On a brisk Saturday morning this month, a dedicated crew of about 90 women, most in their 30s or thereabouts, arrived at a waterfront hotel in Baltimore, prepared for a day-long conference that offered to school them in the latest must-have skill set for the minivan crowd.
Teaching your baby to read? Please. How to hide vegetables in your children’s food? Oh, that’s so 2008.
The topics on the agenda included search-engine optimization, building a “comment tribe” and how to create an effective media kit. There would be much talk of defining your “brand” and driving up page views.
You know. For your blog.
Yes, they had come to Bloggy Boot Camp, the sold-out first stop on a five-city tour. It is the brainchild of Tiffany Romero and Heather Blair, the founders of the Secret Is in the Sauce, a community of 5,000 female bloggers. Boot Camp is at once a networking and social event, bringing together virtual friends for some real-time girly bonding, and an educational seminar designed to help the participants — about 90 percent of them mothers — to take their blogs up a notch, whether in hopes of generating ad revenue and sponsorships, attracting attention to a cause or branching out into paid journalism or marketing.
“You’re here because you want to be seen as a professional,” Romero told the group.
A summer-camp director from Los Angeles, she steered the proceedings with the good-natured sass of a sorority social chairwoman and the enthusiasm of a, well, summer-camp director. (She went barefoot for much of the day and said “You guys!” a lot.)
After the obligatory announcement that participants — who’d paid US$89 and traveled from as far as California — should “feel free to tweet” (hashtag: bloggybootcamp), the women splayed their laptops, pecked at their Blackberries and traded business cards. A handful drank mimosas out of brightly colored plastic sippy cups.
“Do I call you ‘Jill’ or ‘Scary Mommy?’” a participant asked Jill Smokler, a speaker, whose blog, about her life as a mother of three, typically draws about 36,000 page views a month.
Discussions ranged from how to let public-relations firms know that you don’t work free. — “Your time and your experience and your audience are worth something,” Romero said. “It’s capitalism, plain and simple.” — to the benefits of using Facebook fan pages and Twitter — “My entire life in social media changed when I got on Twitter,” she said to knowing nods.
There was a presentation on the new Federal Trade Commission guidelines requiring bloggers to disclose their connections to advertisers and another on how to use keywords to make a post more visible in Google searches. Heed the speaker’s advice and you too might get 28,549 views of your tutu-making tutorial.
Whereas so-called mommy blogs were once little more than glorified electronic scrapbooks, a place to share the latest pictures of little Aidan and Ava with Great-Aunt Sylvia in Omaha, they have more recently evolved into a cultural force to be reckoned with. Embellished with professional graphics, pithy tag lines and labels like “PR Friendly,” these blogs have become a burgeoning industry generating incomes ranging from US$25 a month in what one blogger called “latte money” to, for a very elite few, six figures.
A study by BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners last year showed that 23 million women read, write or comment on blogs weekly.
“We all live online,” said one Boot Camp attendee, Jennifer Gerlock, who blogs at hipasiwannabe.com.
Some women are so entrenched in the blogosphere that there’s even a blog just about ... blogging conferences. (Disclosure: I occasionally write a blog, called Clever Title TK, about everything from American Idol to my love of Alpha-Bits, and was somehow once included in a list of “cool and interesting” but “lesser-known mom bloggers.”)
For many, the blogosphere functions as a modern-day coffee klatch, a vital outlet for conversing and commiserating about day-to-day travails, especially at a time when many mothers raise their children far from family and friends, or work outside the home at 9-to-5 jobs.
Blogging has “opened up a whole new world to me,” said Stephanie Stearns Dulli of Germantown, Maryland, a former Los Angeles-based actress who now writes about being a stay-at-home mom — and occasionally about General Hospital, for which she displays a “brand ambassador” badge on her blog, dialmforminky.com.
“Through Twitter and blogging, I found a whole community of women going through the same thing as I am at the same time,” Sterns Dulli said.
