June 2007 Trends: Moms

technology
Palm Launches a Mom-Friendly Palm
Family Planning gets a new twist with Palm's launch of Zire, a new PDA that Palm is marketing to frazzled mothers juggling play dates, classes, and sports practices rather than to the busy executive.

Xbox Hoping to Lure Moms to Gaming
Microsoft has won over 20-year-old gamers, who spend hours a day launching rockets and firing plasma guns on the company's Xbox 360. Now it wants their moms.

 
websites to watch
ModernMom.com
A comprehensive guide, the site features smart and practical advice on topics such as parenting, finances, career, health, wellness, beauty, entertainment and more. With one click, women can also access a worldwide network of moms who are ready to chat, ask questions and share their most clever tips and advice.

MomSpace.com
Helping moms buy things. Although it includes a bit of personal networking and chat, this site mainly connects women with businesses in their geographic area that have been rated by other local moms. ''It's formalizing the bus stop talk,'' says Colleen Devine, publicist for the site, ''but it's not just for the new mom.''

MomJunction.com
Helping moms talk with each other. The page conveys an accessible, all-inclusive vibe, suggesting a chatting-over-coffee sort of friendliness. But moms posting here still keep their anonymity intact. You can create your own group on this site or join an existing one.

 
blog news
Blogging for Dummies
The Web buzz is still all about Twitter and the “microblogging” craze it has generated, but we’re also hearing about another blogging format: “tumblelogging.” Currently being popularized by the site Tumblr, tumblelogging is essentially a multimedia “blogging for dummies.”

Useful Social Media Tools and Sites For Women
When it comes to social media tools, most are not gender specific. That's a good thing, as it means they can be uniformly useful for everyone, but it's a sign of evolution when more specifically targeted sites start to appear. It happened with websites and now the same seems to be happening with several new interesting social media tools popping up targeted at women.
1. Blogher
2. TeamSugar
4. ChickAdvisor
5. Custom Search Engine for Mom Blogs
6. MotherProof

 
interesting articles
New Viral Movie Reveals How Much a Mom Should Be Paid
The new viral movie, What a Mother is Worth, calculates that moms should be paid over a half-million dollars per year, based upon all the contributions they make to the care and growth of their family.

Alpha Moms Leap to Top of Trendsetters
Alpha Moms are educated, tech-savvy, Type A moms with a common goal: mommy excellence. She is a multitasker. She is kidcentric. She is hands-on. She may or may not work outside the home, but at home, she views motherhood as a job that can be mastered with diligent research. An Alpha Mom typically has money to spend, and — key for marketers — she is, as the label implies, a leader of the pack who influences how other moms spend.

Mulliken Woman Named to Help McDonald's with Healthy Food
Mulliken mom Tina Hoxie is getting access to McDonald's nutritionists, chefs, ingredient suppliers, executives and others responsible for food quality and safety. Hoxie, a mother of two, is joining five other every day mothers across the country to serve as Moms' Quality Correspondents.

Oh, Mother! - Marketers Struggle to Categorize an Increasingly Complex Demo
Marketers in search of a few good women to spread the word about their products are finding themselves smack dab in the middle of the Mommy Wars.

More Mom-to-Mom Advice Sites Spring Up Online
Though every generation has its own parenting experts, one has always remained constant in the eyes of mothers: another mother.

Palm Launches a Mom-Friendly Palm
Trend Central

Family Planning gets a new twist with Palm's launch of Zire, a new PDA that Palm is marketing to frazzled mothers juggling play dates, classes, and sports practices rather than to the busy executive. Zire offers the basic functionality one needs to manage a household, sticking to the basics with simple features such as address book, calendar and a reminder function for birthdays and other events. Zire is reasonably priced at $99, with both cost and ease-of-use making it more accessible to this demographic than the more robust products on the market.

Palm is trying to stop erosion of their market share by expanding their reach beyond the corporate IT department. They'll be selling Zire at mom-friendly retailers such as Target, Kmart, and Radio Shack where it will share shelf-space with calculators and disc players rather than computers. Palm plans to start with moms and then expand to other groups, as well. Perhaps when kids see how well-organized Mom is with this basic, home-based technology, they'll want one of their own, too.

