As I mentioned in my last post, I had the opportunity to not only attend but also moderate a panel discussion at BlogWorld in Las Vegas last week. This was my first visit to BlogWorld, and aside from a few jokes pointed my way by some of my non-digital marketing / non-social media friends and family about what a geek I was for attending, it was a really enlightening experience.

First, some general impressions and takeaways from the conference:
- It’s amazing how many people either make a living from blogging and twitting or use social media as their primary marketing tool
- The real estate industry is way ahead of other small business industries when it comes to using social media to grow their businesses
- There is an entire “sub-culture” of bloggers / twitterers complete with celebrities and household names I had never heard of!
- There were a lot of brands and media companies fully taking advantage of this “sub-culture” to grow their business – including FatBurger, the U.S. Army, and Bud Light.

Now, a couple of thoughts regarding multicultural blogging and social media. As I mentioned, I moderated a panel discussing the role of multicultural bloggers in the social media world and their influence on multicultural marketing in specific. First of all, there were some very interesting insights that emerged from our panelists regarding their respective communities. Our discussion was much more about how Hispanic, African-American, Asian and GLBT communities are participating in the social dialogue and how their voices differ from the general market – as opposed to whether they are even present.

The attendees were heavily engaged, bringing up some complicated questions ranging from how social media can reach low income, urban communities to some of the negative “race” conversations taking place on Twitter. One attendees even asked about how social media could be used to reduce racial tensions and improve multicultural relations. The broad dialogue also included the publisher of a newspaper trying to understand how to attract Latina readers and Gay bloggers concerned about being censored by conservative Christian social bookmarkers.

Probably the biggest takeaway came after our multicultural panel discussion when I actually took a look around and paid attention to the people who were attending BlogWorld. I would say that 30-40% of the attendees were either Hispanic, African-American, or Asian, not to mention people from all over the world. BlogWorld was a sea of multicultural and international bloggers, twitterers, marketers and voices. I wonder if the organizers realize that the blogosphere is already multicultural.

This entry is filed under GLBT, african american, asian, blogs, conferences, demographics, events, hispanic, marketing, multicultural, social media, urban. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.