Mummy bloggers know best
Posted: Thursday 4 June 2009
For Susanna Scott, business is booming: new members are flooding in and a big-name company has even come calling to sponsor her site. Never mind that her "business" is little more than sitting on her computer and blogging with fellow mothers about the ins and outs of their, and their children's, lives.
The "motherhood experience" is nothing new - newspapers and magazines regularly feature first-person columns on the subject, and "mummy lit" has developed as a pink-paperback alternative to chick lit. But parent blogging in the UK is gaining momentum as a powerful tool for advertisers who want to cash in with what is one of the most influential of consumer groups - women are typically in charge of the household budget and influence all the big buying decisions.
Scott set up British Mummy Bloggers, http://britishmummybloggers.ning.com, in late 2008 to create a focus for the nascent community. She now runs four different blogs: A Modern Mother, Thames Valley Mums, London Mums and Ex Pat Mums, and the community has grown to more than 225 members, with new ones joining every week. The response has surprised Scott, a media and technology consultant from San Diego. She says that she expected Brits to be more reserved about blogging.
"Americans are more open to spilling their guts out to people who they don't know," she says. Yet in the UK, "people are coming out of the woodwork". Many of the group's members are recent converts, having started their sites in February or March, she says. And as their numbers have grown, so has the interest of corporations and PR agencies, who are doing all they can to woo the affections of mothers in an attempt to get their brands talked about.
"Six months ago, it was one or two [pitches] a month. Now I'm getting at least ten a week," says Scott.
The relationships between British mummy bloggers and advertisers or PR agencies is low-key and low-cost. Usually, bloggers get free products to review or the companies arrange for events or days out for bloggers to meet one another and provide feedback on a product or service. One of the most hallowed baby brands, Silver Cross, has just signed on to sponsor the British Mummy Bloggers site for £200 a month and cover the nominal cost of occasional meetings for the members The stakes were upped when Disney flew seven mummy bloggers to Florida earlier this month - without children - to experience the Disneyland magic for a week - the British parent blogging world buzzed with the news. Other bloggers clamoured to find out how it had come about. All the women documented their trip with posts, pictures, video and tweeted updates.
A competition offered by Kenco on Mumsnet.com, the UK's busiest online parent community, created a similar buzz. Three mothers from that community were taken to visit coffee farms in Costa Rica, and then blogged about the experience on the site. "I think that's a very sensible strategy for a company. If it works, it works very well," Justine Roberts, the co-founder and managing director of Mumsnet, says. "Particularly if they are trusted and high-profile members of the community." The Kenco event also sparked discussion on the rights and wrongs of accepting a trip in return for blogging about a place or a product. "Some people debated the ethics of representing the company and blogging on their behalf. In the end, it was a real debate. It wasn't contrived," Roberts says.
Experts say that, for companies, blogs can be an affordable way to get a message out or to take the temperature of "regular" mothers who then tell their readers about the experience. Elisa Camahort Page, the chief operations officer of BlogHer.com , a leading US-based community for women bloggers, says: "Blogs also act not only as a loud speaker for the person writing but as entertainment for those reading.
"People are twice as likely to report turning to blogs for anything about information-sharing," she says, citing the results of a recent BlogHer survey that compared blogs to other social media. The BlogHer directory lists almost 22,000 blogs and about 28 per cent of those are about parenting, she says, with fresh voices joining the blogosphere all the time.
So when companies plug-in to a network of mummy blogs they are in effect getting in on the mother-to-mother conversation, compared with the more formal relationship that journalists traditionally have with their readers.
Bachem, the managing director of the agency Digital Outlook, describes mummy bloggers commitment to their sites this way: "It is not their job," he says. "They do it out of a passion for sharing. What they write ends up being more believed or more trusted by the people that read it. Mummy bloggers are mums first and foremost."
