Blogging Angels

Blog Ambassadors do not have diplomatic immunity

by Angel Amy on May 11, 2011

Ambassador. It’s an important sounding word, and companies want you to think that it’s an honor to be their ambassador. But what exactly does that mean? Do you get special access? Should you be paid? Will your status keep Danny Glover from shooting you at the end of Lethal Weapon 2? (Um, no.)

Getting asked to be an ambassador can be flattering, lucrative, and full of insider experiences that are priceless. Or it can be a big waste of time where the company is basically using you. Go in with your eyes open.

We also talk about how (and when) to ask for money, and what not to do if an ambassadorship goes sour (do as Angel Amy says, not as she does!).

This week’s links

Kids Club Thirteen

Nicole Feliciano’s tweets and blog

Liz Gumbinner’s tweets and blog

Jessica Smith’s post about letting people pick your brain

Kim Moldofsky’s post about working for free

A post on Problogger about why the writer’s mom didn’t make it as a blogger

Via Consumerist, Cloud Girlfriend (which has changed it’s purpose a bit since this podcast was recorded – oh well)

The best Mother’s Day gift ever in the history of the world

Blog World

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Inside blogger trips: what do you share with readers?

by Angel Amy on April 7, 2011

Conferences, junkets, trade shows…what do they all mean? And when you go to one, which parts do you share with your readers? Is it OK to blog about swag? Tweet about the awesome food you’re being served? The special treatment you’re receiving? What do your hosts expect of you? And what happens when twitter gets jealous and accuses you of bragging?

This week the Blogging Angels tackle this confusing area, using the recent Disney Social Media Moms Celebration as a jumping off point.

This week’s links:

Chris Brogan

Rene Syler

Georgia Stitt and Susan Egan

Mom Central’s list of blogging conferences

Chrysler’s twitter debacle

Let’s Panic About Babies, by Eden Kennedy and Alice Bradley

Catch A Fire

Anna Quindlen & Lisa Belkin’s post on The Motherlode, The Best Part of Parenting

Camels and Chocolate

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The Business of Blogging

by Angel Amy on March 28, 2011

Whether you blog to make money, influence people, share your writing, or a combination of all of these, there are some tools you should have in your toolbox to help you make the most of opportunities that come your way. In our latest podcast we talk about the business of blogging: rate cards, press kits, media kits, contracts, headshots, and more.

Should you post your ad rates on your site? What should go into your media kit? Which blog stats should you share with potential advertisers? The Blogging Angels – Nancy, Amy, Rebecca, and Heidi – answer these questions and more. And we bitch a little about Facebook, just because.

This Week’s Links:

It’s A New Day, by Esther Crawford

Google Analytics

How to determine the value of a social media mom, by Holly Pavilka

Reasons to Hate

Microsoft Office Support

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What we’re harping on!

by Angel Amy on March 19, 2011

Mobile etiquette: is that phrase rapidly becoming an oxymoron? Are the little devices we carry with us everywhere turning us into anti-social jerks? Or are they just amplifying the jerkiness that already existed in some users? We discuss this and much much more on our latest podcast!

Here are some links from this week’s podcast:

Three of the four Angels attended a mobile etiquette event hosted by Intel, during which mobile habits were discussed.

Did you know that you can set your child’s iPod so that it can’t go over a certain volume? Directions are here.

Very exciting: Nancy and Rebecca recently launched KidzVuz, a video review site for kids.

Angel Amy was included in a recent New York Times Magazine article by the fabulous Lisa Belkin, regarding her completely anal retentive disclosure policy.

And now for our Golden Halos:

Angel Rebecca gave horns to an article on BNet.com attacking mom bloggers, specifically mentioning “friend of the podcast” Momtrends. Go read Jennifer James’ response, but don’t give the original article any more traffic!

Angel Amy recently “ran” (jogged, walked and crawled) Disney’s Princess 1/2 Marathon, and was pissed off to read a babble article dissing the tiara and costume aspect of it.

Angel Nancy had a big horn for the government wanting to shut down Planned Parenthood. Boo!

So that’s it for this week! What do you think about giving your kids mobile devices to play with in restaurants? And why is it considered so much worse to sit on a bench in the playground with your BlackBerry than with a newspaper or book? Chime in on Facebook.

Please note: the Windows phones mentioned during the podcast were given to the Blogging Angels free of charge by Microsoft.

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Reader questions and giveaway issues

by Angel Amy on March 10, 2011

If you’ve got questions, we’ve got answers. And if you do giveaways on your site, you’ve got to listen to this podcast.

We love answering listener questions, since it gives us a chance to act like know-it-alls. So please, keep those questions coming! You can tweet us, @BloggingAngels, or email us, BloggingAngels@gmail.com.

Nancy Horn, of TheProductMama.com, asked a question about what happens when a pr contact leaves a company.

Our second question comes from – we think – @MoreThanMommy: What do you do when a brand switches agencies?

