Mommies with Style’s recap from the Disney Social Media Moms Conference #disneysmmoms

After 8-fun-filled days in Disney World, my family landed back home last night to a world of snow.

While I promise to bring you some great travel-related product reviews in the coming weeks that pertain to my trip, I wanted blog about the second half of my trip to start. It was the catalyst to our even going to Disney World at all – the Disney Social Media Moms conference.

I have to say, this has been the best social media conference I have attended thus far. It was fun, intimate and both inspiriting and educational.

Disney’s involvement in the conference was to let us know about Disney’s Give A Day, Get a Day program. To date, 600,000 volunteers have signed up and completed the program. Basically volunteering at Disney for a day gains you a one day pass into the parks. Meg Crofton, President of the Walt Disney World Resort, spoke to us our first night as we gathered at the ESPN Wide World of Sports for a short briefing and presentation, followed by a fun night of entertainment – dancing for the kids, characters visiting our tables, and schmoozing with other Moms.

Melissa from Girly Mama Blog, Colleen from Classy Mommy, Marissa Winokur & Whitney from Mommies with Style (me!)

Guy Kawasaki was my personal favorite at the conference – he was engaging and funny. And as a working Mom & blogger, I couldn’t help but be captivated with his advice for folks on utilizing Twitter as a power tool in business.

It was fabulous to see so many old faces – and to meet so many new Mom bloggers who I hadn’t yet had the chance to meet. Plus, this was a first opportunity for many of us to meet the inspiration behind all of our blogs – our kids!

On our last day at the conference, we heard from various speakers like Maxine Clark, the CEO of Build-A-Bear. She was truly inspirational.

Kathy Ireland spoke on being a Mom and a successful entrepreneur (one of the most successful women in business in the country!). She was captivating; genuine and nice and obviously as stunning on the inside as she is on the outside.

Here’s the first bit of her presentation – not the best quality visually but you can get the gist from what she’s saying:

Chris Brogan gave us some common sense advice on marketing.

Of course the best part was socializing with so many of my blogging friends: my girls from Philly – Colleen from Classy Mommy & Melissa from Girly Mama. Elizabeth from the Party Planning Professor, Bay from the Queen Mother Blog. Great to see Audrey from Mom Generations again, and Margaret from the Disney Moms Panel. And so many more – women I’ve been talking to via email and Twitter for years.  I couldn’t possibly shout out to everyone because I truly could go on and on, but overall, it was a fabulous experience.

Thanks so much to everyone who made it happen – Disney, 5 Minutes for Mom (Sue is a doll!), Resourceful Mommy (thanks 4 the bus chat Amy, hope your trip home was no where near as crazy as the one down!) and Mom Talk Radio.

Disclaimer: while I paid to attend this conference, it was at a discounted rate. Disney gave us a stay at the Polynesian, plus Media Fast Passes & Park Hopper tickets for my entire family.

With my family in Epcot