Posts Tagged ‘mummy blogging’

This week we’re loving #blogadesh and Reynholm Industries

Friday, August 20th, 2010

Here’s our regular roundup of stories that have caught our eye this week – as ever, thanks to the Shiny team for some great suggestions.

Facebook Places

Lots of news coming out of Facebook this week about forthcoming features and changes to the service. Most notably, Facebook Places has launched in the US and just as they were influenced by Twitter to create the “what’s on your mind” feature, Mark Zuckerberg and his team have responded to the interest in location-based networks like Foursquare and Gowalla, both of whom they’ve partnered with for this launch.

As with Foursquare, Facebook Places allows you to check in to places like bars or shops, and if you wish, tell your friends where you are via your profile. You can also tag friends who are with you, and see who else has checked in there, with each destination having its own Facebook page. Users will get rewards and incentives for checking in, something that to date has been missing in the UK from location-based networks.

It’s a savvy move that will be coming to a smartphone near you soon, and yet again shows Zuck’s determination to make Facebook the only social network most people need – which in turn increases interest from brands, and advertising revenues…

Facebook will also be rolling out some changes to how profiles are displayed from Monday so if you start to spot some changes on familiar pages, don’t be alarmed!

Mummy Bloggers help Save The Children

Twitter’s been full of positive buzz around a great initiative from Save The Children to invite three mummy bloggers to Bangladesh to highlight the issue of child deaths from diseases including malaria. This has huge support from the blogging community, with over 40 supportive blog posts appearing in a matter of days, and a huge number of tweets using the hashtag #blogladesh.

The link-up is explained by one of the chosen bloggers, Sian To (who also organised Cybermummy), and you might have spotted Shiny Red alumni Jaz Cummins, now at Amnesty, giving the campaign her thumbs-up in PR Week.

Chatroulette bites back…

Our video of the week has to be this one from Lionsgate films which is a brilliant use of Chatroulette to promote The Last Exorcism. Teen boys watch expectantly as a girl flirts with them, only to freak out when all is not what it seems…(warning kids – contains strong language…) Subverting Chatroulette like this sees the campaign deliver genuine shock factor to exactly target the right audience who love a scary movie, and the video is a brilliant way of taking that to the wider world.

…and Reynholm Industries online

You might have spotted Aleksandr Orlov’s latest online venture, Compare the Muskrat, but our favourite spoof site of the moment is for Reynholm Industries, workplace of The IT Crowd. If you’re suffering from withdrawal since the show went off air a couple of weeks ago, never fear – Reynholm’s Facebook profile takes you through to Reynholm’s own site where Moss, Roy and Jen are dispensing their usual helpful advice …

Tags: mummy blogging
Posted in Digital download, Facebook, Foursquare, PR and Marcomms, Video, social media | No Comments »

Shiny Red’s research into the UK Mummy Blogging community

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Conversations With Mummy Bloggers

View more documents from Ashleynorris.

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
Posted in Blogging, New Media | 2 Comments »

Shiny Red’s mummy blogging event

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

Over the last few weeks we have been thinking a lot about mummy blogging. As an agency we have always keep a watchful eye on the mummy blogging phenomenon and even pitched a campaign to key mummy bloggers as far back as 2007.

Recently though with parenting media very much in the headlines at the moment, we decided to undertake some research into what makes British mummy bloggers tick. We asked 20 of the key UK mummy bloggers to fill a questionnaire asking them why they blogged, how they thought mummy blogging would evolve and how they wanted to engage with brands.

The research threw up some very interesting insights. It is clear that there is a strong, engaged and dynamic community emerging and that its members are becoming increasingly influential, not just in blogging but also on Facebook, Twitter and other areas of social media.

Today we presented that research to representatives from many high profile brands. We also listened as two of the top five UK mummy bloggers, Jo Beaufoix and the writer of Potty Diaries shared with us their thoughts on where mummy blogging had come from and how it was changing.

What is clear is that there are now two fairly distinctive types of mummy bloggers and that they have a very different approach to both producing content and engaging with brands.

We will stop being a tease later this week when we place the results of the research on the blog. So pop back the for some very interesting insights into what is fast becoming a key social media channel.

Tags: brands, Jo beaufoix, mommy blogging, mummy blogging, Potty diaries, shiny red
Posted in Events and Conferences | 1 Comment »