A Confederacy Of Something Or Other: My Much-Anticipated Broad Summit Post-Game Analysis

I stole this picture from Design Mom. I'm hoping she doesn't make me take it down.

Internet, I had not planned on writing about The Broad Summit, a conference? social gathering? world peace rally? that was thrown a few weeks back in Northern California for a group of about 30 female bloggers. Because even if the event caused a bit of a stir among the mommyblogosphere, involving the usual wave of jealousy and hurt feelings that are part and parcel of events like these, I figured that none of this was really news for us from a business perspective. I prefer to analyze these kinds of dust-ups by asking questions such as e.g. how does an event/ set of actions strengthen (or weaken) the blogosphere as an industry? how will this event/these actions reflect on me as a businesswoman in the same industry? is this a model that I can/should adopt for my own business? and the like. Because for me, blogging is first and foremost a business endeavor: if I have fun and make friends in the process, then so much the better, but my primary goal is to strengthen the business model of the blog itself and this informs everything I do here and elsewhere in the blogosphere. And I didn’t really see how hurt feelings over not being invited to a private party could be construed as a business concern.

But now it’s two weeks later and we’re still being subjected to recaps of the Broad Summit and all of the inspirational wonders that occurred there, and my interest has been peaked by what I’m learning about the sponsors of the event: who they were, how/why they were used, how they were pitched. Because I was going on the assumption that this was a private party, and now I’m not so sure. I have seen it suggested that it was a private party, but I have also seen things that indicate otherwise, and what I suspect is that The Broad Summit was somewhere in between the two, and as such it raises interesting questions about the monetization of blogging: are we moms, or are we writers? Are we businesspeople, or are we friends? If we are friends, then why does DDF Skincare have a banner up? I think that the source of the quiet, but decidedly frosty reception of The Broad Summit by the bulk of mommyblogging community is this indecision, and coincidentally, this is a recurring problematic of female identity in The World since, oh, the beginning of time. Are we public, or are we private? We are both. Like it or not, we are judged as agents of both the public and the private spheres simultaneously, and when you choose to take actions that further blur these lines, or when you choose to ignore the niceties of one sphere or the other, you will be criticized. I don’t think this is news to anyone. This is life as a woman: hear us roar.

The broad summit invitations.

On Choices, Both of Words And of Invitees, And On Hierarchies, Both Real And Imagined

The summit is located at the very top of a mountain, far beyond the reach of the average climber. This primary etymology frames the use of the word “summit” in all other contexts, whether it is deployed as a reference to an achievement of the highest caliber, or to a meeting of the most powerful heads of government in the service of some collective higher good. Even when “summit” modified by a tongue-in-cheek use of anachronistic misogyny circa late 1940s America, “summit” suggests a gathering of extreme and necessary exclusivity, the type of thing we are willing to allow to happen because we feel it is necessary, that things of importance will be discussed and decided upon there, by people whom we have entrusted our fate in such important matters as world peace, nuclear disarmerment, global economic stability.

A summit to drink wine out of crazy straws? Not so much.

Words are chosen for a reason, even in jest: I believe this. So when I see something called a Broad Summit, I have to think about the terminology used and why it was chosen. I give it more thought, even, than perhaps the people who named the Broad Summit in the first place, because I believe, as Freud has it, that language is always already overdetermined, and that the meaning in a set of words is not always consciously articulated even by the wordsmith. But that the lack of a conscious decision does not suggest that these kinds of meanings are accidental.

If this is a meeting of the highest powers in our industry, then I have a few questions to pose, foremost of which is how were the attendees chosen? Summit attendees are ordinarily elected or appointed officials that represent the concerns of a community as a whole. Helen Jane says that this was to be a “mini-retreat with a small group of friends –- or people [we’d] like to know better,” which supports what Maggie Mason had to say about the attendee list: “all these women have meant so much to me, some of them are close friends, some my inspirations, but every one of them has enhanced my life in some way. For me, this weekend is a thank you for everything they’ve done to make my life better.” These descriptions are heartwarming, but they still raise some questions for longtime bloggers: why these people and not others? Because it is not Maggie Mason ’s “Blogroll in 3-D,” strictly speaking, as she suggested it would be: where was Dooce (did breastfeeding keep her away? Is she not able to “drink wine and talk about smart things”? Or was it because The Bloggess was there, and things might have been awkward?), or Sara Brown? &c.

Hey look! Free earrings. From Gwen Bell's Flickr Photostream.

