feminist blogs

There are 3 things that really seem to validate a blogger:

1. Creating a s*&#%storm Breaking a controversial story and getting tens of thousands of new visitors and dozens of trolls to your blog,

2. Going to a blog insiders’ conference like BlogHer and having people recognize your blog, and

3. Meeting Gary Vaynerchuk.

I am pleased to say that as of last Friday, AuthenticOrganizations.com and I have accomplished the third item on the list.

Who is Gary Vaynerchuk?

If you work at all in the online space, you’ve heard of GaryVaynerchuk. It you haven’t heard of him, take a look at the NYT Business Best-seller List. GaryV has made his name through WineLibrary.com, where he has been one of the first and one of the most aggressive adopters of each social media tool that’s become important.

And, like so many of us who work online and offline, he has become an expert at using social media to build his business and his personal brand.

What distinguishes GaryV from other early adopters of social media have been his ambition, his enthusiasm, and his willingness to take risks.

I’ve been bemused by GaryV as an online presence — he’s remarkable, and unique, and also sort of loud and brash. My sense of Gary was that he was a little self-important, maybe verging on being a bit of a “jerk-in-a-nice-way”.

So far, the closest our paths have come is that GaryV and I are speakers for the same NYU Entrepreneurship-in-action class (on different days, but it still feels like being part of the in-crowd). When I heard that Vaynerchuk would be giving a talk and a book signing at our neighborhood independent book store, I thought it might be worth the walk over there to check him out. I’m so glad that I went, not only to hear him talk but to see him in action.

After hearing GaryV speak, seeing him interact with others, and meeting him myself, I’m convinced that the guy is the real deal: funny, self-deprecating, self-confident, warm, self-reflective and authentic. He’s even more fun in real life than he is in his online keynotes and webisodes.

What’s more, he really has developed some unique insights about social media, in part because he has set some high standards for himself (e.g., reply to every email) and in part because he  allows invites challenges himself to experiment and fail and experiment again.

Three observations about GaryV ‘in real life’ :

• GaryV is the most extroverted person I’ve ever met.
  Despite how weary Gary must have been from his crazy book tour, he got recharged with each and every personal interaction.

• GaryV was able to stop and dwell in his interactions with each person who came up to have a book signed.
  He was happy to pose for pictures with just about anyone, and he took his time with each of us. No one felt rushed; instead, we felt welcomed. This was the single loveliest thing about the evening, just having the chance to watch someone be authentic, maybe even to go beyond their ‘personal brand promise’.

• GaryV’s heart is bigger than his ego or his ambition.

GaryV attracts a good crowd

I wished that we’d been able to grab all 25-30 people at the book signing to take them out for a beer a glass of wine. I was so curious to hear what other people had learned and what new things they were planning to do based on GaryV’s insights. We did manage to get some friends of friends to join us for dinner, and we had 2 hours of some of the best ‘how can I make my business better?’ conversation ever.

Why is meeting GaryV a validation?

I said that meeting GaryV was a validation– and you may ask, just how does that work? Why does meeting some “web celeb” ® validate you?

It’s not so much that what GaryV has to say validates any of us who blog, but more that his insights help confirm that blogging and social media can influence people in ways that make (more of) a difference.

If only I were a better multi-tasker, or just less polite with my Flip cam. I would have saved some of GaryV’s comments to muse on later. Let me leave you with just this one:

The best thing you can do for your business online is to scale up your caring.

How might things change, if all of us did that?

Be sure to see:

Gary Vaynerchuck Is One Inspiring Man (by TK Hamilton)
Crush It! A book review (wineconversation.com)
Blogher’s Lisa Stone on the power of women bloggers (reportr.net)

Ah, Blogher fumes still rumbling thru my veins...

So Florinda mentions TWICE my most embarrassing moment of Blogher. She asked me for an autograph on the Ms. magazine that I just handed her. I laughed and saw she was dead serious. It was extra funny because my husband had just been teasing me the day before about "When is your signing at Women & Children First?" But Florinda was serious and since I love her so, I took her pen, my pen?, and signed my name under my photo. I meant to write a peace symbol and then my name. But it came out as [Peace sign], [heart] and feminism.

