The first session I attended was “Generate Awareness & Profit: How to Take Your Social Network Offline” presented by Rebecca Braglio, Emily Burns and Rachel Phelps. They spoke about how to use your blog and social media tools to become more influential and make a difference in your community.
The next session was “Navigating the Pet Lifestyle Product Landscape: How to Attract Readers and Advertisers with the Hottest Trends in Pet Blogging.” Jaime Derringer and Kate Benjamin discussed how to find your niche in the pet lifestyle landscape and how to structure your blog to appeal to advertisers.
Next up was “Helping Pets in Need While Activating Community” presented by Kat Smith. Kat talked about the new Petco community and presented information about their Think Adoption First program. She also announced that Petco would donate $5,000 to three animal shelters to be selected at the end of the day!
Then Stacy Mantle presented “Blogging While Broke: Cost Savers for Online Pet Influencers.” Stacy identified free resources and tools to help save time and money, and she showed us how to repurpose content and images to keep development costs low.
The afternoon keynote speaker was Brent Herd from Twitter. Brent shared the back story on Twitter’s growth and global impact. He also discussed how pet bloggers can use Twitter to build a community, increase their readers, grow their business, and shine a light on their favorite cause!
The final session of the day was “Finding and Keeping Sponsors” presented by Joanne McGonagle and Amy Burkert. They discussed developing a mindset that increases your confidence when dealing with sponsors and gave advice on what to include when making a pitch. They also gave insights on maintaining your integrity while balancing sponsor requests.
The conference closing included the drawing of three animal shelters to receive the $5,000 Petco donation, lots of great prizes, and an opportunity to vote for the date of BarkWorld 2013. Thanks again to BarkWorld Expo and Natural Balance for sponsoring me – I look forward to attending again next year!
I was so bummed I did not make it this time. Thank you so much for posting the line up, it looks like another great conference! I would have love to attend all of them and am especially intrigued about taking Social Media offline...... thanks!
ReplyDeleteI wish I could have seen more of these presentations! Responsible for participating in three of my own limited my abilities, to be be sure. Thanks for the recount here!
ReplyDeleteOne thing I was so glad NOT to miss was seeing you at the block parties. It was lovely to spend time and to laugh. Thanks for that!