Monetizing the Village: CafeMom’s Social Network Strategy

Click here...

BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS

Monetizing the Village: CafeMom’s Social Network Strategy
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Steve Smith

The great uncracked nut of social networking remains the monetization strategy. How can publishers help brands become part of online relationships and conversations without seeming intrusive, phony or downright crass? As the online exchanges between users becomes more intimate, the messages from outside sponsors appear to be less welcome. And yet, obviously, these communities cannot survive as businesses without advertising support.

This week in min and minonline’s ongoing series on monetizing and leveraging community for content brands, we go to the heart of the model—the pure social network CafeMom, which has attracted 1.6 m

illion members since its November 2006 launch. The New York-based company has 80 employees who tend the communities themselves and sell to major brands custom integrated sponsorships. CafeMom and Razorfish conducted a joint study of the online behavior and social networking habits of women online, and they found a range of different profiles, which invited various marketing strategies. As CafeMom’s Laura Fortner, SVP of marketing and insights, tells us, social networkers are willing to interact with and share branded messages if the advertiser is enhancing the social networking experience the moms already enjoy. In this world, you shouldn’t just sponsor the activity; you need to add value to the community experience.

minonline: What are the editorial and maintenance duties of the CafeMom staff?
Fortner: The CafeMom site is powered by moms and for moms, and primarily features user generated content and member created mom-to-mom conversations. CafeMom’s community team is comprised of 16 community managers and community moderators responsible for helping make every mom’s experience on CafeMom a positive one. The team responds to questions and issues via email and on the site. As a result, they know both the moms and the features of CafeMom better than anyone. The team members have many years of experience working on the Internet, including contributing to major women’s sites, running large blogs and moderating communities on other sites.

minonline: Is there any content being made by the team itself or an effort to aggregate the conversations in some way?
Fortner: In October 2008, CafeMom created its first editorially driven section of the site called the Daily Buzz. As CafeMom’s community grew in size, so did the vast array of member-supplied content and conversations captured each day. To help our moms find the most noteworthy and topical material in areas of interest, we brought on nine Daily Buzz editors to curate, package and blog about the best of what moms are talking about on CafeMom and around the Web in nine core categories. Each Daily Buzz editor comes to CafeMom with years of editorial experience at publications ranging from Working Mother to Reader’s Digest to CosmoGirl.

minonline: A lot of publishers are trying to crack the code of integrating brand sponsorships with community. What are some of the things you have done differently in this regard? What are some good examples of the kinds of sponsorship you offer brands we wouldn’t find at many other community sites or areas at major publishers?
Fortner: At CafeMom, we take a very custom approach to integrating brand sponsorships, and strike a delicate balance between serving member and community interests as well as campaign objectives. We specialize in developing programs that add value to the mom’s social networking experience and get her participating in sponsorship programs in ways she appreciates and enjoys. For our influencer programs, we select certain CafeMom members to try a product and share their experiences with the rest of the CafeMom community through blog posts, photo uploads and video. Each influencer opportunity and related assignment is unique, and we recruit specialized mom advocate candidates based on key characteristics. We do not script the moms in any way or censor their authentic experiences with the product. That real mom perspective is so important to the integrity of the program and is one reason our audience trusts and appreciates the reviews these influencer moms provide. We’ve executed successful influencer programs in a wide range of categories from food, packaged goods, home, fashion, technology, online services, entertainment, baby products, even retail stores.

minonline: Widgets were all the rage in 2008. Do they work for brands?
Fortner: We have a wide range of widgets that can be tailored to deliver different types of experiences. Gifting widgets allow our moms to connect through virtual gifts, so they can design and share a holiday cookie presented by Betty Crocker or plant trees in virtual allergy-free gardens sponsored by Benadryl. Gaming widgets allow our moms to have fun and relax right on their profile pages with games ranging from a Web 2.0 take on a classic memory match game sponsored by Yoplait Kids, to a Febreze Smell Squasher game similar to the arcade favorite whack-a-mole game. Scavenger Hunt widgets entertain and challenge moms to hunt across CafeMom on other moms’ profile pages to find items and compete, whether they’re finding parts to build virtual toys for a Wal-Mart holiday scavenger hunt widget, or looking for dirty socks and towels to wash for the Clorox laundry scavenger hunt.
Expressive widgets allow our moms to embrace their creative side—a recent widget sponsored by Sony enabled moms to create snowman-themed portraits of their families and display them on their profile pages and in their post signatures. Badge and quiz widgets allow moms to share a bit about who they are on their profile pages, whether joining virtual hands with other moms in support of breast cancer in a Yoplait sponsored widget, or finding out what kind of holiday shopper they are in a quiz and badge widget presented by JC Penney. These sponsored widget opportunities give brands the chance to be invited onto moms’ profile pages in an organic and meaningful way.

minonline: Your recent research segments women into different types of community participants. How is that knowledge being applied already to sponsorship programs?
Fortner: We have known for some time the most popular site areas and activities for our mom community at large. Our recent segmentation emerging from our Digital Mom study is the first closer look at five categories of mom social network users based on demographic, behavioral and psychographic profile points. Knowing more about the types of users on our site, their expectations and motivations, helps us more effectively develop sponsorship programs that would be most appealing and add the most value to each type of mom’s experience. For instance, our Infoseeker mom is very focused on consuming discreet bites of information based on her specific needs and less inclined to participate in social or “just for fun” type activities. We would focus sponsorship programs to reach this target around our Answers section which provides a robust repository of mom responses to common questions searchable by topic and keyword. This would best provide her what she’s looking for—well-organized, comprehensive mom-provided information and insight. In contrast, our Hyperconnector mom is extremely social with a large friend base, very fluent in social media and keeps up multiple conversations on a wide range of topics. She is the type of mom we would look to involve in our influencer programs as a brand advocate to leverage her skills and interests, and best serve the community and sponsor program.

minonline: What kinds of behaviors is the site capturing from its users and how do your users typically view privacy issues?
Fortner: CafeMom is a highly participatory community, and our members engage in a diverse array of activities including blogging and microblogging, photosharing and photo competitions, customizing their personal profiles pages, playing with widgets and connecting with other moms through our over 60,000 groups. Privacy is a very important issue for our moms. Moms not only decide how much or how little information to share about themselves. The site’s customizable privacy settings allow each mom to control exactly who can access her personal profile page, see her journal posts, view her photos or join groups she has created based on her personal preferences. Our moms also appreciate the anonymity the site can provide for discussing sensitive subjects. When registering for CafeMom, a mom chooses her own screen name and avatar to serve as her CafeMom identity. That name and image can be close to her real-life identity or more abstracted based on her preference. She can also opt to ask and answer certain questions within the site as “Anonymous” to provide her greater comfort to share thoughts or concerns she might not otherwise want to have personally attributed to her. All of these measures are designed to make moms as comfortable as possible connecting with others and sharing their experiences in a safe, well-monitored community environment that respects member privacy.

If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com

More Breaking News & Views

Breaking News & Views Archives

COMMENTS

Very Informative & up to date, thank you for sharing this.

Posted by Postcard Printing on Saturday, March 14, 2009 @ 12:26 AM

Post a Comment

Just Posted