Photo credit: David Erickson

In the parenting blogger universe, there’s no topic hotter than compensation. Only the perennial “I can’t believe the lame PR pitch I just got” rant might rival the compensation discussion in a popularity contest – which mom blogging is not, by the way.

I’m with the majority in believing mom bloggers — and all bloggers, for that matter — should earn something for their labor, and receive something in exchange for the attention of their uber-valuable audience. But turning those lame PR inquiries into dollars requires an understanding of marketing agencies and what they do. Different types of agencies have different roles and objectives, and it pays to know what they’re trying to achieve — so you can sell them on how you’re going to help them reach their goals.

In this post, I’ll explain the differences between the two types of agencies most likely to touch bloggers. (A caveat here: the agency world is changing, in part because of the influence of blogs and social media, and every agency is a little different, anyway.)

The PR Agency

These are the folks that most commonly reach out to mom bloggers. Their job, historically, has been to forge relationships with — or just plain send press releases to — traditional journalists, in print, TV, radio, online, etc. Their expertise lies in identifying which reporters and outlets are interested in what particular type of story. (The reporters and outlets are responsible for looking our for the needs of the audience.) The best PR professionals then look at the message their clients are trying to get out there, and pitch an interesting angle to the reporters most likely to “bite.” What results in the ideal sitution is a story that’s interesting to the audience (making the reporter happy) and that highlights the client favorably (making the agency and client happy).

In this very traditional scenario, the agency gets paid by the client, but there’s no budget for them to spend, other than on the labor of their employees. The PR agency just plain doesn’t get access to any money, because they are supposed to be getting free, or “earned” media coverage. “The operative word here is ‘free,’” explains PR blogger Kel Kelly of Kel & Partners, in a recent blog post called The Mommy Elephant in the Room.

What happens a lot with mommy bloggers is that they get a PR pitch, and then, perhaps insulted at being asked to write about something for free, they respond with their advertising or sponsored post rates. Since PR agencies rarely have the budget to buy advertising, I’d suggest this may not be the most fruitful approach.

An alternative might be to seek something that could be in the PR agency’s power to provide — a giveaway. If your audience would genuinely enjoy hearing about the product, and appreciate the chance to win one, then you should pursue that route with the PR agency. But, honestly, I’d suggest valuing the PR agencies for what they do best — provide information about products or trends that might be of interest to your audience. If you never talk about products in your editorial, a polite “no, thanks” or “please take me off your list” may be the best response. Believe me, PR professional are accustomed to rejection from journalists, and should welcome the opportunity to narrow their efforts to the outlets where they might get coverage.

If you’re looking for ad dollars, however, you might ask the PR agency who handles the client’s media spending.

The Media Agency

Media agencies buy advertising space — online, in the display category, that’s banner ads. They’re all about the CPM (cost-per-thousand-impressions), and some are only authorized by their clients to buy on a CPM basis. They’re the ones who can buy ad space on your site, or, potentially, do a sponsored post buy. These are the agencies we work with most often at Federated Media. You’ll know you’re talking to a media agency when they say they want to RFP you, and you’re expected to turn something around in 24 hours or less.

The challenge of working with mom blogs for these folks is that — especially for those working for bigger clients — buying on tons of small sites is sometimes more time consuming than it is worth. (Most every mom blog is small when you compare it to Yahoo or MSN.) They often need to reach humongous amounts of people, and they’re looking for efficient ways to do that. Sometimes, they’re willing to work with smaller sites — which is fantastic — but there are a lot that won’t.

As a mom blogger looking for marketing dollars, your best bet is really to deal directly with the client if at all possible. The smallest companies won’t even have an agency of any kind, and the marketing folks on the client side are closest to the budget, anyway.

Bloggers, what’s been your most successful technique to turn PR pitches into revenue for your site?

Via @lmayes and @mihow

One of my day-to-day jobs at Federated Media is deciding — with input from sales and other members of the team — which parenting sites (including blogs) would be good partners for our company.

Parenting blogs are unique in that they so often start as labors of love, or just means of staying in touch with far-flung families, and later evolve into businesses. So, the first step, really, is to decide if you want to get into the advertising business. It might not be for you, because of your creative vision, your personality, or your other commitments. (One good test may be to review the following tips and see if they feel right for your site and yourself.)

So, without further ado, here are my tips for the fledgling mommy or daddy blogger with ambitions of reaping significant advertising revenue:

1. Post every day or even more often. Be consistent.

2. Cultivate your readership.

The first thing that advertisers and agencies look for are stats like unique users and pageviews. Next, for savvy marketers, is engagement (as measured by comments, contest entries, etc.). Numbers 1 and 2 on this list are about building up both of those key metrics.

3. Keep it PG rated.

4. Think about your target advertiser.

Be consistent with your editorial, as well. So many times, a personal blog becomes a place for anything the person happens to be interested in, at the moment. Avoid that impulse and stick to a coherent theme, so advertisers understand what they’re getting.

5. Make room for ads above the fold (fewer than 550 pixels from the top).

6. Develop sponsorable opportunities. And provide stats!

Via elsua.net

Pete Spande at Continuous Beta says:

Media hasn’t become social. It always was. I talked about the latest Dukes of Hazzard episode with anyone who would listen in 1980. My mother sent me newspaper clippings all the through my college career (for example – don’t use Bean0, it is made with penicillin! [I'm alergic.]) The difference now is that media is social with SCALE.

The other big difference, Pete, is that social media — word of mouth, to use the old term — is now measurable. I used to get a lot of gaff at ClickZ for writing about word-of-mouth marketing, because, uh… what’s digital or interactive about that?

My argument was always that the advent of digital media, and user-generated media, meant that you can now see and measure what people are saying about your brand. You can analyze positive versus negative; you can take that feedback and improve your products. And you can participate in the conversation and affect what people are saying about you. Pretty damned cool.

