BlogHer Session: $$$ and Sense

Moderator: Elisa Camhort
Panelists:

• Toby Bloomberg
• Carolyn Elefant
• Susannah Gardner

Elisa, one of the co-mothers of Blogher is also the Queen Bee at Worker Bees, a company she founded in 2003.  She blogs on no less than 7 blogs including Health Concerns.com, a blog sponsored by eHealth Insurance, to speak about the layperson's perspective on health care and coverage.

Toby is a marketer consultant, a blog evangelist who blogs at  diva marketing.

Carolyn, a lawyer whose blog MyShingle.com brings her clients and also inspiration to other lawyers with solo or small practices. 

Susannah is co founder of Hop Studios Internet Consultant and the author of Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies.  At one point, she was a senior editor of the Online Journalism Review and was one of the editors responsible for the launch of the Los Angeles Times website.

Elisa
Where do you draw the line when you start thinking about money.
Are you trading credibility when you put ads on your blog?

Susannah. 
Each person has to decide whether it's worthwhile to earn coffee money.    I started my blog to publicize my book, Buzz Marketing with Bogs for Dummies and that was my primary goal.

Darrell at Problogging is making about $10,000/mo but he writes a number of blogs

Carolyn
Tip jars for lawyers make me wonder if they can run a business or whether they'll 'nickle and dime' me.

Susannah
I'd draw the line at too many ads that overwhelm the content.  Also  Businesses with tip jars are questionable unless they're non-profits.

Question to Audience
Do you consider your  personal blog your brand.  Most of them.

Elisa
I have a sponsored blog that pays me a monthly retainer.  My sponsor eHealth originally brought me in to learn about blogs.  They quickly realized they were too heavily

Evelyn Rodriguez.
My personal blog is ad free, but I'm planning a commercial blog focused on tea and all the countries where tea comes from and plan to get sponsors or ads

Audience member.  Just so it's transparent.

Question to audience
How many would take a sponsor for their ads. 
A. About half.

Toby
Her experience of creating a blog for Gourmet Station, an online company that sells  beautifully packaged food.

T. Alexander is their icon character on the website and introduces newsletters.  The blog strategy was to use the character T. Alexander as the blogger who would bring value to their customers with good information.

I blogged the experience on my blog, Diva Marketing.  It launched in April and shortly was picked up as 'faux blog' by a marketing professor.

Soon a firestorm of flames by some bloggers  who were incensed that their vision of blogosphere, of real people that talked to real people, was threatened.    Some of it was ugly and personal.  Others supported the character blog and Toby.  Even as all the traditional rules of transparency were followed including the character revealing himself in the first post.

Hugh of Gaping Void was one of the those bloggers that reacted badly but was mollified when the company responded in his comments.

The net effect on the business is unclear.  The character blog continues.  The writer of the blog still offers value-added content and engages in conversations with customers.

Q from audience. How to price it.
Sponsorships and ads are being broken up.  Sponsors depend more on time the blog writes about the sponsor.  Ads usually depend on click throughs.

Elisa.  I went to blog ads as a customer and looked at the traffic of their biggest blogs and prices from there

Susannah. Ask for as much as you could possibly get and go down from there.

Carolyn.  I use my blog to leverage new clients.  Now, I'm thinking about  tools I can sell to solo practitioners.  I offer a link to any solo practitioner and sometimes will write a post about them. 

Elisa.  This generosity of bloggers is the 'light' side of the blogosphere. 

Audience member.  I've blogged about the science experiments I created for a first grade class and put on Google ads.  I made $200/year which I'm donating to the school.  A lot easier than a bake sale.

Technorati Tags: BlogHer, Bloghercon

BlogHer Con -

This is the start of Blogher live blogging.  I've got my coffee, the room is packed and a video Sheryl Crow is playing on the big screen. Now it's Tina Turner, 63 and looking  great.

A long jam-packed day means an early start.  Attention to detail highlights:

• good breakfast, lots of fruit,  small sized muffins, bagels already.
• wireless throughout the lobby and the entire tech center provided by Google
• good looking and skinny folders with all the information we need and no more
• lots of small tables for small groups to talk
• the variety of women from around the country is astounding - a punk rocker next to a middle-aged marketing professional behind a fashion model behind a mommy blogger, in front of the techie, with a lawyer on the side.
• Best tote bags ever from Google
• power strips everywhere

The four co-mothers of the conference, Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort, Jory des Jardins and Katrin Verclas.  Congrats to all of them for all their good, hard work in record time.

