Yvonne DiVita would like to offer a word of advice about the 2016 BlogPaws Conference: Don’t let any cat in a stroller fool you.
“People hear we’re having this conference, and that there’s pets,” says DiVita. “That doesn’t mean we’re not serious about the work in the sessions and the keynotes and the effort that we put in.”
DiVita co-founded this uber-pet-friendly social media conference in 2010, looking to gather, inspire and help promote the growing pet-blogging community. This year’s event is scheduled for June 23-25 at the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass Resort in Phoenix. DiVita expects more than 500 bloggers to be a part of it, along with sponsors like Purina and Natural Balance, and nominees for BlogPaws’ fourth annual Nose-to-Nose Awards.
Among the latter group will be a group from the A Voice for Lil Olive team: executive producer Ashley Schuermann, executive producer Tom Young, his wife Lori Young, Lil Olive’s mom Pam Horton, and associate producer Heather Langton. After they walk the red carpet on the 25th, they’ll be hoping for a win in the Best Pet Video on a Blog category.
But while in Phoenix, they’ll be doing much more than that. They’ll attend seminars on topics related to business-building, SEO and much more. While Lil Olive’s Tom Young has long been an influential Internet professional as owner of Intuitive Websites, there’s always more to know. As Langton puts it, “I think it will be great to meet all the other people that have done blogs that are nominated; we can learn from them.”
The team will also learn from keynote speakers including Pamela Wilson, executive vice president of educational content for Rainmaker Digital (formerly Copyblogger Media), and Pamela Slim, an award-winning author, speaker and business consultant to companies including Hewlett-Packard and Charles Schwab.
Those keynote speeches will be live-streamed, as will the awards ceremony, which is the capstone event of the conference. And while DiVita can’t comment on any specific nominees, she emphasizes that being nominated truly should be considered an honor. “We had such outstanding entries this year, in all the categories,” she says. “I was one of the people that vetted, so I went through close to a thousand entries. It was pretty exciting to see the quality of all of what came in.”
She also emphasizes that these awards are in no way, shape or form a popularity contest. BlogPaws’ awards committee devises criteria on which to judge the entrants in each category, and as she puts it, an award “is based on, ‘Did you fulfill this criteria, and how well did you fulfill it?’”
Criteria in the Pet Video on a Blog category includes creativity, focus, visual appeal, use of color and purpose. It’s a good mix — a description that could also apply to the collection of four-legged creatures that help to make this an event like none other. After all, it’s not all serious business at BlogPaws. Says DiVita: “We have ferrets, and we have rats and guinea pigs, and giant Great Danes and little tiny Chihuahuas …”