“Mommy bloggers” have been called the most influential group on the Internet. A huge network composed of women with buying power, many brands have been scrambling to get the attention of these women in order to leverage their popularity within this target demographic.
Mom bloggers are invited to conferences, to product demonstrations, sent free products, paid for reviews and more. Brands vie for advertising space on their blogs and offer incentives, prizes and rewards for a positive mention in their blog. However, a recent post on MomDot.com entitled “Bloggers are Stupid” demonstrates some of the backlash that is happening within the community, where the feeling that mom bloggers are being taken advantage of, underestimated and undervalued is becoming more and more prevalent.
The particular incident that inspired the post on MomDot.com has to do with General Mills. On BrandWeek.com, an article about General Mills recruiting bloggers has drawn the attention of those same bloggers. The article on BrandWeek.com opens,
Bloggers, particularly moms, are an audience of such growing importance to General Mills that the consumer-goods company has built a formal network to feed them free products and enable them to run giveaways for their audiences.
This program involved 900 bloggers applying for the chance to receive coupons and product samples, and to report back about their experiences with the products on their blogs. While positive reviews were not required, one of the requirements participants must agree to reads, ” “If you feel you cannot write a positive post regarding the product or service, please contact the MyBlogSpark team before posting any content.”
While the reaction to the program was largely positive – everyone loves free stuff, right? – the negative reaction has come from a quote that MomDot.com picked out from the second page of the BrandWeek.com article.
Overall, the program resulted in 5 million total impressions and over 8,000 comments with no media costs. (General Mills does not buy ads on blogs, Witt said.)
MomDot.com calls this “a slap in the face to bloggers.” It seems that General Mills receiving 5 million blog hits by offering a voluntary program for bloggers to participate in, but claiming they had no media costs, is insulting the the bloggers who participated.
The push at MomDot.com is for bloggers to stop undervaluing themselves. To stop taking token gifts for excessive requirements (out of pocket spending, free advertising, etc). The problem is, however, is that getting space on a popular mom blogger’s page is profitable for the companies involved. As long as it is profitable, they will keep pushing this lucrative and low cost method of advertising. And no matter how many of the top mom bloggers may mobilize to demand more respect, if a company is offering something for free, there will always be someone willing to take it.
While it’s true that it may be in the best interest of brands like General Mills to take a more serious interest and understanding of the blogging world, big companies know what works. If handing out a few free products is going to lead to five million ad impressions, is it really going to stop? It might, when General Mills realizes how quickly this negative attention is going to undo their efforts.
Marketing to bloggers is obviously a low cost addition to the marketing strategy for any company, if you go about it the way that General Mills has. If you send out 8000 samples, you’re likely to get a large amount of positive feedback. Many bloggers will feel obligated to write something, and many are hesitant to write something negative. General Mills has taken advantage of those two facts, with positive results.
However, when you look at companies like HP and Pampers, both of which have recently conducted blogger outreach programs, you can’t help but see the difference. HP and Pampers carefully chose strategic bloggers to attend their events and test out their products, and came off well overall. Compare that to General Mills, who chose the “throw it against the wall and see what sticks” method and has ended up in the weeds for it.
While utilizing influential bloggers is a relatively new idea in marketing as a whole, it is apparently not as easy as it seems. Companies eager to jump on this gravy train are advised to spend real time investigating the blogging world as a whole, in order to prevent the kind of negative feedback that is now likely to erase all of General Mills’ efforts.
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Thanks for the mention of our article!
Trisha
momDot.com
Creating a positive campaign that values bloggers is very important. These women are intelligent social media mavens who know how to get the word out. As a blogger relations consultant and a professional blogger myself, I advise businesses to take these women seriously. They need to create a great experience that is well planned out. Doing a half fast job and then expecting favors is disrespectful. Plus it may very well back fire on them.
As a blogger who participated in HP’s Moms for Simplicity outreach, I must say that HP got it right. They treated each blogger special and with respect allowing each of us to share as much/as little about our experience as we liked.
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