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Xbox hoping to lure moms to gaming
June 28, 2007
Bloomberg News
By Dina Bass

Microsoft has won over 20-year-old gamers, who spend hours a day launching rockets and firing plasma guns on the company's Xbox 360. Now it wants their moms.

To lure them, the world's largest software maker says it plans to add more family games and redo retail displays to make the children's titles easier to find. It also may cut the Xbox price, which is as high as $399, analysts say.

Microsoft is emulating rival Nintendo. The Japanese company's Wii console outsells the Xbox 360 in the U.S. by appealing to women, children and the elderly, a strategy Microsoft says it needs to adopt to win a broader audience than the first Xbox attracted.

"If we don't make that move, make it early and expand our demographic, we will wind up in the same place as with Xbox 1, a solid business with 25 million people," said Peter Moore, a vice president who oversees the Xbox. "What I need is a solid business with 90 million people."

Microsoft loses money on every Xbox it sells, said UBS analyst Heather Bellini in New York. In the fiscal year that ended June 30, the unit that sells the console lost $1.26 billion on sales of $4.26 billion. Microsoft says the division, which accounted for 9.6 percent of total sales last year, will be profitable in the year that starts July 1.

That may mean a price cut heading into the holiday season to spur sales of games, which do make a profit, Bellini said.

"If they really are going to have a good Christmas games lineup, then they just have to have the largest number of boxes out there so that they sell the largest number of games," said Bellini, Institutional Investor's top-ranked software analyst. She expects a price cut as early as September.

"We are well aware that the sweet spot of the market is really 199 bucks," said David Hufford, a director of Xbox product management. Sony sold 75 million PlayStation 2s at or below that price.

Wii costs $250 and makes a "strong value proposition," Hufford said. "When mom walks into the store and sees she can get a console with a game for $250, she sees it as a $300 value. They've done a good job."

He declined to say whether Microsoft will reduce the Xbox's price.

Research firm IDC estimates that Nintendo will sell almost 16.1 million consoles in 2007, about 60 percent more than the 9.87 million estimated for PlayStation 3 and 9.69 million for Xbox 360.

Microsoft's initial attempts to target children didn't live up to the company's expectations. A November game called "Viva Piñata," in which kids build a garden and raise animals that look like piñatas brought to life, didn't make it into the top 20, even with a Saturday morning cartoon created to promote the game.

Microsoft says it's winning female users with "Guitar Hero 2," the No. 3 selling console game in the U.S. in March.

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Blogging for Dummies
TrendCentral

The Web buzz is still all about Twitter and the “microblogging” craze it has generated, but we’re also hearing about another blogging format: “tumblelogging.” Currently being popularized by the site Tumblr, tumblelogging is essentially a multimedia “blogging for dummies.” Just like Twitter, it simplifies the act of blogging, making it more enticing to novice bloggers. (We tried it, and it really is amazingly easy and useful.) While regular blogging is more for writing lengthy posts, tumblelogging is more akin to making an online scrapbook of all the interesting things you find in the cyberworld. After registering with Tumblr, all one needs to do to get started is add a “Share on Tumblr” bookmark to their favorites list. To add content to a Tumblr page, simply select the content (can be a web page, text, photos or video) and click the bookmark, which automatically adds it to one’s personal Tumblr page.

Just a little over a month old, Tumblr already has over 50,000 users. If you’ve always been intimidated by blogging or don’t have the time to write but still want a place to collect the fruits of your web exploration, Tumblr may be the answer.

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Useful Social Media Tools and Sites For Women
June 26, 2007
Digital Media Wire

When it comes to social media tools, most are not gender specific. That's a good thing, as it means they can be uniformly useful for everyone, but it's a sign of evolution when more specifically targeted sites start to appear. It happened with websites and now the same seems to be happening with several new interesting social media tools popping up targeted at women. Based on some planning efforts for a number of campaigns we have recently been putting together for clients targeting women, here's my starter list of 5 great social media tools for women.