The blogosphere is also increasingly the place where many women look for their parenting role models. Just as television viewers have a seemingly insatiable hunger for reality shows, mothers often prefer the warts-and-all experiences of other moms online — and the ability to discuss them interactively — to the dry, inflexible pronouncements spouted by experts in books and parenting magazines.
Another attendee, Mary Fischer, began her blog, the Mommyologist (Tag line: “Analyzing Motherhood with Laughter and Honesty ... and Trying Not to Lose my Mind in the Process!”), as a way to cope with her feelings of disorientation after trading in a career as a meeting planner for life as a stay-at-home mother.
“I thought that something was wrong with me,” she said. “Or maybe I wasn’t a good mother. And so now I feel, like, with my blog, maybe I can help other girls that are feeling isolated know that everybody goes through that.”
Francesca Banducci, a co-writer of mayhemandmoxie.com (tag line: “Because Perfection & Motherhood Simply Cannot Co-Exist”), has an MBA in marketing, but said she’s given up trying to have the “big blog.” Instead, Banducci, pregnant with her third child, blogs mostly for fun and friendship, treating it as a hobby like any other.
“My husband calls it my expensive hobby,” she said with a laugh.
Just as companies like Tupperware saw the untapped sales potential in the old-school coffee klatch, advertisers have now set their sights on mommy blogs, recognizing that anywhere women’s eyes flock in huge numbers — especially anywhere they might be discussing the products they use — is prime real estate.
“The blogosphere is where authentic conversation is happening,” said Pamela Parker, a senior manager with Federated Media, which sells ad space for an A-list roster of about 150 bloggers that includes superstars like Dooce and the Pioneer Woman, who’ve parlayed their blogs into lucrative one-woman industries. (The New York Times Co is an investor in Federated Media.)
“Marketers are recognizing that they want to be there, associated with that authentic conversation,” Parker said.
According to eMarketer, advertising on blogs will top US$746 million by 2012, more than twice the figure for 2007. There are perks, too. In just the last month alone, popular mommy bloggers have been sent to the Olympics, courtesy of Procter & Gamble, and to the Oscars, courtesy of Kodak; and road-tripped to Disney World in a Chevy Traverse, courtesy of GM Canada.
But just as some cringe at Tupperware parties and the like for allowing a commercial enterprise to masquerade as a social one, some find the massive influx of corporate sponsors, freebies and promotions into the blogosphere a bit troubling. That might be, in part, because bloggers and corporations are still forging the proper boundaries of their relationship, groping through uncharted territory.
“It’s like we’re playing seven minutes in heaven,” Ciaran Blumenfeld, the publisher of momfluential.net, said in a telephone interview. “The brands know they need a blogger. The bloggers know they need a brand. When everyone gets in the closet, nobody knows what to do with each other. It’s like we’re all 13 again.”
Last summer, one blogger organized a week-long public-relations blackout in which bloggers were urged to eschew contests, product reviews and giveaways and instead get “back to basics” by writing about their lives. Another blogger replied that she couldn’t do so because the blackout fell the week of her daughter’s first birthday party, which she was promoting on her blog. With sponsors and giveaways.
“I wish we could go back to where blogging was five years ago, when it was just about the writing and the connecting and none of the free stuff and the vacations and the swag bags,” said Smokler, of ScaryMommy.com.
Her blog recently landed her a full-time job with Nickelodeon’s ParentsConnect.com social-networking site, despite her not even having a resume.
“I think it dilutes the point,” she said.
Some defend the growing alliance between bloggers and corporate America as empowering rather than exploitative, allowing women to have a voice in shaping the brands they consume.
It’s also a way for mothers to flex their dormant professional muscles, make some money and, says Amy Lupold Bair, who runs resourcefulmommy.com and was a speaker at the Boot Camp, still “take their kids to the bus stop in the morning and be there when they get off in the afternoon.”
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