My Biggest Takeaway from the Disney Social Media Moms Celebration #DisneySMMC

I’m sitting on a plane headed back to CVG from my first Disney Social Media Moms Celebration.  I have to admit, it may be a few days (weeks?) as I process everything from the event, but I wanted to share some of my first thoughts with you.

As you may recall (though I’m still terribly behind recapping it), I attended Social Media Marketing World in San Diego two months ago. That conference was remarkably well run, the presenters were all thought leaders and experts in every field, and I still can’t think about the conference without feeling like I was drinking from a firehose. I learned so, so much.

The Disney Social Media Moms Celebration – and perhaps blog conferences in general, since I hadn’t previously attended any events on “the blog circuit” – is very different… but in an equally wonderful way. In one breakout session I attended I actually learned far more from my fellow attendees than I did the first speaker. That struck me as odd, but never once did I feel like this conference was anything but an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime (though I’d love for it to be a few-times-in-a-lifetime ;)) experience. Instead, that relatively isolated situation in which I didn’t necessarily learn from the scheduled speaker felt absolutely fine.

You see, it’s because a large part of this conference is about the attendees. Sure, the invitation process is shrouded in mystery, but there’s no doubt that each woman (and the one man!) that was in attendance this year has so much to offer. They are all doing and writing about different things – savings, special needs parenting, humor, Disney, fitness – but each tells their own story in their own voice. As you know if you’ve been around here long, I think that’s a big deal :)

Disney Social Media Moms Celebration wouldn’t be a conference with just attendees, though. The speakers – especially those in the general sessions – were nothing short of inspirational. Just as the attendees has his or her own story and perspective, each of the speakers clearly brought their own individuality to the event. Still, I wasn’t the only one that noticed a commonality among them – a love of family, and a desire to make the world a better place.

That’s my biggest inspiration from this weekend. I started writing as a “real blogger” with little direction or purpose (you can read some of that story here). Over time, I learned that I really just wanted to encourage and empower people. For the Love of Disney was started for my family, but also to bring joy to others… yet it still felt like a bit of a frivolous side project. As hard as I worked before and since the Disney On-the-Road event last summer, could it serve any purpose beyond being fun?

I absolutely think it can. As I spent a few months working through our recent rebranding, merging two sides of my own story into one, I really started to believe that. Donald Driver (yes, that one) said it so beautifully: social media (and digital content) can be used to bring pain and shame, or it can bring positive change.

Writer Jon Acuff began with a blog that was, in large part, satirical and fun; his tribe went on to build two schools in Vietnam. Maria Bailey and her community just finished raising almost $25,000 for Village Ambulances in Uganda, which will help women get to clinics in time for safe childbirths. Through my site and podcast and those of the people I met this week, people have been encouraged to start working toward their own dream, to seek much-needed help, to take a look at how they want to grow and become the best version of themselves. Large or small, positive change effects more positive change.

And speaking of Maria Bailey, she and her team – along with everyone at Walt Disney World Special Events (Leanne, Jamie, and countless others in 2015, now the “Disney Moms” team) – went out of their way to make each of us feel respected and appreciated, no matter the size of our audience or length of our blogging career.

At the Disney Social Media Moms Celebration I did learn a lot about Disney Parks, early childhood education and development, and so much more. But I was also reminded over and over of that thing we already know around here: our stories – every part of them – can change our world.

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