Blogher
Not surprisingly, the flagship organization for women in the blogosphere is also one of the most useful sites. With aggregated content, information about their highly popular annual event, and a rapidly growing blog index that lists nearly 10,000 female-authored blogs - the site is a must read for anyone interested in learning about women in social media and joining the community.

Sk*rt
This relatively new site was created using Pligg and is getting a lot of attention as the new "Digg for women." The site has a nice design, compelling content and seems to already have lots of great article submissions. Interestingly, the level of activity on the site in terms of people (presumably women) voting also seems very high when compared with Digg that has been around much longer. The story behind the site is equally compelling and you might be tempted to wonder how come no one thought of this idea before. Regardless, I am quickly finding it's one of my top resources for research and learning.

TeamSugar
This site offers a network for women to share content, comment, find stories and discover news. It is published by a group called Sugar Inc. which also has a collection of other sites under the same brand altogether described on their site as "nine distinct lifestyle and entertainment sites that define their category, covering topics that include celebrity, fashion, entertainment, food, fitness and more." The TeamSugar site was built after the popular PopSugar site, and is one of the leading sites targeted at women bridging the gap between news, online community, blog and social bookmarking site.

ChickAdvisor
This site is currently in beta and features women reviewing a range of products and has many online community tools that will be familiar to women from many other online communities. The site has an official blog and recently launched a new podcast called "Where'd You Get That?" Together it's a good female friendly experience, though it will be interesting to see if it can stand up against social shopping sites like Kaboodle or Wists which are broader and not solely targeted at women.

Custom Search Engine for Mom Blogs
Created by Michelle Mitchell (aka Scribbet), a mom blogger from Alaska, this is an exhaustive list of mommy blogs that are all pulled together into a custom Google blogsearch. It's a great resource to find mom's blog posts about a specific subject or challenge, and a good resource for marketers to find blog posts about certain types of products or brands as well. The blog search is also getting mentioned on lots of mom blogs, which is likely to help it become even more authoritative and used.

MotherProof
In an interesting new site launched by Cars.com, MotherProof is a site that encourages moms in particular, and also other women, to review cars and post their reviews online. The site presents a new model for actively soliciting female-authored reviews for products and aggregating them into a distinct location. The power of this idea is that researching a car purchase is in an entirely different category to "shopping" in the online retail sense. The site offers a way to separate that experience and is therefore much more useful to consumers. My guess is you will start to see many other sites in vertical industry categories follow the same format to offer a distinct area to separate reviews on their category of products.

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MySpace Lays Claim to Fresh-Faced Flektor
Marketing Vox
May 16, 2007

Flektor, a widget creation service that is only a few weeks old, has just been tagged "taken" by MySpace, divulges TechCrunch. This comes shortly after news of the social networking giant's soon-to-be acquisition of PhotoBucket.

The deal will make hardly a dent in the MySpace pocketbook after it agreed to pay $250 for the photo storage website. Flektor is estimated to cost between $10 and $20 million with potential of an earnout.

Fresh-faced Flektor enables users to build widgets out of their photos, video and text media. Its elaborate functionalities enable audio, effects and transition capabilities, setting it apart from established arena names like RockYou and Slide.

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Critical Metrics
http://criticalmetrics.com
Trendcentral
May 18, 2007

This music site tracks and aggregates recommendations and playlists across all media (including TV, newspapers, magazines, retailers, DJs and bloggers), not only enabling site visitors to see what music people are talking about but also allowing them to listen to it directly on the site.

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New Viral Movie Reveals How Much a Mom Should Be Paid
PRWeb
June 26, 2007

The new viral movie, What a Mother is Worth, calculates that moms should be paid over a half-million dollars per year, based upon all the contributions they make to the care and growth of their family.

Elizabeth Potts Weinstein, CFP®, JD, a Certified Financial Planner practitioner, attorney, and owner of The Wealth Spa, has launched a new viral movie called "What a Mother is Worth," tracking the invaluable contributions a mother makes to the care, raising, and growth of her children.

As mother of a 2-year old daughter, Weinstein has struggled with the conflicting responsibilities of being a mother, wife, and entrepreneur. She created this free online movie to help other moms appreciate the valuable contribution they make to their family.

