The agenda for the first day has been focused mostly on case studies with people who have been successful using blogs and other social media.

A few interesting takeaways:

• The kick-off had a bunch of interesting data about women in blogging and social media. Many more details can be found in the presentation.
  • 36.2 million women actively participate in the blogsophere every week (15.1 publishing, 21.1 reading and commenting)?
  • More than half of women maintain the original blog they started
  • 24 percent of women surveyed say we watch less television because we’re blogging. 25 percent of us say we read fewer magazines because we’re blogging. 22 percent of us say we read fewer newspapers because we’re blogging
• Find sponsors that *add* to your goals. For example, Manic Mommies got GM to sponsor the Mommy Escape by providing something useful for the attendees – transportation to and from various parts of the event. It was a way for GM to be involved without distracting the attendees with sales pitches.
• Listening is so important. “Participate” in the community by watching and learning first. Once you understand the community and the audience, then you should start contributing in a way that helps to build the relationship. This is especially important in business conversations to avoid coming across as a jerk with a hard sales pitch.
• Don’t send bloggers press releases and pitches – it is really easy for bloggers to delete those. If you have a relationship with them and you send them a personal email with information that is really useful for them – those are harder to ignore and much better received.