Bloggasm

Trisha Haas told me this morning that she receives between 50 to 60 pitches a day from P.R. reps, and an additional 15 to 20 follow-ups from people she hadn’t responded to within 24 hours of their initial emails. For the past year Haas has been writing for Momdot, a mom blog that also serves as a community forum for moms and mom bloggers.

“I think part of it comes from the excellent advertising that mom bloggers have done for themselves,” she said. “We have convinced the industry that we are the leading medium online, that journalism is dying, and newspapers are closing, and mom bloggers have come out and said, ‘hey, we’ll talk to you.’”

However, it seems that some within that part of the blogosphere are experiencing P.R. fatigue. In a blog post a few days ago, Haas proposed a “P.R. blackout” for mom bloggers, suggesting that they pick a week in August and refuse to respond or interact with any P.R. reps during that period.

“Originally, sometime last week on the forum, we realized there were a lot of bloggers that have been recently very stressed out,” she said. “They said they’ve become too focused on how many hits they have, how many links they have coming in, and it’s gotten really overwhelmingly busy. And that discussion went to three to four pages, and we realized that people were getting really stressed out with their obligations to P.R. reps. They always had one more review, one more thing to do. So with that we blogged about how it’s a little overwhelming, and we asked, ‘have you ever considered quitting blogging because of it?’”

The lure of free products that arose recently has created a new generation of mommy bloggers over the past year. Many of these blogs, no matter how small in readership, are inundated with requests for reviews. The mom blogosphere has been under particular scrutiny since the FTC announced that it would begin cracking down on bloggers who receive free products and payment and don’t disclose this to their readers. I asked Haas if she thought the space had become too commercialized.

“I do,” she said. “I actually think in talking to other bloggers, you’ll find out that the bloggers that have been doing this for years, they’ll say, ‘listen, it’s you guys that are doing this. We’re stilll writing about our family, it’s all this new generation that came in. And they’re product bloggers, and they’re commercial bloggers.’ I made a statement along the lines of, ‘let’s go forward, let’s go beyond where we are.’ And somebody emailed me and said, ‘Trisha , it’s not going forward it’s going back to where it was.’ So I’ve been schooled by the older bloggers.”

The P.R. blackout is scheduled to take place between August 10th through the 16th. She said she placed the date so far in advance so that those who want to participate can wrap up any obligations ahead of time.

So what does the blackout entail? She said that not only should you not review any products during that week, but also refrain from responding to P.R. emails at all. She stressed, however, that the entire blackout has been construed as her hating P.R., which she doesn’t. She’s just worried that the mom blogosphere is losing its authenticity.

“In the blogosphere there’s a lot of keeping up with the Joneses,” she explained. “If someone gets a free giveaway of a swingset, there are 900 other bloggers that are trying to figure out how that blogger got that. And I think that’s what’s supposed to stop. It doesn’t matter how someone got it, you need to be true to who you are. If you’re a review blogger, that’s fabulous, but if you’re not don’t try to be one.”

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