Women underestimate themselves. As mothers, wives, sisters, daughter, and friends, we change the world daily by helping everyone in our family, social, and business circles. This movie reminds moms of their contribution, and helps them realize that they should value themselves accordingly "Women underestimate themselves. As mothers, wives, sisters, daughter, and friends, we change the world daily by helping everyone in our family, social, and business circles. This movie reminds moms of their contribution, and helps them realize that they should value themselves accordingly," says Weinstein.

In the movie, many of the roles of a mother are tracked, such as taxi driver, coach, motivational speaker, and nanny. The salaries of each role are added up and calculated to be over a half-million dollars per year, but the real value is calculated as the unlimited hugs, kisses, and unconditional love from children to mothers.

Viral movies have been popularized over the last few years though successful campaigns via email marketing and sites such as YouTube and Google Video. The principal behind the viral movie campaigns is to connect with the emotions of the viewer, thus motivating them to pass on the movie to their friends and colleagues.

To view the movie, go to http://www.WhatAMotherIsWorth.com More information about the production and marketing of viral movies can be obtained by contacting The Wealth Spa at the email listed below, or at (800) 752-3592.

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Alpha Moms Leap to Top of Trendsetters
USA Today
March 27, 2007

There may be moments in Constance Van Flandern's day when she's got a BlackBerry in one hand and one of her two kids in the other.

That is her Alpha Mom moment. She ought to know: She created the label to describe moms such as herself.

The graphic designer from Eugene, Ore., and millions of mothers like her, are becoming a marketing phenomenon. Alpha Moms are educated, tech-savvy, Type A moms with a common goal: mommy excellence. She is a multitasker. She is kidcentric. She is hands-on. She may or may not work outside the home, but at home, she views motherhood as a job that can be mastered with diligent research.

An Alpha Mom typically has money to spend, and — key for marketers — she is, as the label implies, a leader of the pack who influences how other moms spend.

She's also wired — online 87 minutes a day, estimates ComScore Networks, an Internet market research specialist — and she spends a hefty 7% more than the typical Internet user. The impact of her purchases or what she touts can spread on the Internet far beyond her e-mail list or blog.

If your product or service passes the Alpha Mom test, it's gold. That's why the nation's biggest marketers, from Procter & Gamble to General Motors to Nintendo, are focusing on this remix of the modern mom.

"She ignites markets," says Michael Silverstein, consumer guru at Boston Consulting Group. "She's a hyperactive purchasing agent."

There've been other moms before her at the forefront of cultural shifts. They, too, were highly sought after by marketers as "influencers" — people whose brand preferences are followed by others. There were the Soccer Moms lugging kids to sports fields in their minivans and courted as key swing voters by presidential campaigns. They were culturally ousted by the Yoga Moms who made time for themselves and made millions for marketers who wooed them.

A label that described her life
Van Flandern came up with the Alpha Mom label while working on a graphics assignment several years ago. She was designing a logo for a new video-on-demand cable TV service that wanted to attract information-hungry, multitasking moms. Names being considered: Mommy TV, Mommy Channel, even Mommy Says.

Though Van Flandern is an artist, not a marketing maven, none of the names sat well with her. She'd just given birth to her daughter but continued to work as a freelance graphic artist. She was living the life of the customer her client wanted to reach, and none of these names fit.

"I couldn't get behind Mommy Channel," she says. "But I realized that the audience is me: a hip mom who wants to be involved with her children's lives but who doesn't want to give up her identity."

Presto: Alpha Mom TV.

The name she came up with was embraced by her client, Isabel Kallman, CEO and "founding mother" of Alpha Mom TV. She was a new mom herself and a former Wall Street executive, and her husband, Craig, is co-chairman of Atlantic Records. She was living that complex life, too. But with some frustration.

"As a new mom, I couldn't trust my own instincts," Kallman recalls. "I sought information on how to take care of my child, but I couldn't find anything on TV." That's when she got the idea of a 24/7 cable channel dedicated to parenting.

The channel launched in 2005 with this simple mission: Provide information that helps parents trust their instincts. Short videos cover everything from breastfeeding to blogging.

