make sure more people (including the media, by the way) know about it?
Here are some of the things we're thinking about sessions:
4. How should we respond when members of the community do things that hurt the community?
This is a tough one. While sponsored bloggers have attended previous BlogHers, 2009 was the year it became somewhat commonplace to hear about individual bloggers being sponsored to attend by companies. We don't know exact numbers, but we doubt that more than 20% of attendees had any such sponsorship.
However, we learned from your comments that, unfortunately, a few sponsored bloggers may have given the majority of them a bad name. While we already have guidelines for sponsored bloggers, we learned from your comments that these guidelines need to be strengthened in the following ways, in order to try to give sponsored bloggers even better guidance:
