Guide to mom bloggers and marketing

From fast-food chains to family carmakers, companies are reaching out to you through your favourite digital moms. We investigate the trend

Shanda Deziel,

Originally published in Today's Parent February 2012

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Illustrated by Tara Hardy

Not many people will have the experience of travelling on Walt Disney’s dime — although if you’re a mommy blogger, you may just get the call. Last year, Lynette Robinson, who lives in Halifax, was flown to Los Angeles for the red carpet premiere of The Lion King 3D. Disney put her up at the Four Seasons Hotel on the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Rodeo Drive. “You know,” says Robinson, “the one from Pretty Woman.”

Thanks to the success of her blog, My Wee View, which she started three years ago after her daughter (and only child) was born, Robinson is a frequent flyer. Pampers invited her to Cincinnati for a party at the home of their company vice-president; she was in Toronto to film a Dove commercial, starring women in social media; and she did a test drive of the Nissan Quest in Mont-Tremblant, Que. But Disney events, Robinson says, are the best: “They take care of every detail you can imagine. Just like how Disney movies fill you with that warmth in your heart, when you go on these trips, they pretty much do the same.”

Mom bloggers (the term they prefer) can get pretty sentimental about companies like Disney, Fisher-Price or even Dyson, the vacuum-maker. And you have to wonder if it has something to do with the fact that big corporations are taking a personal interest in moms and reaching out to this community of bloggers: offering products, asking for opinions and hosting events where moms are wined, dined and loaded with freebies.

“I think mothers have historically felt quite isolated and alienated,” says May Friedman, an assistant professor of social work at Toronto’s Ryerson University and co-editor of Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Act of the MommyBlog. Companies are capitalizing on that isolation, she says; they’re desperate to harness that “word of mom” — the passing along of tips and recommendations that used to happen over tea and cookies, but now happens on a much grander scale through blogs, Facebook and Twitter.

From "mom blog" to big business
That’s not to say these digital moms — and there are about 1,000 to 1,500 influential ones in Canada — are corporate dupes or pawns. Many of them are leveraging their relationships with brands to turn their personal blogging sites, often started as a hobby, into successful online businesses.

Women like Erica Ehm, founder and publisher of yummymummyclub.ca, and Maureen Dennis, of Wee Welcome, started one-woman websites and now have fully staffed online enterprises, paid advertisers and tens of thousands of subscribers. They’ve become, in essence, their own brands. These bloggers are called upon as social media experts (former MuchMusic VJ Ehm speaks at conferences about the power of Twitter) and as parenting experts (Maureen Dennis has a regular gig on Marilyn Denis’s TV talk show). And they’ve been working with brands in one way or another from the start. “It’s mutually beneficial,” says Dennis. The companies get buzz about their products, the bloggers get the financial support they need to keep their sites running, and their audiences get access to information they wouldn’t otherwise.

Moms vs. companies: Who's getting the better deal?
It’s arguable who is getting the better deal out of the partnership. Concordia marketing professor Brent Pearce says social media influencers, like mom bloggers, seem to have the upper hand; they have forced companies to change the way they advertise and market. “The traditional paradigm said the companies create the message, they choose the medium by which it will be disseminated, and out it goes,” Pearce notes. “But in the last five years, companies have lost control of the message. It is now controlled and dictated by the consumer.” Ehm marvels at how Twitter, Facebook and blogs have given moms the power to speak out against brands they don’t like: “I think it’s a really interesting time in the way that women are being empowered.”

Read on to learn how specific Canadian brands are utilizing mom bloggers >