Consumer Social Media

I read a really interesting article today by professional mummy blogger, Jessica Smith, about the misconceptions surrounding mummy bloggers. At work I have recently implemented a social media strategy for a new children’s TV show, Chuggington, and part of that was a blogger outreach programme.

Once we began looking into the blogosphere, we found there were hundreds of mummy bloggers out there, most of whom were extremely influential, with thousands of readers. On closer inspection of these blogs, it became clear that although all of these bloggers wrote about motherhood in some sense, their post varied massively.

These women were all mothers, but they had many more facets to their personality than just that. Some used their blogs to talk about their experiences with being full time mums, others talked about juggling a busy career with children. Some used their blogs to air their views and get opinions on parenting, whilst others had teenage children and used their blogs to vent their inevitable frustrations!

As with any outreach programme, we had to listen to these conversations and pinpoint the key bloggers who would be interested in the new TV show. We decided to put on a blogger event in London where attendees could bring their children, see two exclusive episodes of the show, talk to one of the creators, have a lunch and a tour of the venue, the Movieum.

This gave the mummy bloggers a chance to meet up face-to-face and get some interesting information for their blog. The real life meet up was one of our key selling points when approaching them about our event. Many of these bloggers knew of each other online and would comment on each other’s posts etc, but had never met in real life.

They were so excited about the chance to meet up and network, not to mention put a face to the name and meet each other’s children whom they’d read so much about. The feedback from the event was brilliant and everyone said how individual the approach had been and how nice it was to meet fellow mummy bloggers.

I think the fact we provided an opportunity for a real life meet up made all the difference to the campaign. As much as people need an online community and they are hugely beneficial, I believe sometimes there’s nothing like sharing a cup of coffee with someone and having a chat face-to-face.

This is something Graco in the US have taken full advantage of. In addition to their online community of mummy bloggers, they also host quarterly real life meet ups for their bloggers.

For me, the things you gain from meeting someone in person - whether that’s a journalist, fellow PR person or blogger - are invaluable. I think your relationship with someone changes so much once you’ve been able to experience their mannerisms, sense of humour and personality in the flesh. These things are very hard to convey online, even for the most transparent social media advocate!

Social networking is an extremely powerful tool, but I think if you combine it with a personal touch it is unstoppable.