Yesterday I was one of the fortunate ones to head of to Bristol Blog camp. I had a wonderful day, met lots of lovely people and learnt lots too. I am so glad I went and would recommend to all considering going to one.
The venue was M Shed an impressive venue overlooking the harbour. The glass gave great views and I think it might have been even more impressive on a warmer sunny day.
The day started off with introductions by Sally Whittel, the organiser of the event. You might also know her from the Tots 100 Prenting Blog Index , Blogger.Ed and of course The MAD Awards. She also blogs herself at Who's The Mummy? She introduced each speaker and was a vital part of the day, encouraging questions, tweeting and generally keeping us all smiling and engaged. She was lovely.
We then went on to a talk by Chris Mosler from Thinly Spread. Already a follower of her blog and impressed by her work with Save The children, I was rather in awe of her. I managed to speak to her at lunch time and she was really lovely too. I was very surprised to hear that she has only been blogging for 19 months, I really thought it was a lot longer than that.
Next up was Elisebeth Winkler who has an award winning blog, Real Food Lover. Again I was really impressed with her talk and she gave us lots of handy tips including go for awards, anything going. Even being shortlisted looks good on your blog
I must admit I was very surprised to see that she sets herself a target of blogging at least once a month. She said too many people blog daily and you cannot keep up with it, read every post or comment on them all either.
Coffee break gave us a quick chance to freshen up and have a chat. I was pleased to meet up with the lovely Jenny from Mummy Mishaps with her little 6 month month old boy. I had met them both previously at an event in the Summer so it was lovely to catch up again and have a little cuddle with a little one too.
I was really interested in the talk on keeping your kids safe online and hearing about Homesafe by Talk Talk.
Later Phil Szomszor who blogs at The Red Rocket talked about the relationship between blogger's and PR's. This was probably the most controversial of all the talks, particularly when he said PR's do not read our blogs but are good at giving bloggers free stuff. Twitter was going mad! He stuck to his guns though and said that he was surprised that 37% of bloggers thought PR companies got it right, he thought it would be much lower than that.
He also said to not get too worried about the number of follower's you have and other scores as generally PR companies do not even look. Interesting!
After a lovely lunch and a chance for a chat and catch up it was time for the final session. Despite being told at this point that we were running over, most of us were not too worried. It helped that it was an interesting talk by Lee Smallwood on helping people find your blog.
Some of the best tips included:
- Be active and post comments on other sites
- Reply to posts on yahoo Questions
- Try video responses to other peoples videos on YouTube
- Try bookmarks like Delicious
Looking forward to the next event now.
Karen x
