The Mommy Blogger = Corporate Genius?
January 20th, 2010
guest blogger: Megan Jeffery
Loralee Choate doesn’t really like the term “mommy blogger”, but as she would probably admit, the topics of her blog are very relevant to mothers and women, though she does have her share of male readers. Loralee authors Loralee’s Looney Tunes, blogging about her new baby, healthcare, depression, and occasionally a topic she considers silly. It was a post on healthcare and the subsequent tweeting and retweeting of this post that caught the attention of Valerie Jarret, a senior White House advisor. Choate and her husband (who had posted a differing view on healthcare on the blog) were invited to a luncheon at the White House to discuss thier views on healthcare. This lead to an article in February’s Parents magazine on the Virtual Power of Moms.
Loralee Choate’s incredible network of readers is directly responsible for the way this post made it’s way through the web.
Moms have always been a powerful force when it came to how the almighty American dollar was spent. I think this is probably true of most of the Western world. Women do the majority of acquiring goods and services for their families. Therefore, the lion’s share of marketing is directed at women.
Well, what happens when you take an already powerful spending group, add in an incredible group of women blogging about thier lives and creating rings and rings of people following these blogs and starting blogs of thier own? You get an enormous network of people (um, about 35 million of us mommys on the web as of this year) who have come to rely on each other, trust each other’s word, and root for each other. You get tribalization. You also get corporations trying to emulate and recreate the phenomenon for themselves.
Corporations have gotten on board with the web, totally. They have gotten Facebook pages and are learning how to use Twitter to promote thier products. What they haven’t quite figured out how to do is create the type of environment where their products are loved and defended and championed. They have started enlisting the help of mommy bloggers to try and help them create the types of networks enjoyed by bloggers. This practice has been chronicled a great deal in the last year or two. Mommy (and daddy) bloggers are changing the way American businesses market their wares or services. There has been a bit of backlash, as popular bloggers may get a bit pushy about recieving products. The FTC has even put new rules in place to help readers determine which statements bloggers make are paid, and which are thier personal opinion.
At the end of the day, I think the model, this tribalization that occurs for these bloggers is very interesting, and some aspects of it can work for business owners and corporations. But, when it gets right down to it, parents are connecting over emotions, events in our children’s lives and the things that are most important to us, and no corporation is going to be able to emulate that entirely.
