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Mommy's new frontier

The signing won't start until Ree Drummond sings.

In a colossal Barnes and Noble in Skokie, Ill., more than 200 women lean against the upstairs banister, hollering questions at the Oklahoman speaking below. At least 100 more surround her in folding chairs. Few men are in attendance.

The crowd is antsy. She did it in Kansas City, St. Louis, Salt Lake City. The crowd knows, because they all read her blog. They've seen video and listened to the audio she uploaded three years ago. "Can you do Ethel?" one woman shouts. Drummond shades her eyes in feigned humility before belting "There's no business like show business...."

The crowd erupts, and the signing begins.

***

By 7:20 p.m., 297 people have purchased Drummond's cookbook, The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl, and filed along the railing, winding up the staircase and through the rows of books. Wait time: two hours.

"You'd only expect this kind of crowd if Milli Vanilli were here," a disgruntled, crinkled older man says after inquiring why anybody cares about "this cookbook lady."

Drummond -- better known as The Pioneer Woman -- is a lively 40-year-old with coconut brown hair (recently dyed from red, her natural color). The women who sit to chat while she signs their cookbooks adore her site, her cooking, her photography. She gushes about their shoes, their hair, their tiny newborn babies. Jealous of the attention, one of her sons (her four kids range between 5 and 12) signs a book himself.

"I comment on every entry," one woman said.

More than 35,000 people read her Twitter account. Her site receives an estimated 13 million page views each month. The self-described “desperate housewife” documents Oklahoma ranch life with detailed photos of her food and her home-schooled children.

But for Drummond, blogging is a business.

Hewlett-Packard sponsors high-resolution photographs for download. Microsoft Windows helped create her new recipe-sharing site, Tasty Kitchen.

Drummond -- who says her family makes their living from ranching, not blogging -- uses the ad revenue to sponsor frequent giveaways with extravagant prizes: A $250 Amazon gift certificate. A $500 Cuisinart cookware set. A brand-new Nikon worth $900.

She isn't the only "mommy blogger," or even the first. Technorati, a Web site which indexes blogs, estimates more than 800,000 Web sites are dedicated to motherhood. Some sit unused, but many contain anecdotes about family and parenting -- alongside descriptions of dozens of products received free-of-charge. The community of moms is now a thinly-disguised shill for swag -- a problem so pressing that exasperated mothers are eager for escape. Even the FTC intervened: As of Dec. 1, bloggers must note if they received compensation for a post.

Ads pay for Drummond’s prizes, but other mommy bloggers don’t have the expense account for such luxuries.

But marketers do.

***

Diana Prichard began "Of the Princess and the Pea" in May 2006. She shuttered the blog last July. As far as Web sites go, 24-year-old Prichard is no Pioneer Woman: most posts earned between zero and six comments. But that's what she wanted -- not popularity and products. Her daughters, Natalie ("the princess") and Ella ("the pea") were five and two. She needed support.

“I was reading women who were writing about motherhood and saying ‘I did this, I shouldn’t have, I know better, but I had a bad day and it happened.' You don’t see that when you go to school to pick up your kids,” Prichard says. But disgusted by the PR pitches piling in her inbox and a community newly obsessed with corporate sponsorship, she quit.

Now she blogs about politics, writing, “life in general” and, sometimes, her kids, at DianaPrichard.com. Some readers don't know she has children.

When mommy blogging became a business, Prichard bailed. For others, that's when the Internet got interesting. Readers began their own Web sites, seeking swag, cash and hundreds of followers.

Searching “giveaway” on Twitter reveals more than 50 tweets per minute — mostly mommy bloggers promoting their newest prize. Not all are as exorbitant as Drummond’s; these moms award plastic play kitchens, helium balloon kits or a baby dishware set -- all provided by PR reps.

Prichard gave away two prizes on her blog: the movie Kitt Kittredge, An American Girl and the Wiggles: You Make Me Feel Like Dancing DVD. Each giveaway had four comments.

The blog "I Thode You So" features product reviews, giveaways and nothing else. People comment on giveaways (between 30 and 70 comments, depending on the prize), but other comments are rare. “If nobody’s commenting, it doesn’t matter how many people read that blog. They’re not having much influence over their readers,” says Jennifer Mattern, who runs NakedPR.com.

Public relations companies don't care if a blogger has no cachet. They see comments, and giveaways receive dozens. But if readers don't trust the writer, who cares how many enter? The message has no more impact than a stranger's endorsement. Bloggers and marketers perform an elaborate farce: Bloggers convince marketers that they’re relevant, and marketers ply bloggers with free products. 

