When (not if, but when) you go sign up for BlogHer you'll find a little questionnaire is part of the registration process. There are two reasons we did this:
1. we wanted to use this info to fine tune this year's Conference.
2. we thought it would help us plan future events, perhaps even including other geographies to target
I recently did a midway point compilation of the particulars of our attendees thus far and thought I'd share some of the interesting facts about who will be there on July 30th:
~10% are students
~15% men
~53% are from outside Silicon Valley
~54% have never been to a blogging conference before
More than 75% of attendees do care about either links or traffic or both.
Most attendees thought every reason we suggested as a possible motivator to come to BlogHer sounded pretty good and checked 'All of the above.' Among those who picked specific motivators, most seems specifically interested in meeting bloggers face to face...bloggers they know and bloggers they don't. (For all of our online relationships, we still jump at the chance for that f2f contact, don't we?)
Lastly, almost 40% listed "All Talk, No Take-away" as their least-liked aspect of other conferences they have attended. "Too Sterile/No Passion" came in second.
What do we get from this info?
-We're glad we planned several networking sessions/events starting the night before and through to the close of the conference.
-We're glad we've banned PowerPoint from most sessions! Poor PowerPoint, so scorned.
-We're glad we made sure to get alternate viewpoints represented in many of the sessions...by people passionate about their viewpoints!
Keep those registrations (and questionnaire responses) coming! [Remember, we have to close of registration on July 26th and cannot accept onsite registrations.]
How about an opt-in list of blog URLs for people coming to the conference? I would be happy to set up a public aggregator page for this.
Posted by: Lisa Williams | June 27, 2005 at 10:24 AM