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I'm really pleased to have all of you and to present to you today to Justin Roberts. You will hear from her more in a minute. She launched the most successful and popular website for parents about parenting in the UK back in 2000 and she'll tell you a bit about the journey. It has 4.3 million visitors each month and 300, 500 people who keep their dogs on there. It really fits fantastically with our topic for this week about the question of community and network. And maybe mumsnet can be give you ideas for some research about whether networks are sustainable for social relations and so on. So I wouldn't be surprised after I heard Justin that she was also.
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Is.
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One of the seventh most powerful women in the uk, so it's a huge honor to have her. I was asked to remind you all that the hashtag for this event is polispanznet. Women's Net is the website that Justin is going to tell you all about today. So please welcome with me, Justin. Thank you very much for coming today.
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Thank you. Can you hear me? Is this working or do I pick it up? I pick it up. There we are. Hilarious. 7th most powerful woman and I have four children. I can't get any of them to do anything ever. So it always makes me laugh when I think about that. Anyway, so Mumsnet. Mumsnet was started nearly 14 years ago now. So in Internet years, which I think are a bit like dog years, we are actually practically dead. We're definitely geriatric. We were sort of four years before Facebook, six years before Twitter, and our servers are very, very creaky and old. We spent a long time. Not really. This is a chart of our unique visitors and you can see it was a slow start. We actually launched in the middle of the dot com crash. So all the money I was going to raise to get fancy offices in Clerkenwell and hire loads of never really materialize, which was probably a good thing because as you probably know, the business model for Internet companies was pretty ropey. And all my plans about E commerce and the rest of it didn't really come to fruition. So what happened was we grew out of a back bedroom and the idea for mumsnet came from a family holiday and it was an awful, disastrous family holiday. You'd be interested to know that the CBI told me that at 4.7 million of new business ideas stem from disastrous family holidays. That's a lie, obviously, but there's a grain of truth in there because this was the first holiday I'd Taken with my children, I had nearly one year old twins and they were, it was very precious. We had, you know, mountains of luggage for them and a little hand carrier for us. And it's a terribly difficult thing to embark on a holiday with your children when you can barely sort of brush your teeth and get up in the morning. And I remember it well because we stepped onto the plane and they immediately started vomiting and the poor man sitting next to me was literally passing me cups to catch their vomit and we ran out of nappies and, well, you can imagine then we got there and we were in this wrong time zone. So they kept waking up in the middle of the night and it was far too hot and the child friendly resort was anything but and all the parents were round the pool saying, why, oh, why did we, our precious family holiday, why did we end up here? And that really was as much of a light bulb moment as I had. I thought, oh, well, if only we could have known about this before. And there's this thing called the Internet where we could have swapped this kind of knowledge and advice. And so I came home and uniquely was in a position to actually go through with an idea. Everyone had an idea at that time. You couldn't walk down the street with someone regaling you with their Internet idea. But I was in a unique position because I'd given up work because I had kids, I was on maternity leave, so I thought, well, I'll give it a go. And I roped in a friend who was techie who could build it in his spare time. He worked for a bank, but he built it in the evening and we chucked in a forum which cost $50. The software for a forum, $50. We thought, oh, well, you know, I thought I was going to be Witch for parents do you know, witch the brand where you compare stuff. We were going to compare holidays and all sorts of other things, but we'll have a forum too. And so we had a forum and it soon turned out that little by little, with no money, this thing spread by word of mouth. Mumsnet has never spent a penny on marketing. I don't believe in marketing. Well, I did, actually. I bought a 100 pound ad in timeout Kids once and we didn't get one response from it that I could see. So that was the last penny I ever spent on marketing. But it was word of mouth really that spread the word. Anyway, we grew. And when Americans see this chart, do we have any Americans in the audience? So Silicon Valley Americans look at this chart and they Always say to me, oh my God, you're going exponential. Which I really hope I am going exponential. Once I looked up and found out what that meant, I was very pleased about that. So just here are our vital statistics. So MomStat is basically a forum based website. It's a community where mothers swap advice about anything and everything. It starts off about the kids, but it rarely stays that way. We have over 50 million page views a month. We actually have now 5 million uniques a month, 30,000 posts a day to our active forums and it's quite sticky. People hang around when they come. In fact, many people ask us to ban them because they're so addicted it's ruining their lives, which isn't what we're there for. We're there to make parents lives easier. And we just did. This is the parenting marketplace