Mom bloggers become powerful online force

Like many a mommy blogger before her, Cathy Hale started her Web site out of feelings of isolation. She was at home with her 4-year-old and 6-month-old boys last year when she started a blog, MommyQ.

"Your life just changes instantly from being around people all the time and being involved in important work that's meaningful to you," she said over coffee at a South Austin café. "All of a sudden you're taken out of that and you're in your house with a teeny-tiny, helpless little baby ? you feel like you're the only person in the world who's trying to make that work."

But unlike the deeply personal online journals many bloggers maintained in the past, Hale's is a new kind of mom blog that's becoming increasingly common.

"I don't put my kids' names, initials, nothing," she says. She doesn't post photos of herself or her children and doesn't use her real name. Instead, Hale, a freelance public relations and marketing specialist, focuses on product reviews, posts about pop culture and her opinions on parenting issues.

She's gained a readership of about 2,600 visitors a month, and one of her blog posts was picked up recently by MSN.com, bringing her 800 visitors in a day. She treats the site like a full-time job, promoting it on Twitter and Facebook, an investment she hopes will eventually earn her money.

"Everything in my life was about babies and baby products," Hale says. "So it just made sense for me to harness those feelings and turn that energy into a blog."

Mommy blogs have been around as long as there's been a blogosphere, but in the past few years they've become so numerous and influential that blogs like Hale's are becoming increasingly common. Some are also shifting to the kind of writing that attracts free products, trips or even book deals from companies who've embraced this powerful demographic of informed, connected women.

'The holy grail'

Jennifer James remembers what mom blogging used to be like: "We were just talking about our kids and about our families, and connecting based on parenting ideas and philosophies," she said. "The marketers hadn't figured out that we were, like, the holy grail."

James, who lives in Winston-Salem, N.C., runs Mom Bloggers Club, a network of more than 5,000 mom blogs. She started it in 2007. She says that when articles started appearing in places like The New York Times that year about the growing influence of mom bloggers, everything changed. An A-list of increasingly famous mom bloggers had begun to form, led by Heather Armstrong (dooce.com), who is the most widely read among the top mom bloggers.

"We had amassed such large readerships, collectively, if not necessarily individually," James said. The free products came. James said she was flooded with children's books, toys, electronics and offers for free trips.

Soon after, James switched from writing about her family to only doing product reviews. "I was talking about education, but then as the products started coming, the next post would be about soap," she said. A large number of page views from Europe targeting photos of her daughter sealed the decision to take her family out of her blog. "I decided I wasn't going to do that ever again."

Meanwhile, companies including Wal-Mart and Johnson & Johnson have incorporated mom bloggers into marketing campaigns with names like "Elevenmoms" and "Real Moms."

Are they the holy grail? According to research firm Nielsen Online, "Power Moms" - women ages 25 to 54 with at least one child - now account for 19.2 percent of the active online population.

Jessica Hogue, who led Nielsen's research this year into the world of mom bloggers, helped select the 50 top mom bloggers in the country in a list called "The Power Mom 50." The list was based on blog traffic, Twitter followers and other indicators of a blogger's readership and influence.

Her company now monitors 10,000 to 13,000 mom blogs at any one time and plans to keep tracking trends across the community with the help of a mom blog advisory board that will help select future rounds of the Power Mom 50 list.

"Mom blogs today are the epicenter for products reviews," Hogue said. "We know that Mom is sort of at the center of all, if not many, purchase decisions. Increasingly, there's been interest in what moms are talking about online."

The growth of such product reviewing has spread so rapidly that the Federal Trade Commission is examining whether bloggers should disclose when they've been given free products or are being paid to review them.

In niches, more readers

Lest you think that all the mommy bloggers have stopped writing about their families, the core of popular mom blogs are still written by sharp, compelling writers who can strike a chord with their readers with a disastrous potty training story or a rant about the challenges of finding a good day-care facility.

Austin blogger Jennifer Newcomb Marine thinks most mom bloggers still want to connect with other women and vent about their lives. She just thinks many bloggers have gotten savvier about the content - whether it's text, videos or even Twitter posts - that they put out there.

"It's gone so much beyond that now," Newcomb Marine said, "It's about entertainment, practical information, creating networks - maybe on a global basis, but also locally."

Newcomb Marine has found her audience by writing a specific genre of mom blog: the stepmom blog. Along with the stepmother of her two children, Carol Marine, she blogs at a site called No One's the Bitch. The two published a book that used some material from the blog; the site was instrumental in landing the book deal, Newcomb Marine said.

She believes stepmom blogs are going to be an increasing segment of mom blogs as family demographics change and that her blog's focus has helped it attract more readers.

