Babystepping My Way Back To Blogging

It’s been over two weeks since my last post. In that time, every single member of my family was sick, sometimes two at a time. I got so frazzled, I just couldn’t find room in my brain to think about clever posts.

When I started this blog in 2005, I thought of it like an online journal. I wrote about everything from what I was watching on TV to what was happening in politics, with the occasional amusing kid story thrown in.  Since that time though, I’ve often felt like my blog was barely in my own hands.   In order to get blog traffic these days, in order to stand out among the thousands, I feel like I have to constantly be better, be bigger, be more funny, have a bigger giveaway, post something new every day, post, post, post.

If this was just my online journal, then I would just post whenever I felt like it, even if that meant months in between. But because I need this site to generate at least some income every month so we don’t lose our house, I feel this pressure all the time.  I’m sure it’s a common feeling among bloggers who monetize.

But the longer I go without posting, the guiltier I feel, so it’s pretty much a whole bunch of feelings wrapped up in a URL for me. I LOVE this blog, you guys. It’s not the biggest, it’s not the best, it never gets on those “top blogger” lists, but it’s MINE. I created it, I typed every word on it, and when I go to an event or conference and someone says “hey, you’re Elizabeth from Table for Five”, I beam like I won Miss America.

So that’s what’s been going on in my head this past few weeks, the desire to jump back into blogging but without driving myself nuts doing it. I’m going to start by getting a Menu Plan Monday post ready, since I need to make a grocery list anyway. And then I’ll see what else pops into my head that I want to get in a blog post for posterity.

Enjoy your weekend my friends!

xoxo

ELIZABETH

Table for Five circa September 2005 – Where it all began

Blogging – I’ve been doing it wrong.

I didn’t make a big announcement or anything – which is unusual for me, I know – but I’ve stopped writing product reviews and hosting giveaways here,  and it wasn’t even a big deal, I just…stopped.  I wanted Table for Five to go back to what it was when it started, a personal blog.

There’s just been one problem. I forgot HOW to write a personal blog. I know that sounds crazy, but it’s true. Personal blogging  in my mind became this HUGE thing, like if I didn’t have profound things to say, there was no point in writing at all. I had built it up in my head that every post had to be a long discourse on deep subjects.

And then this morning, while Kaitlyn was getting ready for school, it hit me.  I was remembering this blog the way it was in 2005 when it started, but was I remembering it correctly?  After the bus came, I opened up my dashboard to All Posts and filtered it to September 2005, and opened up Notepad.  Was my first month of blogging filled with long profound posts on deep subjects?

In between pregnancy updates, this is what I blogged about in September and October of ’05:

hurricane katrina
gas prices
funny post about school lunch
favorite links
stupid political moves
feelings about weight
seeing the movie Serenity
fun google search game
reaction to A.A.P. story about pacifiers
funny joke chris sent me
“Life is Good” – a post about a great day
Looking back when the boys were little
dumb thing I did
politics

And you know what the most surprising revelation was? The average post was only 200 words! I had one post that I counted and it was only 95 words. And it still got comments!

Personal blogging for me does not have to be about deep profound thoughts and hours of writing a day.  I need to stop being afraid that my writing isn’t “good enough” as it is. I need to stop worrying that if my blog doesn’t have the same kinds of posts as others, no one will read it.

When I first started Table for Five, I didn’t think anyone would read it. I thought a blog was like an online diary, that only people I told about it would read it.  When I would write a post and get 4 or 5 comments, it made me feel amazing. But writing a post and getting no comments didn’t stop me from writing again.  And that’s where I got off track this time.

I love Facebook and I respect Twitter, but if I put all my good thoughts there instead of here, I’m missing out on an opportunity to have all those thoughts collected in one place.

So those are my thoughts this morning.  I just may be getting my blogging mojo back, and that’s a good thing.

Words and Photos of my Friend Tre of Thought by Thought

Blogging has brought some incredible people into my life, and one of them is my friend  Tresha (TREE-sha) Thorsen of  Thought by Thought. I’m sharing her words and photos of her here because I want all of you to know just why she is so special to me!

It all started in 2007 when she emailed me to say that she had seen the BlogHer ’07 badge on my blog and was also going to be there and would love to meet me. Despite having each other’s cell numbers, she looked for me that Thursday night, all day Friday, and all day Saturday before finally literally standing right in front of me that Saturday night. I had taken a photo of her Friday morning when everyone got up for “speed dating” without even realizing it was her!

It's Tresha!

Look, it's Tre!

