Is the Dad Blogger’s Turn Coming in 2010?

Jessica Smith of JessicaKnows.com posed an interesting question last week:

Will 2010 be the year of the Daddy Blogger?

2009 has clearly been the year of the mommy blogger. Brands have recognized this through their engagement of these influential women.

Mainstream media has brought mom bloggers and their stories of buying power and word-of-mouth success stories into the folds of newspapers and on television screens across the country. We’ve also witnessed the notoriety lead to controversy, drama, and some may argue, scandal…if only just perceived.

However, I’ve been noticing a quiet trend. The stealth mode of the “Daddy Bloggers”.

Jessica’s argument centers on what she calls grit, reach, “Mars and Venus”, fresh voices, and ready to rock and roll. Go read her post for the full and very compelling argument.

My take? Yes, 2010 will see the dad bloggers attract significant attention from brands. Here’s why:

• The model is proven: Mom blogs have been thoroughly embraced by brands ranging from auto manufacturers to consumer products to TV networks. Entire conferences and niche consulting practices have sprung up about connecting marketers to moms, with a significant focus on moms who are active in social media. It’s not a huge leap from moms to dads, especially the not-insignificant number of stay-at-home-dads, and dads who play an increasingly active role in management of the household, many of whom are active on blogs.
• Dads may appeal to a distinct set of brands: Be it stereotyping or accurate market segmentation, many dad blog product reviews* tend to focus, unsurprisingly, on products traditionally associated with dads: gadgets, technical gear, sports, outdoors, etc. It’s not unreasonable to see many brands that haven’t found a suitable niche with mom blogs to latch on to dad blogs as their own way to ride some of the social media wave. (*My own casual observation)
• Marketers flock to the appearance of trust and authenticity: Just as mom blogs gained traction as storytellers of remarkable honesty, emotion, and humor, dad blogs are doing the same. Trust and authenticity, married with relevance, creates loyal and often broad bases of followers. Marketers love this, as a product endorsement given by someone you feel an emotional connection vastly outweighs one given by a generic review site.
• The potential is largely untapped: Some of the examples outlined below notwithstanding, relative to the mom blog community, dad blogs are an untapped market for brands. Some of the better known dad blogs are seeing commercial success and are flooded with product pitches, but you’re not seeing, yet, the proliferation of highly trafficked and pitched review sites written by accomplished dad blogs. As the Sony DigiDad campaign illustrates, there are lots of opportunities for creative engagement.
• The mom blogs are reaching a saturation point: This may be a controversial point, but my spidey sense is telling me that the mom blog community, in the midst of a full-on goldrush, is approaching an attention saturation point. The established, unique bloggers with passionate followers will always be able to command attention from major brands. However the next tier down is seeing a massive amount of review sites go live, creating pressure to grab more readers and potentially diluting some of the original appeal of the mom blog community. Dad bloggers, still heavily loaded with storytelling blogs, may represent an attractive and available adjacent segment for marketers.

This argument isn’t entirely new, but the beginnings of this shift are finally starting to appear: The NY Times and AdAge both covered Sony’s recent effort to engage gadget-oriented dad blogs, driven in large part by Chris Brogan (who has his own Dad group blog at Dad-O-Matic). Commercial success is cropping up for dad bloggers such as the guys at DadLabs and the blogger-turned-book author Danny Evans at DadGoneMad. Even Wired is in the game, with the dad-blog-firehose known as GeekDad (your RSS reader has been warned).

There is also a group of smaller, but growing Dad group blogs and communities, such as Dad-Blogs.com (disclosure: I’ll be starting a guest column there shortly), CC Chapman’s Digital Dads, The Art of Manliness, Geek Dads @ Home, and the previously mentioned Dad-O-Matic, among many others.

Dad blogging may be the Internet’s tiniest niche; or at least it’s least lucrative. - Shawn Burns

That may be about to change.

Disclosures: In addition to the guest column I’m planning to write at Dad-Blogs, I’m also a newish author of my own storytelling blog about being a dad. So yes, I’m making this argument from someone in a position to benefit from my own predictions coming to pass. So caveat emptor. That said, I stand by comments, just run them through your own BS filter. I also make a number of assertions based on observation rather than published data. Again FWIW.

