We just officially announced over the weekend at SXSW that our 2010 dates are October 14 – 16 and we are moving to Mandalay Bay Hotel & Convention Center!

I apologize for not getting the news out sooner but wanted to put up a quick post to let you know why it took so long, why we are moving and give you some other details.

First off this is a very big deal to move the show from the Las Vegas Convention Center to Mandalay Bay. I hope you can appreciate we had to keep this top secret until everything was finalized. Rumors suck and we didn’t want anyone to be confused about the dates or the location.

While we love the LVCC (our home for the last three years) we had outgrown the meeting space they had for us. Particularly for our keynotes and all of our community tracks (more on those in a bit).  If you have been to the show before you know the LVCC is massive (the 3rd largest convention center in the United States), but we took up every single meeting room next to our exhibit hall and actually had to build out our keynote area on the tradeshow floor. Exhibit halls are not known for their acoustics so this caused some problems with the audio particularly as we grew and it cost us a fortune to put down carpet, AV and a massive 20 foot high drape to divide the keynote area from the exhibit hall.

One other major factor was the location. The LVCC is in a great location for huge events like CES, SEMA and MAGIC, but for us it was inconvenient for our attendees. We couldn’t everyone into the Renaissance hotel which is a 2 minute walk from the South Hall where our show was located. So most people stayed at the Las Vegas Hilton. While it is directly adjacent to the North Hall of the LVCC thats about a mile long walk to where BlogWorld was! Like I said its a big convention center. So our community was spread out and obviously the community feel of the event is a very important thing.

At Mandalay Bay those problems are solved. We have a huge ballroom for our keynotes located right next to the exhibit hall, and all of the other meeting rooms for our breakouts and community tracks surrounding. Of course the convention center is attached to the Mandalay Bay Hotel (my wife’s favorite hotel in Vegas).  Mandalay Bay has over 3,300 rooms so everyone can stay there if they like and we were able to negotiate a killer deal for everyone. In large part because the management there sees the huge value of having 3,000 + bloggers, podcasters, and social media influencers staying there.

Whats the deal?

Rooms for $109 a night! That includes free WiFi in your room and of course free WiFi in the conference and exhibit area.  Those rooms will go on sale through our site in the next couple of weeks so stay tuned for that announcement. These are very nice rooms!

If $109 a night isn’t cheap enough for you, we will be announcing even lower rates at Luxor and Excaliber soon. Both of these hotels are connected to Mandalay Bay via a free monorail.  Oh and you high rollers can stay at the very quiet and very cool “The Hotel” which is directly connected to Mandalay Bay, or the even more posh Four Seasons; also directly connected.

A couple other quick items about the conference content. We will be hosting once again the Social Media Business Summit. This content is meant specifically for business owners and business executives to help them understand how to navigate the social media space, and how to use social media tools to build their business, communicate better with their customers and internally. Anyone who had been before knows we have a blockbuster line up of speakers who are offering real actionable business solutions.

We will have tracks on Monetization, Audio, Video, Advanced Podcasting, and New Media 101 for people just getting started with their blogs, podcasts, video and social networking.

Of course we will have community tracks, returning this year we have Sports, Travel, Health Care, Non-profit and Cause Marketing, Politics, Real Estate, Milblogging, Music & Entertainment.

And we have one new community track that everyone seems to be excited about; Food.

Oh and if you haven’t heard our opening Keynote will be Mr. Scott Stratten Author of the UnMarketing Blog, @Unmarketing on Twitter and author of the sure to be best selling upcoming book….. UnMarketing. Yes the man knows a thing or two about brand building =p.

We will be releasing lots more details over the next several weeks so check back at the blog, follow me on Twitter @blogworld or sign up for the newsletter here.

If you have any questions about the event feel free to leave a comment under this post message me on Twitter, or shoot me an email rick@blogworldexpo.com

Blog on!
Rick