When I Heart Snapping Went To BritMums Live

On the Friday and Saturday we just had, the I Heart Snapping team were at the BritMums Live conference in London. It was a great opportunity for us to get together and also to meet up with other lovely bloggers, hear great speakers, take part in inspiring workshops and generally feel glad to be part of the world that is blogging.

We picked up so many little tips and ideas to share with you all and just like when we went to Cybher last month, we want to give you the lowdown on what we heard.

It all opened up on Friday afternoon with a keynote speech from Ruby Wax and then we were straight into the business of workshops.

We chose a workshop on writing about parenting for our first session, as we both do this on our personal blogs. There was a lot of discussion about parenting blogs that are either too positive, too negative or too preachy, but the overall feeling was that if you are authentic and honest then people will enjoy reading it. It came back to things we have said here on I Heart Snapping before; which is that your voice IS your blog, so be true to yourself and don’t try to be something you’re not, people see straight through it and would always rather read a ‘real’ post from the ‘real’ you.

The evening was all about the BiB awards, which celebrated bloggers doing great things across a variety of categories. Go and check out the winners if you get time, you are bound to come away feeling inspired.

Saturday was a day cram-packed with sessions which were varied and fantastic. The choices of workshop session available were really great and there seemed to be something for everyone. We attended a quite frankly awesome workshop by Julia Boggio on photography, which I will write up separately in a different post as there was so much she said that we want to share with you.

We went to a Pinterest session too which was really fab and informative, I know for a fact that I’m not using Pinterest to its full potential so expect a post with more information on Pinterest to come your way very soon.

We also attended a discussion session on blogging for happiness. I think the strongest message to come away from this session was that blogging can and has changed people’s lives through the opportunities it has given them and the community it puts them in touch with. There was some great advice from the panel and from the people attending the discussion on how to keep it real,  but one of the best was to go back and read people’s first posts so that you can see why they started and what they are all about. And also not to over think blog posts that you write, but to stick with being honest and being yourself. A recurring theme it would seem.

In between the sessions there was plenty of time for networking, chatting and eating lots of cake. It was lovely to meet so many I Heart Snapping readers and to hear so many of you saying great things about how helpful this site is and how much you love it. We really hope this site will go from strength to strength and we don’t see ourselves running out of ideas any time soon. And you can always comment, tweet or email us if you’d like us to look at something in particular. We don’t know it all and we don’t pretend to but if we can help then we will.

Anyway, back to BritMums Live. The weekend finished with a keynote speech from Cherry Healey who had some really interesting things to say about how blogging has an increasing impact on her work as a tv journalist and presenter. It seems like we’re on the cusp of something quite big in the UK with regards to blogging and we’re really excited to see where it leads.

The conference ended with the Bloggers Keynote speech which was a definite favourite with a lot of the delegates. It made such a nice ending to the conference to bring it all back to why we were there; the blogging, the writing and the community. Blog posts can often be emotive when you read them, but there is something about hearing posts read aloud by their writer which is extremely powerful and the thirteen posts selected took everyone through an emotional roller coaster. There were tears, smiles, joy, laughter. It was a definite high point to end on, even if a lot of people’s mascara was looking the worse for wear.

BritMums founders, Jen and Susanna

BritMums Live was a brilliant weekend. It was inspiring and informative as well as giving us a great chance to meet blogger friends new and old. We’ll be putting it in the diaries for next year.