I'm taking the madness abroad: I'm speaking at the Women Business Blogging Conference in the UK

One of the questions I'm often asked regarding BlogHerCon is "Why a conference for women?" And I remind them, the event is for men, too. But we launched BlogHer in 2005 to provide a place for women where they could address their specific uses of social media. Sure, there are tech heads and gurus in our midst whom you'd see at the other blogging conferences, but there are also Mombloggers, personal diarists, knitting bloggers, food bloggers, you name it. And they want an event that connects them to others in their communities and provides discussion on their specific slice of the internet. Our approach to building community and addressing the many reasons why we blog is equally valuable to both men and to women, but it sprang from a need to incorporate the needs of women bloggers.

You might wonder, why do women need a business blogging conference? We showed at BlogHer Business that even in a field like business, where (for the purposes of this argument) men and women hold equal sway, there is something unique about how women approach the subject. By most reports BlogHer Business was as collaborative and practical as business conferences come. Men and women alike shared best practices, whether formally in sessions, or by scrawling a new tool on the back of a napkin. But it was a women's conference because it fully leveraged women's innate ability to share by example and through storytelling. And it offered up knowledgeable speakers who were women.

The success of BlogHer Business emphasizes the need I see for the Women Business Blogging Conference in the UK on June 8. Conference founder Sue Thomas, Professor of New Media, Faculty of Humanities, De Montfort University, has pulled together an event in conjunction with her department NLab (Narrative Laboratory for the Creative Industries) that brings much of what we've established with BlogHer to European academics, non-profits, marketers, and small business owners.

Sue writes:

In Europe over the last year several conferences have explored the potential of Web 2.0 networks to increase business opportunities - see LIFT07 (Geneva) and Le Web (Paris) for just two examples. But there have been no European events focusing specifically on women and social media.

Nancy White, responding to Sue's post, agreed that the visibility of the women's Blogosphere in Europe has been fairly low. Though Suw Charman would disagree:

Truth is that there aren't as many women in tech as there are men, and many of the women that are in tech aren't very good at promoting themselves and shy away from speaking roles. We have to ask why is that? And what can we do to make women feel more at ease in the spotlight? This is a far deeper problem, a societal problem, that is not restricted to blogging or technology. Why is it, for example, that women entrepreneurs end up paying more in bank interest than male entrepreneurs? These issues run deep.

Where do I stand on this issue? Like Suw, I've enjoyed many opportunities to speak at conferences, but then, being a Co-Founder of a women's blogging organization, that isn't as difficult to achieve as it is for an independent female blogger. What I find much more difficult is extracting the nuggets of wisdom about women and blogging that I take for granted--the knowledge I've neglected and filed away in the "no duh" drawer--that is like treasure to marketers, researchers, and others trying to grasp how women play into the power shift occurring in media today.

Fact is, women know stuff, stuff that marketers and researchers are becoming increasingly fascinated by and want to understand, but we women don't value that knowledge because it's so innate. We heard in '05 from MommyBloggers who had no idea what they would say by heading up a panel about their passion. Funny, they figured it out. And not such a surprise: people were fascinated to hear it.

I will be speaking at the Women Business Blogging Conference about the power that women hold online, and not just the women who get millions of page views per month, but women whose individual ecosystems, however small they may be, hold value. I feel lucky doing this because, quite frankly, so many of us already know this stuff. It's apparent in our blogging every day.

 

Women Business Blogging Conference, BlogHer, DeMontfort University, Sue Thomas, Nancy White, Suw Charman, NLab

Comments

[Nancy White]

I think you are right on, Jory, about noticing and articulating those nuggets. They start feeling so natural, that we forget they may not be natural for others!

[Felix Gerena]

Excellent piece, Jory. Knowledge always emerges in small portions. Even the most complex systems are the result of joining the pieces and giving them some kind of shape. Anyway, I have also felt the same sensation of thinking the results of some of my researches were pretty "obvious", but what else can you think after all if you are convinced with the truth value of something or you are so familiar with it you don't even put it into question?

In Europe we must be a bit more stalled, society is less dynamic and social movements take more time to develop.

I think you are doing a great job. Just keep doing it.

[Dave Seah]

I found this phrase really personally interesting:

"But it was a women's conference because it fully leveraged women's innate ability to share by example and through storytelling."

This has been an ideal that I've been moving toward in my own work-life direction, and it hadn't occurred to me that this might be why I found the BlogHer organization so compelling despite my guy-ness, or that these were traits associated with a woman's innate approach. Fascinating!

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