I Spoke, I Saw, I Re-evaluated What I Love: Mom 2.0 Summit

I was in Laguna Niguel, California at the Mom 2.0 Summit from May 2nd to May 5th.

Now, before you worry that this is one of those annoying conference posts that cheers RAH! RAH! while telling you nothing of import, I swear this is not one of those. Unless you don't give a fig for the state of women, social media, and the health of Us. I hope you do, because this is the future we're in, baby, and the water's fine.

Also, this might be long-ish. Get coffee.



The conference was held at the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel, which was undeniably ritzy.

I am one of those people who opens her suitcase, pulls out every last item, and then proceeds to throw each article across different pieces of furniture. My brain calls this "organizing my outfits", which is hilarious, because I don't have outfits. I have black, black, and more black occasionally broken up by a pattern on black or a brown shirt. Aaanywaaay, I exploded my suitcase, left the room, and when I came back, everything was folded square and placed neatly back in my suitcase.

The staff at the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel are incredible. They are beautiful and friendly and will hang your thong underwear delicately from the bathroom doorknob if you are the kind of blogger who might indelicately leave your thong underwear out in the middle of the bathroom for your roommate's enjoyment.

Which I am not. Okay, I so am. I miss Suebob already. She was the best roommate.



You maybe don't know this, but I'm afraid of flying, so I distracted myself on the way to the conference by making fun of a giant children's toy at the Calgary airport. Who couldn't, though?

As you can see from its plaque above, the toy is in memory of Punch Dickins, a bush pilot who flew a Fokker through Regina. The jokes just write themselves, and I'm sure that that toy must defile the minds of thousands of children every year.

I apologize for my immaturity if Punch was your uncle or something. I'm sure he was a lovely man.



Anyway, I got on the plane, I made my peace with my place in the universe and the things I have done in it, and then I survived again, as usual.

My mind, it brings on the drama.



The conference was a string of gorgeous events from the opening party to the last,



with meals under palm fronds in sunny, oceanside courtyards,



and, well, the OCEAN was there, but all of that natural beauty and the posh environs were not what made Mom 2.0 Summit a success.


Whirlpool made me lusty after appliances and avocado pesto over pasta.

What made Mom 2.0 Summit such a success was the dedication of both its founders — Laura Mayes and Carrie Pacini — and the conference sponsors — Dove, Honda, and Lowe's, to name a few — not only to the social media and marketing end of things but also to truly meaningful engagement and social good.

This was what I found in my conversations with the attendees, as well. While we had honest discussions about our desire for professional growth in social media, most of those discussions also included ideas about how we can incorporate social good into the work we do. Sure, it was nice to get free gift bags of a company's product, but we also wanted to know how that product, that company, or our relationship with that company would work towards bettering the world we live in.


Jessica Ashley and Meagan Francis getting manicures

I've watched blogging and social media grow and change over the last ten years, and, at least in the parent blogging communities of which I am part, all childlessness aside, it is growing up into a fine, fine thing. The people I met were mindful and focused and inspired to contribute both to the communities they inhabit and the world at large.

Gone was the childish elbowing for swag for which bloggers have been criticized. At Mom 2.0, I saw attendees, sponsors, and film and television personalities, such as Kyra Phillips and Amanda Peet, engaging with one another on more equal footing, watching and listening and figuring out the next steps through this medium together. There was an equality and a shared purpose that I had not seen before.

I say all this as someone who does not focus on sponsored content in my own work but who believes that the blogging and social media community's health depends, at least in part, on its ability to handle its connections with marketing not only well but also meaningfully.

Women bloggers are smart, focused, and generous, contrary to The Wall Street Journal's take on us.

I did have a low point, though. I'm not going to lie. Conferences tend to overwhelm me, because, despite the fact that I get on stage to speak, and I travel the halls hugging people and trading business cards, I am a fairly extreme introvert.

I finally broke on Saturday afternoon — too much socializing coupled with a vulnerability hangover from the "Fear and Becoming Known" talk I delivered to a couple hundred people on Friday afternoon — and so I took some time to go for a walk on the beach alone and reconsider my entire life up until that point and going forward, because why not reassess your place in the universe and freak out about middle age and feel completely lost and more than a little hopeless in the middle of one of the most beautiful places on earth?

Again: my mind, it brings on the drama.



By the time I made it back to the hotel, though, I felt like I had been set aright again. Sometimes, all I need is a little bit of a realignment. Call it soul chiropracty, if you will.

I looked around at my community, and I was proud of what I saw. The entire community down to the last blogger is not always a stellar example representing the whole, but, by and large, this is the kind of community I have been trying to build up, hoping for, the kind of community that strives for quality, creativity, and meaningful action.

