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; timesonline.typepad.com/alphamummy/
