Matthew Allen

Momblogging is a popular theme at blogworldexpo. Lots of sessions on this theme. Will cover some of the issues here, via blogging various sessions over next two days. To provide a sense of importance 30 million+ moms blog (I assume in the USA). Note the importance of media demographics – ‘moms’ as category; does it translate worldwide? does it matter if it doesn’t? US trends create global movements in similar countries. Perhaps I will get momblogging going in Australia?

This is a blog of a couple of sessions at the conference… scroll down for latest.

Some research appearing:
The radical act of ‘mommy blogging’: redefining motherhood through the blogosphere (lopez, 2009, NMS)

See also Works-in-progress: an analysis of Canadian mommyblogs (Heather Fleming, SFU)

Some important background / reflections:

marketing uses words like communication and community and conversation, too. Marketing has a direct, less analytical, yet curiously more realistic understanding of what these words mean in action, especially (in this context) as a way of harnessing and joining with women’s online activities. Consumerism as a purpose in life is also important.

First up, as I delve into the world of Momblogging:

Kate Thorp ‘Moms: The Ultimate influencers on the web’

Who is the Mommy Blogger (the archetype, not all)
“mostly female” [nice gender comment]; at home, younger children, living life online regularly, sharing of advice, emotions, reflections; content focus is on kids and mothering. BUT she’s ‘talking about brands’ and she has ‘control of the purse strings’ – eg 85% of car purchases determined by mother. Thorp reflects on marketing industry – there’s a long history of targetting women, but she asserts a change of state possible through social media, reaching more deeply into the home and focusing on women, rather than having to use a woman to reach the male decision maker. Especially younger women, with kids, heavily involved in online world – evidence shows much less TV viewing

Media shift – nice triptych; customer engagement (Social media); lead generation (direct marketing); identification (brand marketing).

“Experience trumps expertise” – this is the mantra for marketing people focusing on mothers; draws on deeper social trends away from expertise towards wisdom through prior experience [does this relate to truthiness?]; value of anonymity through social media for some kinds of information requests. value of personal connectivity – immediacy.

The mommy blogger is both a person and a marketing category: Thorp discusses in detail value of these types of people in generating brand awareness, spread of information. Emphasises, as a marketing lesson, the need for participants to speak freely. Then discusses traffic interaction – builds bloggers into a campaign, traffic to and from their blogs and the main marketing channel “it’s collaborative”. Critical to use them because they are the intermediaries of influence into other markets.

And to sum up this paper: nice question re race. Thorp responds that social media is not just white middle-class lifestyle. Is racial differentiation re-produced through different assumptions about gendered roles?

Session on Ethics of mommyblogging

One of the key issues that emerges, as if from nowhere, is the question of what disclosure is required for people who blog, and then take some kind of commission or product which they then endorse. It is a good example of how a moment occurs and then builds, almost without anyone realising it, to the point where mass or scale moves this apparently sub-cultural, unregulated moment into the mainstream and old rules need to be applied, creatively, to that moment.

(background: Soon, Bloggers Must Give Full Disclosure)

The discussion is relatively straightfoward at the panel; focuses on the practical issues relating to being an opinion-leading mommy blogger who has been approached, or is already, leading social media conversations for money, and not for love. (refer back to the professional blogger class that Technorati claims). The ethical questions articulated through a technological language – when is a tweet a sponsored tweet? everytime? whenever mentioned? or only when it is explicitly a sponsored tweet? ‘if I get paid to promote a game, what happens in 6 months time when I am not being paid but mention the game because it’s something I am doing?’

Panel is wrestling with the question of sincerity – that’s the power of mommyblogging, and yet it is what disappears when you start paying (perhaps). Good comment about needing to edit sincere posts which are wrong (eg someone endorsing a babyseat in a car by saying to use it in a wrong way). [The challenge here is that sincere is not equal to true; this is one of the fundamental issues of the Internet].

Also true that companies were fearful – if they didnt give in to ‘giving away’ products to bloggers, they worried that bad things would be said about them. An inversion – the blogging moms exercising a kind of exploitative power over the corporations [reflecting back the fundamentally unethical world of consumerism?]
But, as is later pointed out, companies regularly attempt to be nice to people, as consumers, so as to generate good word-of-mouth.

Bloggers saying – “i love the product, but have to say something negative so that people believe me” – response “if you are being honest, nothing else matters”.

Comment from floor – “mommyblogging is an industry” and earning a living is important and should happen, but ethics matters. This question, implicitly, turns it around – the ethics is actually a call for marketing industry to be ethical – to pay the damn money!.

Ads on momblogs – very small number of clickthroughs, but high clickthrough rate; comment from professional – design of blogs is bad, ads don’t work there. Bloggers need to basically professionalise their sites, get serious about metrics and analysis and updating.

Side notes:
There’s a deep sense of authenticity and presentation of the real self (as experienced or wanted) in momblogging at least as understood from the marketing perspective; social media is understood as a way of being who you are ‘for real’ but in the context of social connectivity online. An entirely different perspective to anything concerned with escaping from children or mothering; a focus on the real which, I think, is deeply connected to marketing which needs people to be real, so as to ensure the right sales pitch is made and their information is mobilised.

Social construction of gendered identities; moms are both characterised conservatively (they are the heart of community); and yet also progressively (they can be successful in business and at home). Moms, too, reconnect gender with family life, which is critical for marketing because of the money to be extracted from a whole family unit (which is why mommy bloggers can be men too). Do moms also speak truthfully, in the discursive sense? If so, why are they believed to be that way moreso than men?

Part of the story here is that mombloggers are a special kind of consumer, an ‘active consumer’ perhaps, who has opinions and knowledge, wants to share, performs their identity through the agency of consumerism – not buying but being the consumer. It’s not unlike the active audience research in TV studies.

The ethical question is most interesting; the industry wants people to be brand- and product-promoters in their everyday lives – so the challenge is that mommy bloggers are constructed as people who do this for free, anyway, authentically, and yet… this isn’t enough – advertisers want to control and manage this via paid endorsements.

I notice that sincerity, authenticity (and by implication ‘grounded in real experience’) come to be very important; celebrity endorsement is less about ‘experience’ but ‘celebrity’ – though drawing on the fantasy that the celebrity uses the product; mommyblogger endorsement is the inverse – someone utterly like you, the customer, whose words are convincing precisely because, in a media-saturated world, they are not the media. So new media is a kind of not-media, as I have argued elsewhere, but in this case because it is anti-media. I note, too, that there is a deployment of the moral imperatives which are common at this conference – to speak honestly, to be sensible, to be normal – this is a grounded articulation of more complex ideals of an ethical life which perhaps are difficult to maintain without a deep sense of community with like-minded individuals.

Tags: blogworldexpo, bwe09, gender, momblogging, net marketing, social media

This entry was posted on Friday, October 16th, 2009 at 01:59 and is filed under Conferences, Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response.