Little Dooce Coup
How mommybloggers are changing American business.
by Carrie Kirby
September 30, 2009
George G. Smith could scarcely believe a mommyblogger was trying to blackmail him — over a pair of Crocs.
"Ya know, if you don’t give me shoes — I could totally write something bad about you on my blog," threatened the unnamed woman, according to Smith's account on his own Web site.
The setting was July's BlogHer conference in Chicago, where many attendees came away with the feeling that mommyblogging has become more about collecting swag bags and corporate sponsorships than about bonding over potty training stories. Smith gave away 350 pairs of Crocs flip-flops at a party there, but this blogger didn't manage to grab a pair in her size. So she wanted him to procure her one. "I really hope it was an isolated incident, but it’s something to watch out for," wrote Smith, who works with bloggers on behalf of Crocs.
Others see the incident as emblematic of a new breed of online mom: a social media tyrant so spoiled by marketers' attentions that she expects companies to bow to her every whim. The "divas" are a minority by all accounts, but some say they're spoiling mommyblogging for everyone.
Naturally, moms who have complained about companies online don't see themselves as out-of-control tyrants, even when their comments snowball into a much larger hubbub than they'd intended. It's more like they're part of a grass-roots movement with the power to make things better for all consumers.
One person's empowered woman is another person's bully.
"Mommybloggers rightly feel empowered," said Heather Armstrong, author of Dooce.com, one of the most popular blogs on the Internet. "We're the ones spending the money; we are the ones talking to each other."
Indeed, mothers control eighty-five percent of household spending nowadays, according to the Marketing to Moms Coalition. And online is where the moms are. New moms — a particularly delicious demographic because family spending jumps when children arrive — are more than twice as likely to visit blogging site Blogger than other Web users, and eighty-five percent more likely to visit Facebook, according to research firm Nielsen.
But one person's empowered woman is another person's bully — a word that came up repeatedly in comments about these three incidents where moms attacked brands online:
In August, Armstrong turned to her Twitter account in a rage about an unrepaired washing machine, lousy customer service and a growing stack of her newborn daughter's poopy onesies. "DO NOT EVER BUY A MAYTAG," she typed in a series of five angry missives. Some of her 1.25 million followers rallied in support; others, such as Linda, who Tweets as @sundry, called it "no-context corporate bashing."
In July, two BlogHer attendees were turned away from an exclusive party thrown by Nikon because they had infants in tow and the event was adults-only. Esther Brady Crawford, who blogs at FaintStarlite, tweeted about getting turned down. Using a Twitter convention that marks a message as part of a group conversation, she tagged her complaint "#Nikonhatesbabies." Crawford later wrote that she meant the message as a joke (http://www.faintstarlite.com/2009/07/babies-blogher-bars/), but many, many other moms who felt it was wrong to ban a nursing infant forwarded her original complaint with straight — indeed outraged — faces.
In November 2008, mom Jessica Gottlieb was dismayed by an ad from Motrin that implied that mothers are motivated to wear babies in slings for fashion reasons, and that the practice results in pain (hence the need for Motrin-brand ibuprofin). Her complaint quickly circulated around Twitter, and within a day the topic briefly became the top conversation there.
All these incidents got started on Twitter, the social networking site where messages can be disseminated to millions of people within minutes, especially when they originate from an account as popular as Armstrong's, whose legion of followers dwarfs the population of Salt Lake City, where she lives.
All of these moms gone riled succeeded in getting action out of the companies targeted: Maytag parent Whirlpool dispatched a repairman for Armstrong's washing machine, Nikon had a face-to-face talk with the snubbed moms, and Motrin swiftly eighty-sixed the offending ad.
The moms got action, and they — mainly the Motrin Moms — got some accolades for standing up to corporate America in a novel way.
©2009 Carrie Kirby and Babble
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