Kim & Mel’s Take on Snap! 2012

SNAP Conference
Salt Lake City, Utah
April 2012

Dialogue between Kim Janocko, Community Manager and Mel Lockcuff, Community Coordinator

Kim: The SNAP conference was a conference designed to bring together bloggers who are passionate about creativity, handmade goodness and DIY.

While at the conference I met several members of the community for the first time in person.  It is always great to meet community members in real life and hear what they have to say about their experiences in Social Fabric and how thankful they are for what we do.  Hearing how much they love our community while being able to see the sparkle in their eye makes every day worth it.  I also had the pleasure of seeing and catching up with a few members I have met before in real life.

Mel: Yeah, it was really awesome to put the faces to the blogs and Twitter handles. We were able to meet new bloggers, as well as sponsors. Whether we were walking around outside, walking around the smaller expo area, sitting down to dinner, browsing the Queen Bee Market, or even meeting up with bloggers over a break, we were able to talk to quite a few people, and I brought home several business card contacts. We met up with a few Social Fabric members, as well, which was awesome because we were able to not just type back and forth to each other in the community but give each other a great big hug. It was so nice to have that one-on-one communication in person. It really does add a whole new value to the power of community.

Kim: The sessions offered at SNAP were a great mix of professional development, hands on creative, photography, and blogging basics.  I walk away from most conferences learning something new each time, but the thing I also walked away with from this conference was a renewed love of what I starting blogging for to begin with, to share my creativity and love of crafting. I learned some great things from the sessions I attended that I will be sharing in the community.  Here is a little about some of the sessions I attended

•  SEO -  I feel like I can always learn more about this; I walked away with SEO basics and helpful SEO plugins for Word Press.
• Video – this session focused on the basics of great video; whether it is a home video, a video review or a motion picture feature, the tips given in the session are easy for anyone to apply when filming.
• Legal matters – a great reminder about disclosure, what constitutes a contract, prizing rules and Facebook guidelines.
• Facebook Apps – how to design your Facebook page to get the most exposure for your brand and reminders about Facebook contest guidelines.  This session and the legal session both touched on Facebook contests with conflicting info….in the end I decided that the best thing to do when it comes to directing fans to Facebook from your blog for contests is either to not do it or to “like gate” your page using the Wildfire app.
• Trend spotting – a great session on finding the current trends in fashion and décor and how to use those trends to your advantage on your blog as well as your social channels.
• I also attended some hands on sessions where I got to get my hands sticky and get my craft on. It was great therapy, almost too good.

Mel: The sessions were very beneficial, and I walked away with pages and pages of notes both in my notebook and phone. A couple of different times, we even walked away with a project we’d created during a hands-on crafting session. Photography was a huge focus, as were different topics like Facebook apps, video creation, DIY, relationships, trend spotting, blogging for good, etc. I really do feel I’ll be able to take the things I learned and not only apply them to my own life but also apply them to my work in the community, encouraging and helping our members, as well. I walked away from this conference, not really feeling overwhelmed but inspired and motivated. Inspired to come home and work on various projects…. motivated to share this experience with both our community and my readers. Here is a small recap of the few of the sessions I attended:

• Oh Snap Photography Session- This session was a 3 hour session that focused on things like quality of photos, lighting, and editing. I learned about different pieces of equipment, including lenses and props (like reflector shields). I felt like I walked away with a bit more knowledge of manual settings but more of a thirst to learn more. The session also covered photographing objects or interior spaces. I also took a lot of notes on photo editing within Photoshop, which was really exciting, as we’ve just started a Photoshop group in the Social Fabric community.
• Facebook apps- I learned about quite a few apps that I had no idea about, to help in managing and designing a Facebook page. I agree, it was a bit conflicting when we started talking about Facebook and giveaways; there are so many different opinions….
• Video Creation- Roger Sherman taught us techniques for creating great video, such as holding steady, not panning back and forth, not using the zoom function, keeping shots short, varying shots, etc. He taught us the technique for his 10 Shot Video.
• Epic DIY Guide to Survival- This session was all about the tools you need for DIY projects; they even went into the use of power tools. Another part of the session focused on paint techniques, such as aging wood, distressing, etc.
• Blogging for Good- Ethan Austin, from Give Forward, was a panelist in this session, and I was especially excited to hear him speak, since Give Forward was the method I used to help raise money for my best friend when her husband had cancer. You could really feel his and the other panelists’ passion for fundraising and using their blogs to help pay it forward. The 3 p’s for fundraising: personalization, promotion, and persistence.
• Trend Spotting- We learned about different avenues for finding and noting trends, even unexpected places, but even more importantly, we were inspired to be our own trend.

Kim: Attending these conferences is always a great way to grow and learn professionally, to take notes on fun things to do at a conference should we ever decide to have one of our own, and most importantly for me, to network with the community and get to know them on a more personal level.  Nothing compares to the feeling of meeting someone in real life and seeing their face as they talk about Social Fabric, Collective Bias and the community management team and how much they love and appreciate all that we do.  Likewise, it is awesome to be able to tell them to their faces how much we love and appreciate them and all that they do as well.  I look forward to fostering these in real life relationships at the other conferences I will be attending throughout the year.

Mel: Attending SNAP! was a phenomenal way to not only form relationships with other bloggers who may like to join the Social Fabric community, but it was a way to gain back some of that inspiration that can so easily get lost in the daily shuffle of life. It was a way of gaining back some of the perspective i needed to hopefully breathe more inspiration and motivation into our community. Meeting members in real life really does bring to light the reality that they’re not just faces of Social Fabric; they’re real people living life, sharing their lives with us as a community management team, and it’s awesome to be a part of such a great community (aka, family). The whole theme of the conference seemed to really revolve around being yourself, not comparing yourself to others, finding your own creativity, your own trends. I firmly believe if we can take some of that inspiration and give back to Social Fabric, we’ll be able to grow an even more awesome community of trend setters, go-getters, and motivated individuals who support each other along the way to reaching major goals and milestones in their lives.

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