Amazing women of all stripes, that sums up the annual BlogHer conference for me. Annually in July or August since 2005, for two to three days, women who write online or who are thinking about starting a blog gather in a major city to learn, share, discuss topics with each other and woo and be wooed by advertisers and sponsors.
I tried to attend the BlogHer in 2006, but my personal life was disintegrating at the time, and I had to make some tough decisions about priorities.
My first time attending the annual conference was in 2007, a couple weeks after my mother’s funeral. The trip to Chicago saved my sanity and gave me a network within which I could exist as a writer. I was closing up my Mom’s house in Indiana that month and the proximity of the conference to the place where I had grown up and where I had taken care of my Mom during the last few months of her life was a godsend.
Since then I have attended when the conference was in San Francisco, then last year in San Diego, and now, this year, in New York. I also attended the first BlogHer Business Entrepreneurs and Technology Conference in Santa Clara in 2011.
I feel like I am a real part of the BlogHer network of women who are creating and developing communication experiences that are changing the world for the better. That is the secret to BlogHer’s success. Women who interact within this network know it is real.
BlogHer is a network of women doing what women have always done even in the days before social media and blogging. Women communicate and organize the now. Yes, it is sort of Zen. Women are the curators of culture. Throughout the last few millennia men have traditionally created and curated the historical world through the lenses of geography and politics/religion. Women are now sharing the organization and curation of their lives and the lives of their families in a way that previously had been accomplished face to face in small family and groups. When these personal processes were documented it was usually done through letters and recipes.
Now we are sharing evolved, contemporary letters and recipes of all sorts through a global community. The women who were smart enough to give a structure to the expansive contemporary community of women are Lisa, Elisa, and Jory, the cofounders of BlogHer. The structure of the BlogHer company expands as a publishing platform, advertising network, and conference series. There are now “TV” and print offerings and ads served beyond a bounded network. But more than anything else BlogHer feels like a network of women. That’s because it is.
Much more to come on different aspects of the network this week as I publish my “report back” from my attendance at the 8th Annual BlogHer Conference. Just a bit of a teaser, but BoomHers abounded, tit for tat info exchange was de rigueur as sponsors know more of what they want and what we can offer, and oh my, we are 8 years older than when this all started. Plus, I am already planning next year’s attendance as BlogHer returns to Chicago in 2013!
Corporate Sponsorship and Advertising in the Blogosphere
Corporate Sponsorship and Advertising in the Blogosphere
I’ve been “watching” people tweet about attending the BlogHer ’12 conference for a while now. I don’t observe all the time, or even every day, but #BlogHer12 is one of the streams of hashtags I follow when I do log in. I have also started planning out a FaceBook fan page so I can update it while I’m at BlogHer at the beginning of August. It isn’t a big deal, I’ve known how to do this sort of stuff for ages, and played around with these sorts of things several times before now.
I see bloggers announcing on Twitter that they are open to receiving corporate sponsorships. Well, duh! Sure, I will take some money, too, if a corporation wants to throw money at me. I put out a question about information on securing corporate sponsorship to attend BlogHer ’12 on the BlogHer ’12 tweet-stream. I only got one meaningful reply that actually referenced a page that showed what would be called a media kit in the “print” publication world.
All of this stuff, every single bit of it, points (in semiotic jargon anything that points to something else is an index) to the fact that the publication industry isn’t just changing, it has already changed.
You can read BlogHer’s policy on sponsored bloggers at conferences on their page called BlogHer and Sponsored Bloggers: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) In it they say they first became aware of bloggers independently securing sponsorships to help them attend BlogHer conferences only a couple years ago.
The first year I attended BlogHer, 2007, I was in awe of my roomie who seemed to know how to leverage everything to its full extent and market herself exceptionally well. I have stayed in contact with her on several networks and watched her develop and extend her brand. She was only the first of many, many savvy, intelligent, and entrepreneurial women I would meet through BlogHer.