in the UK and we're happily the biggest. And our audience are spread really mostly throughout the UK. We have about 10% overseas. They're mostly expats, I think, missing discussion about Eastenders and things like that. And they are mostly working in part time or full time employment. And as I say, they are in their prime, 25 to 45. So you guys haven't even reached your prime, some of you. I sadly am on the way out of my prime. I did actually say in their prime to a Sainsbury's board member the other day who looked at me and said, I'm 46. We didn't get that business. And this is. We ask our users why they use mumsnet and broadly speaking, it's for advice and information, which is what you'd expect. Some people come along and have a good debate. One of the options we didn't give here was for a laugh, really. And actually when, when our users came back at us about the survey, they said, you should have put something in here about humor and comedy and we'll catch a bit more of that later. But that, believe it or not, mothers are quite funny. This is hard to believe. No one believes this in the media in this country. Another reason why it's valued, I think, for women is that it is dominated by women. I don't know if you saw, but there was something called the Twitter Hundred published the other day, which is the hundred most influential people on Twitter and 83 of them were men, 17 were women. And there's this whole discussion about whether women really can, you know, whether they happily engage online and whether they have influence and whether they are afraid of speaking online. Well, not on mumsnet, on Mumsnet they're very happily engaging and happily putting their opinion across. And I think there is something valuable about a female space. My own view that Twitter is slightly show offy space, but Mumsnet is anonymous. So it's not so much showing off and shouting, it's more really getting to the nitty gritty about things. So you've got essentially a large smart. They are Quite smart mums, debtors. 75% have a degree or equivalent. And the result is that large audience can be quite influential. And if mom's nesters really like something, a product or a politician or a TV program, then word about that can spread quite fast. This is a fun example. This is something called baby bottom butter. I hope none of you have had to encounter it yet. It's quite sticky. But if you are in need and you're feeling you've lost your moisturizer and your face is quite dry, chances are if you're a mother, you probably might slap some of this on your face, which is what a mumsnetta did and she reported mirac. So this £2 49 tub of bottom butter was being touted as the miracle solution for all your wrinkles and skin worries. And Waitrose sold out up and down the country. Tubs were going on eBay for £15. The Daily Mail loved it. I think they wrote about it three times about the miracle bottom buster and it was very powerful. And finally Waitrose, after about a year even managed to send me a tub. And I tried it. I thought it was awful stuff, but there you go. But equally, if moms nurses don't like something, they will also spread the word. So this is an interesting ad campaign. It was actually put on by the Outdoor Advertising association and they decided to make a provocative campaign that would get people talking. And it certainly did get people talking, I think. Imagine dropping your screaming 2 year old at nursery to head off to work and you're confronted with this sign, career women make bad mothers. No one ever talks about career men. Have you noticed that? And it caused a lot of outrage on Mumsnet and the Mumsnet users collectively organized. They found out who the ad agency who made that ad was. They wrote to every single one of their clients and complained. They contacted the ASA, which is the Advertising Standards Authority here. And within 48 hours those ads had been replaced with alternative ones that said sexist ads are bad for business. So we'll count that as a small victory. So not surprisingly, an influential big online community, before you know it, the politicians are quite interested in you and we had a visit. We had. David Cameron was the first to come, actually, just after he'd been elected leader of the Conservative Party. He'd been on paternity leave and he called us up and said, can I come and do a web chat with your users? And he sort of set the trail, opened the door. He was a trailblazer. And subsequently, all the leaders have come many times. So much so, actually, that the last election, general election in this country was dubbed the momsnet election by a very influential political writer in the Times, and then all the other media subsequently, we had 12 senior ministers, including all three leaders. Gordon Brown, twice come on in the three months before the election to do web chats on Mumsnet. They were very keen to harness the Mumsnet vote. Of course, there is no such thing as the mumsnet vote, because mumsnet is a collection of four and a half million individuals and they certainly wouldn't vote the same way. But anyway, the politicians seemed to think it was important. And that sort of virtuous circle of perceived influence becoming real influence becoming perceived influence kind of has gone round and round ever since. So rarely do you hear the mumsdec quota without the words influential next to it. And we thought because of that, it was probably remiss of us not to get involved in a few issues that our users cared about. And so mumsnet sort of campaigns began. It wasn't the initial aim of our site. We didn't set up the site thinking, we're going to go and make the world a better place. Well, I suppose we did. We thought we were going to make it easier for parents, but we didn't think we'd get involved in causes. But what happens is our users really bring