Open The Dialogue

Nikon’s recent participation in BlogHer illustrates the power, speed and influence of the blogging community. Nikon, a conference sponsor, also hosted an invitation-only event Friday night, designed to engage a variety of women, including style, design, food, technology and parenting bloggers. Their common bond was a shared enthusiasm for photography.

The buzz was incredible; the event a major triumph; the response from the attendees overwhelmingly positive. To everyone on-site in Chicago, the event was a smashing success.

Yet to the outside world, a slightly different story was being told, one which adversely comments on both the Nikon and MWW brands. Because misinformation is being communicated, we wanted to share the facts of the event and more importantly, the outcome.

As many of the women who attended the BlogHer conference came with their families, two women wanted to attend the Nikon Night Out event with their young children.  While we politely informed them that they could not bring their babies to the cocktail event, one woman, in what she thought was a joke, tweeted #nikonhatesbabies from her Twitter account. This resulted in a storm of tweets and some misinformed blog posts from women who did not attend the event nor knew the full account of what happened. This is really unfortunate as the anticipation and excitement leading up to the event by those invited was tremendous.

These are the facts:

• Due to the time of the event, the noise level, the availability of alcohol and the proximity to water, we determined that from a safety perspective, children should not attend.

• During the event on Friday night, two people tweeted about not being able to get into the event with their babies.

• On Saturday morning, MWW and Nikon planned to contact the two women about the prior evening’s events, and the #nikonhatesbabies chatter made that even more timely. We contacted both original bloggers and asked them to stop by the Nikon booth to discuss the situation.  The woman who first tweeted said it was a joke and that she did not mean any harm to Nikon.  She said that her tweet had been taken out of context as a bad joke (indeed). The second expressed her dismay and embarrassment that the situation had become so inflated.

• A few marketing bloggers – who did not attend the event – started blogging about best practices while blaming Nikon and MWW for not understanding the audience.

• Following conversations with MWW and Nikon, the two women tweeted about their discussion and apologized for their impact.

• Once the corrected tweets appeared and began to circulate, other bloggers, fans and event patrons posted similar stories with the facts, and complimented Nikon on the personal response and engagement.

1. http://bit.ly/V8z7W2
2. http://tinyurl.com/msr7qn
3. http://twitpic.com/blxiu

Clearly, some people, who did not attend either the conference or the party, used the incident to elevate themselves and their marketing expertise without bothering to confirm the facts.

We felt strongly that these two women deserved a face-to-face, personal discussion. We could have simply taken our version online and debated in public, but in doing so, would have focused on the people this DIDN’T affect, rather than the ones it did. We had great conversations with both women, walking away hopeful we had just formed a future valuable relationship with two great bloggers. There are a few interesting lessons here, including:

1. Know your audience: We invited people who were interested in Nikon, cameras or photography, not exclusively moms or women with kids. Had we planned an event for only mom bloggers, the location and other logistics would have been different altogether.
2. Relationships: We hosted this event to extend and continue those engaging relationships we have with blog communities. The vast majority of the online and in-person feedback about a well-received event has been positive and gracious. Knowing we built stronger ties with the bloggers because of the event, we’ll continue to do so in years to come.
3. One-on-One: We learned that talking with people, hearing what they have to say, learning the facts, and questions they may have about Nikon products is one of the best ways to grow as a company. We also learned that there are many people out there who don’t listen and will jump-to-conclusions without the facts to spread misinformation.

What now? Should this scare big brands away from the increasingly real-time digital world? Not at all. In fact, this should encourage it. There was learning on both sides of the fence. Real-time opinion is just that – real-time. And it’s important to tell the whole story when all the facts are available.

In one post, a mommyblogger suggested this year’s conference had the theme of “not all bloggers are like that.” We agree and believe that the Mom in question isn’t either. We had multiple conversations with Liz Gumbinner of Blog with Integrity, and support the badge that she’s encouraging all bloggers to consider. In a real example of the blogger community policing itself, #nikonlovesbabies popped up with photos and statements as well.

Will this deter MWW or Nikon from continuing to engage and conduct open, honest and transparent dialogue with the blogger community? Of course not. We achieved our original goal to have meaningful conversation and personal interaction with bloggers and will continue to do so.

We recognize this BlogHer conference was a tipping point for corporations and bloggers to slowly come together on the same playing field. Together we should commit to letting the facts surface and put accusations on the back burner. Together, we can learn from one another and appreciate the influence and voice each of us has.

Yesterday, Facebook announced in a blog post that starting 12:01 EDT, Saturday, June 13^th, vanity URLs will be available for all Facebook profiles and Fan Pages.  This is an important step for Facebook. They are perhaps the last of the major social media platforms to offer them, as both  MySpace and Twitter already do.

A vanity URL is key for your personal brand because it allows us to find others online, by name and without a lot of work. Sure, Facebook has a search bar, but right now the problem is that once you search for someone and it pulls up results and then you still have to dig through those all of those to find the “right” person.  Once Saturday hits, you can easily just type in a friend’s specific URL and you’re DONE. Much easier.

This also means that Facebook can now play a more pivotal role in a person’s online brand.  Across all social media platforms, most of us try to keep consistent whether we use our real name or a pseudonym, people learn about us and look for us based off of the personal brand we have built.

Why else does this matter? It’s good for SEO and it allows us to find exactly what we’re looking for and know what we’re looking at. Something with a bunch of random numbers and symbols at the end doesn’t really tell us if we’ve found the right person or page. It also makes me dig even more when searching.

A few questions I have about the change though: will we find that Facebook users will begin to utilize the platform differently? Will search be as popular and will we still browse through the hundreds of random “John Smiths” of the world until we find the right one?  It will be interesting to see if this alters behavior in any significant way.

