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I may be the slowest blogger to write about Camp Baby out there (in fact talking with and reading the posts of my colleague bloggers I am sure of this!), but there was so much to think about and reflect upon, and suddenly writing a thoughtful blog took quite a bit of time.
Invite 55 prominent Mom bloggers to gather (all expenses paid) at a corporate-sponsored event, as Johnson & Johnson did recently at Camp Baby held in Hackensack, New Jersey, and watch the online fireworks begin before anyone has even arrived.
Perhaps blogstorm is the most appropriate description.
And it caught the well-meaning J & J folks completely off balance: publicists and senior brand managers did not quite realize how much we Mom bloggers comprised such a collection of wondrously articulate yet completely unmanageable individuals. A few less-than-happy bloggers condemned the gathering before it even began as “Camp Babygate” for everything from not providing care for their infants or toddlers, not enabling them to come for only part of the 2-day camp, or having the audacity of not having selected them for to attend the event at all. Some leapt onto the bandwagon of protest, while others enthusiastically looked forward to convening. A flurry of blog postings, comments, counters, twitter postings, and phone calls followed. Forget the Oprah watching, we had all tuned in to “Days of our Blogger Lives” and the plot twists kept everyone waiting for the latest episode.
That is, until we arrived via cars, trains, buses, taxis, and planes. Many of us meeting each other in person for the very first time and cementing virtual friendships we had nurtured for months or years. Many others of us greeting old friends who they had met at last year’s BlogHer conference. We came from wildly diverse walks of life and personalities, from basement computers in Illinois to laptops on decks in California, from stay-at-home to working Moms, from natural comedians to serious academics, but we shared 5 profound things in common:
1) We love to write
2) We find it incredibly rewarding to share our experiences online with other Moms
3) We feel passionate about our children, from babies to teens: though at differing times we adore them or are ready for a really long nap to recover from the arduous task of raising them
4) Social media has become our grown-up playground: as we constantly update information, learn the latest, make connections, as well as upload information to and from our computers to cell phones to digital cameras and video-cameras.
5) We are curious as to what the corporations are up to, how we fit into this, and how we feel about it: from information gathering to product sampling.
So as we bloggers quickly checked in and them poured into the refreshments room to meet and greet each other, and quickly the twelve chairs set up in advance had to be augmented with stacks of others. And the vibrant conversations started in this small space bubbled and built during our two days together. I could not believe how amazing and fabulously eclectic all these women are, and how much I wanted to spend time getting to know each of them individually. New friendships cropped up everywhere.
Moreover, as we met with and heard from the various Johnson & Johnson team members, they garnered both our attention and my personal admiration (along with most others). They were there to get to know us, to be transparent when it comes to what goes into their products, from laboratory development to ingredients to philosophy and history behind their launch. From gracious and fun Lori, our official Camp Convener from Johnson and Johnson’s team to impressive Bridgette Heller, the Global President of Baby Care at J & J to internet guru-in-the-know Tina Sharkey the CEO of BabyCenter (which is owned by J & J: this was news to me, and I thought I was in the know), we met about a dozen remarkable women who were ultimately curious about what was on our minds, how we gathered information for our blogs, what we thought about the job they were doing both with their individual brands and their company and websites, to giving us directly the most accurate information they had available, and bouncing their best thinking off of us as part of their ideation process.
And candor they got in spades, as it turns out that as a group we are anything but shy. Heck, we all became bloggers because we have divergent opinions and passionate perspectives. We like lots of details, want to be considered more intelligent than most brand messaging strikes us as aimed for, and hold fiercely to the freedom to express our own take on things.
The next moring featured the beginning of the program along with an eye-opening, fascinating cultural immersion into the wild and wooly world of Mom bloggers. We emerged from blogging outdoors with laptops on decks in California, computers in basements in Indiana, home offices in Florida, to myself leaving my Mom Central office in Boston. The one thing we all have in common? Living on our computers: and here at Camp Baby, laptops reign supreme. Also, some bloggers type furiously on the cellphones “twittering” so that in any moment in time they stay connected to anywhere from a dozen to 500 online friends. They take a picture here, and up it goes to blogs, to Facebook, to their blog friends not here.
