Do you know what a Mommy Blogger is? A parent (usually a mother, but who’s to say that a father couldn’t be a Mr. Mommy Blogger too?) who blogs about parenting AND about life.
But there’s more. AdAge calls Mommy Bloggers, “… marketing business heavyweights. Now said to number in the millions, these online women have cobbled together content networks that rival some mainstream media companies.”
Mommy Bloggers can’t be stereotyped. They are mothers, yes, but to children of all ages. And their professions? While some are At-Home Mothers, others, as Mashable points out, (quoting a tweet from @JessicaKnows), are: “… lawyers, writers, engineers, wives, and sisters …”
Yet many Mommy Bloggers are united by their sophisticated understanding of social media marketing, recognizing the power of the blog, and of micro sites such as Twitter, to be great social and consumer influences. Better still, they understand and RESPECT this power to such degree that last month, at the fifth annual BlogHer Conference, a group of bloggers launched Blog with Integrity, a website that is devoted to improving the ethics of blogs and how blogs are used.
According to CNN, as of Monday, more than “880 blogs have signed the site’s pledge, in which bloggers promise to disclose material relationships, policies and business practices, and let readers know the difference between editorial content and advertising.”
Mommy Blogging seems to have come full circle. Starting out as a sharing and communication tool, perhaps the influence of commercial backers, swayed some Mommy Bloggers away from their focus on exchanging thoughts and ideas, and toward a more gratuitous role, where their blogs ‘endorsing’ certain products or services netted them freebies and gifts from the vendors. As these commercialized Mommy Blogs became more focused on the “marketing” side of social media, they began to lose credibility. Readers started to see them as pitches instead of posts, and even the Federal Trade Commission began to wonder where to draw the lines.
A lesson for us all.
… and only the beginning of our discussion on women and social media.
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