Clever girl, that Stefania.

I'm heading to San Diego this week.  The annual BlogHer conference is kicking off, but rather than attending the panel discussions etc I'll be at the I'm With the Brand party hosted by Clever Girls Collective. Fresh & Easy (a client) is a sponsor.  I'm stepping up my involvement with this client, and I'm very happy about that.

But there's another reason why I'm excited to travel 3000 miles for a 3-hour party.  I'm really looking forward to witnessing the success of Clever Girls Collective - and specifically one of its founders, Stefania Pomponi Butler - first-hand.

I'm very fortunate to be able to point to specific moments in my social media career where I built relationships with entrepreneurial bloggers, or learned an important lesson from the community of online moms.  The first touchpoint, I'll readily acknowledge, was dumb luck - I was tasked with connecting bloggers to a new radio network that featured Gloria Steinem on its Board of Directors, and I thought it might be a good idea for Ms. Steinem to actually talk with some of those bloggers.  But the year was 2006.  Bloggers (and especially mom-bloggers) were still regarded by mainstream media as insignificant and DEFINITELY NOT journalists. Marketers were only beginning to realize the potential of the mom-o-sphere.  The idea of someone with the fame and gravitas of Gloria Steinem talking with a dozen "regular people" was questionable at best.  It took a lot of convincing.  I had to write memos titled, "What is a blog?" because nobody really knew what I was doing. (Neither did I.)  But of course, Gloria Steinem isn't afraid of anyone, and she agreed to do it without a fuss.

So Ms. Steinem talked with regular people like  Liz Gumbinner.  And Kristen Chase. And Catherine Connors. And Leah Peterson.  And a bunch of other women.  And they loved it.  And then some bloggers met Ms. Steinem at the network's launch party.  And they loved that too.  The radio network wound up folding, but I became "the guy who did the Gloria Steinem thing" and rode that wave into the "State of the Mom-o-Sphere" panel at BlogHer 2007 in Chicago, and I really thought I was this amazing PR hot-shot and everyone would love me.

Yeah, not so much.

By July 2007, a lot of bloggers were getting slammed with emails from PR and marketing flacks basically asking them to write about how awesome their products were. It didn't matter what the product was, or if the mom actually wrote about anything relevant to the product.  And the moms were sick of it.  And they let me know it. Loudly.  So even though I never really spammed anyone like that, I felt compelled to apologize on behalf of the industry and wrote a manifesto of sorts  and I became "the PR guy who gets it."

But another very important thing happened at that panel discussion, and it was an idea led by Kelly Wickham and by Stefania. They noticed the moms getting all these pitches from PR flacks happened to be white, and that blogs written by people of color were being ignored - even though they had comparable levels of popularity - and they wanted to know why.  So I tried to give an explanation - it's basically because, when it comes to diversity, often the PR industry just plain sucks.  And I became "the PR guy who gets it" all over again.

Of course that answer didn't settle the matter for Stefania or Kelly, nor should it.  They've led several panel discussions at subsequent BlogHer conferences and beyond on the issue of diversity in the blogosphere.  And Stefania and her partners founded Clever Girls Collective. They started out by showing brands that they could reach out to online moms - and particularly moms of color - much more effectively than big PR firms.  They've grown dramatically over the past couple of years because they take their job very seriously, they always work with integrity, and they deliver results.

I've learned a lot by watching and talking with Stefania and these other dynamic women.  I've learned that you can achieve much greater success by engaging bloggers not as ersatz journalists or outreach targets, but as entrepreneurs or partners.  I've learned how important a mom blogger's integrity and fidelity to the greater community of online moms is, and you should support that community without necessarily asking for anything in return.  I've learned that in this community, bloggers support each other relentlessly and find true friendship and build amazingly strong bonds over great distances.

I've learned this and more and I'm very, very grateful.

Buy PunditMom's book or I WILL HUNT YOU DOWN

Joanne "PunditMom" Bamberger has a book coming out called Mothers of Intention: How Women and Social Media are Revolutionizing Politics in America.  You should buy it. And then you should read it.  And then you should do whatever Joanne tells you to do, because she's going to rule the world someday and you probably want to be on her good side now. (OK, kidding.)  (But not really.)

This book is important - and not simply because Joanne is more than qualified to write this book as an online mom with an impressive background in government and politics. (She was deputy director of communications at the Securities Exchange Commission, you know.)  It's important because she uses the book to amplify the voices of people the beltway chattering class too often ignore - "everyday" women from different walks of life in America. Seriously - read the essays Joanne compiled in the book and then think about what you see on cable "news" shows or hear on talk radio.

