Saturday was the much-anticipated Minnesota Blogger Conference at St. Paul’s CoCo. Hosted by Arik Hanson and Melissa Berggren, the conference drew over 140 of Minnesota’s most influential bloggers.
In addition to all the people I was able to meet on Saturday, I was also left with a lot of things to think about when planning my next social media move.
Toby Cryns gave an excellent presentation about CSS for Wordpress, and I left with a pageful of plugins and websites that will save me hours of googling as I start my next web project. Just the words Firebug and css3generator.com made this entire conference worth it.
Local favorite Julio Ojeda-Zapata lead a session on pain-free blogging and introduced me to a lot of up-and-coming blogging platforms like Posterious and Tumblr. Most importantly, he gave me a reason to think about domain hosting and why you should at least consider paying for a hosting service. When it boils down to it, you need to know if you own your content or if your hosting service does.
Molly Snyder lead a conversation about how to host blogger giveaways without giving away your integrity. A great session filled with excellent questions and discussion left me wondering about the big ad networks like BlogHer. As these bloggers ponder if what they review and giveaway will be a fit for their readership, ad networks have a lot of control over blog content. Does belonging to an ad network compromise your integrity?
And of course, as we learn local, we eat local. During the conference lunch, I snuck over to the St. Paul Farmers Market to grab some cucumbers and hummus. A girl’s gotta eat.
My favorite tweet during the conference was that social media is becoming reputation management. Wise words from a group of local experts. What was your favorite takeaway from the conference?