Then came my favorite sluts...I gave them a copy of the magazine before the panel started. After I composed myself from signing Florinda's copy, one of them asked me to autograph their copy with a fushia Sharpie. More nervous chuckling.

By now my dear readers, you should know that while I'm excited about all the stuff I do, I am also a horrible promoter. I'm currently fundraising to hire Cinnamon for that role. I'm only a few thousand short, so someone give me a huge ass book deal! haha...Seriously thou, I'm awful at it, thou I am getting better. But the thought of anyone wanting my autograph is too overwhelming for me to really comprehend, so it pushes me to being more embarrassed than anything. I guess cause I just don't know how to handle it.

So what was the most kick ass moment of Blogher? Introducing friends to Gloria Feldt. I mean, hello!? How many years have I been getting mass emails & snail mail from her about Planned Parenthood? And because of the Progressive Women's Voices program, I know her well enough to introduce her around. Oh, yeah...now that's bad ass.

But it helped show me (and it should you too) that we're all experts at something (thanks Katie) and well, blogging is one of the things I'm an expert at. I might not be a Forbes Power Mom blogger, but I know a thing or two about this medium. I also love, love, LOVE connecting amazing women to each other. I am the human LinkedIn/Friend Finder. And honestly, I love it because I can talk until my neighbors come home about you and this other amazing woman. And yes, that means I don't have to talk about me! Perfect, eh?

So if you ever pay me a compliment and I get all "aw, shucks..." that really is how I am. And while it is embarrassing, it's also pretty fab too. Thanks.

Walking into my office this morning, I tripped over a ‘rubber bracelet cum flash drive’ that was part of the swag I brought back with me from Chicago and the 2009 BlogHer.

That clumsy move plus a few friends’ Tweets about supposedly free swag costing them money to ship home, made me wonder about how swag and the pursuit of swag may have distracted BlogHer attendees from their larger purpose for attending the conference. And, it made me wonder how swag and the distribution of swag may have distracted BlogHer as an organization from its larger purpose.

To understand this dynamic, you need to know that

(1) Swag is the free stuff that  organizations give away– the pens, the flash drives, the mousepads, the product samples — as a way to advertise their organization and/or product.

(2) BlogHer is the annual conference, and companion website & ad network, that has brought together a diverse community of women (and some men) bloggers.

Bloggers go to the BlogHer conference to meet each other IRL, to share writing & tech advice, and to learn how to develop their blogging skills, their online communities, and their overall purpose.

BlogHer exists as an organization  “To create opportunities for women who blog to pursue exposure, education, community, and economic empowerment.”

My experience as a member and my perceptions as an observant, organizational scholar both confirm that, overall, BlogHer is doing a really really good job creating these opportunities. So, in the big picture, the whole swag issue at BlogHer was mostly a distraction. However, it’s a distraction that could signal a trending away from BlogHer’s core purpose.

Here are just a few of the swag related problems I saw:

• Online conversation leading up to the conference was full of references on what swag would be availabe, where to get it, how to get it home. Some conversation, but in my opinion not enough, addressed why the swag was going to be there in the first place.

• Not enough of the conversation addressed how to really make the most of your participation in sessions or how to find your tribe of like-minded bloggers.

• Efforts to acquire swag changed the participation patterns of many attendees. People went to exhibits instead of community keynotes to get the Walmart cookies or the Disney Ice Creams (which were, btw, very tasty).

• Parties were so loud crowded you couldn’t hear yourself Twitter, much less talk to anyone.

• People went to and stayed at parties only until the swag bags were handed out.

• The minute it was announced that the swag was being distributed, the whole physical shape of the room would change, from clusters of women talking to a line of women waiting.

• The energy dynamic shifted from meeting & greeting other bloggers to getting & vetting the swag.
  [I did have one interesting conversation with a sex blogger about the Moxie doll we both received at one party. Personally, I was turned off by the doll's dominatrix outfit, but the sex blogger saw it as a blog topic opportuntity. Mileage varies. I gave my doll to the sex blogger. ]

• Swag distribution events created ‘in crowds’ and outsiders, as some bloggers were wisked Swiffer - ed away to private parties and sent back with free Nikon cameras, and other bloggers took swag bags at parties they hadn’t rsvp’d to (leaving the bag’s intended recipient empty-handed– and pissed).