Tre is a healer. She works with people to help them learn to push aside those negative, self-doubting inner voices that hold us back and learn to accept ourselves, to treat ourselves with kindness, to live thought by thought if that’s what it takes. Just being around her makes me feel like I’m okay. She radiates this peacefulness from her beautiful blue eyes. And she is 100% genuine.

BlogHer ’08 was in San Francisco, and Tre was there. I took a commuter train from the airport to a stop near the hotel, and as the train doors opened and I stepped out, I almost knocked Tre off her feet. How coincidental is that, that I just happened to be getting off the train as she just happened to be getting on the same car? She was heading to Berkeley to meet friends so she had to run, but we met up during the conference.

IMG_4501

Since then I haven’t seen her in person, but we’ve emailed and gchatted and facebooked. In fact, what prompted me to write this post is her latest Facebook update. It seems like whenever I am having a crisis about something, Tre has a post that says exactly what I need to hear and think about. Like this one from her Facebook wall today:

Ever feel like you react to life and get overwhelmed by it? Or feel you are beat by it or like your life isn’t going how you want? What if it’s not about reacting but creating? Not being impacted by but causing an impact of your intending… Not about never getting where you wanna be but seeing you are there ( the only where) and allowing for that?

That is exactly the problem I’ve been having for a couple of weeks now. Reacting instead of creating. Holding back instead of moving ahead. Living in the past instead of focusing on now. I suspect many of us feel that way at one time or another.

The saying goes that people come into our lives for a reason. Tre came into my life and I am a better person for it, even if I don’t always remember her advice.  I strongly encourage you to visit her blog thoughtbythought.net and read the page “My Healing Practice” first. If you need help NOW, if you need someone to listen, someone to support you even if things are falling apart, please go to Tre’s blog and click the Need Help Now tab.

if I hadn’t started blogging, I would have never met Tre. And that’s why blogging is so amazing, because the day you publish your first post, you become a part of a community, if you want to be. Open yourself up to new people and new experiences.  Learn what makes your fellow bloggers unique and interesting.  Promote them, support them, and by all means, share them with your readers like I’m doing here!

 

 

Why No, I Can’t Just Leave Things Alone. Why Do You Ask?

I have no excuse. I just saw it in my themes folder and thought hmmm, wonder if I can fix the weird sidebar problem I was having before?

I fixed it, except that something is still wrong with the way the sidebar handles widgets. Some are smushed over to the right and I can’t figure out why yet, but you know I will.

Just thought it warranted at least a mention :)

The Right Words Don’t Belong Here

Diary

Image by Barnaby via Flickr

I wish I could put what is in my head into words. I wish I could unburden myself, pour it all out of myself in a thick stream, and have something that makes any kind of sense come out.  This blog was started as a personal diary, but back then, there was no Twitter or Facebook. I didn’t know about Google, about each individual post being it’s own search result. I didn’t know how not private a blog is.

Unless I were to password-protect this blog, there’s no way to make what I write here private. There’s no way I can use this space as a place to write about what’s really happening in my life, because it’s not really personal anymore. Table for Five is a brand, an entity with a life of it’s own. But all I want to do right now is write, unburden, purge.

The problem with blogging as a job is that any other kind of blogging besides the kind that furthers business goals feels like cheating. I need 5 or 6 hours a day MINIMUM to make even a small dent in my email and update my three blogs.  The problem is, the place I’m in right now in my head, I’d rather spend that 5 or 6 hours a day on denial and avoidance and trying to shake it off so I can move forward.

I realize how cryptic I’m being here, which is exactly the problem.

There’s a lot going on in my life right now. I feel just a little bit like my arms and legs have each been tied to a separate horse, and someone’s about to crack a whip and yell GO.   I can’t deal with all the broken things but I can’t figure out how to fix them all, either.   I’ve completely given up on expectations of perfection, now I would settle for just okay most days.

And now comes the part where I admit just how lame I am – one of the reasons I don’t just start a private blog is because I would hope for comments on my posts. *hangs head in shame*  Yes, it’s true. Even if I were blogging about my personal problems, I would still hope for a few friendly, supportive comments once in a while. Maybe someone would read something they could relate to, something they’ve been through themselves, and would have a comment that would make me feel better.

Is that wrong?

So that’s where I am right now.  It’s so hard for me to focus on any one thing that I can’t focus on anything. My head is a swirling pool of unfocused thoughts and plans. I’ve used more similes and metaphors in this post than I can count, because I don’t know how else to explain anything.  I just wanted to write something here, so that some day maybe I can look back and say that I tried to explain it, without actually, um, explaining anything at all.