Alpha Mom TV, in 11.5 million homes with distribution deals with Comcast and Cox, has struggled in the early going. So has Kallman, who was the subject of a biting profile in New York magazine that portrayed the Alpha Mom as an ultra-controlling, hyper-ambitious Robo Mom.

"I am a complex woman who is unloading a lot of emotional baggage on her motherhood journey," is how Kallman responded in her blog to that article. "Alpha Mom is my reflection — and my beacon."

Alpha Mom TV's website next month will add a baby name search engine, product reviews and social networking, and it is creating content for everything from broadband to mobile phones. The company will turn a profit this year, Kallman says.

Marketers go for those moms A funny thing has happened along the way, however: The label Alpha Mom and the women it describes were embraced by the marketing world.

Among the first big marketers to chase Alpha Moms: video game company Nintendo, which is trying to expand its market beyond hard-core gamers.

Last fall, as it was about to roll out the cool Wii game console, Nintendo gathered small groups of trend-setting moms in eight cities to test it.

In Los Angeles, it treated 35 moms to an evening at the chic Chateau Marmont. Among those tapped was Linda Perry of Venice Beach, who has two kids, is a full-time legal assistant and leads a Yahoo parenting group that reaches 7,000 tech-savvy moms.

"I'm constantly using the computer to find information," says Perry. "If I get an amazing facial, the whole world knows about it."

Ka-ching. This is just the type of Alpha Mom that Nintendo wants to impress with its Wii, which uses motion-sensitive controllers to manipulate action on the TV screen. Nintendo went all out, setting up a room filled with fancy food, an open bar and Wii demos.

Perry went bonkers for Wii — so much so, she says, that more than 200 women in her e-mail group have bought the $250 console on her recommendations.

With the help of Alpha Moms, Wii became the nation's top-selling game system in January.

"Alpha Moms are one of our key targets, because they have this high social-networking factor," says Perrin Kaplan, Nintendo's vice president of marketing. The company's outreach to them, she says, "is not a fad — it's permanent."

Baby, you should drive my car
General Motors is getting hip to Alpha Moms, too — at least its Cadillac division is, and not by accident. Liz Vanzura, Cadillac's new global marketing director, is a self-described Alpha Mom with three kids ages 4, 7 and 12. The brand recently started targeting Alpha Moms because Vanzura saw Cadillac missing out on a big growth opportunity.

While 75% of Cadillac buyers are male, 70% of car purchases are influenced by women, Vanzura says.

"We're going after moms who wouldn't be caught dead in a minivan," she says. "These are Type A moms who hit one goal, then are off to the next." Much like Vanzura.

A good chunk of Cadillac's online ad campaign — at mycadillacstory.com— features Alpha Moms.

One of them is Holly McPeak, a professional beach volleyball player who won a bronze medal in the 2004 Olympics. She's also a stepmom to two teenagers. She's pressed to divide her time between family, workouts and media. "My BlackBerry is attached to me all the time except when I'm on the beach practicing," she says. She's online four hours a day.

She told Cadillac how much she loves the Escalade she bought two years ago, and, for no fee, appeared in a video now on Cadillac's website. McPeak says she likes the SUV because it's efficient for hauling volleyballs, groceries or family.

An Alpha Mom, she says, is someone who does it all, "but doesn't forget about themselves."

Executives at Kimberly-Clark have joined the Alpha Mom hunt.

The company has grown hip to the fact that Alpha Moms are "often online seeking out peer information," says Brad Santeler, director of media and relationship marketing.

Its Huggies brand created the online Huggies Baby Network. It's intentionally light on pitching diapers and wipes, but offers a fountain of information on healthy baby tips and nursery design. The site lets moms find things of interest, "link it to the brand, then share it with a friend," says Santeler.

Next month, Unilever has big plans for Alpha Moms.

In partnership with Sprint, the company's Suave brand is creating an "In the Motherhood " website that will air a mom-focused Web video series. Moms will suggest the story ideas and vote on which ones to produce.

"This is where moms are and where we need to be playing," says Sarah Jensen, director of marketing for hair care at Unilever U.S. "The minute you start doing things online, the word spreads."

