The Mom-Borg Collective Redux II: Resistance is Futile!

Today’s Mom Bloggers are overall amazing: forging an entire profession woven out of the tapestry of powerful words.

Proving ourselves smart and opinionated, we attract passionate readers and attention as influencers from companies and brands focused on reaching the Mom vertical.

Let’s take Liz Gubinner of Mom-101 for instance. She’s a talented, accomplished advertising executive by day, and by night, a dedicated Mom to her two daughters, author of the blog Mom-101, and co-founder of Cool Mom Picks, a very successful site, featuring significant sponsored advertising and her close work with brands.

So how did we arrive at the point yesterday where Liz derides many of her fellow Mom Bloggers as unintelligent, vulnerable to coercion, and naive in general and specifically when posting about high fructose corn syrup?

To understand this current situation, we have to take a giant step back.

The Mom Borg Collective?

How ironic to defend Mom Bloggers in 2009 against external accusations of being a “Mom Borg Collective” by insisting that we do not approach the world with one shared collective brain as the unstoppable villains of Star Trek.

For non-Trekkies among us, the Borg had one collective mind, one collective voice, and assimilated any alien cultures in their path. They would issue forth a warning to the population of any approaching world in the path of their ominous black ship, “Resistance is futile! Prepare to be assimilated!”

Each individual Borg, a “drone,” had no ability to think independently and received commands from the central collective headed by the Queen Borg. They conquered all in their path. The Borg had no desire for negotiation or reason, only to assimilate and move on, and thus posed the greatest known threat in the universe.

Yet, it turns out that in 2010 the danger lies within our own ranks – by those Mom Bloggers unable to tolerate differing opinions of others so instead pressure them to “assimilate” to the “correct opinion.” Instead of respecting differences, they berate and self-righteously declare that the differing opinions must be due to 1) a lack of education or smart thinking or 2) being co-opted into those opinions by products, gift cards, opportunities, money or swag. “If they were thinking clearly and without bias,” so the Borg-thinking goes, “they could surely not disagree with us.”

How Mom Central worked with the Corn Refiners Association

As part of Mom Central Consulting, we work with hundreds of brands and companies, all of which have some “brand negators” who truly dislike, disapprove, and are opposed to their product or service. For instance, there are those passionately against artificial sweeteners or soda, those who consider certain products not green enough, those who want only natural ingredients, and so on.

So how did this play out in a recent campaign by Mom Central Consulting for the Corn Refiners Association? When approached by this association, we found ourselves struck by their (granted biased – as every brand, group or company has bias) perspective that high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) has been vilified by the media, with the pros and cons a subject of ongoing debate and that a much larger issue concerns our own and our kids’ total amount of sugar consumption. We took on an educational campaign not focused on promoting HFCS as “good for you.” Rather, the campaign had two parts: a webinar sharing the perspective of the association and their experts, as well as a “pantry hunt” to discover hidden sugars within all the food we eat as part of a challenge to reduce our family’s overall sugar consumption. A couple years prior to this, we posted a question and answer article on our Mom Central site by a Corn Refiners Association expert who supported HFCS as part of an advertising package on our site and labeled her authored article as advertorial.

Standing up for Mom Bloggers

As a number of Mom bloggers posted their opinions, here’s where the Borg-mentality of those passionately opposed to HFCS reared its snarky, ugly head. Out came insinuations of blogger stupidity, coercion, naivity and lack of research intelligence.

Working with Mom bloggers with diverse opinions and beliefs, here is what we at Mom Central Consulting instead find to be true:

OUR “WE BELIEVE” MANIFESTO

• Mom Bloggers are among the most engaged and involved members of the blogosphere
• Mom Bloggers ask our own questions and are not easily swayed by others
• We care deeply about their families – and our writing and advocacy reflects this
• Mom Bloggers think and act for ourselves, and we have the right to opt-in, and opt-out to anything we want. Everyone has a choice: every time an email lands in a blogger’s inbox, it’s OPT-IN not CO-OPT-IN. Mom Bloggers simply put are not co-opted idiots who are among the so-called “worthless and weak”
• The brands we choose to work with are those we want to know more about or those that encourage Moms to open up a larger dialogue about what affects us and our families
• Influencers, such as bloggers, rise to prominence by being true to their core beliefs and thus holding onto their core audience

Here’s what seems to be the ultimate underlying theory of the Mom-Blogger-bashing elite, “You other Mom Bloggers are so stupid, you’re allowing yourself to be preyed upon.” Talk about throwing your peers under the bus…or make that the Borg ship.