I've spent some time in DC myself, so I'm a bit cynical.  I hope the beltway crowd won't view this book and the perspectives of the women in it as an "I care about politics too" human interest story.  I hope they will take this book as a wake-up call.  I think Joanne and her contributors are telling the politicians (and their sycophants) that while the jobs they have are important, they're wasting everyone's time on irrelevant and potentially harmful flights of fancy.   Moms are life's true decision makers, and they don't have time to waste on distractions.  If moms have more input in political decisions, our politics will be more substantive and our policies will be more effective.

I hope you read this book - not simply because Joanne is someone I've known for years, or because she's helped me out with work from time to time.  I hope you read this book because we all need to do better at understanding what women want and what they care about - and not just for the purposes of selling moms stuff.  Finally, I hope you read this book because for me it's personal.  I was raised by a "pundit mom."  I'm married to another "pundit mom."  For years they've spoken up to help their families, and for as long as I can remember, strong political forces have been aligned against them.  Their actions have helped shape who I am.  In a very real sense, Joanne is speaking up for them and for all the pundit moms out there.

Oh, and the writers she features in the book are pretty amazing too.

speaking of #scimom...

The Wandering Scientist reads my "reflections" post and says I left out #scimom's who don't work in academia.  It's a valid point. And she's been paying attention to this a lot longer than I have - and not just because she's actually a #scimom.  Back in 2009 she put together perhaps the first #scimom list.

She says academic #scimoms can be more visible in the blogosphere and are more able to write about their work.   And she says being a mom prompts some to take you less seriously at work.   I think perspectives vary a bit on this (the CEO of the company where I work is a proud mom and grandmother), though I understand her point.

I'm curious to know what #scimoms think.  The impression I get is a lot of #scimoms write under a pseudonym whether they're academic or not.  Again just my impression but I get the feeling that anonymity has declined in the mom-o-sphere generally as it's grown more commercialized, but #scimom's still see a significant downside to sharing their names.

I know this topic has been the subject of much discussion at ScienceOnline and elsewhere.  I come from a different online community - public relations and issues management - where transparency is paramount and hiding your identity means hiding your true interests.  So it's hard for me to accept.  But that doesn't make this any less real.   Again, curious to know more about what others think.

Bring Science Home by Scientific American

I think this is great.

Great, no pressure

So I'm giving a talk next month in Kentucky.  Nothing too out of the ordinary there, right? Lots of PR folks give lots of presentations in lots of places.

Except this talk is called "What Women Want" and I'm supposed to go on local radio next week to talk about it. So I'm doing exhaustive research on the topic, using the most sophisticated tools and approaching the most credible sources.  Here's a glimpse of the sheer genius I've unearthed:

Make sure you tune in to the live online stream on May 3 at 1pm...  And may @almightygod have mercy on my soul. 

Never Write Off Mom Bloggers, Part 2,953

I first learned about Leah Peterson doing research for a social media client a few years ago. I was trying to find women bloggers who would be interested in participating in a conference call with Gloria Steinem. (Yes, THAT Gloria Steinem. It really wasn't that hard.)

If you read Leah's blog you learn very quickly that she's really up front about her mental illness. She shares a lot of details. And I have to admit I was a little nervous about inviting her to the call. We were putting a high-profile client in a public setting, and we would be giving access to someone who wrote frequently about multiple personalities, drug addiction, and worse.

But here's the thing: it was quite clear the other moms knew her well. They all linked to her blog and said very nice things about her. I remember she featured interviews of other bloggers - and that's where I got the idea for the sidebar on the right. She was a full-fledged, credible member of an online community. She wrote a reasonably prominent blog. The only reason we'd be excluding her was her health status, and that's just wrong. So we invited her.

The conference call went well - the women asked great questions, and Gloria Steinem gave great answers. So, happy little PR flack that I am, I went to the blogs to see if the women would write about it. And I saw a post on every woman's personal blog except one - Leah's.

Turns out Leah published her piece on The Huffington Post. You know, that blog with the millions of visitors. So from a PR perspective, she went from being a "risky" choice to being an absolute no-brainer.

I kept in touch with Leah over the years, as any halfway-decent social media flack would - not as much as I keep in touch with some bloggers, but every now and then. I saw her at BlogHer '07 in Chicago and thanked her for the post she wrote. I wrote about a project she was working on called Real Mental. A couple of months ago she sent me a note out of the blue, asking me to contribute some stuff to her new magazine, LP Creative Humans, so I did.

And now I learn she's a consultant for Showtime's Emmy-winning series, The United States of Tara. She's doing it to help educate people about mental illness, get people talking about it, and reduce stigma. Not too shabby, huh?