I am laying her in the afterglow of Blogher17. I have been enlightened, made connections, and had the opportunity to breathe the same air as many of my sheroes. Thanks to Dorethea Volpe, my new catch phrase is “Bacon is God’s way of saying “I love you”. In addition to the above, here are my 4 biggest takeaways from the conference:
I am not a liberal as I thought I was. I really did not know exactly what to expect. I honestly thought the conference would be non-stop blogger talk; however, t
here was an unexpected, but welcomed, political/activism aspect. Through this exchange, I learned that I am definitely left of moderate, but I am a bit closer to the middle than the far left, and I’m OK with that. Also, though I don’t necessarily agree with all the political views of Ana Navarro, seeing her in person at the conference made her a political rock star in my book.
I came as myself. For the first time EVA I attended a conference as Chandra. I’ve been to numerous conferences, both personal and professional, and at each of these conference you got either “Chandra the Woman of God” or “Chandra the Community Servant” or “Chandra the Insurance Professional”. But this conference allowed me to be “Chandra” who i
s a mixture of the aforementioned versions and a lot more. My first tweet on Friday was about the anxiety I had about wearing leopard leggings. When I arrived to the conference, I was relieved to see that everyone showed up the way they desired. This was liberating and was definitely a confidence booster.
Know thy brand. This conference was the mother of all “Elevator Pitches”. I’m used to saying “ Hi! How are you? Where are you from?”. Here, it was like “Who are you and what is your platform?”. You definitely need to KNOW your brand and your target audience.
Engagement. I hate to admit, but I was not sold on the Twitter game. I only signed up for a twitter account to be nosy one time. But I now know that if I want to make a space for me in this blogging universe, Twitter is one of the platforms that I need to utilize to build a presence and following. I have tweeted more this past weekend than I have in my entire Twitter existence, and I’ve gained some followers as a result. Who knew that “if you tweet, they will come”? I guess everyone did but me.
Needless to say, the conference was very fulfilling and I look forward to doing it again!
A Gullah Girl 