BlogHer 2009, the conference dedicated to female bloggers and the companies that want to market to them, went off in Chicago last weekend.
After spending some time reading accounts of the experience on blogs and Twitter, one thing has become overwhelmingly clear: BlogHer has turned into a marketing orgy, which is resulting in formerly normal, sane women turning into swag hungry monsters.
It's understood that the money that comes from these corporations (BlogHer was sponsored by a ton of them, including but not limited to Pepsi, Tide, Wal-Mart, Ragu, Swiffer, and the National Pork Board) is what makes these expensive conferences happen, but with great power to accumulate free stuff, comes great responsibility. And it looks like some people can not handle it.
Case in point: George Smith, the Social Media Director for Crocs, was accosted by a blogger after she didn't receive a free pair of shoes at the Crocs party. A woman blackmailing a man who was at this conference doing his job, for a pair of plastic shoes.
The second case of misdirected outrage was on a smaller scale, but just as ridiculous. Nokia threw an invite-only cocktail party and turned a woman away who brought her baby. She jokingly tweeted about this with the hashtag #nokiahatesbabies and the Twitter floodgates opened. While some bloggers called for a rational response, others were pissed and said Nokia should have anticipated that people would bring babies to a bar.
It didn't exactly turn into Motrin Moms 2, but the amount of time spent bemoaning an incident which the actual person involved in said was a simple misunderstanding is indicative of the sense of entitlement that is taking over a certain section of bloggers simply because PR agencies are now paying attention to them. Not to mention that mommyblogging, what started out as a form of "radical truth-telling" (and which it still is) is now turning into shilling.
Which is essentially what has appeared to have happened at BlogHer. One blogger says it best: "While Blog Her 2007 was a kind of geeky gathering of babywearers and girls in horn-rimmed glasses who dreamed of making the jump from blog to book, BlogHer 09 was a chaotic, whorish dance of brands and bloggers."
When a movement is forced to start a campaign called "Blog With Integrity" then something fundamental has changed. Where has the integrity gone?