Speaker: Tara Cain, Blogger-to-Blogger Inspiration

Our Blogger-to-Blogger Inspiration session showcases best practices and success stories from four different blogs, to share the best blogging knowledge in our community. Tara Cain will talk about her highly successful photo meme The Gallery, which hundreds of bloggers take part in every month.

Tara is a former journalist who has been writing her blog Sticky Fingers since 2008. She writes about parenting, family life, topical issues and has seen her readership rocket to nearly 40K a month. But her great love is photography, and last year she launched a new feature on Sticky Fingers to take advantage of her passion for photographs. The Gallery kicked off in February 2010 and invited other writers to appreciate and showcase their own photos – and it has grown into a huge community of supportive bloggers across the world. Tara lives in the West Midlands with her husband and two young children.

In her former life she was a features editor, but now works from home as a social media consultant and writer. Twitter:

Speaker: Christine Beardsell, Video Blogging

More and more bloggers are making the jump to video. Our afternoon video blogging session will feature high-profile vlogger Nick Coffer (My Daddy Cooks) and in addition we have BritMum’s Christine Beardsell, a content pioneer and video expert.

Before partnering with Britmums, Christine spent 10 years pioneering the use of both Social Media and Brand Content at the world’s largest digital agency, Digitas, and was a driving force behind the Digital Content New Front staged in New York each June.

A graduate of The Cooper Union School of Art in New York City, Christine’s mix of creative, tech and media skills, plus her entrepreneur’s innovation, have led her to invent hugely impactful and ground-breaking projects for major brands like Kraft, American Express, IHG, and Samsung. Her work has contributed to the winning of many top industry honours, including Cannes Cyber Lions, Caples, Effies, and OMMA Awards.

Christine’s practical vision for the new partnerships that technology makes possible between brands, content creators and, most important of all, audiences themselves has made her a sought-after speaker and panelist at major industry conferences from Digital Hollywood to Adtech. Her popular column on ClickZ in 2009 remains a valued source of thinking on Brand Content, which she also teaches for the world-famous Miami Ad School.

Speaker: Sue Davis, Blogging Essentials and Getting to Know WordPress

Sue Davis has such fabulous experience working with blogs and training people to use them that we’re featuring her twice on the schedule. Blogging Essentials is a great place to brush up on all those elements of blogging you may have forgotten or never learned in the first place, from design and RSS feeds to SEO. Then in the next time slot she gives a crash course to one of the most versatile and popular blogging platforms – WordPress.

Sue Davis has been a freelance web designer, information architect and content strategist since 1998. She has advised companies including Channel 4 Television on editing for the web; designed web sites for the BBC, Channel 4 and many medium-sized organisations; and presented TV programmes about the Internet and families for BBC2. She runs popular WordPress and social media courses for the Publishing Training Centre in London and has used WordPress to design and develop blogs and CMS-based websites since 2007. She has a seven year old daughter and an aging campervan and lives in Chatham, Kent. You can follow her on Twitter: .

LEGO DUPLO sponsor CyberMummy

The LEGO DUPLO brand is delighted be supporting the upcoming CyberMummy Conference via sponsorship of both the event itself and eighteen of its LEGO DUPLO ‘experts’ who will be travelling down from all over the United Kingdom to attend the London event. As well as a LEGO DUPLO table exhibit where delegates can get hands on with the product range and register for the free LEGO CLUB magazine, there will also be fantastic giveaways throughout the day for all CyberMummy attendees.

LEGO DUPLO’s social media campaign, which launched in August 2010, aims to build a relationship with the UK’s parent blogger community – a key audience for the brand. The recruitment of twenty LEGO DUPLO ‘experts’ has resulted in some fantastic feedback via product reviews and the creation of unique ‘birthday party packs’ – including the very popular LEGO DUPLO ‘brick’ birthday cakes – has generated interest from all over the parent blogosphere. A LEGO DUPLO Experts event is also planned for late summer.

Claire Dorrington, Brand Manager at the LEGO Group says: “CyberMummy offers us the perfect opportunity to create a buzz around the LEGO DUPLO brand amongst the online parenting community, which is growing year upon year, and is now a powerful influence within the media world. The online environment is where mums and dads meet, chat and form opinions about all sorts of topics. It provides a great arena for us to engage them in the DUPLO brand, sharing information on the benefits of the toys.”