Damn it.

It’s supremely weird that I’m basically telling all of you that I have stuff to blog about that I don’t want to post here, but I don’t want it to be private, so if you wanted to, you know, read my Ode to Unburdening, you would have to ask me for the URL to the blog, which is you admitting that you would be fascinated by my internal turmoil, and me admitting that I would want to open myself up like I never have before, expose all kinds of ugliness, knowing that people who were likely to share an elevator with me at BlogHer would be reading it.

Blogging is really weird sometimes, you know?

It’s because I have this blog that I haven’t just gone and buried my head in the proverbial sand and disappeared. It’s bad enough that there are huge gaps where I wrote almost nothing personal at all, during my year of making badly-needed money but losing almost everyone who originally read this blog and who also, probably not coincidentally, moved on to bigger and better things while I stood back at the starting line yelling wait, what about me?

Issues, much?

The issues I have right now could fill a book. A THICK book. If I started from the beginning, if I broke my life down for you into manageable chunks and told you what I’ve done, where I’ve been, and how messed up things are now, you would probably give me a wide berth on that BlogHer elevator. Or maybe you wouldn’t, I don’t know. I hate being this fucking passive-aggressive.  So, I’m going to stop now and hit publish, and go take a two hour nap while Kaitlyn takes hers, and maybe when I wake up, everything will feel a little better. Sorry to go all Emo on you.

 

 

 

 

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Coming Around Again

I know nothing stays the same,
But if you’re willing to play the game,
It’s coming around again.

Even though that Carly Simon song is about marriage, I keep hearing that lyric in my head. Now that I switched to this Genesis framework/Lifestyle child theme and have my categories up at the top, I’ve been going through the categories looking for ones I can combine so there aren’t three rows of them. Which means I’ve been reading a lot of old posts.

You know what? In 2006, 2007, this blog was really good. I wrote exactly the way I spoke, let words just pour out of me onto the screen. I wrote posts where I talked about what I did all day, what I watched on TV that night, places I went, things I saw. I told my readers how awesome they were, how much I appreciated them, how important they were to me. I wrote posts where I linked to new readers, it blows my mind how some of today’s most well-known bloggers were once my commenters. But I know exactly why those bloggers stopped reading and commenting.

I started writing paid posts. I don’t regret doing it, at the time I needed the money so much, but what I do regret is letting it change the way I wrote. I realize now that my writing got really formal sounding, like I was writing ad copy instead of incorporating the paid links into regular posts. I lost my voice. And that sucks.

I can’t go back and make it 2006 or 2007 again, but I’ve been reading those old posts and, well, trying to re-learn how I wrote back then. I liked that Table for Five, and I want to get it back.   I’m still accepting the very occasional paid posting job, it’s hard to say no to some of the dollar amounts I get offered, especially when it’s for a product I really like.  But I think I can see now how I can get back to the kind of blogging I used to do and still work in the occasional paid post or giveaway.

If you have a minute or two, I encourage you to click on the category links up at the top. The ones with the little arrows next to them mean it’s a dropdown menu and there are subcategories.  It’s been fun for me, finding posts I had completely forgotten about writing, and reading where I was in my life three or four years ago.

And if I haven’t told you lately, THANK YOU for reading this blog. Thank you for reading, and commenting, and making me feel like I’m not just talking to myself.  I hope you all stick around for the next five years.

Jennifer Mendelsohn and the New York Times got it totally and completely WRONG.

The article: Honey, Don’t Bother Mommy. I’m Too Busy Building My Brand. (I really, REALLY wish I was kidding)

The topic: Women attending the SiTS “Bloggy Boot Camp” in Baltimore, a day-long workshop on SEO, Social Media, working with PR, etc.

The section: FASHION & STYLE

Number of times FASHION and/or STYLE were mentioned in the article: ZERO

Number of times my daughter “bothered” me while I was reading the article: 3

Number of times my daughter has “bothered” me while I’m writing this: 2

Number of times I told her to “stop bothering me because I’m too busy building my brand”: ZERO

The opening paragraphs of the article:

ON a brisk Saturday morning this month, a dedicated crew of about 90 women, most in their 30s or thereabouts, arrived at a waterfront hotel here, prepared for a daylong conference that offered to school them in the latest must-have skill set for the minivan crowd.

Teaching your baby to read? Please. How to hide vegetables in your children’s food? Oh, that’s so 2008.