to the fore causes that are important to them. And if there are a majority of people who agree with that and they want us to campaign on it, then we do. We go out there and campaign on those issues. And the fact is, we have access to the senior politicians in this country. The other day, a senior advisor to a very senior politician run me up and said, give me some policies, Justine, what do you want to see? So it's that level of. I think this female vote thing in this country is very crucial. It's very viewed as a floating vote. It's a bit like Clinton's soccer mums. I think if you can win the soccer mums, you can win the election. So we have a certain amount of influence amongst those senior politicians and we feel we ought to use it so we've campaigned on issues like premature sexualisation of girls, miscarriage care and rights around respite care for people who have disabled children. So I just want to talk a little bit about what I think the rules of engagement are with online communities and more broadly in social media. And it's relevant for brands, it's relevant for politicians, it's even relevant for individuals. I think, I think maybe this is more about women and mothers, but there is a tendency for people to patronize mothers. I've even noticed. We sent someone actually to the G12 summit. They asked for us to send a blogger. So we sent a blogger along and she came back and said. I said, how did it go? She said, oh, well, everyone was really nice. Yeah, they were really nice. All the global media, the people from the BBC, Sky. But I did notice they all started talking very slowly when they talked to me and there is this kind of, you know, you're a bit stupid because you're a mother. Have you noticed that? It's so true, I promise you. Everyone just suddenly thinks you lose all your brain cells and you become incredibly insular and you're only interested in issues around your children. And this particular ad was an ad that a company ran on Mumsnet and this was. It's that whole thing advertisers do, they're obsessed by me time. All mothers care about is number one, nappies and their children, number two, me time. They want to get some me time. And this ad was essentially saying to us, we thought it's selfish to have a bath, you know, because you have to be this sort of self sacrificing woman who gives everything to your children and that's all you care about. So to take time off to have a bath is selfish. So that didn't go well. We thought that was a bit patronizing on MumsDead. And you probably don't know who this is. This is Kerry Katona, who's a celebrity in this country. I'm not quite sure why she's a celebrity. She's one of those celebrities who really just a celebrity and that's why she's famous. And you know, just using celebrities feels so last century. It just, you know, these are women who are consulting each other for peer to peer advice. They've kind of given up on being told what to do by people, least of all by celebrities who are famous for being famous. So I think the age of celebrity may be over. Well, actually the age of the wrong type of celebrity of over. This is just an example of an ad campaign that went really, really badly wrong. This used to happen a lot in the old days on the Internet. So brands wanted to sort of get involved in discussions on the Internet and they'd hire these people called brand ambassadors and they'd send them out into the Internet world. These worlds they couldn't really understand and were a bit scared of where people were talking to, to each other online. And these people would pretend to be regular users and they would pop up on conversations everywhere. In this case it was about a product called Halaborange Multivitamins and they'd pop up on threads where people were saying, you know, I've got a really bad cold or my kids have got xyz. And they'd say, have you tried Haliborange Multivitamins? They're really good for you. So what happened was the mums that users got really pissed off and they started a thread called May Kill Otters about this product. And the first the brand new about this was when they googled themselves, as they do, as we all do. And it was the number one result on Google was haliborange May Kill Otters. And you can't fake things. I mean people are spotted straight away if they're fakes on communities which are close knit and where people know each other and they have rules about speaking and they have special language and you will be spotted if you try and fake it. So that's another piece of advice, I think, don't fake it. But it is very important to engage. This is just an example of a. It was a social media company that measured how popular a brand was on Mumsnet and they measured how popular that brand was before and after. They simply asked a question, they simply posted a message saying, we're going to work with you, we really want to hear what you've got to say. Mumsnet users. And that was all they wrote. And their popularity went as measured by these people who do these things from 68% popularity to 95% popularity, just because they said, we want to hear what you've got to say. So it's just a measure of really that listening and engaging is the key thing. Now, dear old Gordon Brown, you may remember, was our Prime Minister. He wasn't very good at the listening bit of this. He came on to do a web chat and he, as is his wont really, he's a very serious man, a very clever man and he also thought that mothers really wanted to know about the child tax credits. That's what it is. And he didn't really care about what questions he was being asked. He was determined to talk about child tax credits and all the other things he thought everyone ought to be interested in or should be because they're mothers. And as a result of that, the Mum's Day audience got a bit pissed off. Again, you notice a