My Gnomedex Post: Create Something

I was lucky enough to attend Gnomedex ’09 late last week, the third time I’ve joined Chris Pirillo and team for one of my favorite annual tech conferences. If you follow tech blogs, or can wade through the spam on the #gnomedex hashtag, you can find thousands of great recaps of the parties (which I couldn’t attend) and the many presentations (which I made it for most of). So many quality recaps, in fact, that I’m not going to do my own traditional-style conference trip report blog post.

Rather, I’ll just leave you with my #1 takeaway from it all: Those who create, win.

Hugh Macleod’s cartoon, shown above, is one of my favorites. If I could afford the limited addition print of it, I would slap it up on my office wall and breathe it in every morning.

“Create or die!” is an extreme way of putting it (most everything Hugh does comes off as extreme, which is part of why he stands out), but it dovetails nicely with so much of what I came away from Gnomedex thinking.

At the event, we heard from people who created a movement, created masterpieces of YouTube buzz (the secret being naked people farting, in case you’re wondering) along with a documentary on hope and opportunity, an online movement towards healthy skepticism, a physical art form version of nerd-dom, a kind of spammy but still very useful and wildly popular Twitter meme, and a fairly tale about digital life (Ignite presentation…sorry, can’t find a useful link). Among many others.

These excellent presenters all built wildly different things, but they still got out there and created something that expressed a bit of themselves and had an impact on others. They didn’t just analyze, discuss, or pontificate. They put something out there for the world to see and make what it would of it.

These are the kinds of people I get energy from, and why I love Gnomedex and eclectic conferences like it as sources of motivation and inspiration. Nice work Chris and team! Now, off to work on my own bubbling pots of creativity to see what comes out of it all.

Side note: I highly recommend buying the album “Maisha Magumu” from the documentary Bongo, filmed by Jay and Leah with GiantAntMedia. It’s for a good cause, yes, but it’s also great music for window-down driving on a sunny afternoon. Enjoy.

Creating a Simple Mac Workflow for Posting Blog Images

Blogs look better with nice in-post images, just admit it. Yes, content is king, but pure text without some eye candy is just plain boring. Continually adding images though, from a blogger’s perspective, can be a real pain, from finding them to editing to ensuring fit and finish. To keep things simple, here is my workflow:

1. Find the Image
If you have an expense account and are looking for solid rights to generally high quality images, go over to www.istockphoto.com and search to your heart’s delight. There are some wonderful images for incredibly reasonably prices. However, thanks to Flickr’s fantastic use of Creative Commons, and the Advanced Search feature (check the CC search option towards the bottom), finding legally usable, high quality, and relevant imagery for your everyday blog posts can be fast and easy.

Just *always* remember to check the type of CC license, and ensure you provide proper attribution to give the photography credit for their work.

For screen caps and shots, the easiest tool I’ve found is Grab, which comes with OSX (search for it in Spotlight). Add this handy utility to your Dock.

2. Understand Your Layout
Figure out how wide your main blog column is, so you know the max image width. An easy and fast way to do this is by using the Firebug extension for Firefox. Right click somewhere over some text in one your blog posts, select Inspect Element, and then look at the bottom right window. Select Layout, and look at the first number (e.g. 520 x 190) in the center box. That *should* be the pixel width of your main blog content column. Your mileage may vary.

3. Use ImageWell Templates for fast editing
I highly recommend ImageWell for fast image editing on a Mac (and no, that’s not an affiliate link). It may cost $20 or so, but it’s well worth it and saves you from trying to string something together with iPhoto or firing up that beastly overkill known as PhotoShop. Open ImageWell, drag your saved image into its window, click “edit” and resize/crop the image to your desired width.

If you use full column width images on every post – which makes things much easier by obviating the need for text wrap, IMO – you only need to do this once by hand in ImageWell. Set up the max width, ad a border if you like, then select “Add Template” and name it. From then on, every time you edit a photo in ImageWell, just select “File > Templates > yourtemplatename” and done. Your image will be resized, border applied, etc.

4. Upload and enjoy!
You can either use the handy “Send To” feature in ImageWell to FTP the image directly to your blog’s content folder, or use something like WordPress’ image gallery upload feature to get the image where you need it.

Once you get the hang of it, the longest part of the process will be fretting over which image to actually use. The download/edit/upload process should take mere seconds, and you’re on your way to blogging bliss. Good luck!

Photo within the screen shot is by vernhart on Flickr via CC License. Screenshot itself taken of ImageWell during a sample editing process.