It’s the perfect system for opportunists — until PR reps recognize its flaws and stop sending pitches.

“We’re holding them to such a low standard at this point that people are starting blogs solely for the purpose of getting the swag. They all think they’re going to get rich quick,” Mattern says. “They want the fame, they want the fortune, but they don’t realize it doesn’t happen that way.”

***

Publishing parental concerns isn't a new phenomenon. In Gifts from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh (wife of Charles) wrote, "I want to give and take from my children and husband, to share with friends and community, to carry out my obligations to man and to the world, as a woman, as an artist, as a citizen."

Born 70 years later, she might have made an excellent mommy blogger.

The sentiments behind journaling have barely changed. Written records differ by gender: Men tend to narrate the day’s events and community news. Women transform their experiences and feelings into narratives -- much like Lindbergh, Drummond and Prichard.

On the first blogs, mothers detailed their worries, fears and mistakes. Other moms stumbled across these journals, and relieved to discover they weren’t alone, created their own.

“There was a growing movement that said, 'We are having kids and being realistic about the challenges of motherhood,' and they formed a community of moms that was vocal and noisy and creating a ruckus that people had to pay attention to,” says Lori Kido Lopez, a doctoral student at the University of Southern California who researched mommy blogging.

A 2005 New York Times profile of Heather B. Armstrong (who blogs at Dooce.com) cemented the practice in popular culture. Armstrong may be the archetypical mommy blogger — eager to divulge every personal fault in vivid detail.

After the profile's publication, the community exploded to derision. Moms are frivolous, irrelevant and trivial -- not bloggers. The first annual BlogHer conference was held in San José, Calif. in 2005. Hostilities spread between childless women and mothers.

“Mommy blogging is a radical act,” one frustrated woman declared. Mothers embraced her words; in 2006, BlogHer held a session entitled “Mommy Blogging as a Radical Act.”

Organizers announced the BlogHer Ad Network, intended to connect women  — an underserved market — with sponsors. Marketers found gold. Readers were loyal, educated, wealthy mothers making important purchasing decisions.

Mothers loved the recognition, and advertisers liked the money. PR firms and independent businesses inundated moms with free products and sponsored posts.

“They start liking the attention and the publicity, and they start needing all these products just to write on their blogs so people have content to read,” says Brian G. Smith, assistant professor of integrated marketing communications at the University of Houston who studies blogger/marketer relations.

When free products come in droves, maintaining a community falls in importance.

***

Prichard attended BlogHer 2009 in Chicago, 200 miles from her home in Fowler, Mich., with some trepidation. She had considered leaving the community before, but her experience cemented the decision.

Women were “lunging for swag, weighting themselves down with bag after bag after bag, stealing dolls from the hallways like savages, running into infants in a dash for freebies, [and] bitching and moaning in the entitled fashion that has become their trademark as of late,” Prichard wrote in her last post for "Of the Princess and the Pea."

Commenters agreed: “I was shocked by the whole experience and ended up leaving a day early because the greed was too much for me,” one mother wrote. “The opportunity to meet people and talk and learn is what I’m focused on, not the STUFF, and that was unfortunately eclipsed by the schwag-a-thon atmosphere,” said another.

The marketing mayhem that transformed mommy blogging was a matter of supply-and-demand: “There’s a huge supply of bloggers, but there’s only a certain amount of time that we have to devote to them, and only a certain amount of financial resources,” Mattern says. Marketers contact the most women possible for the cheapest price, because it's easy and effective. Conventions and mass emails are their specialty, and bloggers snap up offers for the spoils.

Bad marketers care about one thing: a blog's ranking on sites like Technorati. Technorati determines ranking by examining incoming links to a site -- so a blog like "I Thode You So" elevates their ranking by allowing additional contest entries when readers link to a giveaway. The site has a Technorati Authority ranking of 465 -- just 63 points below Drummond's "The Pioneer Woman" and 300 below celeb blogger extraordinaire Perez Hilton.

Women like Prichard, who rarely accept pitches or products, grew annoyed with the PR sandstorm.

Shortly before BlogHer 2009, MomDot — a site created “to assist newbie bloggers in information on how to start a blog, run a contest, connect with Public Relations, make money from your blog, and more” — pushed a “PR Blackout.” During one week in August, mommy bloggers were to post neither giveaways nor reviews.

PR firms “don’t value bloggers time,” Prichard says. “They really want something for nothing, and that was one of the things that didn’t sit well with me.”

Unlike journalists, bloggers aren't trained in media relations. By accepting samples for review, they lost time for writing about their families or their friends.

