Dad 2.0 Summit is an annual conference about the changing perception and online voice of modern fatherhood. Carter Gaddis tells us all about it . . .
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In April 2011, as the Mom 2.0 Summit came to a close in New Orleans, John Pacini and Doug French stood on the main stage and proclaimed their intention to hold a national conference for blogging fathers in 2012. Dad 2.0 Summit was born.
Thursday, the third annual Dad 2.0 Summit returns to its place of origin, where more than 250 fatherhood-oriented content creators from around the world will converge on the J.W. Marriott New Orleans.
They’ll go to learn, to network, to meet face-to-face with brand representatives from companies like title sponsor Dove Men+Care. And yes, they’ll go to socialize “in real life” with people they know primarily through Facebook, Twitter, Google Hangouts, and their blogging platforms of choice.
French, who writes the venerable parenting blog Laid-Off Dad, announced in early January that the initial block of event tickets had sold out two weeks earlier than last year’s second Dad 2.0 Summit in Houston.
“To come back [to New Orleans] 33 months later anticipating a fifty-percent surge in attendance, and with a returning title sponsor, while dads groups are popping up all over the world and major brands are embracing more dad-specific marketing strategies,” French said, “is an absolute marvel.”
Pacini, an entrepreneur and business advisor who is married to Mom 2.0 Summit co-founder Carrie Pacini, recognized in 2011 that the time was right for the dad blogging community to have a conference of its own.
“In the early days of Mom 2.0 we used to discuss the concept of a dad blogger event, but early on we didn’t feel like there was enough traction in the space – numbers of active dad bloggers and/or brands who took dads seriously – to support a national event,” Pacini said. “But as you know that started to change very quickly in the late 2000s, as dad blogging became a better known, more recognized, and more populous category. Some attribute this to the recession, others to social media simply allowing fathers to share a story that was prevalent all along, but regardless, it was a very real and highly vocal emergence of a new face of fatherhood.”
French and Pacini own and operate XY Media Group, the Dad 2.0 Summit parent company that helps pair blogging fathers with brands. They were introduced in 2010 by Mom 2.0 Summit co-founder Laura Mayes. At the 2011 Mom 2.0 Summit, a breakout session on dad blogging called Dad 2.0 drew so much attention that French and Pacini asked for a few minutes of main stage time to announce the formation of Dad 2.0 Summit.
“We hadn’t set a city or venue or anything yet,” Pacini said. “We just had a lot of excitement and faith in the future of the ‘modern dad’ movement and the dad blogging space.”
The event has been a notable success. The New York Times sent a reporter to Houston to document the second annual conference, and event-planning publication BizBash named Dad 2.0 Summit one of its Top 15 Most Innovative Meetings of 2013.
This year, the conference features keynote speakers Josh Levs of CNN and author/entrepreneur Peter Shankman. There will be nine breakout panels on topics such as the psychology of men’s health, juggling the demands of the workplace with parenthood, and writing about controversial topics (and weathering the fallout). There also will be 12 workshop round table sessions designed to provide insight about topics such as building an engaged social community, becoming a published author, understanding how brands measure return on investment on digital platforms and other granular aspects of the creative process and business of blogging. (Full disclosure: I will conduct a workshop on journalism and storytelling.)
Eric, a Good Men Project contributor who blogs anonymously at Dad on the Run, will attend the Dad 2.0 Summit for the first time.
“I’ve never been to New Orleans, so I get to mark that off my bucket list, and what better way to do it short of a bachelor party?” he said. “I’m looking forward to meeting many online brothers for the first time and a few for the second time. Last, but not least, I expect to come away with tools to help me be a more successful father, blogger, and person. My goal is to learn enough about the business that I can make blogging worth my while, but to come away with a strong enough passion for storytelling that I won’t care if it’s worth my while or not.”
Second-year Dad 2.0 Summit attendee Kenny Bodanis of Montreal publishes the parenting blog Men Get Pregnant, Too, as well as the recently published book by the same title. He returns hoping to come away with the same injection of creative and emotional spark he got from Houston in 2013.
“Last year’s conference really gave me a new life/second wind as a husband, father and writer at a time when I was feeling pretty stuck in rut (especially where writing was concerned),” Bodanis said. “I expect the same from this year’s summit. Hopefully, minus the first-time jitters, which seemed to last the entire three days last year.”
Charlie Capen, co-founder of the highly successful entertainment blog How to be a Dad, will participate as a speaker for the third consecutive year.
“There is nothing more valuable than being able to see someone face to face and talk to them,” Capen said during a Life of Dad show earlier this month. “There’s a coalescence they talk about, like a quorum, because it feels like a complete group. You see all these people talking from different vantages, going for different goals. You can talk shop. You can talk to brands directly. You can influence some of their opinions about, whether it’s your own personal commerce or the way they approach marketing to men. If you’re a writer and a father, there’s nowhere else you should be, other than Dad 2.0.”
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Disclosure: Editor Whit Honea also works with XY Media Group and is the Community Manager for the Dad 2.0 Summit
The post Dad 2.0 Summit: An Open Conversation for Modern Dads appeared first on The Good Men Project.
