The BritMums Blog

Could a BritMum be Disney’s new expert?

Fancy a 'training' trip to Walt Disney World Resort® in Florida? This week, Disney has started the hunt for a UK parent to join their existing ‘Mom’s Panel’ and it could be a BritMum!

The space has opened up for a Brit for only the second time, and the new panellist would join an existing team of around 30 holiday planning experts based across the globe, offering advice and suggestions, and helping with specific queries from families planning a trip to  Walt Disney World® Resort in Orlando, Florida.

The BritMums survey results: who are the mum bloggers?

Those of us within the blogging community are aware of just how varied and vibrant the community is, both in our blogging topics and our interests. Now, with the first BritMums blogging survey, we know more than ever what interests parent bloggers as well as who they are. It’s a picture that shows mum bloggers at the forefront of the social media revolution, with an eye toward the future. (Click through for some groovy charts.)

Listen to some quarters of the mainstream media and you could develop a picture of mum bloggers as stay-at-home saddos without real-world friends, neglecting their families in favour of writing self-obsessed online journal entries and tweeting with anonymous “friends”.

What the new ASA online guidelines mean for mum bloggers

How blogs and brands work together has been an ongoing topic of conversation in the blogging world as well as at the Office of Fair Trading and the Advertising Standards Agency. This week the ASA has issued new guidelines for online advertising and marketing that have provoked mixed reaction.

The goal of the guidelines is to promote clear and truthful advertising and marketing to protect consumers.

So what does this mean for you?

According to a conversation I had yesterday with a man at Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP), what you say on your blog is not affected. CAP is the committee that writes the advertising rules for the industry. Using his example of a shampoo review, you can write your review as usual - eg, “I loved this shampoo. It left my hair shinier than my usual brand.”

Your 50 top tips for getting secret goodness into kids’ diets

  Ask a bunch of parents about how to get secret goodness into children’s meals and you get not only recipes and cooking tips. You also get down-to-earth strategies and philosophies that go way beyond the kitchen.

At our  Twitter party Thursday, sponsored by Kingsmill to announce their new Seeded range, the tweets were flying thick and fast. The hashtag #secretgoodness trended in the UK!

Some bloggers even used the party as inspiration for posts as well. Angels&Urchins wrote about foodie strategies she uses.  Mummysquared has a great picture of her little one trying loads of food. (Awww.) If you wrote about it, let us know!

Register for Kingsmill news and offers, and see food writer Jo Pratt's recipe for a Chicken Delight sandwich.

Guest post: How to create a media kit for your blog

Do you want to sell ads on your blog? Are you looking for a sponsor for CyberMummy? Why don't you create a media kit for your blog? Rebecca from Two Become Four gives us some hands-on tips.

A media kit, or media pack, is a little like a curriculum vitae for your blog. It's a chance for you to sell your blog and yourself, and to offer your details and stats to the various agencies and companies who may contact you, or for you to send out.

I've received some very positive feedback from my media kit and I thought I would share some of my suggestions and findings. I'm using mine as an example, because, if you're anything like me, it helps to see one "in the flesh".

Dear mummy blogger... PR pitches, what works and what, erm, doesn't

When it comes to blogger/brand relationships, Tara Cain from Sticky Fingers has had her fair share of pitches. Read this post to find out what works ... and what ends up in the bin!

I have had some truly awful PR pitches in my time as a blogger.

I'm constantly asked if I would like to 'use' a company's press release, invited to pre-schooler/baby events (I don't have either) and - controversial one - asked if I wanted to review a product then send it back.

Of course, I've also had some great ones too.

It's all too easy to roll your eyes and moan about the shoddy ones clogging up your inbox, and stress about the time it takes you to reply to them all. But actually I've just learned to bin them and move or. Or Tweet about how truly awful they are!

There is no two ways about it these days; parenting bloggers are a force to be reckoned with. 

Whether you understand it or not, our voice is powerful and brands want a piece of it.

Campaigns: Three, eBay and Next

The run up to Christmas is seeing some really creative blogger campaigns. For a start, Three has given five "mobile mums" a smart phone to see how the technology changes their lives. In conjunction with Bounty they sent out a call for mums to participate. The result was a wide mix of mums from Scotland to the South East. As part of the promotion, the mums will appear in OK Magazine over the course of four weeks.

Five seems to be a lucky number, and eBay has set five mum bloggers against each other in an eBay Christmas challenge. Bloggers were given £250 to find the best bargains on the auction site. A special Facebook app was created so that fans could help search out and recommend items for the bloggers. The mum blogger with the most creativity and the Facebook fan that helps the most will both win prizes.

9 tips on how to work with brands

Lots of BMB'ers tell us they'd like to work with brands but aren't sure how to get started. So we decided to get an expert on the topic to dish out her advice.

Natalie runs one of the most visible blogs in the UK, Bambino Goodies, and her blog Baggage Reclaim was nominated for the Cosmo Blog Awards. We're trying to think what Natalie hasn't done, what with her books, workshops, blogs and brand relationships. Here she tells a little about her latest foray with a brand and gives her very wise tips. Over to Natalie:

A couple of Fridays ago my eyes went on stalks at a tweet asking me if I was free to go to New York the following week! I'd met Nick from JCPR a few weeks before at a blogging workshop. When tasked with sending a  'mummy blogger' to New York to check out the launch of the very exciting Kinect for Xbox, he thought of me.

If you’ve never heard of a Kinect, it’s a device that works in conjunction with the Xbox 360, letting your body control the game instead of using controllers. Totally revolutionary, your movements are replicated on screen as you interact with the game. Sounding very American here, I have to say, quite frankly, it's awesome!

A few days later, my three year old daughter and I were at the crowdsourced celebration in Times Square, watching 600 dancers shaking their moneymakers in sync while Ne Yo and er..Lady Sovereign performed. Afterwards we checked out the retail promotion at Toys R Us where queues of hundreds of people, some who had started queuing two days before including mums, were snaking around the blocks. Although we didn’t go to the midnight party, it was very interesting to see a PR effort in action. (See Natalie's post about the trip on Bambino Goodies.)

My visit to NYC was a pretty unusual and rather cool experience - in fact, after six years of blogging, I'd say it's my favourite!  For you, as a mum (or dad) who blogs, as I explained at Cybermummy in the summer, it's important to get savvy about working with brands so here are some tips.