Thursday, February 22, 2007

The Rise of Mommy Bloggers

While doing more research on female PR practitioners and blogging, I came across an interesting new movement currently taking place in the blogoshere – something that has become known as “Mommy Blogs”. It all started with Dooce (real name Heather B. Armstrong), an American mommy who was fired because her blog became more popular than the company she worked for. She never challenged her termination, however a fierce debate about privacy issues started as a result. Armstrong is now so famous that her nickname has become a neologism: being “dooced” refers to losing one’s job as a result of something one wrote on the Internet.


The mommy blog community is now growing by the day, both in numbers and influence. It demonstrates that women are powerful communicators and is fast becoming a place where people are turning to seek access for their messages. Dooce even posts press releases on her website. And marketers have already taken notice of this new phenomenon. As pointed out by Rohit Bhargava on his Influential Interactive Marketing blog, with the help of blogging these women can now easily connect with each other and create online communities. They represent an influential audience, and marketers are increasingly trying to develop personal relationships with the leaders among them. Guy Kawasaki, one of the original Apple employees responsible for marketing the Makintosh in the 1980s, is maintaining a rapidly expanding Ultimate Mommy Blog list. Even large corporations are participating. For instance, Johnson & Johnson (an Ogilvy client) is launching a mom blogger directory.

According to Michael Sommermeyer, a PR strategist and writer, mommy blogs will become a channel for groups seeking access to targeted audience, which will lead to more PR campaigns in collaboration with mommy bloggers. Sommermeyer sees a cottage industry emerging, with mommy bloggers aiding in generating buzz and promoting viral marketing.


Generally, there are large female bloggers networks emerging, devoted to the women on the Web. One of them, Blog Sisters, was founded by a female PR practitioner. Other examples include BlogHer, BlogsbyWomen and BlogSheroes.

4 comments:

M.M said...

Hi Alena,
Actually, this is an interesting post. What you said insures what I said in my blog. I believe that blogs will get more famous. Blogs are the free places for all people to show there abilities. I hope that women in the poor countries realize that and start blogging to raise their voices. Anyway, the women are still not intrest in blogging. According to Elliott Back 76.8% of bloggers are men and 23.2% are females. she analysed generic first name data on 24,846 different blogs. her goal was to determine how many men versus how many women are blogging, and what the most popular blogger names are for each gender are. To do this, she compared the raw data against US Census first names data, which lists 1000 male and female names, ranked by frequency. If there is a tie between these lists for a given name, she choose the one with a frequency twice as much as the other, or else ignore it. This rarely occurs. Then, there are plenty of other first names that are harder to classify. Those fall into the backup lists, which are simply long lists of male / female names she trolled off the internet. Finally, if it can’t match that, it gives up. This brings her to the following “raw numbers” result: (1) male: 14548 (2)female: 4390 (3)neither: 5908
Out of the 18,938 names could identify, 76.8% of them are male and only 23.2% female.

Sheryl said...

Very interesting. Well with current trends, where more and more women are leaving the corporate world to set up their own businesses, there could be an influx of mummy bloggers!
I remember some statistics, that the ratio of men to women in public relations was something like 1:4 or 40:60 percent - figures may have changed.
Like Moeen said, blogs are popular and as long as people have access to the internet, this media is accessible to anyone. Just look at the gender mix of our class, or the lack of it! Blogging is part of the coursework, who knows, some of us just might end up as mummy bloggers!

Anonymous said...

That's really interesting of hearing the term "mommy bloggers". I couldn't find any statistics about the ratio of male and female bloggers. However I believe that the ratio which Sheryl mentions here may have greatly changed due to the trend of instant messaging, i.e. getting instant feedback from clients will be one of the goals of many departments of corporations, not only pr department.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for writing this.