Risking Swiffer reviews
Which is why consumer giant Procter & Gamble is tapping parenting websites to get its products into the hands of Alpha Moms.

P&G recently gave several hundred Swiffer WetJets to what it identified as influential moms who often visited TheNest.com., a site about homes. P&G asked the moms to review the Swiffers on the site.

"You get positive and negative responses," says Paul O'Connor, brand manager of Swiffer. "But if you get 98% positive and 2% negative, it's a win."

A win for Van Flandern, the graphic artist who coined the Alpha Mom phrase, is any day that she simply can fit everything in.

Early mornings with her kids. Work at home on her laptop from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Exercise from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. Afternoon activities with the kids. Dinner at 5:30. Bath time at 7, followed by bedtime for the kids. Then there's a debriefing with her husband, before she goes back online to revisit her latest project.

"I'm at my Alpha-Mommy-est when I have the most balls in the air," she says. "It's multitasking to the nth degree. It's like training for the Olympics. Most of all, it's fun."

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Mulliken Woman Named to Help McDonald's With Healthy Food
June 20, 2007
By Sentinel-Standard staff

Mulliken mom Tina Hoxie is getting access to McDonald's nutritionists, chefs, ingredient suppliers, executives and others responsible for food quality and safety.

Hoxie, a mother of two, is joining five other every day mothers across the country to serve as Moms' Quality Correspondents.

“I am a mom of two boys whose health I care deeply about,” said Hoxie. “I like to be assured about the quality of food they eat as well as their spiritual, intellectual and emotional well-being. I hope this program will help me do just that.”

The mothers will be given an exclusive look at menu items being developed, as well as the opportunity to explore McDonald's kitchens and supplier facilities during the next four months.

A recent survey shows that nearly 90 percent of mothers believe it's important that fast-food restaurants provide more information about the food they serve.

So, this summer the fast food chain will be providing them an unprecedented opportunity to go behind the counter, ask questions about food quality and see firsthand how McDonald's menu items are made.

The Moms' Quality Correspondents will publicly share their experiences through journals and downloadable videos on www.McDonaldsmom.com.

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Marketers Struggle to Categorize an Increasingly Complex Demo
May 21, 2007
Adage
By Stephanie Thompson

Marketers in search of a few good women to spread the word about their products are finding themselves smack dab in the middle of the Mommy Wars.

Sprint Nextel, Nintendo and General Motors Corp. all have been clamoring to reach the high-income, highly influential potential product advocator touted as the Alpha Mom. But now a backlash has begun in the form of the Beta Mom, the self-proclaimed antithesis of the superachieving Alpha. And, if that wasn't bad enough, probability suggests that accounting for all types of moms could take us all the way to Omega.

Collapsing mom differences
Isabel Kallman, CEO of Alpha Mom, the mom-media company that coined the now somewhat incendiary moniker in 2005, dismissed the idea of mommy divisiveness as media hype. That's no surprise: In March, her Alpha Mom was touted in USA Today as marketing gold, only to be debunked in early May by a story in the same publication on Beta Moms.

Ms. Kallman, who has become a fixture on "Good Morning America" and in New York magazine, said her website (AlphaMom.com) and cable TV content she has created for Cox and Comcast are about reaching "all moms who want to do the best for their families." They are 18 to 39 with household incomes above $75,000; 81% log on to the internet for advice. And that will certainly be her mantra as she looks to close deals with multinational marketers on the hook to sponsor her content (and reach the more than 175,000 women who sign on monthly to the site) for '08.

What Ms. Kallman has somewhat unwittingly created, however, is a cottage industry for mom marketers. Kristi Bridges, creative director of Sawtooth Group, is using the much-talked-about Alpha Mom term to help clients including spice marketer McCormick & Co. try to reach the modern more-time-for-herself mom. As Ms. Bridges sees it, Alphas have made it OK to come out and say they want to make themselves happy first and by doing so be a better wife and mother. That concept opens up media opportunities to reach mom, beyond the typical Seven Sisters publications, to spa and travel magazines, cooking shows, and, of course, the internet. But even Ms. Bridges acknowledges that Alpha Mom, like Soccer Mom before her, is probably a limited-time term and that, in reality, "somewhere in the middle between Alpha and Beta is where most moms are."

