Another day at the 2012 Fitness and Health Bloggers Conference in the books 😀
The morning started with two workout classes, both of which I missed because I didn’t wake up early enough to get to them. From what I understand, most people slept in too. Then there was breakfast, mostly non-vegan. I was told by one of the servers that there was nothing vegan, so I didn’t eat anything, but I found out later that they actually did have granola and almond milk. Still sucks that I couldn’t partake in the yummy smoothies and breakfast parfaits everyone else was eating though.
After breakfast, they started the presentations.
Monika Nuffer was up first. She’s a pharmacist and she spoke about the drug and supplement industry. Lots of interesting things going on there. One very helpful tip she gave is to look on the packaging for seals of approval, such as from Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP), United States Pharmacopeia (USP), NSF International (NSF), or Consumer Lab (CL).
Up next was Lana Bradley. She’s a licensed acupuncturist and she spoke on practices of traditional chinese medicine. I particularly liked a diagram she drew on the white board, which featured a sort of circle or path of yin and yang. I didn’t take a picture because it wasn’t very legible, but this is a better representation of what she drew.
She mentioned that if there was an imbalance in one element, for example metal, it would affect the entire circle. An example she gave had something to do with a menopausal woman suffering from diarrhea and some other problem I can’t remember. When they fixed the imbalance, her problems went away. Very interesting concept.
Then came Dana Abbey, who spoke on finding and assessing information on the internet. She’s a librarian, so she provided great information on doing internet research and how to use the most credible resources. In my experience of reading hundreds of health articles every week, a lot of bloggers post health information and advice without citing sources, and often speak based mostly on opinion, but I don’t think that will be a problem with any of the attendees of this conference. Citing sources and providing credible information has been pushed hard this weekend, and that’s great for all of us.
Next up was Janet Helm. She spoke about communicating information. A lot of her presentation focused on social media, such as using Pinterest, and other best practices for bloggers. She mentioned that being transparent online makes you more trustworthy and likable. You should have an “About” page or section on your site, an image of yourself and at least your first name.
You should also be disclosing any relationships you have with marketers, as according to FTC rules. That means if you do paid blog post, or if you were given a product free for a review, you need to publicly disclose that to your readers. I’m familiar with all of this stuff, but as a marketer who works with a lot of bloggers on behalf of several large businesses, I find that many people aren’t as familiar as they should be. I tend to point the bloggers I work with to cmp.ly for more info on disclosures.
Great sessions today!
We ate lunch and then broke off into four smaller groups and attended the “cohort breakout sessions.” Yesterday we did only one session, and my group went to the library to learn about online research.
Today we did the other three, which first started with watching the chef at Bistro Elaia prepare a delicious looking meal, again something that I couldn’t eat because it had chicken in the main dish and yogurt and milk in the smoothie. Then we watched as Inigo San Millan did a performance test on an athlete, complete with facemask and blood tests. After that, we took a walkthrough of the “micribiotic kitchen” and the test grocery store. More info about those will be in my conference recap.
It was a full day of education and fun 😀
* Chinese herbalism image via http://www.moondragon.org/alternative/images/chineseherbalism5.jpg
it’s more fun here,