Lisa Stone begins
Taking women blogging to a whole new level, pushing way past where are the women bloggers. 
We know 43-56% of all bloggers are women
At the closing session, we'll create the mother of all to-do lists
Three questions we'll be asking

• what have you learned
• what will you do with this information
• what would you tell other women not here

She thanks all the women who came and showed up. She  thanks the sponsors.

Elisa Camahort, reports on the survey.  Jory on the guidelines.
________________________________________
Next up
Halley Suitt and Charlene Li debate "Playing by the Rules"

Lisa Stone say  women bloggers are not showing up in the search results.  They're not on the top 100 bloggers on the Technorati lsit.

Charlene Li, from Forrester.  There is a game out there, characterized by the 80/20 rule.  Some of us want to be on the A list, others blog for their own personal satisfaction.  You have to play by the rules .

Haley: Wasn't blogging begun so as not to play by the rules.  Weren't the personal stories told by Jeff Jarvis and others influential in changing even the New York Times to

Charlene Li 's rules
1. Be good at networking

We're not as good at networking as the men are.

• Tell people what you can give.
• Ask people for what you need.

Haley says ask for links.  ASK.  Women don't ask.  ASK again.  ASK the third time.
2. Be relevant
3. Be unique

Will men only link to other men?  Do you have to write about politics?  Who cares about the Technorati 100? Don't we have all have our own A list?

Audience says it's key words and search and you can always find the blogs who write on the subject.

Another says traffic is not an end in itself, your goal is.  Think about what you want to achieve, traffic is just the means to get there.

Dina another become credible in what you care about.  She gives her example of a citizens group in Texas fighting an attempt by local phone companies to ban broadband.

A female tech CEO says its your own sphere of influence that counts.  Let's come up with a new metric that measures female bloggers - a new code.

Another Everyday Goddess:  let's have more versions of the lists.

Another: join up in networks for woman bloggers

Complaints about Technorati's reliability in posting all the posts tagged Blogher.

Mary Hodder who once worked at Technorati, is working on a community algorhythm that looks at more than inbound links. 

Miriam, who speaks five languages, can write in only one - even though she writes primarily about Africa and Asia and people of color.

Mena Trott, President of Six Apart

Live Journal 72% women and under 21
Typepad about 50/50 women, men.

She says she, Meg (founder of Blogger), Katherine of Flick'r are often dismissed, sometimes by other women

Mark:  Empower yourselves, all these companies have open APIs, create your own BlogHer 100.

Amber, a teen blogger says send postcards, offline means work too.

Summary
Halley.  Blog-whoring  - isn't that a female derogatory term.  Let's not use it.
Charlene,  Ask for links when it's relevant
Halley.  Push the medium.  Start your own companies. 

Technorati Tags: BlogHer, Bloghercon

BlogHer -Session #1 Political Blogging Grows Up

Moderator Courtney Lowery
Roxanne Cooper
Ambra Nykol

Courtney is a former AP writer and editor who's interested in the intersection of politics and environment and launched a network of blogs called New West .net to talk about growth and change in the Rocky Mountain West.

Roxanne writes at Rox Populi and is the director of sales and marketing for the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies.

Ambra from Seattle works at Google and writes a political blog - Nykola.com  and wants to steer people away from the lemming mentality and encourage them to think independently.

Courtney.  We're still compartmentalizing political discussions and taking our talking points from the top political blogs.  How can we open up the discussion.

Amber.  I'm from the more conservative side and I find a lot of the political blogs very boring.  They're reporting, not opining.  I'm black, Christian, 23, and most interested in opinions, not what I can hear on CNN.  I

Roxanne.  People who repeat messages in the "parrotsphere" get links.  If you have your own voice, you don't get linked.  It's too much of an echosphere.

UPDATE 1

Courtney.  You can make politics sexy again by bringing the personal back.  The personal resonates.  What politics means in your everyday life counts. 

Amber.  People who don't vote because they don't see the relevance in their own lives.  Blogs have the ability to make it real.  I've gotten more understanding about social security by reading blogs than by reading any party's website.  People are numb to copy written messages.  Too many people don't  understand and are intimidated by complexities.

Q.  How do you break things down for your readers.

Amber.  I just write for myself, but what I can do is come at it from a philosophical standpoint.  What's the philosophy behind a proposed law And I like to critique political leaders' fashion.
I hear from my emails that people really respond to that.

Q. What can we do to write in a more common language?  As a librarian, we need to teach critical thinking.  We need to teach what are credible sources. 

