Where the Moms Are: Online

It's always been difficult to reach men -- that's why the Super Bowl developed into a big advertising day.

Now it's getting more difficult to reach women, too.

Media fragmentation is impacting how organizations reach and engage with their customers. With the demise or circulation declines of printed newspapers, reaching mass audiences is more difficult than ever.

So where are moms? These days, they're often online. A survey quoted in a Wall St. Journal article, "A Pitch Only a Mother Could Love: Newspaper Sites Seek Local Appeal With Parenting Sites," found that 86% of moms go online at least once a month as compared to 68% of women without children, who went online once a month.

There are a lot of "mommy bloggers," and the Journal article is a good overview of them.

It's still going to be difficult to reach mommy bloggers because there are so many -- and most of the blogs lack the large readership compared to print magazines like Good Housekeeping or Working Mother. But moms and women in general are too big an audience to ignore, even for tech companies.

We've already seen the power of mommy bloggers to derail ad campaigns.

But it's important to keep in mind what AdAge.com columnist Teressa Iezzi wrote in May about an ultimately insulting attempt by Dell to talk directly to women via a microsite called Della: “But now that more marketers do seem to be attempting to appeal directly to women, the execrable results speak to a culture that’s still mired in biased, old-timey thinking...Women aren’t a niche.”