Getting in bed with the Alphas
Such a truth has not stopped companies such as Sprint from trying to get in bed with Alpha Moms. In a recent Mother's Day pitch to elicit publicity for its wireless and online offerings, Sprint dropped the A-bomb no fewer than seven times (mostly in bolded headlines). While Sprint addresses that "the term 'Alpha Mom' may not apply to every mother in America," it goes on to offer that "the challenges are the same -- to be the 'always on' multitasker, devoted to raising her children and seeking the best resources to help her do it."

Such obvious we-get-you blather exactly spells out the problem many women have with being a so-called Alpha Mom, Ms. Bailey said, which is that "that they don't want to be pushovers for marketers to influence." And that, she says, is exactly what the term has come to imply.

How, then, should marketers navigate the minefield that is mommy marketing? Nintendo used Alpha Moms to help spread the word about its Wii gaming console, holding events for "trendsetting" moms in eight cities to take advantage of their social connectedness. GM reached out to the Type A's for its Cadillac division, primarily the Escalade, with its Alpha Mom-targeted website, MyCadillacStory.com.

Targeting life stages
One suggestion Ms. Bailey makes in her book is to wage life-stage-based marketing. Kara Forney is offering advertisers of her expanding local pregnancy guides, "The Bump," just that.

Citing data that show 4 million babies are born a year and an average of 16,000 pregnant women enter the market every day, Bump CEO Ms. Forney plans to expand to a total of 12 cities by year's end. Her expecting mothers may not have determined whether they are Alpha or Beta yet, but they are looking for where to buy baby gear, electronics, etc. in their local market -- especially after seeing abstract articles and ads in national parenting pubs.

The digest-size annual guide is partnering with Starwood's Westin Hotels & Resorts and high-end maternity retailer BabyStyle for a "babymoon" event in Phoenix, promoting the growing concept of taking a last vacation getaway before having a baby. And, catering to cravings, The Bump is partnering with Carvel to hold a contest for a Bump ice-cream flavor.

More Mom-to-Mom Advice Sites Spring Up Online
Associated Press
June 25, 2007

Though every generation has its own parenting experts, one has always remained constant in the eyes of mothers: another mother.

The Internet has only served to amplify that option, sometimes replacing the back fence or the neighborhood playground as the quickest and best place to find real-life advice. Mothers scattered across the globe can log in to these sites, freely sharing thoughts and fears about any motherhood-related topic imaginable.

The 24/7 availability of networking sites fits well into the frenzied schedule of new mothers, and many find comfort in the odd blend of intimacy and anonymity the Internet provides.

“There’s so much competition in the mommy community,” says Rosie Amodio, executive editor of TheNestBaby.com, a networking site that launched in May. “You have all these questions, and you don’t always feel comfortable asking your friends. You’re not going to come out and say, ‘Is my child the only one who hits people?’ So you find this community that provides you with support, but there’s also some anonymity.”

Here are just a few of the newest sources of mommy wisdom:

‘What the Other Mothers Know’
Author: Michele Gendelman, Ilene Graff and Donna Rosenstein (released in April). Mission: This new book’s lengthy subtitle says it all: “A Practical Guide to Child Rearing Told in a Really Nice, Funny Way That Won’t Make You Feel Like a Complete Idiot the Way All Those Other Parenting Books Do.” Cost: Harper Paperbacks, $12.95.

momspace.com
Mission: Helping moms buy things. “MomSpace was created to help you, the CEO of your household,” announces the home page. Cost: free to join, and moms can earn money by requesting a part-time job selling advertising space on the site to local businesses in their area.

TheNestBaby.com
Mission: Helping new moms tackle motherhood. “You have questions, you want answers. You don’t have time to weed through tons of information,” says executive editor Rosie Amodio. Cost: free to join.

momjunction.com
Mission: Helping moms talk with each other. “Tap into the wisdom of moms everywhere” says the home page. Cost: free to join.