Marketing WITH Mom Bloggers, 101

I’m about to have lunch with a marketer and the president of a company who want to reach out to mom bloggers.  I expect it is because they want to pick my brain.  That is fine with me.  There’s not much in there that can be taken advantage of.  I’m doing this as a favor for the father of Kyle’s classmate.  He seems hungry and ready to take it all in.

Here is what’s in my brain:

To utilize the vast collection of “mom bloggers” in spreading the word about your product, you can:

-Send out samples of your product and ask them to write about it on their blogs.  Unless this product is free food, a lap dance by Justin Timberlake, or a free trip to Hawaii, this venture is a crap shoot.  Some may review it if it strikes a chord, most won’t even accept the free product.

-Hire a bunch of bloggers to do a sponsored post.  You will need to manage these bloggers.  Depending on how many you hire, this could be a giant PITA.  If they blog about your product, they will most likely post the link on Twitter and Facebook, and even StumbleUpon and others.  This sort of handles those social media apps for you.

-Throw a Twitter party, in which you have someone asking questions and generating discussion that has something to do with your product, at a specific time.  You can give prizes to randomly chosen tweeters during this time.  All of the tweets during your twitter party can be hashtagged, or labeled, with your company or product name.  You will need to invite people to the Twitter party, and manage their attendance.

-Have an event.  Invite a bunch of mom bloggers and wine and dine them.  Show them your product.  Let them mingle with one another.  Give them a hashtag to use while they are tweeting during your event.  Post photos from the event online.

-For God’s sake, update your Twitter feed and Facebook fan page and your blog.  If there is nothing there, there’s no there there.  You know what I mean?

Or just kill all those birds with one stone and hire a mom blogger marketing professional to manage all of the above.  I know several of these people and companies.  They know the community, they are respected bloggers themselves, and they have proven track records at generating buzz for products and services.  They are not dirt cheap.

You get what you pay for.

Updated:

First of all, MY BAD.  I published this post when I meant to hit “save draft” and immediately changed the status from publish to draft…except then I didn’t hit “updated.”  Long story short – it wasn’t finished when it went live.  Also, I am not normally dumb enough to write something like this RIGHT BEFORE a meeting with someone who was most surely about to check my blog to do his homework on me before we met.

So there I was, going to my meeting thinking I had pulled this post down.  I sauntered into the restaurant and I saw:  this blog post, printed out, in the hands of the people I was writing to/about.

Um, haha.  I pointed it out and said “Now you don’t even have to buy me lunch!”

Luckily these two gentlemen each have a sense of humor.  In fact, they had each done their own research about the world of mom blogging.  I was even handed a list of blogs one had visited, read, and made notes about.  You might be on this list, fellow mom blogger.  It was small font, and covered a whole page.

Turns out there is more in my brain than what I wrote, above.  And while I don’t espouse the practice of giving away the milk for free, I do believe in connecting people I like.  I like these people.  And I like mom bloggers.  I want you all to work together for mutual benefit and good karma.  So I told these gentlemen what I know, what I have witnessed, what I recommend, and what I do not recommend.  They seemed receptive.

And the tacos were delicious.

So, instead of letting a brand pick my brain and then steal my ideas, as has happened to so many of my colleagues and therefore served as fair warning that this could happen to me, I offered up a basic picture of how best to work with mom bloggers.  Anyone who has done this realizes that there is work involved, it’s not magic.  As the old saying goes, you can get two of the three:  fast, cheap, or good.  Not all three at once.

My point is that while I can certainly charge a fee for giving advice and sharing my experience with a brand, I did this with no expectations because I know this company will need to put some serious legwork and/or cash into doing it right.  And hopefully I set them on the right path.

And at a future date, I’ll post a cleaned up version of this whole marketing WITH mom bloggers idea.