What I think I am seeing is the new and very different face of publishing. When I was a little girl reading the magazines on my parent’s end table between Mom’s spot on the couch and Dad’s chair, I remember a women’s magazine with a column called something like “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” That column transmogrified into 100s if not 1000s of blogs where relationships are examined and possibilities far less genteel than in that original column are voiced, remixed and chimed in on again and again in the comments sections of blogs.
Ads on blogs, memberships in ad networks, and give aways and coupon exchange were the “egg money” of the 2000s. But right around 2010 that began changing again as professional models of marketing designed for the social web began to be incorporated in Mommy Blogs by the young professionals who helped design social media.
The incorporation of professional strategies and tactics into a totally new channel of communication that grew out of a rather stilted publication model where 90 percent of the information that went out to women in magazines through a rather one sided flow was in the form of advertising.
It seems that some women have managed to market themselves to the vestiges of the old magazine advertising models in the form of P.R. companies that have always created ad campaigns for manufacturers. Right now these companies are apparently willing to invest in women who are creating the new medium that is replacing the old. Their intended market is the same as ever, the people who run the millions of households that comprise the bulk of the American marketplace: the women raising families.
Smaller segmented populations are a known commodity in media and have been so since the explosion of cable channels replaced the small number of channels carried by early cable stations along with network stations. Blogs are segmenting a market that was once populated by “ladies” magazines.
The women who attend BlogHer do so for a variety of reasons, only a very few of them want to develop a professional publication.
Some of women attend to learn how to make “egg money.” Egg money isn’t just chicken scratch, by the way. Sorry, I could not resist that one. Egg money, for those of a generation totally disconnected from the last vestiges of a predominantly rural America that existed in the 20th Century, was the “extra” money made by women selling eggs, that they used to fund rural households “incidental” expenses.
Some of the attendees do so to find out about making their blogs more professional but not necessarily to make tons of money. They may want to blog in support of a cause, to advance a belief, to connect with hobby aficionados who share the same passion they do.
Some attend to have a break from family, travel, and meet-up with old, or make new, friends.
The women who attend and want to create a professional publication and work with advertisers who want to connect with their readers is probably relatively small. The number who have the where with all to to figure out how to sell their own attendance at a conference to a corporate sponsor are a much smaller group. This small number is why I fail to understand why the folks who have corporate sponsors are so tight-lipped about the whole process.
Competition is vastly over-rated. Cooperation in developing a new market should be one of our goals, in my very humble opinion. It is very unlikely that many of us would pose any competition to anyone else. We blog in different areas, in different ways, and could provide inroads to very different groups of potential customers to the same company.
I’m a free flow of information sort of person so I will share basic information I find out about the sponsorship process as I figure it out.
Stay tuned. I will definitely write about this topic again.
Site Security, Again…
There is a security update for self-hosted WordPress sites that you need to install. It is numbered 3.4.1 and it contains security updates.
- Back up your site.
- Run the update.
- Update your BPS Security installation, or update whatever site security softwear you use. You may have to create new, updated .hta accesss files. Then you will have to reactivate the BPS coverage of them.
I have invested too much of my soul into my writing to risk losing all those captured thoughts, or allowing someone else to control them. I also wanted to host my own images for the same reasons.
Wordpress was the logical choice for me. I will admit that at first I did not understand what a huge security risk I was taking with this step. Live and learn. I learned a great deal about the real differences between a url, a domain, a site, a host, the site software, intellectual property, and a huge amount of other information about how I put my thoughts out on the web.
Because I had next to no funds to pay someone else to create and maintain sites for me, when I first started doing this,I learned how to do it myself.
I’m continuing to learn how to do as much as I can for myself. I have played aroud with Drupal CMS (content management system) sites in the past and will eventually use Drupal for some of my sites. But some of my main strengths are my skepticism and my DIY attitude. So I am not apt to give in and 1) believe everything I’m told, and 2) allow anyone else to do for me what I cannot do for myself.
