Day Three, the final day of the 2011 North American Beer Bloggers Conference, was designed to allow participants to hear from fellow bloggers.
We started with eight presentations by eight bloggers, each given 10 minutes to talk about a topic of his or her choice. Topics ranged from how to get a scholarship to the next BBC to using voice recognition software to help your blogging. Pretty cool range of stuff.
As the organizer, I was most impressed that these eight bloggers had not only committed to talking but had each clearly put a lot of time into forming their presentation, creating slides, and delivering a professional 10-minute summary.
We then heard from Jay Wilson, blogger at Brewvana, who told us about his amazing journey through his project Diary of a Part-Time Monk. You should read about the project yourself – living only on beer for 46 days – but from our perspective, we invited Jay because he did a couple of things:
1. Came up with a great idea.
2. Executed it.
3. Gained exposure for himself and for beer blogging in general.
The very first piece of PR Jay received was in the Des Moines Register and was titled “Beer Blogger Tests Monk Tale”. We love that “beer blogger” was front and center.
By noon, the conference was over and folks were discussing where we should meet in 2012.
Thanks for an interesting and delicious weekend. I only regret that I was so busy connecting with my old friends that I met fewer of the interesting bloggers in the room than I wanted. But that’s community for you. Thank you for a worthwhile event!