From August 4th thru August 6th I joined nearly 7,000 people at BlogHer 2011 in San Diego. Of the 7,000 attendees and exhbitors, it felt like less than 10% were men. One thing that was a dead giveaway was how short the bathroom lines were for the men’s room

It’s been a while since I attended BlogHer. The last time was roughly 6 years ago A lot has changed. What was once a small and intimate gathering of bloggers all trying to make “it” work, has now become a large, powerhouse, idea exchange.

This was my first time attending on behalf of a “brand” and not representing an agency. For attendees there were 3 formal ways to participate in all the BlogHer goodness:

1. Exhibits: these were companies/people who had booths designed to connect with attendees. P&G (easily the largest presence and footprint), Pepsi, Philosophy, Lee, Samsung and 3M are examples of companies who chose to exhibit.
2. Knowledge: these were sessions through out the day focused on making attendees smarter about specific topics. I attended Bad Blogger Pitches, Success On Our Own Terms (lead by AOL and Huffington Post), Perfecting Product Reviews, Great Blog Design, Exploring Inspiration And Leadership and the Twitterholics sessions. Each session was roughly 75 minutes.
3. Break Outs: these were usually sponsored modules from companies like Hershey, HTC and Google. I was impressed with how strong Google’s presence was. They were pushing Google+ hard and with good reason. The tools included in Google+ are going to let us transform how we leverage social (specifically the video chatting features).

I could turn this post into something obscenely long, but I’ll spare you! Here’s a few of my key take-aways:

1. Based on data from Nielsen bloggers are trusted more than news publications and even peers on social networks for product reviews. The Hispanic audience specifically over indexes with trust for blogs and bloggers.
2. Blogs are becoming more commercial. This is diminishing their value as being seen as “authentic” and “real” unbiased sources of info.
3. 5 years ago, PR companies were pitching bloggers. There’s a paradigm shift, because of how many blogs exist, where bloggers are pitching companies like us and agencies directly.
4. Google will be giving serious weight to content generated on Google+ for SEO rankings. More to come here from Google over the coming weeks.
5. iPads were critical to exhibitor performance. Those using them well like P&G and Jimmy Dean, leveraged them for demos, data capture, social media promotion, message maps and photo taking.  However, signups still take a while to process, which makes for quite a challenge when you consider each booth visitor has less than 5 minutes. A few companies understand this problem and nailed it by pushing SMS as a method for sign up.
6. Male/Dad bloggers are in high demand. But there are very few of them out there.
7. The real way for a brand to succeed at BlogHer is to have some combination of a large physical presence (P&G had a 60×60 area), big story (McDonalds had a small booth, but was talking about healthier Happy Meals), integrated sponsorship (Pepsi’s CEO was a keynote speaker), something unique or valuable (Samsung’s presence included charging stations).

I met several colleagues, learned a lot from them, shared ideas, discussed challenges and talked about how we continue improving. I was a little bummed that I never got the change to connect with Jess Berlin, the head of social at American Eagle. We played twitter tag for a few days, but could never meet up in person. She’s a smart one and I was hoping to get smarter from talking with her. Next time for sure!

Beyond the colleagues, I also met several bloggers. It was great hearing directly from them without a filter (aka agency). It’s clear that in a supposed era of transparency, we all seem to be withholding critical pieces of information that stunt our ability to collaborate well. We need to figure out how to fix this if bloggers are ever going to be able to trust brands and if brands are ever going to see the value from working with bloggers.

This was a great trip and good use of time/investment. The next BlogHer is in New York City. Definitely get it on your calendar.