But more interesting to me than the people who weren’t there are the people who were invited for undisclosed reasons. Like Jean Aw (of Notcot.org, a set of design and fashion related sites that gets over 3,220,000 pageviews per month and is represented by Federated Media) is not even on Maggie’s blogroll, neither is Dorothy McGivney (who used to work for Google, but now writes a travel blog and has connections in the travel industry) of Jauntsetter, and neither is Asha Dornfest of Parent Hacks (a highly respected parenting site that is represented by Federated Media). For kicks, I cross-referenced the blogrolls of other Broad Summit organizers to see if these bloggers were featured on other blogrolls, but they are not on Aubrey Sabala’s blogroll, either, and Helen Jane and Laura Mayes don’t have blogrolls posted. We must assume that these bloggers figure heavily into those Google Reader lists that we cannot see, because otherwise it would mean that these bloggers were invited to an event despite the fact that nobody who organized the event reads their blogs. And why would somebody do that?

So who are these people, then? Are they friends? People who the organizers thought might get along well? People who they wanted to meet, but never had the chance? In her own words, Helen Jane “would not have been invited to this event were [she] not throwing it. Period.” And Melissa Summers felt she was “incredibly fortunate” to have been invited. These comments suggest that there is some kind of hierarchy involved in the invitee list, if we hadn’t already figured that out by just looking at it. So let me be the one to clear up the confusion on how the invitees were chosen. They were chosen based upon their classification into one or more of four groups, with some overlap among the categories in certain cases:

1. Maggie Mason’s Friends, aka The Old Guard;
2. Bloggers Who Have Clout Of Some Form (Pageviews, popularity, respect in community), aka The New Guard;
3. Maggie Mason’s Blogroll; and
4. Bloggers Who Have Sponsorship Connections.

The percentages of the invitee list are as follows: 30% are Maggie’s friends and the Old Guard; 23% are Bloggers With Clout Of Some Form, aka The New Guard; 26% are from Maggie’s blogroll, and 6% are probable sponsorship connections. Here’s the thing, though: who they invite is up to them. It might make us think of them as elitist douchebags, but then we’re free to throw our own parties whenever we want and not invite them, right? But on the other hand, this was not an exclusively personal, private-sphere event, as is shown by Melissa Summers‘ comment that she “learned more about how people are making their websites pay them for their hard work and was inspired to keep focusing on making this site what I want it to be, without giving away content or being taken advantage of by corporations who see blogs as a free advertising service,” something that presumably she would have already learned from one of her own friends in The Old Guard, had they known such things prior to the event. In fact, that kind of information could only have come from a few select sources on the invitee list, and when you design an event to share information like that, then you are starting to veer into reasons why people might think you’re a douchebag. Because when your event has a high percentage of people who wield some kind of power within a community — a fact of which you are clearly aware, since you’ve named the event a “summit” — then people start to get nervous. Because not only are you saying that there is a hierarchy here (which we all already know, but which we’ve implicitly agreed to keep our mouths shut about so that we might someday hope to be included in that hierarchy), you are saying that this hierarchy is something you intend to take active steps to safeguard. You start looking like you are taking steps to keep out the great unwashed.

And that is when people start getting pissed.

Sponsors couldn't make presentations, but they could make displays. Via Design Mom's Flickr Photostream.

Sponsorship

Do I have a problem with using sponsors to throw yourself a party? Not at all: I think that corporate sponsors are responsible for spending their money wisely. Insofar as you can make them pay for you to “learn about wine” and eat from taco trucks, I encourage you to do so. I have heard through the grapevine that Maggie Mason made no secret that her primary purpose in publishing her life list is to get sponsors for her trips around the world, and to give her and her friends things for free. I really cannot blame her for this approach, and if she can exploit it, I say more power to her. So yes, have a social event, invite your friends, even get somebody else to foot the bill, if you can. Awesome! The only issue I have, really, with sponsorship is that I don’t want the way sponsors are used by people now to affect how they might view me in the future. If sponsors feel they are getting a good return by sending Maggie Mason and Melissa Summers to Costa Rica, then that’s awesome. Because when I approach them with a project, I don’t want to have them citing a past experience with a blogger as a reason why they don’t want to fund my project. So as long as everybody is remaining happy in these deals, I cannot see a problem with it from a business perspective.

That said, I was initially very dubious about how a sponsor could possibly be getting a good deal out of funding something like the Broad Summit. There were less than 30 bloggers there, and if you add up the pageviews per month of all of their websites together, you are still way below Pioneer Woman’s pageview count per month. Take out Jean Aw, and you’ve got significantly less than Dooce . I don’t know how much money the sponsors gave, but I do know that none of the attendees were running Broad Summit ads on their sites, much less giving Toyota and other sponsors space. And the website thrown together for the Broad Summit could not possibly be generating enough traffic to make exposure worth their while on that front. But as the Broad Summit recaps kept coming, then I started digging around, because why are these bloggers dwelling on an event that was over two weeks ago? Why would they keep posting recaps to an audience that is already kind of uncomfortable with the whole thing? Well, maybe because they have to?

