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Business bloggers at the Blog Business Summit

I’ve gone to two blogging conferences this year — BlogHer and the Blog Business Summit.

BlogHer was about the blogging experience, focusing on how it relates to women, of course. The Blog Business Summit was about how to understand blogs — what they can do for businesses and how they’re being used today.

The people I met at BBS seemed to be either from PR & Marketing firms, or from big businesses. I met very nice people from Visa International, Nordstrom, and Mastercard, to name a few of the big corps that are checking out blogging.

These folks are still figuring out how best to use blogs — some want to use it internally, some to converse with customers or suppliers.

There were some small business bloggers at the panel on blogging for small businesses, moderated by Jory Des Jardins. The panelists included Kevin O’Keefe of Lexblog, Stan Mackey, (who’s real estate blog I wrote about in June) But for some reason, I personally didn’t meet any folks from non-tech and non-PR smaller businesses who wanted to use blogging to help them.

On the attendees list of the conference, I also found:

So I know a few of these folks were there, I just didn’t try hard enough to find them.

I think some of the early feedback from the conference was that people wanted to hear more case histories and stories from larger companies who were blogging, not tech insider stuff (but I love that techy stuff!). Perhaps there should be a track on that as the conference grows. These folks wanted to know how other companies handled the internal resistance to blogging, for example.

This conference is something smaller businesses who are thinking about blogging should check out, too. The price for the conference wasn’t bad, especially if you got in on the early-bird rate. Of course, for Connecticut and environs, Seattle was a long way to go.

I think there’s still plenty of needs that these conferences can address for large and small businesses. But Blog Business Summit is definitely on the right track! I’m glad I went and I look forward to the next one.

But I never did find out why “Blog Business Summit” and not “Business Blog Summit.”