One of my friends simply delights in telling WordPress users that something like, he says, 87% of WordPress sites are infected with malware. I say, that may be true, but 50% of those sites have taken absolutely no steps toward securing their site.
Get http://www.akismet.com to stop spam comments. Require that people leaving comments prove they are human the first time they leave a comment by having to fill out name and website; this is an option under the discussion settings on your dashboard.
And MOST IMPORTANTLY of all, make sure that your cpanel settings, through which you access your hosting services, have anonymous ftp disabled. You do not want to allow anonymous access through which someone could upload files, malware, and all sorts of nefarious software onto your server. Seriously, if you don’t know how to do this, or how to find out whether it is enabled, talk to your hosting company or the person or company you use to maintain your WordPress site and make sure anonymous ftp access to your server is disabled.
Don’t be freaked out, just start doing and eventually it all falls into place.
App of the Week, Martha Stewart CraftStudio, Free through July 8th
Reason Creek’s Application of the Week for the iPad: Martha Stewart’s CraftStudio
The Martha Stewart Craft Studio application is free from the App Store until July 8th thanks to the sponsorship of Snapfish! No I’m not getting paid or reimbursed or anything for reviewing this app. I just stumbled across it and thought, “Hey, lots of folks are going to like this for a variety of reasons!”
While you may certainly use it to make cards, I immediately thought of doing quicky web graphics like the one above, although I am sure you can do better than I did. I just wanted to try out several of the features, such as stamps, stickers, background patterns, text, edge and corner treatments, color, and glitter and handwriting (I decided not to use the later two.)
It allows for undoing, layers, reordering of layers, deletion of elements, altering the color of elements. You can save to pictures, sent, and post.
I wholeheartedly recommend downloading it while it is free. The application allows you to purchase additional palettes or styles if you wish. I have not done that yet. But if I have a need for it, it is nice to know I can quickly make a cute graphic when I’m on the road with just my iPad. The app. will be $4.99 after July 8th.
I’m going to try to design some stickers using this app and print them out for my business promo to hand out at BlogHer using Avery stickers.
BlogHer '12 App is Up and Running
The image below is of the BlogHer ’12 App running on my iPad. Isn’t it pretty?
If you go to the App Store you will find the BlogHer ’12 Conference App available, for free naturally, and if you download it you will find it to be up and running, mostly.
Not too many people have added their attendee information as yet. But I did! Descriptions of the tracks seem to be up for the most part and the views that I tried all worked. You can view by track, time, speaker and the flexibiity seems to be very helpful for figuring out what you actually want to attend, focus on and such. You can highlight your interests, view your own schedule, send your contact info to others that want it, and there is room for notes.
The vendor/sponsor info wasn’t up or was slow to load when I played around with it, but if you are attending, having this application up and available well before the conference is a good thing.
I hope the map will show the Sheraton too as many BlogHer attendees will be staying there, not just at the Hilton. Some of us couldn’t get rooms at the Hilton for the days we wanted by the time we could reserve rooms.
I haven’t checked out Twitter and a few other things from the initial menu after you tap the navigation button on the landing page of the app, but everything looks good. All conferences should have such apps.
Today Is All About Business, Well Mostly…
I spent the weekend on politics, on both doing and writing. So today is a get stuff done day. I am so freaking far behind that I may have a serious breakdown if I don’t make some progress. Fortunately I have very low standards and what counts as progress is defined most generously. That is a trick I learned while being a mother.
Seriously, I leave for vacation with the Hubby in less than a month after which he returns home and I go on to BlogHer ’12. That means every frigging thing in my life has to be in order in less than a month. I’m not really OCD, so I can’t imagine what kind of pressure and stress a truly OCD type would feel in a similar situation.
The first thing I must do this week is stop staying up until 2 a.m. “catching up” on games. Foolish waste of time… But so much fun!