theme here, don't you? And they asked him 12 times, 12 separate occasions, what's your favorite biscuit? What's your favorite biscuit? What's your. And got no answer. And this became known as Biscuit Gate. And David Cameron asked a question at Prime Minister's Questions time. He said, could the Prime Minister please let us know what his favorite biscuit is? And it took 24 hours. All the papers ran it. It took about 24 hours before Gordon Brown released the news of his favorite biscuit, which was indeed a chocolate chip cookie, in case you were wondering. And I think this was. Most people thought this was used by particularly the Tory press against Gordon Brown as an example of someone who was dithering or Machiavellian and needed to go and find out the polling on biscuits before he would tell us what his favorite biscuit was. But in fact, what it was was someone who simply wasn't engaging. And in this online world of ours, you have to listen and talk and have a conversation. You can't just broadcast. And so he got a bit of a. He got. He got a bad press, but not for the thing he was bad at as it happened. And I think it's also important that you know, you must be. You must face up to your mistakes in this new world. You can't hide behind your, you know, your PR and your messaging. You have to actually come on and face up to your material states. So this is just a quick example of something that went really right. It was the horse meat scandal in this country. I'm sure you know about that. And Sainsbury's coming on and addressing questions directly with Mumsdent users that worked. You'd think they would have got shouted at, but no, they got a lot of Brownie points for facing up to the criticism. And then the final advice I think I have for people is try not to sue. I think suing generally is a really bad idea in this new world of ours, where I think all these battles will be played out in the media. This lady is a lady called Gina Ford. She sells more books about parenting than any other person in the uk. She is the guru. She writes a book about, it's called Contented Little Baby as her big book. And I have to be a bit careful what I say about this because clearly I've been sued. But let me just say that her advice, some people love it. She's quite a polarizing figure. Some people have. They call them Gina Ford babies and they follow her book to the letter. It's very regimental and, you know, you must eat your toast at five minutes past eight, change your baby's nappy at ten minutes past eight, and so on. I loved it. I'm a real routine freak. I adored it. But plenty of people think it's not quite right. And they said so on mumsnet. And she sued us and she tried to get us shut down. She sued our ISP as well. And, well, it didn't really end that well for her. I mean, it wasn't that pleasant for us. But generally, I think it was viewed as a kind of mistake because if you're suing your target audience, it's never a great idea. So you have to face up to that criticism. You know, she'd been a mums dancer. She should have come on and faced up and said, you know, stop calling me. In one case, people were calling her. She sued us because people called her a fart faced roly Fluff poo. Go figure. Okay, and then I just want to tell you about something that you may have come across. I don't know. This is just an illustration of. I'm sure you guys all know about this, but things going viral, which took us by surprise last week. And it's an example of how innocent conversations on the web can spread. So a question was asked on mumsnet. It was a slightly odd question, but it was really about sort of your personal hygiene, your personal routine. Post coital sex routine, I would call it. And someone said, you know, does any of your partner, do they ever have a little. Do they have a little beaker beside the bed where they wash themselves off after sex? And that was the question, do you dunk? And lo and behold, something was born called Pena Speaker. This was the post, actually. This was her post. I love the fact that she considered changing her anonymous name for this because she's not really caught. Sara Crew. I'll just let you digest that particular message. So what happened was there were about 500 replies to that. No one said yes. Everyone said no in a different way. And it was very funny. And it kind of caught a light. We posted about it on Facebook, as you would. She'd said that the beaker was green. This is why we keep having these green beakers. Lots of people saw it on Facebook, but more importantly, buzzfeed posted about it. And then some important Twitter people with clout. Women with clout. Some women have clout on Twitter. And a man posted about it. Catelyn Moran, Grace Dent, Dara o'. Brien. And then all the newspapers wrote about it one way or another. The best one was the Guardian, actually, which did an analysis from a feminist perspective about penis speaking. But they all wrote about it several times. The Telegraph wrote about it at least three times. And they're writing about it next weekend. They can't stop writing about it. And finally, it broke us. I did actually put. Yeah, something called Penis Breaker the site. I mean, we doubled our traffic for about a week every day. And our poor old servers that I spoke about, we are quite geriatric, could barely hold up under the strain. And, you know, the fallout still goes on. I notice people doing all the time, you know, the 10 best sex threads on Mum's Net. The Mail on Sunday ran a piece about Mum's debt. Seedy underbell. As if you'd think mothers don't have sex or ever talk about it. There we go. But basically. So to sum up, Mumsdead is basically marvellous, as the Telegraph would tell us, and it's for sharing everything from your feelings about babies, politics, TV and, of course, penis speakers, thank you very much.