I love free stuff as much as the next former graduate student. I still attend conference meetings for the free Swedish meatballs even though I can buy my own at IKEA, so I was no paragon of anti-acquisitive virtue. But I did push myself to recognize that, after the PBS booklights and Croc sandals for my girls, and the Izzy T shirt for me, I had all the swag that I needed. I didn’t need to troll the exhibit area or stop off at another party for any more ‘free’ stuff. Unless Ann Taylor was giving away free earrings. Those I’d have left a Geek session for.

Anyway, see what I mean?

I did a mini-experiment, trying to see how the swag giveaway process worked from the side of the giv-er. I walked down the hallway handing out 2/3rds of the chocolate and toys from the Allstate Anti-Driving While Texting Gift Basket I won in a raffle, taking deep breaths and trying to swap greediness for generosity as my dominant vibe.

But oddly, although folks were happy to take the cell phone parking pads and the Gerber babyfood samples, giving these things away didn’t create new relationships for me with other bloggers. Funny how that didn’t work.

I wonder how well it worked for BlogHer, as an organization?

Some of the swagging was from the conference sponsors, who had every reason to expect that the conference would support the distribution of their marketing messages. After all, that’s why they were sponsors. And we attendees got that. We understood that the conference was affordable (and even offered scholarships) because the sponsors paid a fee to be featured.

Former marketer that I am, I did my personal best to support the sponsors that were relevant to my blogging practice. I watched the Bing demonstration and learned how to print trifold brochures on an HP printer. I opined to the Verizon vlogger on appropriate cell phone etiquette. And, I expressed my dismay to the StoneyField yogurt marketing exec that they were discontinuing their MochaLatte flavor. This all was fairly useful interaction with sponsors.

But what wasn’t so useful, to me as a BlogHer participant, were the unofficial sponsors, like the companies behind the exclusive private parties who sapped participant attention away from the blogging practice sharing & community building interactions that the BlogHer conference is supposed to be about. If the crowds around the official swag weren’t bad enough, the distinctions created by the private swag rent the fabric of the community.

Where do you draw the line?

Sponsorship, and thus swag, makes the conference run. But too much swag perverts the conference purpose.

Me, I knew where to draw the line.

My checked luggage was 8 lbs. over weight, and since I wasn’t about to pay $50 to check an ‘overweight bag’, I unzipped my Tumi (they weren’t a BlogHer sponsor- should have been) and handed out some of my swag to airport passersby. Yes, I was the woman giving out free samples of Tide over by the American Airlines counter. But again, giving out this free stuff didn’t create any new relationships for me.

Maybe I was doing the swag thing wrong? Maybe I don’t really know how to use the swag to create or support a community?

But tell me, what does it take to do it right?

Photos by Liz Henry & I should be folding on Flickr

and I'm pooped!

But as is par for the course, life's roller coaster keeps chugging up that hill.

I was lucky enough to get a small number of Ms. magazine copies to pass out at Blogher and I've already gotten word that some stores are selling it despite an August 4th news stand date. This means that I need to brace myself for a small uptick in traffic.

I have to laugh at this because I spoke this morning at the National Council for La Raza (ya know, Sotomayor's racist organization!) on social media and one of the last questions was about rankings. I told the man (damn, what was his blog again? This is what happens when I'm on stage without a pen!) that I gave up on my stats and rankings a long time ago. I gave up because I know I'm listed on some pretty big blogs exclusive blogrolls. I know that I go to places like La Raza & Blogher and get "I love your blog!" comments from people who I have no idea who they are. Thus, stats can suck it. Feedburner, Google stats, Google rank and especially Technorati seem to be unable to explain why I seem to be fairly popular. I'm not A-list, but I'm not totally D-list anymore. But that's not why I missed the D-List lunch - I swear I thought we were having breakfast! haha...

But I'll be back at the La Raza conference for a short event on Monday and part of Tuesday burning up my press pass.