Roxanne - Who are the experts?  I think that expertise can come from a two-way discussion

Q. Bill Clinton tried to start a discussion about race.  But it never happened.

Amber.  Don't be an anonymous blogger.  I emailed one and said you can't keep this up because what you think comes from who we are.
I put up my photo as a black woman and what I think for most people doesn't track.  I'm a deviant from black people, I'm a deviant from conservatives.  I'm a deviant from woman.  Or at least what most people think black, female conservatives should think.  I'm myself.

Roxanne.  Engage people more from the other side.  They're just yelling at each other.  I comment a lot on other blogs and ask them - respectfully - why do they think the way they do.

Audience.  When I read bloggers on either side, they're much too hostile to the other side. 

Amber.  If you think that yelling at people will convince them. There is too much mud-slinging.  I hate Ann Coulter. 

Audience member.  She needs a sandwich.  She needs a makeover.

Roxanne.  But people like conflict, they like drama.

Audience Matthew.  He's from England and sees America is a very apolitical country, apart from the 15% who read and write in the blogosphere.  How do you get people to get interested in politics?

Courtney:  We make it personal.  Isn't that what women are really good at.

UPDATE 2: 
Audience member.  Apart from making it personal, let's get more facts.  The news focuses on the polls.  Those aren't the facts that people need to make a decision.

Courtney.  Where do we want political blogging to go.  How do we break out of the echo chamber.

Roxanne.  It's marketing.  Give them sugar.  Weave politics into culture blogging.

Amber.  I don't think that people need sugar.  They need the truth.  I think you just have to be who you are.  I'm come across far more interesting pro-life blogs then any

Roxanne.  Blogging about Ann Coulter's clothes is the sugar.

Courtney.  Too much of the mainstream press dumbs down the issues.

Amber.  Everyone should understand politics if they're old enough to vote.    The black community often doesn't understand the issues.

Audience member.  I'm part of a group blog focusing on second generation South Asian Americans.  We have bloggers from all sides of the aisle.  It's a unique niche, a void that's become a gathering place for all sorts.  It's real, with a variety of voices.  Sepiamutiny.com. 

Roxanne.  You're providing a real service that the mass media isn't. 

Audience member.  I'm black, married to an Italian, just back from Kenya and I'm really interested in South Asian Americans.  Now I know where to go.

Technorati Tags: BlogHer, Bloghercon

BlogHer: Chromosome X

Despite the amazing growth of the blogosphere, most of the voices you read are men's.

BlogHer, the first convention of women bloggers, will change that in ever-widening ripples of influence and effect.

Jory des Jardin, one of the founding mothers of Bloghercon, has a series of four pieces at FutureTense, also cross-posted on her blog Paus entitled  Chromosome X , that's quite good for setting the context.

Part One examines her own experience of working with women - good and bad.  She quotes Tom Peters who says that a woman's model of leadership must prevail if business is to prevail

Women practice improvisation better than men.

Women are more self-determined and more trust sensitive than men.


Women appreciate and depend upon their intuition more than men do.


Women focus naturally on empowerment, rather than on hierarchical “power”.


Women understand and develop relationships with greater facility than men.

Part Two examines why women are different from men and that results in quite different management skills.

My point is that it’s natural for men to want to dominate, and for women to relate and collaborate. ...Let’s not rate any quality as better or worse than the other. Both inherent natures are valuable in the workplace, but with a more networked and global model of doing business becoming the norm, women's inherent skills, ones we’ve often relegated to off-hours endeavors, are the skills required to make things happen.

Part Three uses the BlogHer conference, set up in only four months, record time, as a real life example of some of those skills in action.

It occurred to me: Such a strongly collaborative model as the Do-ocracy was the only way we would be able to pull this thing off.
In my final installment I’ll report more on the experiment and dare to ask the question, is this really a feminine based model, or just a good model of leadership that I like to call feminine?

With humility, Jory concludes

The skills that we have used here have been, yes, detail work—lots of planning. But in larger part we networked, corralled, spread the word, and removed our desire to control the outcome. We simply steered the conference where it seemed to be going, then helped it culminate into action.

This model has provided a huge amount of freedom for me to move. Having full and open discourse and complete trust in the people I work with, a number of my personality glitches—some of my less attractive aspects—fall to the wayside. For instance, I take things far less personally....

To that point, I include this from Evelyn Rodriguez:
“The blogosphere represents the first medium to integrate both the masculine and feminine: a truly androgynous mindset. And integration isn’t a combinatory function but a fusion. More a soup than a salad.”

Perhaps, it is more like Elisa says—good leadership is not enforcing male or female qualities so much as it is about blending them both into androgynous good management, more soup than salad.

Technorati Tags: BlogHer, Bloghercon