The topics on that day’s agenda included search-engine optimization, building a “comment tribe” and how to create an effective media kit. There would be much talk of defining your “brand” and driving up page views.

You know. For your blog.

Wow. Snarky much? I bet you didn’t know that if you drive a minivan, having a blog is a “must-have skill set”.

On her blog, Ms. Mendelsohn says that her intent was to inform NY Times readers about “an interesting world that many Times readers had no idea existed: a world where hundreds of women are so serious about blogging that they would take a day out of their lives (and even plane fare and the cost of a hotel room for some) to actually take a seminar on how be better at it.”

Fair enough.  But then why didn’t she do what she says in her own blog post, which is simply write an article about the connections between mom bloggers and corporations, about how mom bloggers are realizing the power they have to influence other people’s purchasing decisions, about how we are a “cultural force to be reckoned with”? Now THAT would have been a good article. For the BUSINESS SECTION.

She also says she didn’t write the headline, the Times did.  There is no way I can read that headline and have it come across as anything but condescending and belittling.    Those of us who are working from home  with small children in the house spend all day trying to balance work with parenting.   And yes, there are times when I have a post due and put on a Spongebob DVD for Kaitlyn so I can write without her climbing all over me.  Does it mean I’m “too busy” for her? NO. Does it mean she is “bothering” me? Well, okay, sometimes :)

There is not just one kind of mom blogger. There are mom bloggers who make no money from their blogs, who blog purely for the creative outlet, to have a place to document their lives, share stories, give and receive parenting advice. There are mom bloggers who have said yes to placing ads on their blogs, and those who have said no thank you. There are mom bloggers who review products and host giveaways, and mom bloggers who don’t.   There are as many types of mom blogs as there are moms.

Which is why I also have a problem with this paragraph:

“Whereas so-called mommy blogs were once little more than glorified electronic scrapbooks, a place to share the latest pictures of little Aidan and Ava with Great-Aunt Sylvia in Omaha, they have more recently evolved into a cultural force to be reckoned with. Embellished with professional graphics, pithy tag lines and labels like “PR Friendly,” these blogs have become a burgeoning industry generating incomes ranging from $25 a month in what one blogger called “latte money” to, for a very elite few, six figures.”

Ms. Mendelsohn, there are blogs, written by moms, that ARE “electronic scrapbooks”. They are called scrapblogs. And since the definition of “glorified” is  “To cause to be or seem more glorious or excellent than is actually the case” (source: thefreedictionary.com), what you are saying is that they SEEM like good blogs, but actually are not. That’s pretty harsh.

You did get one thing right though – bloggers are a force to be reckoned with. We are intelligent, educated, passionate, proud, caring, and forgiving, but you need to understand that we are also defensive about what we do.  I spent years as a stay at home Mom with no creative outlet.  I had few friends in my neighborhood and my Mom had passed away before my oldest son’s first birthday, so I had no one to turn to for parenting advice. Then I discovered blogging.

I am PROUD of what I do. I am proud to tell people that I have three blogs, and I sell advertising space on them and also receive products from companies who want MY opinion on them. Going to a day-long or weekend-long conference in order to improve at what I do does not mean I neglect my children.  I don’t earn six figures a year, I don’t even earn five figures a year.  What I do earn is a little extra money that helps us afford “luxuries” like new jeans for my constantly-growing boys, or our family vacation to Great Wolf Lodge last summer.

For your next article, Ms. Mendelsohn,  may I suggest other interesting worlds that NY Times readers might not know exist?  Like the “so-called Daddy blogs”, or the food blogs, or the photography blogs, or political blogs, or eco-friendly blogs, or the frugal/coupon/freebie blogs?  They get together at conferences too. Some of them are probably Moms, and they might even drive minivans!  I’d like to read an in-depth article about their “must-have skill set”.

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Getting Back to Basics

Ever since I started blogging a jillion years ago, I’ve noticed that there are times when it seems like everyone whose blog I read is writing about the same thing. I don’t mean like when we all get home from BlogHer and post our photos and tell our stories, I mean, times when we all seem to be thinking along the same lines regarding our blogging.  I’ll explain what I mean in a minute, first let me backtrack a bit.

Last month, I was chatting with Amy on Facebook and somehow we got on the topic of blog comments. I told her I missed the days when I had 13 readers, and how exciting it was every time any one of them left me a comment on a post.  We talked about Twitter, and Facebook updates, and how it’s so much easier to just post there than come up with a whole blog post. We talked about how there are so many blogs to read that it’s hard to stop and leave a comment when there are 100 more posts in the reader to get through.

