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The Shareaholic team just returned from BlogWorld where we spent two days learning from the best and brightest about the future of blogging and social media. We were most excited to learn from some of our Shareaholic users presenting in sessions. Here are some of our favorite sessions by our users:

Anne Hogan: Building a Blogger Outreach Program

Anne Hogan delivered an excellent session guiding the audience through her lessons learned doing blogger outreach and community management for the Humane Society of the United States. She gave practical “tips from the trenches” that were very useful. Some of the highlights:

• Paying bloggers is still controversial. This is a hot-button topic when it comes to blogger outreach, and Anne handled the topic gracefully when explaining how the Humane Society budgets for this as a non-profit. Since paying for posts wasn’t an option, she mentioned the offering of “social currency” as an incentive to bloggers one is reaching out to – Tweets, Facebook posts and +1’s of the content they post.
• Research is essential to any blogger outreach campaign. Research doesn’t stop at searching once to see if someone wrote about a relevant topic. That’s not enough. You need to see if they already wrote about the event or campaign you are about to pitch them for.
• Track your interactions with bloggers to stay organized. Anne talked about her method for organizing her list in an Excel spreadsheet. She keeps track of how many touchpoints she has with a blogger using a color-coded system of highlighted blocks. She said the system isn’t for everyone, but it sounds like this really helps her track who she has reached out to already and who needs more follow up.

To learn more from Anne, check out her previous post on why you need blogger outreach. Connect with her by following her on Twitter @Anne_Hogan.

Amy Lupold Bair (Resourceful Mommy) and Adam Cohen (Dada Rocks): Marketing to Parents

Amy Lupold Bair and Adam Cohen teamed up for a fantastic session that taught brands a few tips on how to better work with parents who blog. Among the best tips and lessons learned: 

• Parents are really using social media for product research like never before. This is why brands have every incentive to participate in the blogosphere and reach out to these bloggers.
• Remember the long tail. Don’t just go for the “top 10” or “most influential” bloggers when doing your outreach. There are up and comers who have very loyal readerships that could be a great fit for your brand, and they will be particularly appreciative and helpful to the brands who believed in them when they were first building that audience.
• Consider who the readership is for the people you are pitching. If you really want to reach dads, they actually may not be reading the dad blog you are about to pitch – the readership may be primarily moms. Take the time to investigate not only things like the reach of the blogger and the topics they like to write about, but also who that audience is.
• Help the blogger cater to the readers. Help your blogger do things that give back to their readers, like giveaways and contests. Bloggers really care about their readers, and if you as the brand offer them an opportunity to work together that includes a way for them to give back to their readers, they are much more likely to want to work with you.

It was a fantastic session! You can keep up with Amy and Adam on Twitter @ResourcefulMom and @Dadarocks.

Anne-Sophie Reinhardt: How to Effectively Podcast to a Global Audience

Anne-Sophie Reinhardt teamed up with Fr. Roderick Vonhogen, Mark Pentleton, Karin Hoegh and Chris Marquardt to give a global perspective on podcasting. Though we didn’t have a chance to sit in on the session, one of Anne-Sophie’s co-panelists wrote a great preview for the panel that you should check out.  Connect with Anne-Sophie on Twitter @anneso87.

What were some of your favorite sessions at #BWENY? Let us know in the comments below!