In America influential mommy bloggers have caught the eye (and chequebooks) of corporations to create viable businesses. In March 2005, Grechen Vogelzang and Paige Heninger started recording podcasts as a kind of audio blog, with advice for fellow mothers, fitting them in between the school run and grocery shopping. Their podcasts, which feature the two women discussing topics such as family food tips and teaching kids mobile phone etiquette, became so popular that in 2006 they got a cold call from Dixie, a name synonymous in America with paper plates and cups. It wanted to sponsor them and paid more than six figures to have it names in their podcasts, a relationship that continues today. Heather Armstrong is the perhaps the biggest mommy blog success story, the blogging world's "celebu-mom". Her witty and provocative site, dooce.com , details her life with her daughter, husband and dog, taking in everything from her Mormon background, to her pregnancy and her "outie" belly button. The site, started while she was still single and working as a web designer, has supported her family since 2005 with a variety of adverts. She frequently appears on TV talking about blogging and motherhood, and has published two books. She is living - for the most part - every blogging parent's dream.
In the UK, relationships with sponsors are more informal and, so far, less profitable for the parents involved.When Chuggington, a new animated train show for children, was launching on CBeebies, seven bloggers met in person, watched exclusive clips of the show and met the director. Wolfstar, the social media specialist PR agency, organised the family event in London to whip up some interest in the show. "Six out of the seven posted [about it] the day after," says Sam Oakley, the head of online campaigning. "For us it was phenomenally successful."
There are obvious benefits for companies, that can generate word-of-mouth buzz cheaply and reinforce an approachable image. But by stepping outside the normal channels of media messaging, companies have to reconcile themselves to ceding some control of their message.
"You have to let go, because we're going to give them information and they're going to do what they want with it," says Meredith Bradshaw of Fleishman-Hillard, a communications agency that brings together companies and bloggers, and frequently works with BlogHer. "If they review a product and they don't like it, I can't have them retract it." No matter how much they might want to.
In a review of Aveeno products on littlemummy.com, Douglas wrote: "First up the colloidal oatmeal bath. Every time I mention colloidal I think it sounds like a nasty hospital treatment. I have to say the reality wasn't much better (www.littlemummy.com/2009/04/20/aveeno-review-giveaway). Then there was the disposable potty. "Basically, I thought it was rubbish," she says.
Companies maintain that all news is good news, when it comes to blogs. "If they don't like the product, that's good feedback for us," Bradshaw says. Roberts of Mumsnet says: "The truth is that it only works if the people are free to post the negative along with the positive." But with increased money comes increased pressure on the blogger to shill for the advertiser rather than catering to her audience, says Vogelzang. "We have to work very hard to not appear as if we're just selling stuff to our audience. It's not easy when you are dealing with a corporation that is used to having complete control over the message that's being delivered." Listening to Vogelzang and Heninger talk earnestly about children's allergies in a segment sponsored by an allergy medicine, you might have a hard time discerning where the advertiser message stops and the reader benefit begins.
Who benefits is a pressing question as parent bloggers feel their way. Ian Newbold, one of a small group of daddy bloggers, has run a competition with online review site Ciao on his Single Parent Dad blog, www.singleparentdad.blogspot.com , offering a Nintendo Wii. He liked the tangible prize that would appeal to readers and thought that it could help draw traffic to his site. But because of the onerous entry process and prize-giving rules, the response has been less than he expected. In the end he hasn't noticed a jump in traffic. "It's a lesson learned. I think I may do competitions in the future only if the prize is relevant and the method isn't laborious."
Ultimately, selling out or cashing in isn't the motivation behind most parenting bloggers, says Camahort Page of BlogHer. While some might dream of wheelbarrows of sponsor money and book deals, it's not the reason why people continue to join the blogging ranks.
"Mommy blogging started as women sharing with one another, finding others who were going through the same stage of parenting and trying to help one another. For most women who write specifically about parenting, that is still the heaviest influence and the motivation is to tell the story of their lives," she says. "They want to keep a record for themselves and their children."
Jennifer Howze writes for the Times Alpha Mummy blog