I am trying to do some serious networking before BlogHer ’12, not only for practice, but to learn from other repeat offenders, er, I mean attenders. I actually have to do a mind check and think of BlogHer as work, because it is, but I have so much fun there that I tend to feel guilty about attending! I also have a couple meetings I need to attend this week, one tomorrow, and one Wednesday, both of which require materials I haven’t created as yet. But they are materials I can use at BlogHer so at least it will be time I can count toward multiple goals/projects.
I have a few letters of inquiry (emails actually) to vendors that will be at BlogHer that I need to send out.
And there are client, and potential client, follow-ups to be made, as always.
I’m attempting to put in serious time in on Twitter, too, but I am not someone who cannot work that into the multitask menu effectively, so I have to allow a pretty much dedicated block of time to it. I need to do the scheduled tweet thing. But doing scheduled tweets can open a can of worms, so I have to set it up judiciously, effectively, and in a way that actually helps me. I am such a nerd that I really have to be careful setting up “gadgets and widgets and apps, oh my” or I will spend all my time ditzing around with them and not actually do anything that helps me build a business.
I also need to spend an afternoon getting all my accounts interconnected properly with all the right info showing on each one. For instance, I am pretty sure my twitter account links to nfhill.com and not this blog. It should link to this blog. Also, I need to make sure my “hire me” and “contact me” forms all lead to the same forms and have appropriate examples.
Then there is also a real need for a whole day to be spent on cleaning up and securing all my sites and databases. I suspect that the SQL injection thingy that puts code into databases has not been eradicated from all files on all my domains. Most self-hosted WordPress sites that don’t have a professional service monitoring them 24/7 got infected a few months ago, and I just thought of another place I might have missed cleaning out. That means that all accounts and all files, databases, etc. have to be re-cleaned and re-protected. So, I want to reduce to as few as possible installations of WordPress on my host’s server as possible because they are all interconnected and can reinfect each other if I haven’t scrubbed each and every database and reinstalled the security software. Getting it out is more difficult than keeping it out of a clean system. I can do this, but I’m not enough of an expert to teach it to you, so I’m sorry if I’m confusing you.
What I do know enough about to tell you is that basically there is malware out there that isn’t a virus per se as in sending spam to everyone in your email address book. It is more like sending an email about combating yeast infections to any contact stored in your website’s comment database if that visitor has also searched your site for the word feminist. Most hosts do not protect you from such an attack. Most site scan software will show your site as clean even if you have “scanned” it with security software. To get this sort of malware extracted from your databases, from what I can tell, you will need to actually read through your database code and scan your data for things that do not look right. This is why reputable firms get paid a few hundred a month to maintain your site securely. I am documenting my explorations in this area, but database security is one tough cookie, and when you pull the fortune out, it reads, “You are screwed!” This is why I am not in the hosting business and why most people who are should not be. I cannot know about a problem and not fix it. Most companies have not problem in that area though. Being ethical can really cut into your profits.
How will I know if I have fixed any problem that might exist? I will show a greatly reduced number of servers trying to talk to my servers from Romania, the Ukraine, and from China. But don’t quote me on that, I’m just paranoid.
Anyway, when I have all that done, I will be putting tons of domain names up for sale, as well as setting up a page where you can search and buy your own domain name and populate that site with articles about why you should have your own domain name and how to protect it. Some will be freebie articles, some free pamphlets, and there will also be e-documents you can purchase. So between security and this venture I have to spend a couple full days on this sort of stuff this week. There will be a page I set up that has the URLs or domain names I’ve listed for sale at afternic with little promos about what could be done with each title. I have some great foodie blog names and some great boomer names as well as some business and security ones.
Oh well, off to work I go.
*****
The articles I scanned for inspiration before writing this were:
- Psychological Distance: 10 Fascinating Effects of a Simple Mind Hack
- Afraid To Succeed? Sufferers Unite
Thanks for reading along while I organize my week!
*****