We at Zephyr Conferences have talked about rebranding our blogger conferences for years. Eleven years ago when we started the Wine Bloggers Conference as one of the first niche blogging conferences in the world, blogging was new and hot. But even back then, change was in the air as the most debated subject at that 2008 event was whether this new thing called Twitter was going to die a quick death or change the way people communicate.

Fast forward eleven years and we are proud our wine, food, and beer blogger conferences are still going strong. Blogging, despite its many death announcements by pundits, is not going away.

Rebranding of the WBC and BBC

Yet we all recognize blogging is only one form of communicating and that our conferences also attract non-blogging writers and social media users. For years we have discussed changing the name of these three conferences and have now made major steps by rebranding two of our events.

We are rebranding the Wine Bloggers Conference as the Wine Media Conference and the Beer Bloggers & Writers Conference as Beer Now.

We have two main goals we are trying to achieve with these name changes:

1. Better Represent Our Attendees: Almost all our attendees not only blog but also use social media. Many write about wine or beer for print publications or on contract for businesses as well. So calling the conferences “blogger” conferences is not really accurate any longer.
2. Be More Inclusive: There are social media users and writers who communicate about wine and beer but who do not blog. While we feel the conference content is applicable to social media influencers and non-blogging writers, we want names that reflect that.

We did not make these changes in haste, nor without great consultation among our communities. The new names (and websites URLs) will be more accurate and more inclusive. We have also kept our existing graphics, the megaphone man and beer man standing on kegs, which keeps our ties to our original name.

Let there be no mistake. We love bloggers and believe blogging has drastically altered the landscape of beer and wine writing. But with these name changes, we hope to continue our support of beer and wine bloggers while opening up our conferences to others.