Tomorrow evening, Chicago Now will team up with the 900 Shops to host an event dubbed Blogapalooza. Owned by the Tribune Media Company and up and running since August, Chicago Now is a network of local blogs that cover topics ranging from politics to sports, and roughly 15 of the Web site's bloggers will host in-store happenings throughout the Michigan Avenue shopping complex on Thursday. For example, Maya Henderson, author of the yoga-focused "Breath, Body, and Balance" blog, will dole out yoga tips in athletic-apparel shop Lululemon; Sarah Stegner, chef at Prairie Grass Cafe and creator of the "Prairie Chefs" blog, will lead cooking demos at Williams-Sonoma; and "Food Fight" bloggers Joey and Greg Morelli will man a cheesy-noodle bar.
Janie Goldberg-Dicks, president of entertainment at PR firm Margie Korshak Inc., developed the event's concept in June. "I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to bring business to [my client] the 900 Shops and awareness to Chicago Now, which was about to be launched," she said. With the Web site and the shopping complex on board, Goldberg-Dicks and her team worked with Chicago Now editor Tracy Schmidt and 900 shops marketing manager Sarah Burrows to pair merchants with appropriate bloggers and work out the event's logistics. "We wanted to make it fun, with lots of food and drink," Goldberg-Dicks said. "We'll even have a DJ with music throughout the mall."
"Our goal with this event is to promote our bloggers," Schmidt said. "We [at Chicago Now] almost act as their agents in way, by trying to get them on TV or promoting them at events. They're really experts in their fields, and they're great writers. So we just want them to get a bigger audience." Along with promoting the event on Chicago Now, Schmidt said that she and her team set up a Web site dedicated exclusively to Blogapalooza—and, of course, individual writers put up posts about the event on their own blogs. Schmidt said that she hopes to see about 1,000 guests at tomorrow night's event, though "we have no idea what to expect."
Burrows echoed the wait-and-see mentality. "We've never done an event like this before, " she said. "It's sort of our first test with social networking, so we're optimistic and curious to see what kind of turnout we get, and whether this can really drive bodies to the [shopping] center." For its own event-marketing efforts, the 900 Shops tasked individual merchants with promoting Blogapalooza to their customers through "emails, newsletters—any sort of vehicles they had," Burrows said. "But the Tribune company really took care of any outside advertising efforts. We wanted to host the event and agreed to underwrite its cost, so the Tribune's responsibility was to promote it."
