Thank you to the few parties that have reached out to either help support or co-own BlogPotomac in the future. As many of you know, this autumn’s event is being promoted as the Final BlogPotomac. At the time of announcement, I listed two reasons:

1) A desire to recapture some of my personal life, and not become shackled by what is supposed to be a gift back to the community.

2) For me, I find the social media communications early adopter/innovation period to be over, and am starting to look at verticalization in green and nonprofits, as well as mobile.

Number two has been well-debated, and the market has shown that continued demand for social media best practices exist. That includes the three parties who have expressed an interest in helping to facilitate future BlogPotomacs.

My first reason is still my first reason. One thing I know about social media: It can swallow up your life, change your perspective, and morph you with hopes or the reality of nano-fame. At some point in the process you either abandon the old for the new, or you draw a line and restore balance in your life.

This is not to judge others’ successes. My happiness lies in balance, and mindfully choosing which media and events to participate in. My experience is that I can maintain presence with more qualitative social media choices, and at the same time, restore time to my personal life.

Sacrificing BlogPotomac remains one of the harder choices. I designed it as a not-for-profit knowledge exchange, so there’s no money to be gained. It takes an enormous amount of time to plan and execute. The personal reputation points are nice, but, given the vast amount of time it takes, I would rather spend it with family and on future initiatives.

Plus, how many times can I reinvent the same conference? The first two were very similar in scope, and while the third one will be different with a much stronger focus on future communications media, reprogramming and keeping it fresh with new information was challenging. I did it for this October’s event (check out our agenda), but it seems that a truly new blogging conference in 2010, 2011, 2012, well, was dated.

So, when the lights go out on October 23 at the State Theater, it truly will be the Final BlogPotomac. Expect it to be great.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 21st, 2009 at 4:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.