I arrived home yesterday in the late afternoon. I was on the road for 26 days. Do I even have to say that I am tired and so very, very happy to be home? No, I didn’t think that I did.
I have many, many posts floating about in my head. Some are nearly fully formed and I will just have to open the gates and let the words flow. Others are more amorphous, almost like new recipes with the ingredients defined but the proportions between them as yet to be fully determined through tasting, and simmering or baking.
I will definitely create a post later today on how to create a following which will probably focus on how following is different from simply having lots of followers. I also have developed a bit of a passion for the need for a light rail system here in the U.S., and more than one post will draw from my Amtrak and rental car experiences during this past month. Travel and destination blogging have resurfaced as an interest for me, but only as a category within this blog.
The concept of home has also been in my thoughts a great deal during this trip, as has friendship. Identity, and career were also important but nearly dwarfed by the more personal experiences from July/Aug 2012. More will follow on all of these topics. And of course I will also have at least one BlogHer ’12 retrospective post.
Home feels very good. If only my husband wouldn’t have decided to start the redecorating process when he arrived home before I did… bless his heart. There is no place like home, even without a couch…
A Minneapolis Friday: Food and Fine Art
I may add to this post throughout the day, but I want to capture some of my initial thoughts on the wonderful afternoon and evening I spent with my daughter yesterday at the Minneapolis Institute of Art at the Rembrandt in America exhibit, getting mani/pedis (personal fine art), and eating some delightful Italian food at Broeder’s.
Rembrandt in America
I came away from this exhibit appreciating Rembrandt’s view of women and his personal existence on this planet far more than I have from other single artist focus exhibits in my life. I suspect that the reason for this was in the narration of the audio tour that built my understanding of his relationship with women as well as my appreciation for many of feminine world elements included in this particular exhibit. There truly is something different about this curation.
I have been lucky enough to see great masterpieces in Europe and America, including some of Rembrandt’s work. This exhibit is the first one that made Rembrandt real for me. It brought him together as a whole person. I have appreciated his amazing ability to bring people to life in his paintings for decades, but this is the first time I have appreciated him personally. An article I found in the Twin Cities Daily Planet really captures this aspect of the exhibit in their review.
The MIA is the last stop on the tour of the exhibit, that included Cleveland and North Carolina, and will be at the MIA until September 7th. See it if you can. You will not be sorry!
Personal Fine Art
Red lacquered toenails are fine art… And I do the girly spa day sort of thing so infrequently that I do appreciate the art of adornment. We did a Mom & Daughter mani/pedi. See below for my “I’m wearing cute shoes to BlogHer 12.” 
A "Tips for BlogHer '12 List" That Really Isn't
“Isn’t what?” you might ask. “Isn’t a tips list…” is my theoretical reply.
I love lists. I’m trying to use them again. They fell by the wayside in transition from paper to digital organization, or switch to digital lack of organization would be a better description. I’m resurrecting paper lists for myself and we will see how it goes. But for now I’m NOT creating a BlogHer Preparations list that could be used by anyone else! Am I?
Mine includes:
- Dig underneath the stack of papers on the table in my office that was going to be my desk, after my desk filled up with stacks of papers, and find cards from the great bloggers I have previously met at annual and topical BlogHer conferences. Remove sleeping cat first.
- Do not succumb to frugality and cancel the massage you wisely scheduled for yourself three weeks ago so you will at least be relaxed before you lock yourself in a car with The Hubby for three days so as to get to location for the shared part of my upcoming travels — the pre-BlogHer part.
- Send proposal for sponsorship out to remaining PR firms, even though these will be unnecessary because the perfect sponsor to whom you already submitted a proposal will be calling to accept the proposal and give you gazillions of dollars.
- Write a blog post about how there is a LOT more work behind securing corporate sponsorship for attending BlogHer than just tweeting about it. Like having something to offer the sponsors that distinguishes you from every other Thomasina, Dickette, and Harriet B. Blogger.
- Find clothes to wear to BlogHer that are not frayed or stained or more than 10 years old.(lLook under bed, in out of season closets, and in piles of “clean” clothes in chairs that have not been put away for a couple weeks.) Wash them if at all possible. Fold neatly; you know you won’t iron them so don’t even beat yourself up about it, just fold neatly.
- Find camera, camera phone, iPad, iPod, and any and all other tech needed for blogging, tweeting, taking notes, taking pictures… and all the cords that these devices need to work, charge, or communicate with other pieces of equipment. Replace batteries and pack extras, if needed. Test all equipment, cords, and batteries.
- Pack separate suitcases and boxes for different legs of trip – Hubby’s reunion, my visit to the kid, train travel, BlogHer. For things need to be used in more than one location, label storage bag with what needs to be put in the bag before that leg of the trip and put it in the appropriate suitcase. Remember to check the suitcase and bag before heading out on that leg.
- Have business cards printed and ship them to location along the way. Do not wait until the last minute and have to print stupid looking home printed ones like you always do.
- Check out all the blogs of people you are likely to run into at BlogHer so you can seem like you are an active follower of their blog.
I must be the only person who has to do lists that look like this.
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.