Well I posted recently to give you some indication of how the day started at the recent yoUnlimited conference, but I never told you how my session went. I’m so happy to say…really well!
I had proposed to speak again on Genuine Blogging, the same topic that I delivered at the recent WordCamp Victoria event. I was so buoyed up from the buzz in the room at WordCamp that I knew this was a topic that I wanted to do with this different audience. This time it was a room full of inspirational women. So fun!
I mentioned in the earlier post that I was a little nervous about the reaction my hand-drawn slides would elicit, but I realized that it was silly of me to worry. It was definitely an example of me putting myself out there, being authentic – it’s what the whole presentation was about!
The crowd seemed to enjoy my drawn stick figure scenes … I think it was a bit of a breath of fresh air compared to everyone’s usual text-y PowerPoint approach. One of my goals for the presentation was to draw and present images that encapsulated the topic for each particular slide that I wanted to address – to get away from text prompts for my speaking and to go towards visual prompts. My recent reading on graphic facilitation (Yes, I’ve signed up for a course to learn how to do it in early May!) has got me SOOOO excited about this that I just had to start figuring out how to use this in my life and work right now. I’ve been doodling up a storm on my iPad recently using the Adobe Ideas app. An example from the presentation is above.
But back to the actual Genuine Blogging presentation! Here’s what it looked like:
Over the course of the hour, we talked about all the things outlined in my workshop description of this presentation, and had some great participation from people present. There was a real cross-section of bloggers in the room, from people just considering starting their blogs to people that have been blogging for more than five years, to one person that started blogging and then abandoned it! We had so much to talk about.
One example of a great issue that came up during the presentation was the question of “one blog or two?” for those of us that want to blog about both personal and business issues. It was really interesting to hear other people’s ideas in response to this question because it’s been something I’ve been wondering about myself over the last few months after I started my business blog. What I mean by this is … this blog is my “business” blog but I want you to see a personal side of me here too. But I also have had a personal blog for more than six years now. I had been mulling over whether I should I meld the two blogs and just have one blog. But which one would go? I chose to have two blogs in the end simply because I wanted the scope on my personal blog to talk about lots of topics (eg. travel, parenthood, fun activities, ideas etc.) and keep my business talk to my business blog. Especially because the personal one predated the business one – there is a lot of history there – I thought it made sense to keep them both separate. Now, if I were just setting up a business blog and had no personal blog already in existence I might do it differently. I might just have one blog and talk about all sorts of things on the one blog to keep it simple. It’s a great question to ask yourself if you’re considering starting a blog; the decision is really going to be personal to each of us.
All in all the presentation was a great time and I felt good about what happened in the room. But the best part was two things that happened to me after the presentation, but for brevity’s sake I’ll wait to tell you all that in the next post!
