Women of Color Marketing Panel at Blog Her

by Guest Contributor Jasmine D, originally published at This is Jasmine

This was my first BlogHer conference and I’ve been telling folks it won’t be my last. I was lucky to have my friend Liz show me around and introduce me to, like, everybody. One of the folks I met through Liz was Megan Smith, who writes a blog about television called Megan’s Minute. We were able to talk a bit at the first keynote, then a bit more when I crashed the “Women of Color” (or was it “Bloggers of Color”?) table at lunch. I say crashed because I didn’t know you had to sign up for these special tables where affinity bloggers — green, LGBT, political — could connect. I felt kind of intimidated as I didn’t know anybody else at the table, though everyone was super-nice and took my cards when I remembered to pass them out.

I didn’t see most of the ladies from the table until the next day at what was my favorite panel of the weekend, “Women of Color and Marketing”. The panel was borne of a question that Kelly of Mocha Momma brought up during a panel at BlogHer ‘07:

[M]arketers and PR companies don’t often approach women of color (any color) and it seemed as if these companies didn’t know how to speak to this particular group of women. In those two years have companies gotten better at approaching bloggers of color? Are these women being offered similar opportunities as their counterparts?

How should companies approach bloggers of color and have any of these women who have been presented opportunities have anything to share on the do’s and don’ts of dealing with PR companies?

I was eager to attend. After all, I was curious to hear from other people about their own perceptions regarding how they were or were not pitched to, as bloggers, as consumers, as parents. Also, I was curious about how people got in touch with PR and marketing folks. Was it just as simple as you write “I love Crocs” on your blog and all of a sudden a box of the rubbery footwear appeared on your stoop?

“They’re gonna need a bigger room.” I got to the panel early and immediately sat my ass down in the chair nearest a power strip where I promptly plugged in my laptop. The laptop that I proceeded to ignore for the next 90 minutes as the room filled with people (yes, there were a few guys — hi, Joe Schmitt!) eager to begin. The room was filled to capacity, even beyond as the back of the room was full of folks standing.

Heather Barmore of No Pasa Nada acted as the moderator for the panel, which consisted of Kelly, Karen of Chookooloonks, and Stefania of CityMama™. Heather and Kelly filled in the crowd on the 2007 panel where the question of marketing to women of color came up, and then the conversation just flowed.

Heather, in her post-panel recap, put it more eloquently than I could:

In front of a packed room discussing how women of color and marketers can engage one another. How the way companies have come to women of color since President Obama became elected (you know that ‘post-racial’ era that we’ve entered) (obviously) (WTF is post-racial?). And how marketers still screw it up.

That last point has nothing to do with women of color it has to do with every niche in the blogosphere. Sometimes companies don’t read a blog, sometimes companies call bloggers by the wrong name and in my case, sometimes companies ask me about my life as a busy mom and ask that I test out some home dry cleaning product. Which, cool, because I do in fact dry clean my clothes. I also swiffer and drive. I shop at Target. I buy snacks. I wear makeup. I do all of the things that white women do. I do all of the things that women in general do. But I’m never pitched to. That will always be my chief complaint; while I feel the issues with race and will never understand what it means to ’sound more black’ when speaking of a product on my blog. The blog of a woman who lives in Upstate NY and therefore this is about as black sounding as I get. Though that doesn’t hit me as hard as feeling like just because I am a single woman in the blogosphere that I don’t matter.

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