"The more specific you are, the more of a niche you create, actually the more likely it is that you'll be successful," Newcomb Marine said. "It's too hard to stand out with this slew of generic blogs on mothering."

Rachel Hobson found an audience by shifting her mom blog to do more blogging about crafts. "I'm a mom all the time," she said. "I just really felt the need to kind of branch out and do something different. My blog could be more fun and kind of for me ."

As Average Jane Crafter, Hobson did so well that her blogging earned her a paid gig with Make magazine. She's now a contributing writer for Make's Craftzine.com.

Hobson said she's a little frustrated that although she's tried to keep her online writing focused on things she loves, she's found herself reading other mom blogs less and less, as many have become so marketing-focused.

"Clearly big companies see us as such a tasty demographic," she said. "As a blogger it's exciting and fun to get free stuff and review it. At the same time, I get frustrated with that. It just feels like all I am is a wallet."

If the voice of real moms that attracted so many readers to mom blogs in the first place is in danger of disappearing on some blogs, it might live on, ironically, on corporate Web sites.

Seton Family of Hospitals recently hired Austin blogger Melanie Dodge to be the official "Site Mom" for its local maternity site, SetonBabyTalk.com. Dodge works about 20 hours a week for the site; she blogs, keeps a calendar of events on the site, routes reader questions to doctors and promotes SetonBabyTalk on social networks like Facebook.

Adrienne Leyva, communications manager for Seton, said Dodge doesn't run content past anyone before posting it; her authenticity as a blogger and mother was what Seton sought.

"It's been a different experience for our marketing, but we feel like it's really important. She has to be genuine," Leyva said.

"People can relate to her."

Who are the bloggers?

For such a powerful group of Web influencers, it's tough to determine how many mom bloggers are actually out there. In 2005, blog tracker Technorati estimated there were about 8,500 blogs where parents were writing about their kids.

Now, the number is certainly larger, but hard to ascertain because so-called mommy blogs (and daddy blogs, too) are classified as something else (craft blogs, coupon blogs, product review blogs) and many mom bloggers don't lump themselves in with the crowd.

"Nobody really knows how many there are," Hogue of Nielsen Online said. "There's issues with how things are tagged and how people self-identify. Even the term `mommy blogger' - some own it and some find it to be one-dimensional and, in a way, offensive."

The diversity of backgrounds and home situations of these bloggers has at times led to online "mommy wars" over issues like breastfeeding or staying at home versus juggling kids and career. It's easy to exchange heated words with strangers who might be halfway around the world.

Many have found the antidote to online tension is in creating local networks and meeting other moms face-to-face. Catherine Prystup, founder of LiveMom.com, created her site as a community for Austin-area moms after the birth of her second child.

It's a place for Austin moms to post and to find local parenting resources, but it's also become a way to meet: In February, about 40 people showed up to an Austin Mama Blogging Social hosted by the site.

"Sometimes it can feel isolated writing, especially if you don't have a lot of people who comment," Prystup said. "You wonder who your readers are."

It sometimes happens that readers don't know the mom blog authors as well as they thought. Though most bloggers interviewed for this article said they believe most mom bloggers are honest in the way they present themselves online, it's always the information the authors want to present to the world.

Last month, mom blogs got a dose of unwanted attention when it was revealed that Emily McDonald, a local mom blogger who frequently wrote about her premature kids' ailments, was accused of harming her 3-year-old by putting feces into a hospital feeding tube.

On one news site that carried the story, some anonymous commenters said they'd been reading McDonald's blog and had come to feel like they knew her and her kids. "I thought she was supermom," one wrote. "I followed her blog for two years and never suspected anything."

The blog was taken offline shortly thereafter. It was a dark chapter in what has otherwise been an extraordinary story for mom bloggers, who are becoming more organized and more community-focused.

Stephanie Klein, a memoirist of two books and one of Austin's most famous mom bloggers with the site Greek Tragedy, believes the next stage in the evolution of mom blogs might be an end to bickering and even more growth for mommy bloggers as they publish books, pitch television shows and continue to push the envelope in their honesty.

Last year, she delivered a speech at a conference for BlogHer, one of the largest online networks for women bloggers, about what might come next. She echoed her speech as she pondered recently how revolutionary it would be for mom bloggers to simply boost each other.

"What's radical and what's forward-thinking is supporting other parents even if you don't necessarily agree with their choices," Klein said. "The future of mommy blogging will hopefully be mothers making each other feel good about their decisions."

ogallaga@statesman.com; 445-3672

Where the mom bloggers go

Popular online networks for mom bloggers include:

* BlogHer.org

* Mombloggersclub.com

* Cafemom.com

* Twittermoms.com

* Momlogic.com

* Babble.com

Source: http://www.statesman.com/life/content/life/stories/other/2009/07/12/0712momblogs.html