Monday, July 20, 2009

Disclosure Not Enough to Solve Blogola Problem

BlogHer COO Says Paid Posts Should be Segregated

Produced by Hoag Levins
Published: July 20, 2009

Thousands of female bloggers are involved in producing content for BlogHer.com.
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- BlogHer.com, the online female community that logs 15 million unique visitors a month, holds its fifth annual convention in Chicago this week. And one of the things attendees will be buzzing about in the corridors is the growing debate over blogola. In a pre-conference interview, BlogHer co-founder and COO Elisa Camahort Page said a blogger's mere disclosure that she is accepting money, freebies or perks to include product mentions in a post is not enough to solve the problem.


Follow link to video interview:
http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1370868150/bctid30004519001

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

BlogHer - BowlHer - MomTV will be Streaming LIVE from both!

If you are attending BlogHer 09 in Chicago, look for the cameraman...

Don't worry! If you aren't able to attend (like me, MomTV Stephanie) we're streaming LIVE each afternoon with Maria Bailey and special co-hosts Danielle Smith from ExtraOrdinaryMommy.com and Trisha Haas from MomDot with recaps of the day. We also have moms capturing video which they will share on MomTV and NewBaby.com as well.

We are also streaming LIVE from BowlHer 09 - where we will capture the event from the red carpet for the opening (so you can see all your Mom blogger friends) and some of the cool events planned during the evening. We will have 6 parties streaming LIVE with us like we did on the MomTV launch for Mom's Nite Out on May 7th.

You won't want to miss MomTV! Check out the schedules on our LIVE Shows page!

Friday, July 10, 2009

40% of "iUsers" Accessing Internet From Mobile More Than From Computer

According to AdMob, there are many similarities between iPhone and iPod touch users in the US, especially in the demographic makeup of each group in areas such as age and household income. iPhone users are generally older. 69% of iPod touch users are between 13-24 years of age, while this same age segment represents just 26% of iPhone users. 31% of iPhone users are 35-49 years old, while only 12% of iPod touch users fall in this age segment. In total, 74% of iPhone users are over the age of 25, compared to 31% of iPod touch users.

User Age of iPhone & iPod Owners (January thru May, 2009, % of Users)

Source: admob/comScore, July 2009

The research also found that 5 in 10 consumers on both iPhone and iPod touch devices use the mobile Web more frequently than they read printed newspapers. More than 40% reported using the Internet on their mobile device more often than using the Internet from their computers or listening to the radio.

User Media Consumption Patterns, iPhone and iTouch (January thru May, 2009, % of Segment)

Use mobile web more than they:


Source: admob/comScore, July 2009

Loftlon Worth, vice president, comScore, concludes that "... (it is) important for marketers to understand the mobile landscape and the characteristics of the users of a particular platform or mobile device.. "

Additional findings from the study:

* More than 70% of users on both the iPhone and iPod touch are male
* 78% of iPhone users have an annual household income of at least $25,000, compared to only 66% of iPod touch users
* 46% of iPhone users have children, compared to only 28% of iPod touch users

In the next six months:

* 57% of iPhone users plan to purchase clothing, 47%, entertainment and 45%, travel
* 61% of iPod Touch users plan to purchase clothing, 53%, entertainment and 36%, cell phones

The total sample size of iPod touch participants is 3,848, while the total number of participants in the iPhone sample is 3,454. All results were tested for statistically significant differences at the 95% confidence level.

Thursday, July 9, 2009

How To Build Mom Brand Evangelists

By Cynthia Nelson Thursday, July 9, 2009

It's no big news that moms are word-of-mouth mavens. From the beginning of time, women have been the communicators and the central point of all things home and family.
Luckily for advertisers, women have many facets (think diamond) that influence her ability to be a sparkling evangelist for a particular brand, product or service. The role of wife, mother, sister, aunt, chef, chauffeur, maid, teacher, referee, family CFO, PTA volunteer, and nurse all play a part in the products that she engages with at a particular life stage and how the success or failure is communicated to her peers.

With the advances in technology, access to the Internet, and now the near blinding growth of social networking, mom blogs, Twitter, etc., there are endless ways in which moms can talk about and influence other moms about your brand.

In our most recent study, which included over 10,000 Hispanic moms with children 0-5 in the home, over 50% of them said that they reach out to friends and family for advice -- this means they are having daily conversations about what products to buy, what works as a parent, what doesn't and where to find the brands, products and services that meet her family's needs.

If you are interested in developing Hispanic mom evangelists, below are valuable tips to finding success:

Be Careful What You Ask, You Might Not Like the Answer

Opening up your brand to consumer-to-consumer comments, blogs, forums, questions and comments is a scary and daunting task for most brands. Many times, we've drunk so much of our own Kool Aid -- meaning that we think our brand, product or service is already amazing -- we are not really ready to hear negative comments or air any dirty laundry in public.