Then, we moved on to a topic that affects a lot of bloggers, and we’re guessing that most bloggers don’t do enough to protect themselves: giveaways. Nancy and Rebecca attended a seminar run by a law firm dealing with giveaways, and shared their knowledge.

Remember the Hannah Montana contest kerfuffle?

And that RIAA thing that I mentioned? It’s this. And it was ridiculous.

Be careful not to act like you’re representing a company if you have nothing to do with that company. We talked about this last week!

And now for this week’s Golden Halos:

@Marinka sent this Amy‘s way a couple weeks ago: Lost in the Chaos wrote about her fifth anniversary of finding out she had cancer. It’s gut-wrenchingly moving.

Heidi gave hers to Stephanie Smirnoff, of deVries PR, for a post on her site PR Mama discussing advertorial vs. edvertorial.

Rebecca gave hers to Unexperienced Mom‘s Blog Conference Newbie site, which has a ton of valuable info about conferences.

And Nancy gave her Golden Halo to Rebecca’s Twelve Week Blog Shape-Up Plan on Mom Blogger’s Club. Go Rebecca!

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Toy Fair: big business

by Blogging Angels on March 4, 2011

The Blogging Angels hit the Toy Fair at the Javitz Center in New York, and came away with some good info about business in general – because as much as we like to think of toys as happy products having to do with happy kids, it’s actually a 22 billion dollar a year business. Toy fair is a trade show, similar to CES but with more women (who are wearing more clothing), and happy primary colors.

So what did we talk about this week?

For the second year in a row Amy spoke on a panel at the Engage Expo, about how to engage moms online.

Nancy and Rebecca went to hear Moshi Monsters creator and CEO Michael Acton Smith speak about entering the online kids’ world space, and both proclaimed his speech phenomenal.

We all love Melissa & Doug, although most of our kids are sadly out of that stage.

Rebecca really loved Activision’s Skylanders, Spyro’s Adventure.

Amy was careful to preserve the correct memory of Big Pussy Bonpensiero, making this (hopefully) the first and only blog post about Toy Fair to include the word Pussy.

And of course we had to talk about the whole Toyota debacle. Heidi gave an early Golden Halo to Shelly Kramer’s crack investigative reporting regarding Toyota and how they were included – without their knowledge – in a PR disaster. Some other notable mentions were Liz Gumbinner’s take on the whole thing, and Dear Crissy’s post which got the ball rolling in the first place.

This week’s Golden Halos:

Heidi gave her Golden Halo to the Shelly Kramer piece about the Toyota mess.

Amy gave hers to a Gizmodo post about a prototype doll from Mattel. Creepy squared.

Nancy gave her Golden Halo to Blog Hop, which helps you get traction when you write about certain topics, and share the love for others writing about the same topic.

And Rebecca gave hers to a Kissmetrics post (shared by the good folks at Alltop) about the demographic break down of social media.

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Conference takeaways

by Angel Amy on February 22, 2011

With Blissdom behind us, the Blogging Angels are discussing conference take-aways: what do you hope to get out of a conference, and just how does a blogger decide which conferences to go to? Amy got some very solid takeaways from Blissdom and has already started making changes to her blog. But do all conferences provide that kind of concrete, take-action info, and should they? Or is the social aspect just as important?

This week three of the Angels had Golden Halos to give out, and one had Devil Horns:

Amy gave her Golden Halo to Busy Dad Blog’s excellent post about growing up different.

Nancy gave horns (boo!) to auto DMs on twitter.

Rebecca gave her Golden Halo to her favorite dad blog, Blirred Reality.

And Heidi gave her Halo to C. Mom’s post about what it means to have a gifted child.

Here’s what else we talked about this week:

Amy made several changes to her blog because of the SEO workshop at Blissdom (put on by Shelly Kramer, Ang England and Melanie Nelson), but changed one of them back already.

Heidi thought twice about tagging the photo in this post “red dress” since she didn’t want “that” kind of traffic.

Rebecca’s site gets a lot of traffic for a picture tagged “Mona Lisa cat.” Weird.

Nancy gets crazy traffic from pictures of David Hasselhoff and Elmo.

Rebecca has a love/hate relationship with the WordPress Popular Posts plugin.

Rebecca talked about how someone figured out how to get a random story to the top of the New York Times’ most emailed articles list.

Once again, we talk about the usefulness – or not – of the BlogHer conference.

Many people we know are skipping the next BlogHer conference in favor of Mom 2.0 instead.

We discuss how a great list of speakers can convince us to attend a conference, but a speaker we don’t like can be a complete turn-off for the conference as a whole, like with She-Con.

And we were all shocked by the huge range of fees we heard about during previous guest Kim Moldofsky‘s panel about how much bloggers make, based on a survey she did.

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The post where we talk about more than one title can say

by Angel Amy on February 10, 2011

This week The Blogging Angels talk about…well, a lot.

