The cloth diaper industry (businesses and consumers alike) needs to work together to effectively counter a bribed blogger initiative designed to promote disposable diapers through mommy bloggers. This is coming directly from the disposable diaper companies. You may have already started to see these posts on some blogs.
As a reference, you can rely on this little tidbit in the Wall Street Journal in an article called “Big Diaper Makers Square Off” published on April 13, 2009.
“Kimberly-Clark plans to ship free samples of its new diapers to about 500
“mommy bloggers,” hoping to build buzz among mothers who write about
child-rearing and their readers. Likewise, P&G is hosting about a dozen
mommy bloggers at its Cincinnati headquarters next week to show how Pampers
diapers are developed.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123957295459311805.html
To counter this campaign and positively elevate cloth diapers in the eyes of your readers, please make a concerted effort to focus your blogs around cloth diapers and related issues in the coming weeks.
Thanks to everyone for your help. Please feel free to reference this post on your own blogs. I’d also recommend using other social media (ie: Twitter) to get the word out quickly…
Have a great Memorial Day weekend! 🙂
About the Author
Jenn is the founder of Cotton Babies & creator of bumGenius, Flip, and Econobum, worldwide leading cloth diaper brands. She has four children (Andrew, Oscar, Elsie and Louis) and holds an MBA from Washington University. When she's not working full time, she enjoys teaching business leaders how to implement sustainable economic & social change.
Comments
22 Comments
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For those of you who are purchasing Crystal,we realize that this is one of the most important purchasing decisions you will make.
Kimberly Clark can send all those samples to me! Our local food bank desperately needs diapers…
hi i just ordered some cloth diapers for my 2 year old and this will be the first time he has worn them i was just curious if anyone would know if starting on disposable then switching to cloth is hard or not i also wondered if anyone has an opinion on babyland all in one diapers, these are the kind i bought. thanks
I had no idea! Thanks for posting this, not sure they’ll target me but if they do I have the perfect post idea 😛
I’ll be posting about cloth diapering this week here is my first cloth diapering post of the week.
http://ourfullnest.blogspot.com/2009/05/cloth-diaper-conversion.html
I’ve posted my story to myspace, facebook, and my blogspot. Thanks for the tip.
I found cloth diapers VERY easy — for about 3 months until they started leaking all the time. I tried stripping them and it didn’t seem to do any work. So I stripped again, really rinsing a LOT. And they are still leaking.
For the most part, we’ve given up. At least with disposables, we don’t have to worry about being absolutely perfect every time we touch them. And the cloth diapers do not feel like they saved us much money at this point.
occasionally we use the ones we have, when leaking and having to change all the clothes, etc. won’t be a big deal. But.. I’m just not that excited anymore about cloth.
Just last week I started a cloth diapering meme on my blog for mamas to participate in weekly- it is called Chic’ Cheeks: http://mamakenzstudio.blogspot.com/2009/05/meme-for-chic-cheeks.html
It’s one way to spread the word! I will definitely try to feature something on there about this sposie conspiracy! Come on cloth mamas- lets rise up!
I already wrote one! http://ourlittlechernikas.blogspot.com/2009/05/not-your-grandmothers-diaper-how-i-came.html
I have featured cloth diapers several times on my site, but I will try and write up something again this week. Thanks for sharing this!
I also agree that perhaps the Cloth Diaper industry should be following suite.
Have a huge Twitter party get people talking. Support different events that are parenting related but outside the cloth circle.
Get “large” bloggers talking about your products. Thumbs up by Katja, Jessica, Colleen, etc does wonders to your traffic and sales.
Get a blog tour going.
I could go on and on!
One thing that I’m doing is I’m working with MomTV.com to host my own live streaming show. Our first show is on Tuesday and we are talking about Green Diapering 101.
My view however is if you can’t make the 100% switch to cloth diapers then at least use items that are more eco-friendly then the standard disposable diaper. I use both cloth and disposables. One thing I have found when telling people that I use both is it eases there minds knowing that it doesn’t have to be a full switch if they can’t do it.
I highly recommend to all those going to blog, Tweet, Facebook, etc about cloth diapers to start with your own story. Why did you decide to use them? What were you scared about? What types of diaper system do you use- AIO, Fitteds, etc
Then do another follow up post explaining the terminology like what is a AIO, Fitted, etc.
How you store them, how you wash them…etc.
Many who do not use cloth diapers are mostly scared about the poop and washing- so pictures, video, etc on how easy it is!
I tend not to dwell on the environment argument, but more on the actual mechanics of cloth diapering and caring for them.
Also, the Wall Street Journal article is interesting–the big disposable diaper companies aren’t worried about cloth manufacturers (yet). It sounds like Pampers is protecting its sales because they’re more expensive.
Let’s have a switch-to-cloth blog carnival.
I’ve found quite a niche on my blog for cloth diaper advocacy. I’ve written at length several times about how and why we cloth diaper and have received massive positive response and outreach from my readers. Funny that this is happening right now. I’m working on my second CD giveaway. Last time we gave away over $250 in CDs and accessories and had over 1,000 entries. I will def. do my best to get some more CD buzz out there.
Thanks for the tip! We’re working on getting the word out here…cloth diapers are awesome!
Want to share your opinions on cloth diapers? Please take my diaper survey:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=cjVCME83a3hKZ1Vzb0t0VENSQVRjLUE6MA..
As a PR professional, I find P&G’s strategies to influence mommy bloggers really smart – not that I agree with using disposables (I have two in cloth). But perhaps the cloth diapering industry needs to take a page from this and see what they can do to increase word of mouth and awareness in general. The best defense is an offense…
We just need to keep educating moms about the ease, comfort and affordability of cloth.
OHH! I just saw one of these posts here:
http://www.mattlogelin.com/archives/2009/05/14/the-last-few-weeks-2/#more-2432
I love his blog, but didn’t even put two and two together when I read this post! Thanks for the heads up!
Dang! Thanks for getting the word out! While I confess to being a disposable diaper ‘sinner’, I am completely and totally opposed to these types of ‘pay for play’ blogging tactics from big companies and I will be on the lookout for such.
I will be getting the word out!
WOW! thanks for sharing. we heart cloth diapers here. and i’m always promoting, and have started classes to teach others. thanks again!
one of those bloggers is someone i read regularly. you can read about her trip at suburbanbliss.com. i saw this on twitter and RT’d it for you – hope there’s more info about CDing in the coming days.