In response to the intense peer criticism, here’s what we’re hearing both privately as well in public posts from participating bloggers in the Corn Refiners Association campaign as they feel pressured to conform and retract:

“Understand that there is a blogger, a person with feelings that is writing these posts. Attack the content and not the person. Dragging my name or any of the other blogger’s names through the mud because we wrote about something you do not agree with is only hurtful. Understand, my opinions cannot be bought. I write what I want to write about regardless of someone paying me or not. I pick and choose and you may not agree with me.”

“I will say that I personally asked five questions to the panel and was more than satisfied with all the answers that I got. The Dietitian in particular was very “real” in her answers.”

“I’m just not sure how to respond to all the negative feedback.”

“I feel personally attacked after Liz’s post and am thinking of taking my Mom Central post down.”

“As a result of the backlash from posting about the Corn Refiners Blog Tour and HFCS I have decided to pull my post.”
Here’s what Therese Pompa of the Corn Refiners Association shared with the participating bloggers who attended their educational webinar on added sugars:

I have stared at my computer screen for a good 5 minutes, and I struggle with what to say, how do I make this better, how do I convey all that has run through my mind and heart in a brief note – so hopefully this will all make sense. 

Each one of you is valued, and if there were ten of me – I would have been on every blog post defending each of your posts – not because I work for the Corn Refiners, but because it is just wrong, and because all of us know that most of you if not all of you came ready with your questions and that you did not do what you are being accused of.  As an afterthought I also questioned whether me commenting on individual posts would make it worse and rile everyone up more, since the most comments seemed to be centralized to a few particular posts.

I assumed we would get backlash, its par for the course, and a passion for what I do has helped me develop thick enough skin to handle the incoming hate mail that I filter through daily.  Passion for sugar? Not quite, but passion for the farmers, passion for the people behind the various organizations, passion to correct the misinformation that is resulting in many of us missing the bigger picture, absolutely.   And although I know that the blogging world can at times be ugly, I never in my wildest dreams thought it would be this bad. 

I am a mom and an occasional blogger, and personally my kids eat foods with sugar and high fructose corn syrup, and I have eaten it my whole life in products, and I don’t feel as if I am a horrible person, nor can I imagine the feeling of being attacked the way that you all were.  I am so sorry for any anxiety that this experience has caused.  While you are certainly free to take down your posts, I personally hope that you won’t, not because I work with the CRA, but because the more people that succumb to this type of abuse, the more likely the same people will keep doing what they are doing, only next time to others.  

At the end of the day, I hope you can walk away knowing this:  We value you and your opinions, and we want to keep this dialogue open. 

As posts get pulled down under pressure, it’s quite a strident contrast to embracing robust, open debate and differences of opinion encouraged under our country’s First Amendment.

In the end the Borg fell prey to their own inability to respect the differences of others. They were repelled by the daring and critical thinking of unique individuals.

I believe we have a responsibility to stand up for one another’s right to have opinions and decisions, and to respect our peers.

The answer within the blogosphere simply cannot be take down your post or prepare to be assimilated.

When it comes to standing up for each other, I strongly advocate the take-charge attitude in Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s words, let’s “Make it so!”

Of note: late last night I regrettably had to close and take down all comments to ths blog post as it came under sustained attack along with profanity and trash-talking by those supporters of Mom 101 and HCFS.

Stacy DeBroff

Stacy DeBroff, founder and CEO of Mom Central.com and social and digital consultancy, Influence Central, is a social media strategist, attorney, and best-selling parenting author. A sought-after expert for national media, she trend-spots regularly with national brands and speaks frequently to national and international audiences on a wide range of subjects, including influencer marketing, social media, entrepreneurship, and consumer trends. A passionate cook, gardener, reader, and tennis player, she adores this new chapter of post-college-age parenting.