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Speakers: Jory Des Jardins, Elisa Camahort Page, Lisa Stone
Lisa: BlogHer is in its fourth conference year. The ad network reaches 8-9 MM uniques a month.
We are in the big time now.
Jory: Overview of conference operational/layout details. Vista goodies, Intuit goodies. Both have ask the experts sections. Will be giving away software and gift certificates.
Palm will be giving away two Palm Centros. Voxant. 360 PR.
Two tracks this session: Social Media Creation and Social Media Outreach (Ed note: I will be covering Social Media Outreach.)
Sessions will be taped. Ogilvy is taping the entire track of Social Media Creation. Will also have roving reporters so you can catch other sessions that you missed.
Sponsor Share This will do a quick demo of their product. We'll be building a page on BlogHer and testing it out.
Lisa: Talking about live bloggers (ahem). If you don't want to be videotaped, please let her know.
Elisa: WE LOVE KRISTY SAMMIS. Gina Garrubo, Megan Sullivan (I apol0gize if I misspelled their name) are our sales team in NYC. BlogHer has a NYC office.
Also: Party tonight, 6:30-8:30 open bar, apps. (Ed note: I'm so there.)
Real presentation begins.
Who is here:
- Largest portion in PR/marketing
What you're using:
- No dominant tools
- Combination of company blogs, blogger outreach, etc.
Birth of a new paradigm: User-generated publishing
- Growth in the professionalism amongst the blogs
- Embracing editorial standards and professional partnerships
- If you don't reach out to the bloggers, they may reach out to each other and ignore you
- Ex: Moms for Hillary vs. Momocrats
- Don't group women too much for the purposes of marketing to them -- they are not all alike
- Ask, don't tell
Is there a place for:
- Curated editorial?
- Editorial and ethical guidelines?
- Should companies join conversations already in progress?
- Have you measured ROI?
Where to find the conversations?
- Twitter -- it doesn't seem to matter what people are talking about, people are following them. Twitter's not a fad - go there to find out what's going on. Brands are constantly mentioned there.
- Second Life -- Last year BlogHer did the conferences in Second Life. Many parts of it sold out. As a company, you can donate space or islands in Second Life to have a presence.
- Widgets -- Our audience wants to get their work out there. The widget helps promote the conversation or the initiative, then it goes across the network. Any widget that promotes people's work is a valuable widget. It's getting more competitive to get widgets on people's blogs. You have to have a useful widget, and the blogger has to somehow identify with it to put it up.
- Reviews -- BlogHer has never had a negative review. There's a quid pro quo from people -- I'll take your product and I'll give you a balanced review. Marketers sometimes get upset because a particular phrase isn't use. Any balanced review is a huge success. Ex: Book reviews -- no matter what they said, the sales went up. Understand that getting bloggers to talk about your product has a huge value. Any way to facilitate the partying of bloggers is a win. People take pictures when they are partying. They put them up on Flickr. Be at their event and show them that you're interested in them while they are networking. You can still find photos of Dove swag from '06 on Flickr.
How to enter the conversation?
Ex: The Letter to Your Body campaign
- BlogHer started it because they noticed people were talking about this
- You can either dictate a conversation or just pay attention to what they are already talking about.
Ex: Menu widget - did a menu board on BlogHer for the foodies. Guilt season: Healthy Mind, Body & Wallet. Boca sponsored that, provided sampling and did a contest. It worked out really well - there were organic mentions of Boca (har, har) throughout the campaign just by virtue of Boca being there for the conversation.
Ex: New Adventures of Old Christine -- instead of asking the bloggers to write about the show, they invited the bloggers to a screening and Lisa Stone interviewed Julia Louis Dreyfuss.
Elisa: Blogging Surveys
- Pew and Forrester have done the last blogging surveys
- BlogHer wanted to do an independent, third-party market research party to join them and wanted to survey both the BlogHer population and the
