By Chris Lee

One of the most potent blogging groups met in June this year at The Brewery in London. The event, CyberMummy, is one of the biggest gathering of parents – particularly mothers – who blog about their parental journey.

This year’s CyberMummy, which featured Sarah Brown, activist wife of the former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, was attended by around 400 people. Workshops covered a wide variety of subjects relevant to bloggers, including photography, writing, social networking, blogging best practices, and working with companies and charities.

But how influential is the wider mummy blogger audience? NMK asked around.

Virtual counsellor

For freelance PR consultant and mother Claire Williamson, author of the blog PR Mummy, blogging has become her “virtual counsellor”, providing a support network as well as a diary of her own motherhood.

“I’ve made a great network of friends and while I don’t get to chat face to face, I manage to have a deeper level of conversation. I know so much more about my fellow bloggers than if I just met for coffee once a week and getting advice is so much easier; you pose questions and people answer in their own time,” she told NMK. “This ultimately provides multiple opinions and a much deeper level of detail.  When my son went through the biting stage, I was clinging to my sanity and didn’t know what to do. I blogged it and got an array of valuable comments with tons of advice. It was much more valuable than any book or forum.”

Williamson believes that collectively, mummy bloggers can have a positive impact as agents of change, and while she personally does not seek to monetise her blog, those mothers that do face stiff competition.

“Those wishing to make money directly from their blog are probably going to face a lot of hurdles. There are so many mummy blogs now. Equally brand sponsorship and advertising is probably quite competitive (though I’ve avoided this path),” she said.

Growing influence

For Tim Hoang, senior social media consultant at digital agency VivaKi, mummy bloggers are one of the most influential groups on the Web and as such communications professionals should take into account that they are aware of their collective influence and often very business savvy.

“While individually, many of the mummy blogs in the UK get relatively few visitors in comparison to say, the website of any media publication, the highly connected and clustered nature of mummy blogger networks means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” he said. “Mummy bloggers have also managed to establish both virtual and ‘real life’ relationships between each other, making their ties much stronger than other groups of online influencers. Any relevant campaigns aimed at this audience is likely to spread quickly and create discussions among the bloggers.”

Hoang added that mummy bloggers are open to establishing ongoing dialogues with communications professionals via platforms such as Twitter and blogger Sally Whittle’s Blogger.ed forum, which he says is an easy way of beginning conversations and finding out the needs and interests of potentially relevant bloggers.