Why “Mommy Bloggers” are a hot target audience for public sector marketers

I have been wanting to write this blog entry for over a month now. Back in mid-October, I attended a local Ottawa-based Social Media meet-up group called Third Tuesday (organized by Joe Thornley). The speaker that evening, Canadian “mommy-blogger” Danielle Donders was talking about the rise to fame of her mommy-blog “Postcards from the mothership“. I was in shock as to how many sponsorship and promotional offers she claimed to be getting on a weekly basis. Advertisers were sending her everything from diapers to family ski-trips in Vermont.

Since launching her blog in early 2005, Danielle has written more than 950 posts, received more than 10,000 reader comments, and has been quoted in Ottawa Citizen, Chatelaine, Canadian Family magazine, and National Geographic Traveler Online Magazine. She got into blogging for fun, but now admits to enjoying the fame and the occasional freebie. She often rejects certain offers so as not to turn into a spokesperson for anyone in particular and will badmouth a product if its bad, so be careful what you send her. Blogger honesty and integrity are everything in the social media world.

Her presentation made me think of a social marketing strategy (not to be confused with “social media marketing”) we did for Public Safety Canada for their Get Prepared campaign. I can’t reveal all the details, but essentially the background and objectives were as follows:

Background

“Every year Canadians face emergency situations. Disasters can confine a family at home or force an evacuation. A flood, hurricane, ice storm, hazardous material leak or any other disaster could affect water supply, cut electricity, and telephone service for days or weeks. In recent years, disasters have forced more than four million Canadians from their homes and caused billions of dollars in damage.”

Objectives

• Behavior objectivesseek to increase a percentage of the target audience who obtain information about emergencies, complete an emergency plan, and assemble or purchase an emergency kit.
• Knowledge objectives focus on increasing a percentage of the target audience who know more about emergency situations and how to respond
• Belief objectives focus on decreasing a percentage of the target group who believe that there are many emergencies that you simply can’t prepare for. In addition, the campaign was designed to increase the number of Canadians who believe there is a sense of urgency about getting prepared and that preparedness is necessary for their own and their family’s safety.

Typical to government, the majority of the promotional budget went towards TV advertising (30-second spots). Getting back to my point, if PSC had used so much as 1/1000th of the TV advertising budget to send some kits to the top 100 “mommy-bloggers” in Canada, I would not be surprised if the ROI would be above the roof. Better yet, a simple conversation with some key mommy-bloggers about the issue at hand would likely create significant buzz since its a social issue that affects their families and is interesting!

It boggles my mind how public sector marketers (especially those that use social marketing) are not all over Blogs, Podcasts, Social Networks, etc…Bloggers want good content, the quality of their content is what makes or breaks their blog readership, the same applies for other social media platforms. Social Marketing strategies are based on a societal issue that requires a behaviour change of some sort that will lead to a positive outcome for society. Why wouldn’t mommy-bloggers want to talk about these kinds of things?

In fact I was so curious as to what Danielle would do in such a situation that I asked her myself. Here is her response:

“Mike, I would be completely open to being approached on an issue like this, and it would likely even be something that caught my attention enough to blog about or reproduce (sometimes, I just dump the contents of my inbox into a big wrap-up posts of all the worthy pitches I’ve received but done nothing with.) A while ago, I reprinted a PSA release on water safety verbatim, because I thought the message was clear, appropriate for my audience, and interesting. The Emergency Kit example sounds like it would be quite similar. The key is in matching up the interests of the blogger and her (or his) audience and the message. In this particular case, exactly because it’s something I might blog about anyway if I came across it organically (AND it piqued my interest AND I was in need of blog fodder) I would blog about it anyway. Coming across it in my in-box as framed in a polite or friendly PR pitch doesn’t really change how I blog about it – in this particular case. “

Some thoughts I want to close off with :

• While the mommy-bloggers themselves may not be the target audience for your campaign, they are definitely key influencer’s for most social marketing campaigns that I can think of (especially anything to do with health promotion).
• Danielle’s Blog is read by thousands of influential moms each day. I’m pretty sure I don’t have to explain the viral exponential effect of that to you, especially amongst the most gossipy human beings on earth – suburban women.
• 98% of moms trust other moms as a source of information over any other form. Advertising is way down the list.
• In the 5 minutes it took me to ask her that question, I achieved the equivalent of many $ of advertising seeing as how my question and her response has been viewed by her entire audience and through the course of the week will reach all her regular readers.
• Now imagine, what PSC could achieve if it politely asked, as I did, the 50 top mommy bloggers in Canada to help spread the get prepared message.
• No paperwork, no money, no bureaucracy, no bullshit, just honest opinion and help in getting a message across to hundreds of thousands of members of the most influential target group of them all- forget all the buzzwords and technology, this is web2.0 at its best.

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