Karma Is the New Swag

One of my responsibilities as a Blog Ambassador for the Huggies Every Little Bottom program was to “man the booth” for a few hours each day of the BlogHer 2010 conference in New York City.  For a tiny little glimpse of the expo hall – the area where this booth was located – I dutifully filmed this video to show you.

My POV of 1/8 of BlogHer10 Expo Hall from Kim Prince on Vimeo.

Well, this was more about inadvertent closeups of my mouth and bad videography than a great pan over the capitalist overkill of the expo hall, as I intended.  However, if you noticed how many people there were and how noisy it was, maybe you get the idea.  It was huge.

And at most of the booths, visitors were gifted with a sample of the product, a flyer, a chance to win something, or a photograph with a celebrity such as Bruce Jenner, a Real Housewife, or Marmaduke.

At our booth, though, people who were slow enough to be caught in conversation with us, hawkers very much like the salespeople at kiosks in the middle of the mall with their hand lotion, their perfume, or their cell phone plans, were treated to a lighting-fast charity pitch that went something like this:

“Hi!  This is the Every Little Bottom booth!  Yes we are  giving away diapers but not here!  No, Huggies is giving away 22 million diapers over the next year to families who have trouble affording them.  Did you know that 1 in 3 American moms have had trouble affording enough diapers for their babies…?”

Reactions varied.  Many people had already heard of ELB or even Help a Mother Out, which was awesome.  Others were funny “Oh, we don’t need diapers anymore, hurray!” and then shocked when they learned why we were there.  They were then handed a business card that instructed them to post an update on Twitter, Facebook, or Foursquare (more on that later) about what they had learned.  I got business cards from as many people as possible (which is why I asked for a business card scanner for my birthday, in case any of you want to email Stewart lest he forget to get me a present).  And there was one woman who jumped for joy and said she was dying to hold a diaper collection event in her town.

It was pretty gratifying to spend time in real life with the people I have only met on conference calls or Twitter.  The ambassador team is made up of genuine, hearty, quirky women, and the PR team from Ogilvy, Huggies, and Kimberly Clark are sharp tacks with a great collective sense of humor.  I suppose that was obvious, considering the graphic of a baby’s butt above our heads the entire time.

The real message to me was that we were spreading the message.  In a gigantic expo hall filled with sausage, mugs, tote bags, and potato heads, we had nothing to give but our words, much like we give here on our blogs.  Our words are the most powerful tools we have, and in-person is a medium we don’t get to exercise to the masses very often.  At the ELB booth, we got to see the realization dawn on people’s faces when we told them our stories.

I don’t yet know any official measurements of the numbers of people we reached, or how many hits we got on social media apps during BlogHer, but I’ll tell you this much.  It felt like we were Doing Good.

To find out how you can help, please visit Every Little Bottom and Help a Mother Out.