Blog Con, organized by Bess Auer of Central Florida Top 5, was held at the Orlando Science Center on Saturday September 15th. The event was sponsored by Florida Institute of Technology and it was even bigger then last year’s event with about 120 attendees. I arrived a bit late and ended up missing the keynote speech by Lou Mongello in the morning. When Bess greeted me she helped me upload the conference schedule onto my iPhone. It was an impressive little program specially designed for the conference. The first talk I attended and sketched was Marketing Yourself – How to build Your Media Kit by Callie Cowen. Callie was a working mom from Venice Florida who blogs about her journey to a healthier lifestyle and hopes too inspire a few other “wannabe athletes” along the way. I had never considered making a media kit for my blog although I had seen many kits when I worked in the magazine business. She offered plenty of food for  thought.

Different rooms were set up so break out groups could attend different sessions running simultaneously in different rooms. Mark Baratelli who runs thedailycity.com gave a funny and cynical look at how he finds content that leads to a passionate following. He ironically noted that attending “Tweet Ups and other social media gatherings is a waste of time. Mark used to organize the Mobile Art Shows in Downtown Orlando and he had people gather at local food trucks to sample the menu. The food truck angle eventually morphed into the very successful food truck bazaars that he sponsors now. He lamented that getting people to contribute content t thee blog was usually a wasted effort in which time was spent with meetings to get people involved but in the end the contributions would dissipated since, well, people don’t put in much effort when asked to work for free.

My favorite talk was by Josh Murdock who showed us a whole bunch of fun widgets and gadgets.  There were gadgets for animation, film editing and all of them were free or cheap. Who could ask for more? Justice Mitchell gave a great talk on Storytelling and Problem Solving: The Keys to the Infectious Blog. He made it clear that as bloggers, we are all contributing to an ongoing dialogue by telling stories which is a tradition that began way back in the days of the cave man. He advised on creating content that helps people solve problems noting Myth Busters as an example. On Myth Busters they begin with a premise, they apply science and they form a conclusion. There was one session on Analytics that went way over my head. Apparently there is a numbers crunching attribute to this blogging business that is something I have been blind to. Blogging isn’t easy. But this day was a great way to get informed to try and catch the social media train before it leaves the station.