Today, Mr. Lady posted about Community on her blog Whiskey in My Sippy Cup (don’t read it? you should).  This is the part that jumped off the page for me:

This month, I am reinventing my own wheel. I’m changing my outlook on blogging, on my blog, on my role as a blogger and my attitude towards it. There are changes a’coming in my little corner of the internet, starting today. Today, I re-instate the blogroll (that I don’t have to code myself anymore, thank you sweet, pink baby Jesus.) You read my blog? You’re on the blogroll. Leave your url in the comments and I’ll take it from there. (Please be patient) Today, I also start clicking through that blogroll. Fuck the reader, screw Twitter…it’s time to visit blogs. It’s time to delurk, for good. It’s time to help the people who take the time to read this blog earn that extra dollar with their ads. It’s time to remind myself why the hell I do this on the internet and not on a cocktail napkin in the first place, which is honestly way more tactile-y satisfying and significantly easier to roll my chewed gum up in.

Well said. I don’t know about the rest of you, but 2009 left me feeling wrung out to dry. I finished 2009 absolutely and completely exhausted. I realize that it’s mostly my fault, I said yes to way too many things, and didn’t schedule my time well, and that’s something I’ll probably have to continue to work on forever. But there was also this pressure that I felt, whether I was putting it on myself or not, to TWEET MORE and UPDATE FACEBOOK MORE and keep running more giveaways so I didn’t lose my feed subscribers and keep reviewing more products so companies would stay interested in me and GO GO GO GO GO GO GO.

And the fact is, I have stopped reading blogs for the most part.  There are a handful of blogs that I check every day, but there are so many more that I haven’t read in months. And then I wonder why those people never comment on my blog posts any more! Well, DUH.  The truth is that blogging is very much a reciprocal thing.  You read them, they read you. You leave comments, they leave comments. 

So, like Mr. Lady, I’m putting back the blogroll.  I used to have one that linked to everyone who linked to me, I deleted it when an “SEO Expert” told me I had “too many links” on my blog. Well, too bad. Too many for whom?  I’m going to try to recreate it, if you leave a comment on this post telling me you link to me, I’ll start making the list.  And then I am going to click through that list as often as I can, read, and comment.  I’m going to try to find my Community again, and I hope those of you who want to be part of it with me will let me know.

Let’s make 2010 the year we bring back the importance of using our blogs to make connections with each other. Let’s not let “Social Media” (ugh) ruin what made us all start blogging in the first place. We can do it. We can get our blogs back.  Who’s with me?

So This Is What Calm Feels Like

Little People Christmas Toys
Image by Elizabeth/Table4Five via Flickr

Sometime last month, around the same time I mustered the courage to call my doctor and say HELP, I’M LOST IN A BLACK FOG, GET ME OUT, I made a decision. All I had to do to convince myself that it was the right decision was think back to Christmas 2008, when I was an anxious, nervous ball of stress every single day. Christmas is always stressful for me anyway, so the last thing I need to do is make it harder for myself.

So I decided this year that after a certain point in December, I would allow myself to stop worrying about my blogs all the time.  I saw how I had been living more of an online life than a real life, and I saw everything I was missing. I decided that I was going to make my husband and kids the number one priority. I began choosing to close my laptop and actually LOOK at my kids when they talked to me, instead of listening halfway while continuing to type. I started actually watching TV with Chris instead of half-watching while continuing to type, then looking up every couple of minutes saying “wait a minute, what did that guy say?” and making Chris rewind, which drives him nuts.

I’m a lot happier this year, my friends. The combination of the Effexor plus turning off the panic switch in my mind has made such a huge difference in my life, I can hardly explain it. I feel like I’m HERE, like I’m really being a wife and mother.

I’m still feeling a little bit of stress, mostly related to the fact that I STILL didn’t get cards sent out before Christmas, or do the baking I had planned to do, or get any presents wrapped yet at all, but I don’t lay awake for hours every night composing lists of posts I have to write. I don’t jump out of bed in the morning in a panic about the state of my email inboxes (which is pretty major since it used to be a daily source of stress for me). I don’t feel overwhelmed, I feel…calm.  I just wanted to share that with all of you. Thanks for reading!

