A Few Highlights from My Trip to BlogWorld Expo NYC

I attended a bit of the BlogWorld Expo, held at the Jacob Javits Convention Center. It was not too far from Madison Square Garden in the center of urban bliss – New York City. I didn’t take many pictures, and the few I did take turned out horribly, but check out blogworld.posterous.com for gallery images.

Click for more BWE pictures

I stayed with Marlee Ward (contributing editor here at bizchickblogs and founder of Metamorphoself) in a hotel not too far from the convention center. It was great to be able to have time to talk in person. We have much more in common than we could have realized before. That is one of the best reasons to meet people in real life.

The One-on-One Connection: Who I Met Personally

I got to meet, shake hands with, eat with, and talk to some great people at BlogWorld. A few were completely new to me, and others I had heard of or known about through Twitter or blogging.

Farnoosh Brock, ProlificLiving.com

Marlee Ward, Metamorphoself

Srinivas Rao, SkoolofLife.com

John Falchetto, ExpatLifeCoach.com

Marcus Sheridan, TheSalesLion.com

Adrienne Jurado, ExperienceLifeFully.com

Darius Gant, DariusGant.com

Jill Logiudice, JMarieAgency.com

Bernado Mendez, YourGreatLifeTV.com

Lee Odden, TopRankBlog.com

Ted Rubin, TedRubin.com

Cliff Ravenscraft, Podcastanswerman.com

Mari Luangrath, FoiledCupcakes.com

Aileen, KaizenVision.com

Day 1: What I Thought of the Sessions

I attended back-to-back sessions on Day 1 of BlogWorld. I can honestly say that I chose wisely; each of the sessions I attended was either helpful for bizchickblogs.com, or brought great insight into what I am doing for my blogging/social media clients. That to me is money well spent.

Here are the sessions I attended and just a bit about each of them. Remember that there were many, many more sessions than this. These were just the ones I chose to attend.

How I chose the sessions: I chose sessions based on whether or not I thought the information would be particularly helpful for bizchickblogs or my Uncorporate Blogging clients. I did NOT choose sessions just by their catchy titles. You can no more judge a session by its name than you can a blog post by its title.

365 Days to a Household Name: Leveraging Conversation Wherever it Happens – Presented by Srinivas Rao. My big takeaway: This was the one session that I felt was helpful for bizchickblogs.com. Srinivas talked a lot about relationship building and how you can/should use each level of communication for building relationships. I came away from the session with the goal to do a better job at developing more significant relationships with readers and contributors here at bizchickblogs.com, especially as the latter half of this year is going to be a period of what I’m hoping is massive growth and change. Strong relationships are the key to the kind of support that is needed in transition.

Dominate Your Niche with Social SEO for Blogs – Presented by Lee Odden. My big takeaway: Social SEO should be strategic and rooted in where target users are hanging out online. I’ve always connected search & social, but Lee talked about how to do this more strategically by carefully planning your hub (blog content) and spokes (social sharing sites) based on your market and competitive opportunity. He also explained how to create and use a keyword glossary and blog editorial schedule – both of which are discussed on his blog. The info I learned in that session makes me much more confident in attempting to rank higher in particularly competitive niches.

Rapid Fire Case Study Panel: Small Businesses – Moderated by Dierdre Breakenridge. The panel consisted of Mari Luangrath of FoiledCupcakes.com, Brian Simpson of Vikram Chatwal Hotels, and Jacob McKean of Stone Brewery. My big takeaway: The best part of this panel for me was when Mari Luangrath was sharing about the growth of her company. Twitter was the primary way that Mari launched FoiledCupcakes and got customers. It was really interesting to hear about her first few tweets and their particular engagement strategy. They use no traditional marketing methods at all, but one thing that they do is interesting: they make contact with a customer approximately seven times, via a combination of email, phone, written, and even hand-written correspondence.

Facebook Analytics – Presented by Chris Penn. My big takeaway: I got quite a few new pieces of information that I didn’t know about. I must say, though, that Chris is a very quick speaker and there was a TON of information presented in this session. Since I’m already so familiar with Facebook analytics and Google analytics, I followed along well, but it was like taking a 16 week session on analytics in one hour. The parts of the presentation that I would consider immediately actionable are (a) creating custom tracking URLs within the Google Analytics tool, and (b) using Google Website Optimizer to split test a Facebook landing page, now that the pages are used with iframes.

Rapid Fire Case Study Panel: Retail Organizations – Moderated by Justin Goldsborough. I believe that the panels are probably the most valuable sessions to attend. I’d much rather hear stuff from the horse’s mouth than hear someone’s philosophy on social media, right? Anyway. This panel consisted of Gabby Nelson from Sleep Number Bed, Dierdre Mize from Hallmark, and Jess Berlin from American Eagle. My big takeaway was that blogger outreach is still a confusing, scary place for big organizations. They are working through it, but (this is just my personal takeaway) I get the feeling that the larger organizations are still trying to figure out how to use bloggers as part of their marketing force as opposed to leveraging the reach that bloggers have by developing personal relationships established on trust. There are a lot of opportunities for improvement there.

Keynote:  The keynote session was just okay. I want to refrain from saying anything negative but when I think of a keynote presentation, I imagine a single speaker giving a highly-charged, highly-relevant speech or message. Instead, what we got was a sort of mis-matched panel of people who are now book authors. I’m still not exactly sure how anything that they said (other than things Gary Vaynerchuk said) was relevant to blogging or social media.

Awesome Exhibitors

Day 2 of BlogWorld, I didn’t have much time and had planned on an early afternoon flight out (keyword: planned), so I checked out the exhibits. There were a lot of booths, but I did not stop at all of them. Plus, after getting three t-shirts, I was definitely trying to avoid looking like a greedy blogger just looking for swag. Because of that, and the lack of time, I was pretty intentional when it came to booths I checked out.

I stopped and had great conversations with folks from

You can expect to see some changes around here particularly related to LiveFyre, which I have launched on this blog before and plan to do so again, and Adsmoke, which is a new revenue-sharing program for embedded videos. I also had a great discussion with Newstex and during the upcoming months, we will probably begin sending some content to Newstex for use by their branding partners.

Would I Go Again?

Yes. In fact, I’m already planning to go to BlogWorld LA in November of this year, and then back to BlogWorld NYC in June 2012. Even though I didn’t particularly like staying away from my son for a few days, I feel that the conference is part of my continuing education as a consultant, and so going to the conferences is as much for me as it is for my clients.

I would suggest planning early for upcoming BlogWorlds by deciding in advance why you want to go and how you will determine whether the trip was worth it for you. Although it is a great place to rub elbows, there are smaller, regional conferences where you can do that (in fact, a few conversations I overheard were about how small pockets of people already knew each other from the regional conferences and then met up again at BlogWorld).

I’m really looking forward to hearing what other people thought of BlogWorld. There were mixed reviews real-time; I’m curious to see if those mixed reviews will make it to blogs, or, if they will sort of die out and all of the reviews will be positive.

To those of you planning to head to the LA event, I will see you there!

Tagged as: Blogworld, Blogworld Expo