That's why getting together with my peers in the field is so important. I learn, change, go through the ridiculous process of freaking out about said change, because even good change can mean a difficult adjustment, and then I grow again, both personally and professionally.

It's a little like moulting, only less reptilian and more with the crying on the most beautiful beach in California.


This is Polly, me, and Jim. I win in a hair fight.

In short, if anyone tells you that women in blogging and social media are just a pile of over-sharing narcissists who need to get real lives, what they're really telling you is that they have no idea whatsoever about what is actually going on.

I admit it, I was doubting the health and future of our group of early adopters a couple of years ago, but no more. There is a sea change afoot, and we're just getting started.

Dear everyone I met at Mom 2.0 Summit in Laguna Niguel, you rocked it out. Love, me.

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And, last but not least, if you would like to see the slides from my Mom 2.0 Summit talk, "Fear and Becoming Known: Connection and Growth Through Selfish Acts", you can see them in the slideshow below.

Fear & Becoming Known: Connection and Growth Through Selfish Acts
from Elan Morgan

25 Things On My To Do List Before I Head to Laguna Niguel to Speak At Mom 2.0 Summit

1. Look forward to getting out of Saskatchewan for a few days, because this is what our spring dumped on us last night. For serious:



2. Sand the devil callouses off my feet so that they look less hoof-like in sandals.

3. Shave my legs. I have what we Canucks refer to as "insulation" going on, but I don't think anyone's going to be complimenting me on my luxurious fur in Laguna.

4. Find the business cards with my actual name on them, because, believe it or not, I have a name other than Schmutzie!

5. Practice my talk over and over until my voice cracks.

6. Try to rework my talk, because it takes ten minutes to get through, not the seven it's supposed to.

7. Fuss over writing a sentence that ends in a preposition, because procrastination by grammar worry feels productive.

8. Laugh at the men's deodorant in Shoppers Drug Mart. BELIEVE IN YOUR SMELLF:



9. Work on my word enunciation, because maybe I can fit all ten minutes into seven minutes if I speak really fast.

10. Go clothes shopping, because I am still wearing the clothes I bought for BlogHer '10.

11. Launder all of the things.

12. Feel like I'm marching headlong into old age while organizing my vitamins and allergy medication into a days-of-the-week pill organizer.

13. Investigate my suitcase for signs of cat urine, because Onion is an evil bastard who likes to thwart my travel plans.

14. Listen to the whole of Neutral Milk Hotel's "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" album at least three times, because repetition is my lorazepam.



15. Pick up American money at the bank.

16. Play dirty words in Scrabble to amuse myself enough to forget my travel anxiety.

17. Feel the old burn of the grudge I hold against my grandmother for that time she wouldn't let me play FUCK on a triple word score for many tens of points.

18. Place a panicked call to my hairdresser. Leave a panicked message when she doesn't pick up. Panic.

19. Practice gelling my unruly sideburns behind my ears.

20. Make both Onion and the Palinode wheeze with extra squeezes, because I'll miss them when I have to sleep without them in my hotel room. The other two cats are being pissants, so they can suck it.



21. Try to keep my cool about the fact that I get to room with the inimitable Suebob.

22. Make sure I have my itinerary handy, because I have to make my way through seven airports on this one trip, and I WILL NOT FAIL.

23. Write extra poetry in advance so that I can keep up with my #365poems project while I'm travelling.

24. Write a prayer tanka while waiting for the herbal anxiety tincture to kick in:

Remember your feet.
They move on assuredly.
They know the way there.
They've borne you since your first year,
and bear what you cannot see.

25. Pack my suitcase.

5 Reasons Why Blogging Is Not Dead or Dying

Blogging isn't dead. It isn't even dying, even though people have been calling its time of death since about 2006. I've been watching it, doing it, and thinking about it for almost ten years, and blogging is not going anywhere. It is changing, and there are more platforms with various ways of organizing and sharing content, but change does not signal the death of this almost endlessly flexible platform. Blogging is not dead or dying, and here's why...



Reports of blogging's demise are often based on official studies, but the findings of those studies are easily twisted to support attention-grabbing headlines. For instance, Inc. conducted a survey that revealed only 37% of Inc. 500 companies kept blogs, which was a 50% decline from the preceding year. They used these numbers in the beginning of an article titled "Where Have All the Bloggers Gone?" to say that blogging was "...on its way out as a marketing tool". Later in that same article, though, they used the survey's finding that 92% of the businesses' blogs were seen as a success to call blogs "an invaluable tool".

