Pet Naturals at BarkWorld Expo 2012

By Darcie Mumley

We just returned from the Bark World expo in Atlanta, GA and are ready to implement the knowledge we acquired. There is nothing as refreshing or motivating as spending a couple of days with some of the most influential people in the pet industry: pet bloggers.

Let me start by telling you how impressed we are with the enthusiasm of the pet blogging community.  The first night of the expo started with the HOWL-O-Ween Charity party and I couldn’t be more impressed with the detail and thought that went into the costumes. The same, of course, goes for the overall commitment to pet charities that some of these bloggers exhibited.

The next morning kicked off with dog yoga followed by Matt Meeker’s presentation on growing and sustaining an online community.  Meeker is one of the founders of meetup.com, dogpatchlabs.com and barkbox.com. He gave some great insight on how things have gone wrong in his social media businesses and how they have gone right.

What did I take away from this? We have a lot of work to do in creating a true online community for our brand, but we are up for the challenge and ready to come up with some cool ways to engage our fans and customers. Any suggestions?

The next stop was a walk around all the vendor booths that were packed full of great blog post ideas and fun giveaways to take home to our own pets. We were impressed to see such a large turnout to this event and are thinking of setting up our own booth there next year!

Although there were to many presentations to make it to all of them, there were a few that stood out. Google+ for pet businesses gave us some great tips on how to utilize this social media outlet and explained why using Google+ is so important.

We also got a chance to meet the social media marketing team over at Petco. They are full of great ideas on developing a community and engaging their customers in social media. We are excited to start participating in woofwednesday and caturday giveaways as well as implementing some of their strategies into our own social media planning.

Providing some of the healthiest and most effective supplements for pets has allowed us to be a part of the ever growing pet industry, and the Bark World Expo was a great way to connect with some of the most influential people in this industry

We hope to use our new knowledge to provide our customers with not only wonderful supplements, but a community where they can share their passion for animals with us and their friends.