One of the biggest growth areas in social media in the UK is the so called Mummy Blogging sector. This is where bloggers share their experiences of parenting (among other things) with a growing and vibrant community.

Mummy Blogging’s roots are in the US with writers like Dooce who now attract hundreds of thousands of readers. It has however grown significantly this side of the pond, and we think that there could now be as many 1000 parenting blogs in the UK.

Mummy Bloggers are also becoming increasingly influential with core writers attracting thousands of readers each month and creating posts that generate large numbers of comments. There is also a very powerful social media footprint emerging around the Mummy Bloggers powered not just by Twitter and Facebook but also by the Ning community site of The British Mummy Blogger  network.

As an agency Shiny Red has already worked on several campaigns that have involved talking with mummy bloggers. This autumn though we decided that the time was right to take the temperature of the UK scene by surveying 20 of the key bloggers and engaging in conversations with several others. We also gleaned a lot of information about the scene by simply reading their blogs.

Among the questions we asked them were

Why they blog?

How they feel about brands approaching them?

How they use social media?

Where they go for advice and support?

This presentation was developed a for a Mummy Blogging event that we hosted along with our sister agency The Red Consultancy on October 20^th. Here we gave representatives from brands and government agencies the chance to not just hear our views, but more importantly to meet and have a conversation with two of the UK’s leading mummy bloggers.

It is hard to sum up our findings in a couple of sentences. However we feel that the Mummy Bloggers are powerful and vociferous community, but one that is ready and willing to engage with brands, but only on their own terms. They are also well educated, influential women who between them wield an awful lot of economic power.

We also noted there is also a splintering of the Mummy Blogging community with a new breed of writers emerging who are much more focussed on monetising their words than some of their contemporaries.

Feel free to read through the deck and tell us what you think in the comments.

Tags: mummy blogging, Mumsnet, research, shiny red

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at 4:48 pm by Ashley and is filed under Blogging, New Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.