Hello! I hope that nobody minds that I'm joining the discussion. I'm a new poster on Mumsnet, though I read the forums avidly during my daily commute - I find that each thread page is exactly long enough that by the time I've finished it, I'm at the next Underground stop with enough wifi to flip to the next page. :) As an instagram 'influencer', blogger and (teensy tiny and not very good) vlogger I've been following these threads with a mixture of interest and fear in my heart.
When I first started blogging, it was to document my experience starting a family in a same-sex relationship. I've never been 'huge' in the same way as lovely Charlotte Taylor is huge (and she really is lovely, behind the scenes - a genuinely good egg) but I've been fortunate in that over the years my blog and social media have grown to 'good enough' and these days, with the revenue that I generate from #ads on my various social pages, the blog, the retainer that I'm paid by my agent and some additional work that I do behind the scenes for my agent, I do earn what would probably amount to a full-time income outside of London. Alas for I live in London and am positively teeming with children, so it will never be enough money or sufficiently reliable money for me to give up my 'real job'. In a sense it's wonderfully liberating - I don't have to take every opportunity that comes my way and in fact, say 'no' to most things these days. Sometimes I feel like a bit of a failure because I'm not making the most of the opportunities that I'm offered, because my full-time in-the-office job comes first, I never ever get to go on last-minute #gifted holidays because my boss would have a fit, and I do worry that at the moment, my instagram has lost focus - I should be writing more about the joys and challenges of our unusual family dynamic, and instead my page has been consumed by a brand collaboration that has paid for seven #ads in the space of a month. I don't get as many messages these days from young women - and men! - who have felt uncertain about their sexuality and what it means for their future, which makes me worry that I'm diluting my original message by wittering mindlessly about whatever I want to talk about on any given day, but at the same time it's so NICE to be able to chat about ordinary family life, and I feel so grateful to have surrounded myself online with such a supportive and friendly community. I'm a bit of an odd duck 'in real life', and work very long hours, and I don't have many mum-friends off of the internet. I hope that I do enough, that I represent our beautiful family in a way that when my children inevitably find my pages later, they feel proud of me - or at least that they don't find it cringeworthy and horrible.
I feel that I do some of this very badly - I don't have a background in PR, I didn't go to 'blogging school' and I suspect that I'm not actually all that bright, I've been learning as I go along by copying the bigger fish in the pond but clearly they're not getting everything right either. So I do appreciate your thoughts on what an 'influencer'/brand collaboration should look like, and I am amending my own advertorial practices as a result. I love that I get the opportunity to reach out to so many people, and when the pieces come together and I can treat my family or to take them away for the occasional #gifted holiday, it's a glorious thing and I feel proud that I made that happen. My oldest two are three and a half now, and I don't think that we'll keep going forever - or at least not in the same way, with their faces featured more than mine - but I set strict limits about what I will and won't talk about, and I don't think that they will resent me for sharing their babyhood with people in the way that I have. At least, I hope not.