Along with my co-panelist and close friend Raul Pacheco, I will be speaking next month at Northern Voice, an annual conference on personal blogging and social media that I’ve attended since its founding. I credit the first Northern Voice conference as helping me to launch my career in blogging.
On May 13th , Raul and I will be presenting the following panel:
Communities that Rock – Creating kick-ass online communities
Building robust, long-lasting and engaged communities requires much more than just having a Facebook, Twitter profile, a website or a blog. This presentation by Arieanna Schweber and Raul Pacheco is intended to showcase a variety of strategies, tools and techniques that anybody can use to begin laying the foundations of a successful online community.
Using your blog as your social hub, Arieanna and Raul will teach you a broad range of elements associated with community building: good blogging design, social plugins, good practices for sticky blogging, responding to positive and negative feedback, finding your online voice, maximizing your reach and nurturing your blogging niche, and building up a community with guest posts, forums, commentary and additional social platforms.
You will emerge from this session with a broad portfolio of ideas that you will be able to implement immediately to strengthen your online community.
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On May 14th, I will be moderating another panel, Parenting Online – Families, Blogs and Social Media, with Amber Strocel, Kerry Sauriol and Vincent Marra.
There are some great panels and panelists happening on both days – I hope to see you there!
At the start of May, we took Aiden to his very first conference – Northern Voice! We have been a part of the conference for all of its 6 years and I can credit the conference with helping to ‘launch’ my professional blogging career. The conference has always welcomed families, so we felt like it was a good chance for us to spend time with friends and to introduce our little geek around.
Image by Derek Miller
Taking Aiden to a 2-day all-day conference was a lot of work. We knew this. We expected that most of our time would be spent outside the sessions, which it was. We hoped to be able to nap Aiden in the kids room, but unfortunately that room had to become the registration room due to some unexpected fire regulations. I had a difficult time getting Aiden to nap and ended up only getting him 1 nap each day for the hours of 9:30 to 3 – his other naps for the day were in the car seat on the way to and from UBC.
Scales & Aiden in his custom-made ‘Bloggable’ tee in honor of the Northern Voice catchphrase / Image by Derek Miller
So, our little guy was a bit tired and a bit cranky, but he was still a charmer. He was practicing his new happy-yell a bit too much, and that led us to some controversy at the event. We were asked to leave the keynote, without warning, and didn’t feel welcome back after. It was a pity and sparked a huge debate. Lots was said about “babygeddon” online, but I don’t want to comment on that.
Let’s just say that we had a great time, it was tiring, but we are happy we took Aiden out. We look forward to going again next year.
I will, sometime soon, put together a “Family Friendly Conference Tips” post to help conferences that want to be family-friendly to understand the issues.