We heard from a variety of speakers, the highlights of which included:
~ Bridgette Heller, Global President, Baby Care, Johnson & Johnson, captured this best as she thought of bringing us together as part of a more than a century old tradition and mantra at J & J from the label of their first baby product: trust and respect. And that is indeed the audience she was speaking with: a new breed of professional writers whose blogs capture the attention of millions of Moms across the nation and world, and with whom she and her team wanted to, “make sure that the information that you have around Moms, sleep problems, the science of taking care of babies is an accurate as possible, and to get to know what concerns are on your mind and what questions we can answer.” What is not captured here is just how impressive a woman Bridgette is: a total dynamo brimming with a mixture of compassion and business acumen rare to find in a senior corporate manager.
~ Dr. Jodi Mindell, a colleague I know and deeply respect from our both writing parenting books. Jodi is a hard-core academic and author of Sleep Deprived No More, who has been working with J & J researching sleep patterns around the globe. Jodi’s key messages were that when a child is not sleeping, the whole family is affected as lack of sleep has profound cognitive effects on us parents (memory, attention, problem-solving, decision-making, mood disorders); that kids who learn to fall asleep independently sleep better and get more sleep; and that following an evening routine of bath, massage and quiet activities with a child put down to go asleep on their own within 30 minutes of the bath ending works wonders in both sleeping disorder clinics as well as our regular lives.
~ Dr. Charles Gerba (aka Dr. Germ, and he seriously goes by this mantra) J & J’s environmental microbiologist who got an hour hall-pass from the laboratory where he loves to hang out when he’s not on the Today Show or Good Morning America, gave a talk on The Dirt on Germs: What Every Mom Should Know. I will share the cliff notes: credit cards pens, ATM machine and elevator buttons, grocery cart handles, not to mention your kitchen sponge contain much to be avoided. Everyone was passing around the Purell at this point, as we had all arrived via an elevator.
~ Dr. Ellen Kurtz who heads of clinical research for Johnson’s Baby on the science of baby skin care, and went into detail on exactly what is in all of their products for those many Mom-label readers among us, and why Moms should trust their products to be gentle and mild for babies.
~ Dr. Scott Jens an energetic and talented optometrist who heads up a national non-profit, InfantSee, which J & J helps fund and that has a network of over 9,000 optometrists offering completely free baby eye exams all over the U.S. and saving numerous lives in the process, along with the undiagnosed cause of significant learning issues. A separate blog to follow on this: I was completely impressed and want to help spread the word to every Mom out there. Check out their impressive volunteer work at www.InfantSEE.org.
~ Tina Sharkey, a total charismatic dynamo, who now serves as CEO of BabyCenter, following having been a founder of ivillage to spearheading huge online efforts for SesameStreet.com, AOL.com and AIM. I found her history of Moms’ appearance in droves on the internet and how Web 2.0 proved both really empowering but also caused online Mom communities to get blown to be both sanguine and fascinating. Plus she shared some cool micro-trend spotting that struck me as spot-on.
Two evening events had bloggers buzzing and twittering (as in www.twitter.com and you can follow me: “momcentral”): the first night, a wine tasting led by Ted Allen. This guy is even more down to earth, charismatic and winningly smart in person than he is on all the Food Network shows he hosts and serves as a judge on. I think he wowed every woman in that room with his wit and sanguine take on his rise to TV stardom, starting with Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.
The second night, we had dinner out which started by an event hosted by Nintendo, and featured the latest Wii products, including a soon-to-be launched Wii fit, which had me mesmerized. It involves a platform you stand on that can sense ever last movement you make, and leads you through everything from downhill ski racing to increasingly advanced yoga classes. This has got to be the ultimate in Mom’s workout at home, and suddenly I found myself wondering why the heck we had a Playstation for our kids! I have got to try this new product out!
With a Camp Baby event wrap-up that included a product giveaway bonanza from J & J’s latest baby care products to Neutrogena to K-Y gel to Splenda (is there anything this company does not make?), we bloggers happily piled into the free car service provided by GM showcasing their latest cars, and marveling at corporate America coming a’courting.
What has stayed with me the longest has first been the depth of passion of Mom bloggers as a group: our candor, intelligence, desire for full disclosure and transparency, and tempered (and sometimes wildly spontaneous) cynicism. Secondly, was the ultimate triumph of this terrific event hosted by J & J: who like courageous corporate Viking explorers navigated the treacherous social media waters to discover a wondrous new Mom bloggers’ world.