Elisa Camahort Page

Cofounder BlogHer; CEO of Cygnus

• Born: ca. 1972
• Place of Birth: California

Primary Company/Organization: BlogHer

Introduction

Elisa Camahort Page was the groundbreaking chief operating officer (CEO) of BlogHer, one of the largest social networking organizations focused specifically on women. Before cofounding BlogHer in 2005 with Jory Des Jardins and Lisa Stone, Camahort Page ran Worker Bees, a marketing consultancy that integrated social media with corporate marketing strategies. Camahort Page has been influential in encouraging women to take part in technology, to use the Internet for communication, and to create a financially sound model that allows her large-scale blog to thrive.

Early Life

Elisa Camahort Page was born in the Bay Area of California. She has commented that her mother was one of her role models, because her mother made a successful career in the corporate world, becoming the first woman to act as vice president of her company. She attended college and attempted to become a performing artist in New York City but eventually returned to California, where she worked in commodities.

Camahort Page worked in Silicon Valley for seventeen years before founding BlogHer and credits several workplace mentors with helping her understand the technical side of the high-tech business. She worked primarily in marketing before founding BlogHer, running the marketing consultancy Worker Bees and working as senior director of product marketing at Terayon Communication Systems.

Life's Work

Camahort cofounded BlogHer with Jory Des Jardins and Lisa Stone in 2005. BlogHer is an online community that had approximately twenty-five hundred member blogs by October 2010. It is organized into categories such as Blogging and Social Media, Family, Feminism, Health, News and Politics, Style, and Tech. The website also includes BlogHer TV (videos) and an online book club where readers post questions relating to the books and others comment on them. By April 2012, an estimated 14 million women were visiting the BlogHer site monthly. The associated BlogHer conference, which grew from three hundred attendees in 2005 to more than five thousand in 2011, became the world's largest conference for women social media leaders. BlogHer is supported by advertising and sponsorships, and it achieved revenues in eight figures for both 2010 and 2011.

Camahort Page is a frequent public speaker and has presented keynote addresses on conferences such as South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive, MediaBistro Circus, and New Communications Forum. She has received many honors: She was named (along with cofounders Des Jardins and Stone) multiple times as one of the most influential women in technology by Fast Company, a progressive business media publication and website. Camahort Page, Des Jardins, and Stone were also named to the Ernst and Young Winning Women Class of 2011 and were jointly awarded the PepsiCo Women's Inspiration Award in 2011. In 2008, Page, Des Jardins, and Stone were given the Anita Borg Institute Social Impact Award.

The purpose of BlogHer's conference and other events is to bring together women who are involved in or who would like to become involved in blogging. There are no restrictions on who may attend; no particular level of experience or skill is required, and about 10 to 15 percent of the attendees at a typical annual conference are male. The annual conferences include a variety of sessions, social events, and speeches. Some of the programs are geared toward instruction in technical aspects of blogging and the Internet (such as HTML coding, podcasting, screen design, and search engine optimization), some toward marketing (such as turning blog entries into publishable books and articles and drawing attention to one's blog), and some toward using blogs for particular purposes (garnering support for a political cause or health promotion, for example). Two special programs were presented on the first day of the 2012 conference: Health Minder Day covered issues related to caregiving, health promotion and advocacy, and maintaining a balanced life, and Pathfinder Day covered issues related to using blogs for different purposes, including as a business, to create change, as a media company, and as a path to writing and publishing a book.

President Barack Obama addressed the gathering by live video; conference organizers say they also approached former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, then the Republican nominee for presidency, who declined to participate. Obama's talk was seen by conference organizers as recognition of the influence of BlogHer, and of blogs in general, on the political process, as well as the importance of women in the electorate. In his talk, Obama specifically addressed women's concerns in the upcoming election, including access to contraception and health care, as well as the importance of women providing strong role models and having their voices heard on the Internet and elsewhere.

Because of the size and success of BlogHer, it is often discussed in connection with general Internet issues, such as the 2009 U.S. Federal Trade Commission ruling that bloggers who discuss or review products on their blogs must disclose any material connections they may have with the producer of a product they discuss; this ruling interprets such discussions on a blog as endorsement, and failure to comply could result in fines of up to $11,000. Although this may sound like reasonable consumer protection rule, some charge that it amounts to a restriction of free speech, because many bloggers are amateurs not well versed in communications laws; were a few such nonprofessionasls to be assessed large fines, others might well be discouraged from participating in online communications in fear that they might violate some other law with which they were not familiar. In addition, some point out that the availability of free products and other in-kind merchandise has encouraged many women to become involved in blogging, a sphere previously dominated by men; some argue that receiving free products is the way most bloggers are compensated for their work, because they do not receive wages or salaries, and thus the availability of free products facilitates online communications.

BlogHer also proved to be a lightning rod for issues important to women. For instance, sponsorship of the August 2010 BlogHer conference by two Nestlé product lines, Stouffer's frozen foods and Butterfinger candy, drew the wrath of some breastfeeding advocates; Nestlé has been subject to a consumer boycott since 1977 based on issues surrounding the infant formula it has marketed in developing countries. Some women boycotted the 2010 conference, and others made political gestures such as making charitable contributions to organizations focused on mother and child health and welfare.

After BlogHer was acquired by SheKnows Media in November 2014, Camahort Page remained as senior vice president of community content and events and then chief community officer until early 2017. In 2018, Camahort Page coauthored the how-to manual Road Map for Revolutionaries: Resistance, Activism, and Advocacy for All. She went on to become the chief executive officer at Cygnus, a data analytics and visualization company, in mid-2019. She is a consultant and public speaker.

Camahort Page has also been active with nonprofit organizations. She was a founding member of the Society for New Communications Research, a nonprofit 501(c)3 foundation, which studies new media and its effects on business and society. She was a member of the board of directors of the 42nd Street Moon Theatre in San Francisco, which specializes in producing both classic and little-known musical comedies. She also served on the boards of advisers for the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, an organization dedicated to increasing the positive impact of technology on women and women's impact on technology, and for Food on the Table, a website and mobile app designed to help families plan and organize food shopping as well as cook and serve healthy meals. She is on the programming advisory committee for SXSW Interactive, an annual conference in Austin, Texas. Camahort Page also joined the board of directors of the NanoSTEAM Foundation in 2017 and Our Hen House in 2019.

Personal Life

Camahort Page is married to a software developer and lives in California.

Bibliography

"About." Elisa Camahort Page's Official Website, www.elisacp.com/about. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.

Camahort Page, Elisa, Carolyn Gerin, and Jamia Wilson. Road Map for Revolutionaries: Resistance, Activism, and Advocacy for All. Ten Speed Press, 2018. Print.

Cross, Mary. Bloggerati, Twitterati: How Blogs and Twitter are Transforming Popular Culture. Westport: Praeger, 2011. Print.

Funk, Tom. Social Media Playback for Business: Reaching Your Online Community with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and More. Westport: Praeger, 2011. Print.

Marcus, Jake Aryeh. Mothering 162 (2010): 37. Print.

Walker, Rob. “Monetizing Motherhood.” New York Times 22 (2010): 30. Print.