Blogging Moms Turn Macaroni Kid into an Emerging Network to Watch

It's axiomatic in the media business that when it comes to household purchasing decisions, it's usually Mom who wears the pants in the family.

So I figure it's always worth noticing longer term trends like those indicating that women with children at home are embracing social media to a greater extent than the adult U.S. population at large.

According to a Retail Advertising and Marketing Association (RAMA) survey conducted by BIGresearch last September, women with children at home use the major social media sites Twitter, MySpace and Facebook significantly more frequently and more regularly than other adults.

A whopping 60.3 percent of these Moms use Facebook, compared to 50.2 percent of all adults 18 and older, which is an impressive gap. A similar propensity toward MySpace usage showed up in the survey (42.4 percent compared to 34.4 percent); whereas the gap was smaller with Twitter (16.5 percent of Moms compared to 15 percent of all adults.)

Another, perhaps even more notable finding of the RAMA survey was that 15.3 of the Moms maintain their own blog.

It is within this context that the emergence of a rapidly expanding Mom's blogging network over the past year called Macaroni Kid recently caught my attention. Macaroni Kid has moved into 59 markets to date, according to co-founder and CEO Joyce Shulman, and is adding an average of two new communities per week.

"(E)ach community is operated by an individual Publisher Mom who lives (there)," Shulman explained to me via email yesterday. "We describe the role of a Macaroni Publisher Mom (PM) as a 'wobby' -- something right in between work and a hobby. In a nutshell, here's how it works:

"Macaroni Kid's independent PMs have the exclusive right to publish Macaroni Kid in their communities. They control the local content (though we provide content each week that our PMs can choose to use . . . or not), build their subscriber base and sell or barter the advertising on their site (Macaroni Kid places two advertisements network wide, all the other advertising space belongs to the PM). In addition to advertising revenue, the Publisher Moms are building a really close-knit community."

In the process, Shulman and her partners find that they are tapping into a rich resource of hyper-local content-creators who have a lot to say but are feeling a bit disenfranchised from doing so.

"The typical (PM) is a woman who worked before leaving the workforce to focus on raising her children," says Shulman. "But what happens when you take a professional woman out of the professional world? In our experience...(t)hey are often lonely, isolated and almost universally under-appreciated. There are no completed projects, no pats on the back and very few 'job well-dones.' Many of these stay-at-home moms suffer from a loss of identity when they give up their professional lives."

Which brings me back to another relevant characteristic of Moms (whether blogging or not) as revealed in that RAMA study: 93.6 percent seek the advice of others before buying a service or product, and 97.2 percent said they give such advice to others.

From any advertiser or marketer's point-of-view, this is a kind of dream consumer network, which would seem to bode well for startups like Macaroni Kid.