They wrote product reviews. Too many product reviews. PR ruined mommy blogs, MomDot said.

Mattern laughs. Bloggers were “biting the hand that feeds them" during the PR blackout. "These are people who got greedy. It was more, more, more, until they started burning out and realized this wasn’t enough to make an income.”

But PR reps take bloggers for granted, and writers need media savvy to survive. "Practitioners think, 'I can easily tell my story to a blogger and get as many hits as I want. They're easy dupes,'" Smith said.

***

Angela Roy is taking matters into her own hands. A stay-at-home military wife, she started blogging in 2007, writing about her two daughters: Jasmine, 6, and Ariel, 2. She quit after discovering other moms rigging giveaways.

She couldn’t leave the community. While living near Seattle and working on her bachelor's in marketing from Capella University, Roy, 28, founded Mommy PR. She speaks with the precision and reassurance of a practiced counselor, so it's understandable why overwhelmed bloggers come to her. For mothers without time to peruse offers, her company is an attractive option; the site boasts big-name clients like Avon, Casio, HBO and Logitech.

Roy promises her readers and advertisers honest, unbiased posts — with strings attached. Mommy PR requests bloggers inform them before posting a negative review; companies may request bad reviews not be posted. It’s not a perfect rule — she can’t block posts — but Roy doesn’t toe the line.

With all the promotions and products thrown at mommy bloggers, questions of fairness and honesty stain the community. When companies pay you to post, how truthful can you be? Bloggers like to compare themselves to journalists. If reporters receive free products and remain neutral, why can’t they?

Mattern says one distinction separates the two: Journalists don’t ask for products to review, and they don’t beg for sponsorship. Prichard complained that days after the 2009 conference, BlogHer posted seeking sponsors for the next.

Northwestern journalism ethics professor Craig LaMay doesn't see a difference: "I don't think journalists maintain these lofty standards. Many of them do nothing more than pitch products to consumers. Magazines are designed for the advertisers," he says.

Like journalists, many mommy bloggers accept only personalized pitches. For some, any pitch will do. They’ll hawk any product for a payoff, Mattern says.

But so do reporters, LaMay says.

***

In October 2009, a Federal Trade Commission ruling shook blogging's foundation: When reviewing or giving away an item, writers must disclose all products or payments received.

“We already had those rules,” Roy says. Beneath each post on MommyPR.com runs a disclaimer stating the financial terms behind the review. For the items they pass onto other bloggers, she is extra diligent about enforcing guidelines.

While Mommy PR can’t be fined if a blogger elsewhere omits a disclaimer, she is “trying to remind people, ‘Please, make sure that you state that this was provided to you by us or this company, because now you can actually be fined,” she says.

Bloggers have legitimate objections — after all, magazines and newspapers don’t reveal how they receive products. The new ruling "singles out a particular speaker who does do things that journalists do, but applies a rule only to them," LaMay says. By limiting only bloggers, the FTC is opening a dangerous can of worms. Will journalists have to reveal contributions when blogging for their publication, but not in print?

He expects courts will overturn the "unconstitutional" law once someone sues.

***

When Lopez began studying mommy bloggers, she uncovered a worrying dissonance. Every brand of blog runs product reviews and giveaways, but the hammer falls hard on the mothers. Tech blogs accept free products — after all, everybody wants an advance review of the newest gadget.

Society expects women to maintain private lives. “Motherhood is seen as part of the private or domestic sphere that women are supposed to occupy and not challenge. The public sphere — a place that men inhabit and women desire to belong to — consists of the working world, politics, economics, the law and mainstream discourse,” she writes in her paper “The Radical Act of ‘Mommy Blogging.'"

Blogging about motherhood is the quintessential violation of the dichotomy. Mothers should sit down, shut up and breast-feed their children in private — how dare they step outside society’s comfort zone?

Mommy bloggers have lost prestige, but mothers that blog want to revive the community. “The cream will always rise to the top for authentic, real moms who are really looking for a community,” Lopez says.

Mattern predicts that once public relations learns to recognize relevant and trustworthy blogs, the vicious cycle of blogger-marketer relations will end.

“It’s our fault for supporting them,” she says.

Prichard won’t let review-obsessed, product-touting mommy bloggers define her. “We’re still the mommy bloggers that have been written about,” she says — the Armstrongs and the Drummonds, who’ve created a community.

If mothers bother sifting through the silt, they'll uncover gold, Lopez says. "There are always going to be scams and people just trying to sell things. If people are really looking for a small community, they will find it."