I’m a little bit jaded, and, most of the time that I look at social media efforts, it’s as a professional. I think, “how engaging is this call to action?” “How well have they managed to encourage user participation?”

But this week, I got hit right at one of my passion points, and was dragged into participation myself. The campaign is called Bake2Share, and it’s for King Arthur Flour, one of the more premium flour brands that’s based in Vermont. This is a brand that caters to serious bakers, but also offers easy-to-use mixes, including a line especially for baking with kids. And it’s making a significant commitment to e-commerce. Internet Retailer named kingarthurflour.com one of its Hot 100 retail Web sites for 2009, and the company just won top honors from the DMA and Multichannel Marketer as best online food retailer.

It’s also a brand that is sharp about social media. They have a blog, whose RSS feed I subscribe to, and, of course, a very active Twitter account. I’m a big fan of King Arthur, and, though I don’t order from them all that much, I open their e-mail newsletter pretty consistently. Tuesday, I opened an e-mail from them that contained some pretty compelling language:

It’s part of our mission to inspire community-building through baking. When we bake and share, we forge honest, caring connections that help create and sustain a vibrant community. We believe that baking and giving go hand in hand. We want to encourage you to bake and share with family and friends, neighbors, and your community. To get you started, we’ll send you a 2-lb. bag of King Arthur Flour – absolutely free. We simply ask that you bake it forward. We’d love to hear your bake2share stories, and invite you to poste them at kingarthurflour.com/bake2share…

And then, at the bottom of the e-mail, there were links to Twitter, Facebook, delicious and StumbleUpon, with the directive “Share this email”.

Nicely done. It practically oozes with brand values — giving, sharing, community — and even the call-to-action is about sharing and community-building. Not to mention that the free bag of flour — free shipping included — was a pretty pleasant little gift.

When I signed up, there wasn’t yet much on the site. But now — the day I received my free bag — it’s been updated to say they gave away 5,218 bags, all in fewer than 24 hours. They list 106 participating bakers and 4,189 recipients of baked goods. No stories have yet been posted, which is a little disappointing, but also understandable. Another thing they did right: they made submitting a story very very easy. There are fields for what you baked and who you shared it with — stories and photos are optional. This will help them gather plenty of input — both from casual participants (like I probably will be) — and from those who go all-out and document their experience both in text and images.

I’m impressed, King Arthur Flour. I already was pretty fond of your brand, but this has tipped me over into passionate brand advocate territory. Now, off to bake those blueberry muffins.

UPDATE: I’ve finally baked my cupcakes and have been trying to submit my story, only to discover a major social media FAIL in this campaign. Every time I hit submit (and I’ve been doing it over and over again), I get a Network Error message: “The server at ecomm2.bos.kingarthurflour.com is taking too long to respond.” Not good, but a good lesson for others to take note of.

There’s an interesting piece today in Inside Higher Education that discusses Columbia Journalism School and its mandate to educate journalists to handle the tumultuous shifts happening in media today (both consumption patterns and business models). Among the changes proposed by Bill Grueskin, the former deputy managing editor for news at The Wall Street Journal and the school’s new dean of academic affairs, is a course on the business of journalism:

Though he acknowledged that the course would bridge the longstanding gap between the business and editorial sides of the journalism world, he did not think this would present an ethical problem for students. If anything, he said, it might help them in a market where some journalists have had to become entrepreneurs to find an audience for their work online.

At FM, especialy in the author services department, this is a topic we deal with every day, and it’s fascinating to see my alma mater deem it worthy of study. I wholeheartedly agree.

P.S. I would love to be an adjunct professor for such a course.

Just got — and really enjoyed — Doug Weaver’s musings on the new Yahoo! CEO in his Upstream Group newsletter, the Drift (latest not yet posted). The gist is that Carol Bartz is an outsider to the insular little Web 2.0 world, but that may be a good thing rather than a problem:

Those not part of our echo chamber “don’t get it” or “can’t possibly keep up.” Well, as Dwight Schrute famously said on “The Office” in a PG outburst: “That’s Bullcrap.”

I loved Kent Nichols’ (of Ask a Ninja) explanation of what we at FM — specifically our salespeople — do. Paraphrasing here, but the moderator asked how AAN has been successful courting brand advertisers. The secret, Kent said, is “sweaty people who drink” — aka hard work building real-life relationships with agencies and advertisers, sometimes with the lubricating influence of alcohol. It’s the non-engineerable aspect of advertising, he said, and it requires the sweat of people who do “voodoo bullshit” and “close deals.”

This panel has completely rocked — best of the SXSW interactive conference so far — and Kent Nichols is a great instigator. He totally gets it, and he expresses it in a laugh-out-loud hilarous way.

Well, it’s happened. Google is buying DoubleClick. I followed DCLK really closely back in the day when I was based in NYC and it was our “hometown” ad serving company. They had that sign welcoming people to Silicon Alley, yada yada yada. So it’s wild — though not unexpected given rumors and reports — to see the company go so completely Valley. Folks have noted that the two companies already share a building in NYC, interestingly enough. Enough geographic musings. This represents a really interesting move for Google, one that will place it even more at the center of all digital advertising. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next.

UPDATE: Tom comments: “Actually, I think this is about GOOG continuing to “go New York” – ie, get more and more into wider media buying/selling market.”

Agreed, Tom. It’s really both. As Google moves to become more Madison Avenue — becoming more entrenched in the advertising/marketing mainstream — it takes the whole media world just a little more digital and technology-oriented. After all, Eric Schmidt has said he wants people to think of Google as an “operating system” for advertising, or some such. Can you imagine anyone even conceiving of an operating system for advertising, before Google?