Corporate Sponsorship and the Moms Road Trip: full disclosure

Truthfully, I don't remember how it all started, only that it happened in a matter of weeks, not months. The founders of the Silicon Valley Moms Group and some folks from Six Apart were kicking around ideas about how to get more readers to our sites. The Six Apart folks were telling us about search engine optimization and the like, and we were trying to get excited, but it's hard to get excited about SEO. What we at Silicon Valley Moms Group are more interested in is getting content up that people want to read. A few days later, we hit on the idea of a road trip, probably because we have bloggers all over the country, we'd been organizing get togethers for our bloggers to take place on Blogher, so thoughts of moms coming from far-off places to San Francisco were buzzing around in our heads.

Once this idea was on the table, we couldn't even think about search engine optimization anymore (we know, we really have to deal with that at some point). We were envisioning a caravan of cars, carrying flags, driving across the country, picking up bloggers along the way. And since we know GM has been doing a lot of outreach to bloggers, we thought maybe GM would lend us a fleet of cars.