PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi speaking at BlogHer 11. Photo: Feature Photo Service

BlogHer took place in San Diego over the weekend, and while we couldn’t be there, more than 3,000 others could.

We often hear about the importance of women and mothers to brands, both for their purchasing power and as influencers. Add the blogging element, and you have a target group that’s important to huge companies like PepsiCo.

In today’s guest post, Alyssa Galella, an SAE at M Booth and a BlogHer veteran, talks about the evolution of the event and gives us some key takeaways from this year’s conference. Click through more more.

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BlogHer has become a big deal, with 3,000 visitors expected between yesterday’s kick-off and tomorrow’s finale. DeVries PR offers some tips for those attending the San Diego event, to help from getting too overwhelmed. PepsiCo is also trying to make things a little more intimate, taking some activities off the show floor to smaller settings.

According to Jamie Stein, director of digital initiatives at PepsiCo, the company has a variety of brandcentric happenings planned like a Quaker pod off the show floor where folks can taste a new Chewy granola bar and a Trop50 CSR program with E! host Giuliana Rancic to support free school breakfast programs. “These women are important to us and to our long-term success,” Stein said.

BlogHer is also making news because of findings about young children and their use of smartphones.

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Maybe she isn't as influential as we thought? Lady Gagas in the latest issue of 'Harper's Bazaar.' Photo: Terry Richardson

BlogHer‘s 2011 Social Media Matters Study (co-sponsored by Ketchum) found that new digital platforms, such as online and mobile technology, are making more people into early adopters. For example, after only two years, sites like LivingSocial and Groupon are being used by 51 percent of women, 22 percent of women are using mobile gaming, and after a couple of years, 16 percent of adults online are using Foursquare and Gowalla, a milestone that took Twitter twice as long to reach.

The study was conducted in March 2011 and used two groups of respondents: a general population of 1,771 U.S. adults and 2,861 respondents from the BlogHer network. The respondents were a mix of men and women with the number of women far outweighing the men.

The study also found that women are more motivated to make a purchase by a blogger they trust (20 percent) than a celebrity (13 percent) and 47 percent of blog readers use these outlets for new trends and ideas. The entire Slideshare of the study is available here and after the jump.

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