Speaker: Ellie Lee, Working with Brands and Making Money

On the Working with Brands and Making Money panel – in addition to featuring bloggers who earn and brands who work with bloggers – we wanted to consider the relative “value” of parent bloggers’ opinions and also how their content affects the conversations society has about parenting. To help us cast a wider thematic net, we’ve asked sociologist Ellie Lee to be on the panel.

Ellie is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at the University of Kent, England. She is Director of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies, based in the School. She worked previously as a Research Fellow at the University of Southampton. She has published studies about abortion, contraception, teenage pregnancy, and motherhood, and her research addresses the sociological themes of the construction of social problems and the process of medicalization. Her published work includes the monograph Abortion, Motherhood and Mental Health: The Medicalization of Reproduction in the U.S. and Britain (2003, Aldine Transaction), and papers in journals includingSociology of Health and Illness, Health, Risk and Society, Sociological Research On-line and International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family. She is currently working on studies about infant feeding, alcohol and pregnancy, the provision of assisted conception services, abortion counselling, and parenting policy.

You can catch Ellie and the rest of the panel in CyberMummy 1 at morning session II, 12:30 to 13:15.

Lego Duplo CyberMummy ticket winners…

Thank you to everyone who took the time to enter. It’s great to see so many people trying to win tickets for other people – heart warming even!

Lego Duplo Sponsor CyberMummy11

The two winners of the tickets, kindly supplied by Lego Duplo as part of the Lego Duplo Experts campaign are…..

Laura Weight & Claire Louise Parkinson.

Ladies can you please email sian[at] cybermummy [dot] com to claim your prize. Well done!

CyberMummy Ticket Giveaway courtesy of Lego Duplo

I have to say that last minute ‘I need a CyberMummy ticket’ emails have hit fever pitch this week – but there’s nothing we can do.

We are SOLD OUT… completely.

Lego Duplo Sponsor CyberMummy11

However, one of our lovely sponsors Lego Duplo have come to the rescue and are giving away not one but TWO tickets to CyberMummy11!

All you have to do to be in with a chance of getting your hands on one of the tickets is leave a comment on this post telling us why you love Lego Duplo and what excites you most about coming to CyberMummy.

The two winners will be chosen at random on Monday 6th June at Midday (GMT). Good Luck!

Crowdsourced Keynote Speakers

We received a landslide of nominations for the Crowdsourced Keynote this year and had the dilemma of only picking a handful to present their posts at the conference. We wish we could include each submission, as they each had a great story to tell – funny, poignant, or insightful. The ones we are featuring each tell a story not only about, say, parenthood or relationships or the blogosphere but also about the bloggers themselves.

Drop by their blogs now to say hello and we’ll see them all on the dais on June 25th.

CyberMummy 2011 Crowdsourced Keynote bloggers:

• Coffee Lady – The Coffee Lady
• Emily – More Than Just A Mother
• Emily – Babyrambles
• Fi – Childcare is Fun!
• Hannah – Muddling Along Mummy
• Jacqui – Mummy’s Little Monkey
• Jane – Northern Mum
• Jo – Slummy Single Mummy
• Kate – Kate Takes 5
• Nickie - I Am Typecast
• Pippa – A Mother’s Ramblings

Plus we have an honourable mention. We really liked Tattie Weasel’s nominated post, and were going to feature her on the day as well, but she’s had a very parent compromise: whether to attend CyberMummy or go to her son’s sports day. In the end as you might expect, sports day has won (go team!) but we will miss her on the day. Thanks for submitting, Tattie!

Nick from My Daddy Cooks in the Times today

This year at CyberMummy Nick Coffer will be at the video blogging session, 15:15 to 16:10, giving his tips about vlogging and how he turned his cooking videos with his son (the “sous chef”) into a successful book and brand. Nick started making videos in November 2009 on his blog My Daddy Cooks. Now his recipes – simple food cooked well – not only inspire online readers but also have given rise to a .

You can get a sneak peek in today’s Times of some of Nick’s recipes (subscription required) – toad in the hole, plum pudding, chicken and leek pie and several more.

His session at CyberMummy is going to be brilliant (sorry – it’s not a cooking demo) with Nick talking about vlogging from a blogger perspective, and Christine Beardsell, a video expert, giving tips on equipment, software and techniques. Don’t miss it!

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