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BlogHer 2009-The Good and the Bad

First, I want to say how bad I feel that I couldn’t post anything about the conference while I was there, for those of you who were stopping by.  Although we had a room with a wireless network and there was free wi-fi in the lobby and other areas of the hotel,  and although I could get my computer to connect to the BlogHer network, I couldn’t get any pages to load. Not once. And it was weird because people all around me were online everywhere. My roommate had no problem logging on in our room. Me, nothing.

Secondly, I have been trying to write this post for almost 3 hours. I just don’t know how to condense my thoughts.  The whole idea behind a conference about blogging is for bloggers to meet each other and exchange ideas and information. Or so it would seem.  I wanted to sit in on sessions where bloggers I admire talked about how I could make this blog better. I wanted to see the bloggers whose blogs I read and whose tweets I follow and hug them in person. I wanted to bask in the warm embrace of 1400 people who know exactly what I mean when I’m asked “what do you do?” and I say “I’m a blogger”.

The BlogHer staff works for an entire year on each conference.  That’s how long it takes to line up sponsors for the event. Why does the conference need sponsors? Because they enable the conference ticket to cost $200 instead of $1,000 and the hotel room to cost $200 a night instead of $400.  BlogHer finds a hotel that can accomodate 1400 registered attendees plus any additional family they might want to bring, and it’s an extra bonus if the conference rooms are right there as well. They put the BlogHer name on an event that people talk about for months before and after.

So here’s an idea- let’s repay BlogHer for all their hard work by behaving like responsible adults when we go to their conference.  Let’s remember that we are attending a professional conference where people like Tina Brown and Ariana Huffington are asked to speak to us.  We want to be taken seriously. We want what we do to be recognized as something of value.  Many of us want to be seen as writers with journalistic standards and a high sense of ethics.

So why were we (and I’m saying we even though I was not personally involved because BlogHer is a community and what even one person does can affect everyone), why were GROWN ASS WOMEN pushing and shoving and elbowing and complaining and THREATENING other people over…I’m shaking my head now…over FREE STUFF?  Please, someone explain this to me.

When I read that someone elbowed Amy’s baby in his face to get to a table of free stuff at an evening reception (NOT hosted by BlogHer), when I read that a person representing Crocs shoes was threatened in the lobby by a woman who claimed she could embarrass him with her blog if he didn’t find her a pair of the free shoes given away during a different reception, when I saw that one of the (Non-BlogHer sanctioned) parties had a gift bag that contained lube and a vibrator, I wondered where the heck everyone thought they were last weekend?

To their credit, I thought that the companies who set up exhibition booths during the conference all did a magnificent job. I wish I had walked down each aisle and taken a photo of the booths because they were amazing. Zappos and Bill Me Later had a photo booth, Wal-Mart created lounge areas with comfy chairs, Mary Kay brought in a makeup counter. One company that sells Kiwi Fruit brought in bushels full of fruit and these cool plastic serrated knife/spoons for instant eating. Springpad had great little notebooks and were taking business cards for a drawing of one of four prizes (I won a really cool car seat!). McDonalds had cooking demos by Paula Deen and Rick Bayless and gave away complete sets of Teenie Beanie Babies (I won one of those too!).  Pepsico was giving away pop and flavored water and all the little bags of chips and granola bars you wanted. GM put a Camaro right in the room with another one outside for test driving.

Suave brought in two celebrity hairstylists to give free blowouts, styling tips, and Suave hair care products. Degree had their new body sprays. Playskool gave out these adorable little toy vehicles shaped like bugs, All Laundry Detergent dressed up two people in pink clothes (they were the laundry fairies) and gave out chocolate star-shaped lollipop wands and travel size bottles of detergent.  And that’s just a few of them!

Now, these exhibitors, who were staffed by people from the companies and often a PR rep as well, were being extremely generous with their samples. By Saturday afternoon, you could pretty much take as much as you wanted because they didn’t want to pack up and ship home any more than they had to.  There was very little restriction on what you could take and how much.

Which makes it all the more baffling to hear about people scrambling for swag bags at the parties. How much stuff do people really need?  And one party, that asked people to RSVP ahead of time and the first 100 people would get a special (very expensive) gift bag, somehow ran out of bags before those 100 people got there. Who were they giving them too? Why have “rules” if you aren’t going to follow them?

Every year, I come home from BlogHer and there’s some kind of controversy. This year, it’s the Great Swag Debacle. I hope this post helped clarify that BlogHer themselves and the companies in the exhibition hall were not the guilty party.  Please don’t blame BlogHer for the actions and behaviors of others, and please don’t let it stop you from signing up for BlogHer 2010 if you are interested in attending. There was so much more value in this conference than just the stuff.

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