 What are your thoughts on the new vanity URLs? Will you be staying home this Friday to get one?

Also, to stake your customized claim on Facebook this weekend, you can visit http://facebook.com/username.

Elisa Camahort Page is one of the co-founders of the women blogging organization, BlogHer, along with Lisa Stone and Jory Des Jardins. Elisa has been a marketing executive for 18 years in Silicon Valley, and currently leads all events, marketing and public relations for BlogHer.

Prior to BlogHer, Elisa ran Worker Bees, a marketing consultancy company. Elisa can be found on several blog, including: Worker Bees Blog, where she writes about marketing, social media, customer service and web 2.0 initiatives; Healthy Concerns, where she writes about health 2.0 and healthcare from the patient’s point of view; and Elisa’s Green Scene, a collection of green news in areas from design to cooking to politics.

In addition to the BlogHer events, Elisa is also a frequent speaker, having made recent appearances at SXSW and Fem2.0.

-AB

DM: BlogHer’s fourth annual conference is coming up in less than two months. What’s new on the agenda that attendees can look forward to?

ECP: Every year we try to mix it up, so there are indeed new topics on the agenda, such as:
• A travelblogging session
• Sessions around healthcare and medblogging
• A mini-writing workshop from Katie Orenstein of the Op-Ed Project
• An ongoing Geek Lab with presentations, tutorials and the opportunity to just informally connect and hack solutions all day long

When creating the schedule for the conference, what are your goals? What do you hope bloggers get out of the conference?

Our goal is truly to have something for everyone, to feature new, fresh, diverse voices, and to highlight the true diversity and quality to be found at every corner of the blogosphere. We hope bloggers walk away from every session with something they want to do, to try, to talk about, to tell someone about or to share.

Last year, the New York Times story became a bit of a scandal, but I was intrigued by the title of the piece, “Blogging’s Glass Ceiling.” Do you think BlogHer and women have broken a ceiling by blogging? If so, how?

Blogging provides the opportunity for every person to have their own personal platform to use as they wish. Some people use it purely for personal expression and connecting with friends and family. Others use it to promote their ideas and their work. Still others want to parlay their blogs into businesses. Blogging is just the tool. A very accessible and powerful tool. It’s your intent that defines what you can do with it. So yes, many women have had breakthrough facilitated, even precipitated by their blogs! Still others have simply discovered they are not alone with whatever issues they’re dealing with. It’s all good.

What do you think is the biggest barrier for women bloggers or for women who want to become bloggers?

Well, again, it entirely depends on what they want to achieve. There is certainly no barrier to get started. Many tools are even free, so you could start a blog on the computers at your local library. From there, this question could be answered many different ways. Certainly there are more blogs than ever, so finding a way to stand out is a challenge for us all. Often the best blogs reflect a lot of work on the part of the blogger, so our time-impoverished lives are another challenge. The biggest barrier is probably misconceptions about how much it costs, or how hard it is, or how scary the Internet is. To which I always just say: Start a blog and give it a shot. You’ve got to do it to get it sometimes! Certainly true with Twitter

Why do you think it’s important for the companies to get involved with BlogHer?

Because BlogHer is the leading participatory news, entertainment and information network for women online today. The women in our network are hard to find via other channels, and yet they are your customers…and influencing your customers. We now reach over 14MM unique visitors per month…most of whom report being influenced by blogs to make purchases. As a commercial power, women bloggers are hard to beat! BlogHer is deeply invested and engaged in this community. We are part of this community. We know what makes this community tick. That being said, we also have business and professional journalism in our backgrounds, so we are out there figuring out the best practices for this blogger outreach. It’s a great combination of broad reach, deep engagement and best practices!

Women bloggers are mostly known for mommybloggers, because of their influence in the family and buying power. Do you see any other up-and-coming niches of women?

I don’t know if I agree that women bloggers are mostly known for mommybloggers. I would agree that consumer companies certainly recognize that buying power. But the media and political infrastructure pays a lot more attention to other segments of the blogosphere. What I see is that many women hate to be nichified at all. At BlogHer we don’t silo a woman’s interest. Our conference and our web community cover every topic under the sun…and women can hop from commenting about politics to commenting about parenting. We encourage companies to see that women who blog are influential and powerful consumers, whether they’re mom, aunts, grandmothers, sisters, daughters…

Graduation day is right around the corner for many public relations students. If you were professors at the University of BlogHer, what would be your closing remarks to your students?

It’s our mantra regarding best practices:

• Ask, don’t tell
• Listen before speaking
• Be transparent and fully disclose
• Forget about “the A-List”, find YOUR A-List, the bloggers out there who already care about the same values you care about and products or services you represent
Remember, we’re doing fine out here in the blogosphere without you. We’re building trusted community and finding empowerment. What are you doing to be trustworthy? How can you empower us?

Everyone talks about the A-list mommybloggers, like Heather Armstrong at Dooce, but who are three up-and-coming women bloggers that you think we should keep on our RSS feed so we can say “we knew them when…”?

There isn’t one blogosphere, there are many. There are three, four, ten up-and-coming women who blog in every blogging topic there is. I couldn’t possibly choose just three

Marc Orchant has passed away, having never regained consciousness after suffering a massive heart attack a week ago.

I never got to know Marc either personally or professionally but obviously knew him by the reputation he had built up among online folks. But I do know that the tremendous influence he had on others means a part of him remains with us here even after his passing.

The prayers of all those whose lives he touched are with his family and friends.

Just wanted to share our hope that Marc Orchant, who suffered a major heart attack over the weekend, is able to achieve a speedy recovery. Our prayers and best wishes are with Marc and his entire family as they stay by his side. Marc’s stellar reputation in the online space has a lot of people sending their prayers his way. Godspeed on the road back to health, Marc.