One way to prepare your company for some potentially uncomfortable moments is develop a Social Media Strategy. The first thing to understand is that it is not the technology that you should be concerned about -- be it Facebook, Twitter, email, your own forum, call center or other method of consumer interaction -- but rather what as a brand you really want to get out of the conversation. And, to many brands, this means that engagement and a skin in the game from not only marketing, but also technology/development, R&D, Sales and Operations must be engaged and share a vested interest in understanding and being part of the strategy.

Developing a solid strategy includes not only definition of the target consumer, but also testing and measurement criteria and takes time, energy and leadership. Like social networking itself, your Social Media Strategy is a multi-layered and fluid community of key decision makers, influencers, and lots of players on the bench. It is also not a one-time, linear event -- if you are lucky it will evolve, grow, fail, change and continue to morph over time.

Ready, Set, Engage

Step One -- go fish where the fish are. The ability to quickly identify and leverage consumers who are already listening to you and are engaged in your brand is vital to starting up the conversation.

Step Two -- get personal. Rather than starting the first engagement about the brand itself, it is much more valuable to position the conversation around the life stage or facet of life where she engages with the brand. Think of it as consumer dating.

Some examples of appropriate consumer dating could include:

Interact with her where she lives -- Twitter, Facebook, whatever. Where she lives is where you should live with her. This may mean that your social strategy has different types of moms engaged at different times and with different points of view.
Be crystal clear about your relationship's intentions. Define what you are looking for from her, how long it will take, and what she may receive as part of the interaction.
Always acknowledge her issues with your brand quickly and honestly. You don't need to provide a solution but rather just a channel for her to open up and share.
Happy Moms Make Good Evangelists

Building a loyal, viral and active mom evangelist happens over time. By putting mom in the driver's seat, you'll gain valuable insights into her habits while placing your brand in the discussion. Keep these tips in mind:

Continue the relationship as you come out with new products or work on new campaigns to ensure relevant messages and continued trust.
Offer giveaways for moms and those who they influence (friends, family, their social network).
Make sure all conversations speak to not at your moms to keep them coming back for more.
Listen, listen, and listen. Repite por favor.

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Save Money on the Go with your iPhone with Yowza!



Launch Yowza!! on your iPhone or iPod Touch and it automatically finds deals and coupons for stores right in your area!

Special Interview with Actor Greg Grunberg

Watch the replay with Danielle Smith from the popular blog, ExtraOrdinaryMommy.com on her interview with Greg (click to watch on MomTV).

Actor, Greg Grunberg, star of shows such as Heroes, Felicity, and Alias, and leader of Band From TV, has launched his cause: Talk About It. TalkAboutIt.org is a new website created to educate the world about seizures and epilepsy on behalf of the 50 million people around the globe, who are cope with the condition, including his oldest son. Greg is also the co-founder of Yowza!!

Forrester Revises Interactive Outlook, Will Account For 21% Of Marketing By 2014

Interactive marketing expenditures will reach $55 billion by 2015, accounting for 21% of all marketing spending, according to a new forecast released this morning by Forrester Research.

The absolute dollar expenditures are essentially the same as one the research firm released in April, but it has revised interactive marketing's share of total advertising spending, reflecting the downward shift in expenditures for other media since then. Based on Forrester's new outlook, interactive's share of total marketing budgets will rise nine percentage points from its estimate of 12% this year.

"To me, the most interesting takeaway from the research is that overall advertising budgets will decline," Forrester analyst Shar VanBoskirk posted on the company's blog. "Yep. With dollars moving out of traditional media toward less expensive and more efficient interactive tools, marketers will actually need less money to accomplish their current advertising goals. But reasonable marketers won't relinquish budget because their programs are running too efficiently. Instead, marketers will allocate unused advertising dollars into investments like innovation, research, customer service, customer experiences, and marketing-specific technology and IT staff, in order to further marketing's strategic influence within their companies."

The greatest growth is projected to come from social media, which is forecast to rise to $3.113 billion in 2014 from $716 million this year.

The next biggest growth sector will be mobile marketing, which is expected to rise to $1.274 billion in 2014 from $391 million this year.

While search, display and email marketing will continue to grow at double-digit rates over the next five years, their rate of growth is slowing, and will account for a smaller percentage of the interactive marketing stimulus, according to Forrester's estimates.

How To Talk To Moms? Listen.How To Talk To Moms? Listen.

By Stacy Morrison Wednesday, July 8, 2009

As a mother, a woman, and editor of a magazine for 10 million women and moms like me (and not like me), I find it hard not to be amused by the constant handwringing in the media and advertising worlds about how best to talk to "moms." Because more often than not, they end up talking at us. At times, we feel reduced to a tidy pile of demographics and household statistics that effectively erase all the unique distinction we women are each so proud to possess.
People often ask me who the Redbook reader is. I used to answer, "Which one? There are at least five" - before launching into a breakdown of types: the young professional women balancing work and home in suburban or metropolitan areas; the even younger stay-at-home moms in the exurbs who married out of high school or during college; the aspirational can't-wait-to-marrys all over the country, and so forth.