The headline made it sound like bloggers were becoming a dying breed, but the article was really about how most of Inc.'s 500 companies weren't leveraging this powerful tool. The facts really only related to a few hundred blogs in a very specific niche out of the millions that exist.

The 2013 Digital Influence Report from Technorati Media shows that blogs rank third behind retail and brand sites as likely to influence a purchase, so blogging isn't dying as a marketing tool at all. It's being underused due to fear and lack of clear traffic reporting, but it's not dying.



More people are attracted to microblogging on platforms like Twitter and Tumblr than to blogging in longer form, but that is because blogging was never ideal for every user and not because blogging doesn't serve a vital and ongoing purpose for those who use it. It was just all we had outside of forums before microblogging platforms came along. Humans have spent millennia storytelling in longer form, though, so it isn't going to go away just because it's online and we have the option to blurt 140-character messages at each other.

Blogging won't die just because it's not the number one, go-to platform for content creation. Online content platforms are not locked into some kind of cage match where only one can emerge victorious.

Anecdotally, the first telegraph in the United States was invented in 1828, and Western Union didn't discontinue all its telegram services until 2006, even with the advent of telephones and the internet. Not that I'm equating blogging with the entirely obsolete telegram, but it's hard to argue with 178 years. Variety isn't a death knell, and blogging still has a strong heartbeat.



The success of newer platforms like Instagram and Tumblr might be because they're image-based, but guess what? Blogs have pictures, too! The people who use the argument that images trump words online to declare that blogs will die forget three major factors. The first is that blogging is an incredibly versatile platform that can look just about any way you want it to, the second is that there is a lot of text-based content online aside from blogs, and yet no one's calling for the death of reading online, and the third is that people often create the kind of content they want to see, so blogs are already making a natural shift to more visual content.

Is content on the internet moving toward more images and less text? Yes. Is blog content in particular also moving toward more images and less text? Yes, it is!



Shared platforms like Medium are "'rethink[ing] how online publishing works and build[ing] a system optimised for quality, rather than popularity. Where anyone can have a voice but where one has to earn the right to your attention. A system where people work together to make a difference, rather than merely compet[ing] for validation and recognition.'"

The idea, too, is that a shared platform like Medium lends to clickability and shareability, because people are likely to recognize the platform link, much like Twitter links, and trust it more than a lesser known domain name associated with an individual. It seems to be a hair's breadth away from a group blog, and when it opens up to the public out of beta, I wonder how its credibility will hold up or how it will manage to behave any differently from the larger blogging community when it comes to competition for validation and recognition. Whether platforms like Medium are a wild success or not, though, I doubt their existence is the harbinger of the death of blogs.

The content on Medium is pretty good, by the way. Go take a look.

I understand why someone would write for a larger platform with the possibility of increased trust and shareability, but locating all your content on platforms and domains over which you have no control means the possibility of losing that content and, even if you do keep copies of it, losing the urls that point to that content if and when that platform and/or domain closes up shop. Case in point: Posterous is closing its doors on April 30th. Any investment in the power of the links to that material will be lost.

Content you publish on your own domain stays there as long as you choose to maintain it. Your personal power online is only as stable as the home base from which you operate, and blogs make an excellent hub from which to showcase your work and establish a trusted identity.

If journalism is now a process, continually updating and iterating on the facts in any given event, then you can't really freeze it in an article anymore, can you?

Why Blogging Is Dead — And What's Next, Fast Company

There is the argument that we release our information as it happens these days, that our narrative is an ongoing stream, and that an article, once written, is, by its static nature, already behind the times. This argument barely holds up when it comes to writing about current events, because I would argue that some of the most valuable journalism requires longer-form storytelling, but, even if the argument does hold up, not all blogs are about current events. Blogs are avenues for storytelling, and we have been telling stories to each other for millennia, stories with beginnings and middles and ends. The rise of more platforms like Twitter and Facebook to facilitate ongoing conversations does not signal an end to longer-form content on blogs.

Humans are born storytellers, and we still value our stories, even if we have to read actual paragraphs to get them.

Those who declare that the last days of blogging are upon us are more often than not reacting to the decline of their own blogging careers or changes within their corner of the broader community that they find threatening. It's not over for blogging if all the news agencies and journalists jump ship any more than it would be over for book publishing if writers of erotica all became porn video producers instead.

Much ado is made about blogging's decline, but, online or off, we are humans born to tell stories, and we are born to tell them in a variety of ways from 140-character bursts and several-paragraph tomes to art and photos of kittens. We're individuals after all, and not all of us are built to share our stories in the same ways. Blogging is the most flexible platform for communication in human history, which is why, despite all the news to the contrary over the years, social media hasn't managed killed it.

So, is blogging dead? Not even a little bit. Vive le blog!