And if you read my blog on my blog instead of a RSS reader (it's ok, that's how I read your blog too.) you might notice that my Blogher button has been replaced by a Blogalicious button! Oh yes, I'll be traveling to Atlanta to hang with fellow women of color bloggers & some of our super kewl white girlfriends.

BUT...that will be after I get back from Tampa for the Florida Consortium for Women's Studies. I submitted a proposal to look at how the increase in women in general on campuses might be helping the increase of women in STEM. A total, total preliminary study, but I'm hoping that it will give me some direction for some research projects.

Whew!

Like I said, the roller coaster keeps chugging along. Some days I feel like I'm being run over or dragged, but more often than not, I'm enjoying the ride.

And to all my coworkers who read Ms and now have found my blog, Hi!

You might have clicked on that link in your latest Blogher Attendee newsletter and found yourself here.

First let me say thanks for clicking! Or oops, you clicked, but stay a moment.

Next, come say hi to me at the "Leadership: What is "Pro-Woman" in a Post-Palin World?" panel on Friday! It's at 2:45 pm. So take your break before me. I'm sure it's gonna be a fab conversation.

Lastly, don't forget why my link was even in the Blogher newsletter - BlogHer SOS!



And I do have to give 100% of the credit for the idea to Kim and the info on Deborah's Place to my fabu coworkers who helped organize a similar donation drive earlier this year. See my friends, that's my real #1 skill - networking - I get people together. So make sure you get together with me this coming weekend so I can hook ya up later on.

I confess - before I reluctantly started this blog a few months ago, I didn't read too many blogs.  I have a page of RSS feeds but they are mostly professional and academic blogs. But I am compulsive researcher and a news addict.  So my e-mail in-box fills each day with Google Alerts and e-newsletters.  [...]

Girls are more plugged-in than boys. Duh.

A new LA Times/ Bloomberg poll surveyed the habits of 12-24 year-olds and uncovered some interesting data regarding girls' media-consumption habits, as well as their attitudes about media:

They are the most sensitive to degrading depictions of women — 78% find this type of content most offensive — and the most enthusiastic about viewing content on iPods, laptops and cellphones. They're also the most carefully monitored by parents: 68% say their parents know how they spend their time online.

[...]

Often called Generation Y, the Millennials or Echo Boomers, these kids are known by economists, sociologists and marketing experts as optimistic team players and rule-followers, born into "child-centered" families and raised as part of the most celebrated, protected and overscheduled generation in memory. Technology has been so much a part of their lives that, to them, life before e-mail and the Internet was "the Stone Age."

[Girls this age] were influenced by the late-1990s "girl power" phenomenon and now are often more accomplished, higher achievers than their male counterparts, economist and historian Neil Howe said. They're also more likely to use technology to socialize, according to the survey findings. More than half of teenage girls reported regular instant-messaging, about two-thirds report writing and reading e-mail regularly and just under half report visiting social networking sites.

"Today it's the girls at the front of generational change," Howe said.

[...]

The poll showed that ...today's teens contradict long-held assumptions about gender. For example, the survey found that when it comes to offensive content, 66% of boys and girls ranked disrespecting women at the top of the list. Teen girls are especially facile with technology, in some cases more so than boys their age — for example, 21% were open to the idea of watching a movie on an iPod, compared with 16% of teen boys.

Cue the "but boys do the math and science and coding better because they're genetically pre-disposed to perform better at anything that requires thinking. Naturally, the females do better at the social Web." BECAUSE OF THE SOCIAL!!!!!!!!

And, as we all know, women dominate the boards of Web 2.0 companies. BECAUSE OF THE CLUETRAIN!

And while we're on this topic, has anyone seen any women bloggers lately?

 

According to Pew (link is pdf), more than half of all bloggers blog anonymously or under a pseudonym. So I wonder if everyone was lying, coming out naked or drawn from a self-selectively-skewed sampling, because I was the only pseudononymous blogger I met at the BlogHer conference.

"So what's your blog?" was the opening refrain to many conversations. Multiple choise: (a) "Oh, I blogged more in the past, but not much lately, but I'm thinking of getting active again" (which is true); (b) "Mrs. Borden's Parole" (which is false); (c) "I don't want to say, I'm too embarrassed" (which is true); (d) "If I told you, I'd have to kill you" (which is false b/c I'd just kill myself)....