But as I got better at listening to our audience, and as I got to meet them - on Facebook, through Twitter, through redbookmag.com, through the blogs so many of them keep, in person at mall events and so on - I realized there were millions of different kinds of our readers out there. And, that what made the Harley moms, the stitch-and-bitch moms, the widowed moms, single moms, two-times-married moms, the breast-cancer-survivor moms distinct from each other was a much more vital way of making them feel included in everything we do than what made them the same.

Through my own Facebook page - which I invited our readers to join, as well as the magazine's fan page - I see the daily ups and downs of what we call "grown-up life": the disgruntled posts after a hurry-up morning has gone awry; joyful greetings to friends, who are the lifeboats in busy women's lives; the celebration of small joys, like a sunny day or a cheap pair of shoes, each of these a shout-out to be heard and witnessed before another day jammed to the hilt with "to-dos" flies by.

Yes, we moms want to be witnessed, to spend some time on our "to-be" list, instead of merely living our "to-do" list, to get to be women first sometimes, just for ourselves. We get to be a "mom and" these days, not "just a stay-at-home mom" or a "working mom," but a mom and a yoga teacher, a mom and an entrepreneur, a mom and a community organizer, a mom and a beauty addict, a mom and a church leader, a mom and so much more. And the only way for a marketer to learn the "so much more" is to open your ears (and your email in-box, and your Facebook page, and your whatever else you can imagine) and ask the question: "Hello, who are you?" And then listen.

What I hear back through all these channels - and then publish in the magazine, on the web site, in our mobile phone applications, and everywhere else Redbook is - is the lovely, joyful sound of women finding their way in a complicated world, putting their unique fingerprints on everything they do, and, most inspiring of all, standing by to support other moms and women as they find their own way.

I have learned so much about who this group is by listening in on their individual conversations, and I have been able to make the magazine and all its properties feel more rich and inclusive because of it. But the best part is being included in the conversation: To be a magazine editor and a woman and a mom.

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Beyond Blogs: Niche Brands And Mommy Bloggers

by Maryanne Conlin, Wednesday, July 1, 2009

To date, all of the big news about marketing to mommy bloggers has been about how large CPG brands are diving in, wooing and winning them. But what about smaller and niche brands? Is it worthwhile to add blogger outreach to a niche marketing plan?

I think it is. In fact I believe that the real power in the mommy blogsphere is in the marketing of niche products. And a new generation of analytical tools makes this a real possibility.

Lists of bloggers and blog networks for advertisers and PR professionals usually include high-profile bloggers and blog networks with north of 200,000 or even half a million uniques per month. While each blog has its own profile, the audience of larger blogs is of course, varied.

On the other hand, a number of smaller blogs boast niche readership, which may be exactly the target market for smaller brands. The "Nielson-Online Power Moms 50" gives a nod to this theory by listing a number of much smaller blogs in diverse categories such as travel and green.

Yes, their readership is smaller but their reach in selected consumer segments is much greater. And, as any marketer knows, the innovators and early adoptors of just about any product category are research junkies, the ones most likely to be reading niche blogs.

Most important for niche brands, using the power of social media, bloggers have managed to expand their reach beyond their loyal readers to the wider world. In particular, bloggers on Facebook and MySpace straddle the word-of mouth worlds of real and virtual, as we've learned these sites are often a way to connect online with past and present friends and family rather then online buddies.

Twitter, too, enables bloggers to reach a wider audience than with a blog alone. Sophisticated search functions and hash tags alert those not usually inclined to read a blog to the interests and recommendations of high profile Twitter users -- who aren't necessarily top bloggers.

On one level what this means is that the reach of many bloggers is much broader than just their sites and heavily dependent on the blogger's use of social media. This impacts bloggers both large and small but is of particular interest when considering a niche blogger outreach program.

These same sophisticated search and analysis tools (of which there are a mind-boggling number) give marketers the opportunity to conduct research to narrowly target a specific set of bloggers that can best reach their intended audience. Keyword search and use of SEO research using various analytic tools can identify bloggers who write on a wide range of subjects and have a loyal following of both blog readers and social media users.

Finding bloggers who also participate in forums and online review sites is an added bonus! Since that moves their reach beyond the generally agreed upon 30% of Moms who read and write blogs.

Blogger outreach programs are moving into a new phase, where page rank and uniques may not tell the whole story or not the part of the story you need to know. Upfront research using keywords and analysis of social media use may be a better forecaster of blogger influence than sheer volume for niche brands.