We start off talking Blissdom takeaways: what did we learn in Nashville, anyway? And end up talking about this week’s big AOL/Huffington Post takeover and the mounds of cash that must now be piled on top of Arianna Huffington’s desk. In between, we talk hits versus views, versus uniques (hint: nobody who’s anybody uses hits anymore); building a community profile (you’ll have to listen to understand what Heidi means by that), when guest posting for nothing is really worth something, Rebecca’s just about viral post on education and how it got that way (hint: it starts with a T and ends with an R), and we even manage to get a reference or two to Justin Bieber in there.

I told you we talked about a lot.

Here are links to some of the stuff we covered:

Angel Rebecca’s article – reprinted in the Washington Post (Yay Rebecca!).

UnMarketing guru Scott Stratten – and the fact that he left a comment on Nancy’s post.

Cecily K’s blog, and how her… unsavory… language hasn’t stopped her from being a super-powerful blogger.

Compete, Alexa and Google Analytics, and why they do and don’t matter to advertisers and sponsors.

Diane Ravitch, education guru with a BIG twitter reach.

And there’s no link for this one — just had to put it in – my favorite quote from Angel Amy on shameless networking: “If you don’t leverage your real life friends, what do you have them for?”

We also gave out Golden Halos:

Angel Amy gave hers to Should I Work for Free, a website that offers a funny – but surprisingly useful – flowchart to help you determine… well, you can guess that part.

Angel Rebecca gives her Golden Halo to AVC.com, venture capitalist Fred Wilson‘s intelligent, well written blog about… well, just about anything tech that crosses his mind.

Angel Heidi - who may be the only one of us who really does have wings – gave a Golden Halo to CatchaFire.org, a non-profit that asks you to devote time and skill rather than money to help a variety of causes.

Angel Nancy (that’s me!) gave a Golden Halo to 3moms3photos.com, a website that’s exactly what the title says: three moms takin’ photos. Simple, beautiful.

Lastly: we want to hear from you! Come on over to our Facebook page, and join the conversation. Or start one. Or whatever. You comment, we’ll respond. You ask, we’ll answer (as long as it’s not math. I hate math). Come on! We can’t be the only ones with something to say!

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From Blissdom, with love – and special guest Kim Moldofsky

by Angel Amy on February 2, 2011

The Blogging Angels – or at least three-quarters of us – were in Nashville, TN last week for the Blissdom Conference, an annual gathering of (mostly) women who blog. With incredibly informative sessions, dynamic speakers, and great sponsors, Blissdom is three days of learning, fun, and inspiration.

The road to Blissdom was not easy, however. After an incredibly bump-free trip to Las Vegas for CES, the weather did not cooperate last week, getting Rebecca and Nancy into Nashville two days late. Heidi wasn’t able to make it due to prior commitments, and we missed her so much! We also missed the Yeti Pro omnidirectional microphone we recorded with at CES. At Blissdom, we were huddled around a microphone from my XBox RockBand game.

We were thrilled, however, to have Kim Moldofsky as our very special guest. Kim blogs at Hormone Colored Days (including the hilarious house-hunting video series Property Sluts) and Mom Impact, which specializes in connecting bloggers with brands. She tweets as @KimMoldofsky.

Some of the things we talked about in this episode:

Kim’s prior speaking credits include Blogalicious, Blissdom, and Type A Mom. She also spoke at the Sweets and Snacks Expo in Chicago, and got to hang with Nancy Pelosi at a press conference.

Rebecca wrote a great post about the importance of conferences for women. That post of Rebecca’s definitely influenced Amy’s comment on a post written by DadaRocks.

Mom Impact hosted a Blog World Expo webinar about how to develop a great speaker proposal, and luckily for us it was transcribed!

Kim was sponsored at Blissdom by ConAgra Foods, and Amy was sponsored by Kleenex.

The survey that Kim put on Mom Impact about getting paid is still there – chime in!

Amy was happy to wear an eBay Classifieds t-shirt at BlogHer last summer, and all of the Angels were very enthusiastic about promoting new Windows phones as part of our sponsorship to CES last month.

And if we all agree on one thing, it’s that you should never, ever, tape a sign to your shirt with info about your conference sponsor.

Golden Halos

Amy gave her Golden Halo to the concept of “owning it.” Granted, there’s no website to point to for that concept, so she’s just going to link to Blissdom for really hammering home the point.

Rebecca’s Golden Halo went to Hallmark’s personalized paper plates, with pictures in the middle of the plate uploaded by you.

Nancy’s Golden Halo gets split between Alli Worthington, Barbara Jones, Paula Bruno, and Megan Jordan for creating such an amazing event as Blissdom.

And that’s it for this week! See you next week, when we’re be back in familiar territory – Nancy’s dining room – with our good microphones.

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Blog Ambassadors do not have diplomatic immunity

This week’s links

Inside blogger trips: what do you share with readers?

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The Business of Blogging

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What we’re harping on!

Reader questions and giveaway issues

Toy Fair: big business

Conference takeaways

The post where we talk about more than one title can say

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