I stole this picture from Design Mom. I'm hoping she doesn't make me take it down.

Maggie Mason is on her third Broad Summit recap. Design Mom has featured several extraordinarily detailed posts over the course of the past two weeks, together with beautiful photos, that detail exactly what each sponsor did. For example, in a post called “Old & New Friends,” she writes:

Some [of the sponsors] were companies I’ve been a fan of for ages — like Flickr. And some I’m excited to get to know — like Typekit. I thought Typekit’s presentation was especially cool. They offered all attendees a year long subscription to their font service (I’m really looking forward to trying this out). And because it’s hard to wrap up something like an internet service subscription, they attached the card to rustic metal letters . . .

She also mentioned the “Zicam Yoga Session,” which sounds like Dole sponsoring the Jungle Ride at Disneyland to me, and featured a photo. She is careful to explain that

Sponsors weren’t allowed to make any formal presentations about their products, so I wondered how they would participate. I loved Zicam’s solutions (future event sponsors: take note!). 1) They left a thoughtful hangover kit (remember the packed schedule of wine + wine + more wine) on each attendee’s bed — filled with soothing little products to ease dehydrated bodies. 2) They hosted a morning yoga session taught by Gwen Bell. I confess, I did not participate (I opted for extra sleep. I always opt for extra sleep.), but doesn’t it look inviting? And visually pleasing?

These posts are so detailed, in fact, that I started to wonder if they were otherwise sponsored, like this one for DDF Skincare, which is almost like a product placement. If it is indeed a product placement, then that is remarkably well-orchestrated sponsorship, particularly since I don’t believe that Design Mom had anything to do with procuring sponsors for the event. And if it isn’t, then that means that the sponsors of this event are probably getting a decent return on their investment, which I admit was a shock to me. I do wonder what, if anything, Design Mom is getting out of the deal, though.

And Finally, A Note On Alcohol.

As a recovering alcoholic, it is very hard for me to weigh in on the alcohol issue without everyone dismissing me as a teetotaler, and this is why I’ve never really spoken up on this topic before. That said, I would be lying if I didn’t admit that the degree to which alcohol is involved in mommyblogging events and degree to which it is talked about in blogs troubles me. I don’t have a problem with people who can handle their alcohol drinking alcohol: if I were one of you, I would certainly join you. However, I think there’s a reason why, outside of Mad Men episodes, you don’t see a lot of professionals getting toasted while they work. It’s tough to be professional when you are drunk. So if the event is first and foremost a social endeavor, then by all means drink to your heart’s desire. But if you are going to have sponsors for your event, and put up a website (however ill-trafficked) with the names of those sponsors on it, I would think you would want to make it at least appear like you are doing something of interest there other than getting drunk. And I don’t think this occurred at the Broad Summit, since Zicam’s contribution to the event was to provide “hangover cure kits.” I hate to be the one to break it to you, but drunk people are not very interesting to anybody, except maybe other drunk people, and even this is debatable. Trust me on this: this is one area in which I’m an expert.

You can dress it up as “learning about wine” (and I will spare you my thoughts about what wine connoisseurship is, at its heart, because it’s really not the point of this post), but the bottom line is that this obsession with alcohol in the mommyblogosphere is not professional. Sponsors look at mommybloggers like we’re a bunch of lushes who have to be drunk in order to handle being around each other. Do you think they look at their other sponsorship opportunities this way? Do you think that Tiger Woods is getting hangover kits from Nike? And what about the three pregnant women and the two Mormons who attended the Broad Summit? Did you send them wine splits with their invites, too? Or perhaps a little bottle of chocolate milk or something, to match the crazy straw? Alcohol is part of doing business, particularly at social gatherings. I understand this and don’t have a problem with it. But when the alcohol takes center stage — no matter how much you try to class it up with food pairings and the like — I think it starts to make the whole community look pretty bush league. And because of that, I wish we could just give it a rest with the boozing.

I have some other thoughts about this event, but I’ve already been going on for almost 3000 words and I think it’s time to open this up to the community at large. Unlike my usual posts on these topics, I find myself at the end without a decidedly linear argument to make about what The Broad Summit means for the blogosphere as an industry. I would like to say that the event looked beautiful and like there was a lot of fun to be had, and that I recognize the unusual position in which the invitees were placed: had I been invited to the Broad Summit, I’m honestly not sure what I would have done. On the one hand, I would have been excited, flattered, and I would have wanted to attend for obvious reasons. But on the other, I would have worried about the fallout from attending an event like this, much less from sponsoring or organizing it. I do wonder if others felt the same.

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