This may not be a fair generalization, but it seemed like a mommyblogger's conference. At least it seemed like I was meeting a lot of mommies (who presumably were bloggers, or else why would they be there?).

A lot of the sessions were interesting. From what I read of the first conference, I guess I was expecting more interaction within the room, but it seemed like most of the presentations were just that -- presentations, and while they all had Q&A, few of them were room-wide discussions, and that's too bad. There were a lot of really interesting women there, but it seemed like I heard mostly just panelists and presenters.

Now maybe I'm just too burnt out on politics, but I think the most boring session was the politics session. At first the room wasn't even that crowded, but people started to come in after it started. It was kind of unique, with one woman (whose name has escaped me) being kind of the Sally Jessie Raphael, walking around the room with the microphone, getting questions, having a panelist answer, and then opining herself.

I don't know. The whole political thing bores me these days -- which was kind-of addressed, at least the burn-out "dark night" kind of angle. Me, I'm just bored with stupidity. And so I guess I was hoping that we'd have some sharp commentary on the political scene. Maybe I just slept through it. It just seemed like this session was the opposite of what I'd expected, because while the panelists for the most part did not engage each other in debate, it almost had this kind of kumbayah feeling, like, Isn't it just so cool we're all blogging about politics (but let's not really get into it).

It was kind of fun seeing Lindsay Beyerstein up there, and for a conserative, Ann Althouse was reasonably non-offensive -- at least her statements were mostly devoid of party-line jingoism.

(I can already hear the protests about my admittedly over-generalized characterizations of that session and the people. Well, share it. Maybe we can have the exchanges that did not happen there.)

I also liked hearing Jarah of Fresno Famous, who was funny talking about how odd her town is. And hearing about Lindsay's harrowing encounter with the gubmint post-Katrina, and a soldier's (?) threat of "disappearing" her and her friends when they trespassed onto prison grounds where an unofficial morgue was supposedly kept.

The room was overwhelmingly liberal in the I'm-skeptical-of-anything-the-government-does kind of way (which used to be a conservative trait before conservatives embraced fascist values), so at least I didn't feel out of place.

Just bored.

But the conference itself wasn't boring. Arianna Huffington and Grace Davis were almost more political in their closing keynote. Arianna's story about losing her social circle of friends when she dropped conservatism and embraced liberal values was interesting. As someone whose politics haven't changed much in xx years (while the parties have raced righward), I'd never thought about losing all of one's friends just for dropping GOP gang colors.

Still, looking back I can see why the majority of bloggers who blog anonymously or under a pseudonym don't seek out an event like this. In many ways, it was like going back to high school, with clicques and -- how do you spell what sounds like "soashiz"? and then the rest of us.

Biggest hoot: Seeing a blogger named Liz Henry living it loud (to the extent that she is the subject of not one but two of the more outlandish appearances in the Flickr BlogHer photos [and that's 'nuff said]).

Biggest disappointment: Missing Lauren, formerly of Feministe, who's now blogging under a male name and suddenly garnering all sorts of respect. Go figure, huh?

---

Technorati tags: blogging BlogHer internet personal

Sorry for the slow posting of late. It's convention/ conference season and I'm down in Little Rock.

Speaking of conferences, I've heard through the grapevine that Chris and Amanda have raised enough dough (thanks, in part, to you) to purchase Lauren's flight to and from BlogHer. Now she needs some coin to pay for her hotel stay, meals, transportation, etc. If you could give up a latte or two this week and throw those resources Lauren's way, that'd probably be really helpful.

Chris Clarke has all the details:

...A groundbreaking feminist blogger with an emphasis on building community really ought to be at July’s BlogHer conference, which is itself devoted to building community among blogging women. But Lauren can’t afford to go. Strange as it may seem, this Midwestern single mom in her mid-20s with a newly-minted degree and a job in the social services sector to pay for it all is too broke to go to BlogHer. I know! It’s just weird. But it’s true...

Chris and Amanda have devised a scheme to get there. So throw her $5-$10, would ya?