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How Heather B. Armstrong's Personal Blog Beca “I exploit my children for millions and millions of dollars on my mommyblog” How Heather B. Armstrong’s Personal Blog Became A Successful Business Georgiana Toma A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences The University of Sydney 2016 Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ 3 Abstract ................................................................................................................................ 4 Chapter 1. "Why do I daydream about Rod Stewart in inappropriate positions?" .......................................................................................... 6 1.1 Rationale for the study ................................................................................... 11 1.2 Methodology ................................................................................................... 18 Chapter 2. Dooce.com - a "piece of self-loathing, self-indulgent, narcissistic crap” ............................................................................... 56 2.1 A definition of key terms: blog, personal blog, mommy blog .................... 57 2.2 Dooce.com – the blog’s early stages ............................................................ 77 Chapter 3. “But they didn't have to hire me. I hired myself.” ............ 104 3.1 Interpellation and second-person narration: from writing technique to product attribute ................................................................................................. 113 3.2 Zany, abject, interesting and cute aesthetics: from writing style to product attribute ............................................................................................................... 123 3.3 Constructing a human brand: the representation of the everyday and the online reality effect ............................................................................................. 139 Chapter 4. “Thank you for catching me, Internet” ............................. 158 4.1 The Dooce brand core value: honesty ........................................................ 159 4.2 Audience engagement and loyalty ............................................................. 193 Chapter 5. “These posts keep me in business and allow me to continue to tell stories” ................................................................................. 209 5.1 Mitigating brand identity, consumer loyalty and blog monetisation ....... 210 5.2 Additional monetisation strategies ............................................................. 222 5.3 Brand awareness strategies ......................................................................... 246 Chapter 6 .“So, what will happen to dooce®?! Will you shut it down? What is your last post going to say?” ............................................... 261 Bibliography .................................................................................... 272 2 Acknowledgements First and foremost I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor Rebecca Johinke. It is because of her steadfast support, her profound insights and generous advice that this project was made possible. I admire Rebecca for her work ethic and subject knowledge and I consider her a role model. I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to work with her and I will strive to emulate her generosity, kindness and adherence to high standards in all my future work. I would also like to thank Patrick Pheasant, Director of the Centre for English Teaching at the University of Sydney, for his unwavering care and encouragement. I am very grateful for Patrick’s unflinching commitment to supporting my research. Patrick is a mentor and an inspirational leader and I feel extremely fortunate to receive his guidance. I would like to dedicate this work to my father, Constantin Toma. His love, care and support made this project possible. I would like to express my gratitude and profound respect for a man whose resilience, adaptability and self-awareness I find inspirational. Thank you, dad, for teaching me what strength and love are! 3 Abstract This study interrogates strategies to convert a personal blog into a brand and a business by analysing the narrative and aesthetic techniques involved in generating audience engagement, trust and affection, and the branding and monetisation approaches involved in developing a blog into a revenue-generating enterprise. The strategies presented in this study have been extrapolated from an in-depth analysis of the extremely successful personal blog: www.dooce.com, the website of Heather B. Armstrong. The research questions this study aims to address are grounded in distinct fields of enquiry, examining the narrative and aesthetic features underpinning the conversion of a personal blog into a brand; the representation of the everyday and its role in the construction of the blogger avatar as a human brand; the interplay between writing motivations and brand core values; and the influence that stereotypes about stay-at-home mothers, pregnancy and motherhood exert on the brand creation process of a female author. The interdisciplinary nature of this study is mirrored in its multi-faceted analytical approach which draws on theories pertaining to diverse fields of enquiry such as narratology, aesthetics, digital media, marketing communications and branding. The study aims to present strategies to construct a personal brand in the context of co-created online forums, with an emphasis on attaining authenticity, followership and audience loyalty through careful framing and strategic use of second person narration, and aesthetic 4 categories such as zany, cute, interesting and abject. The study transposes a narrative approach to branding and online marketing studies with the aim of proposing a model of personal branding whereby blogger identity is simultaneously the product of authorial control and consumer-driven cultural work, with the blogger negotiating her personal brand in relation to personal values, everyday life circumstances, commercial pressures and audience feedback. The key propositions of this study are, firstly, that the use of second person narration as interpellation into active readerhood and of the cute, interesting, zany and abject as aesthetic categories that create novel reading experiences can generate high audience engagement, the abject being also directly related to fostering trust and authenticity. Secondly, bloggers can become human brands by strategically exhibiting and then reinforcing personality traits related to sophistication, competence, sincerity, excitement, ruggedness and non- conformism. Thirdly, consistency in writing style and self-disclosure can foster audience attachment and trust in the integrity and authenticity of the human brand. Fourthly, consumer attachment can be strategically cultivated through audience autonomy, competence and relatedness to the human brand and the development of an online brand community. 5 Chapter 1 "Why do I daydream about Rod Stewart in inappropriate positions?"1 The aim of this study is to interrogate strategies to convert a personal blog into a brand and a business. More specifically, this study analyses narrative and aesthetic techniques to generate audience engagement, trust and affection, as well as branding and monetisation approaches to develop a blog into a revenue-generating enterprise. The strategies presented in this study have been extrapolated from an in-depth analysis of the extremely successful personal blog: www.dooce.com. This interdisciplinary analysis is underpinned by theoretical frameworks pertaining to the diverse fields of enquiry of narratology, aesthetics, digital media, marketing communications and branding.2 www.dooce.com is the personal website of Heather B. Armstrong. Created in 2001, it is one of the very first personal blogs to 1 Excerpt taken from the first entry on dooce.com. Full post reproduced below: Thinking 2001/05/06 I should probably shoplift something before I die. Why do I daydream about Rod Stewart in inappropriate positions? (Armstrong 2001a) 2 A note on the pronouns used in this study. Given that one of the themes covered in the study is that of gender stereotypes and biases, one cannot help but struggle with the generic third-person singular pronouns. For obvious reasons, the masculine “he” or “him” cannot be used to signify both genders. At the same time, using the plural “they” or “their” as singular might cause confusion in certain instances. “he/she”, “s/he” or “he or she”, “him and her” might make the text tiresome to read through tedious re-iterations. The solution adopted therefore is to keep the singular pronoun in its accurate grammatical form and deliberately alternate between the genders, so that both male and female readers feel included as implied readers of the text. 6 have attracted commercial advertisements (hereafter ‘ads’) (Rettberg 2008) and one of the very few personal blogs that are still regularly updated and read fifteen years later 3 . In 2015, the blog boasted 1,600,000 – 2,000,000 page views and 150,000 – 200,000 unique visitors each month (Armstrong 2015a). In 2009, Time Magazine featured dooce.com as one of the 25 Best Blogs of the year, referring to Heather Armstrong as an ‘old hand’ even though ‘blogging has been around less than a decade’ (McNichol 2009). The same year Forbes magazine lists Armstrong as number 8 on its list of 25 Web Celebs
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