When blogging met Twitter: meet Ready for Ten

We’re now the proud parents of a site for, well, parents. Ready for Ten is a conversation space for mums and dads of 6-9 year olds. We built it for Fruit Shoot, which is the UK’s top brand for kids of this age group, and as such, wanted to create a resource for parents. Ready for Ten is a website that brings together the best of the web — blog posts, links and tips — for parents of kids in this age group.

All the content on the site is generated by the parents who use it: by the mummy bloggers who write regular blog posts on parenting, by the parents in the Ready for Ten Twitter stream, and by the people who comment on these posts and tweets. We refer to Ready for Ten as being parent-powered because the conversation on the site is steered by these parents, rather than an editorial board somewhere, without a parent in its ranks.

The site has been live for just over a month now but it only came out of private Beta this past week. Take-up has been good thus far, with more and more people following on Twitter, reading and commenting. We’re excited about the site as it’s a real departure for an FMCG brand to use Twitter this way — we think it’s pretty forward-thinking of Britvic, the company behind Fruit Shoot, to connect with their audience like this.

Let’s take a look under the bonnet…

ReadyforTen.com is partially built out of Twitter, but in a highly controlled way. Twitter is fast becoming the most powerful discovery tool on the Web. When you subscribe to a bunch of people’s tweets, you’re subscribing to all of the sites they discover. By following lots of people who are good at discovering great stuff online, you can save yourself a lot of time. In our case, we saw that although most mums of 6-9 year olds in the UK aren’t currently using Twitter, the leading mummy bloggers and social networkers are — and so we could use Twitter to aggregate value from all those pots into one pot: it’s about bringing the best of the Web for mums of 6-9 year olds instead of expecting them to spend hours visiting loads of different sites to collect. It’s the ‘come to me Web’.

This approach was based on an insight gained very early on in the project from a group of mums who tested our initial thinking. What we heard from them is that they don’t have very much time, perhaps even less time than the parents of younger or older kids. They go online, but sometimes they don’t get much further than checking their email (the reason we’re offering an email digest, by the way). For those parents who get past checking email, we wanted to make it as quick and easy as possible to find this stuff.

The information gap for parents of 6-9 year olds

Finding stuff quickly and easily was particularly important in this case because the 6-9 age group represents something of a ‘gap’. There are tons of sites and blogs dedicated to babies, as you’d expect, because that’s the scariest period of time when your information and support needs are the most acute. There are also many dedicated resources on older kids, as well as in categories such as education. But what seemed to be missing was a dedicated site about 6-9 year olds. What I’ve just said does not mean that there isn’t a ton of useful content for this group, just that it’s dispersed within sites like NetMums, ParentDish, iVillage and so on. This poses a particular challenge to the time-poor consumers of this content, and the aggregation idea seemed to work well as a solution to this challenge.

Twitter and the Ready for Ten conversation

It’s important to say that while Twitter is a big part of the site, we knew it was important that the parents who use it shouldn’t even have to know Twitter exists to get the value from this approach. We expect lots more mums to join Twitter in the future but we know that a relatively small percentage of all parents of kids in this age group would have a Twitter account. But some do, and for these parents there’s the option of connecting their account and joining the conversation on a more significant level, as the site then publishes their interactions with Ready for Ten into those parents’ own Twitter feeds as well. This is great for propagating the site but also means that you don’t even have to come to Ready for Ten to benefit from it. It’s a great way of using Twitter to reach the right mums and dads through their own networks. And of course, Twitter works really well on a mobile (we know most mums are never without their phones).

Each of our bloggers is also a tweeter, and we augment their aggregated feed — the Ready for Ten Twitter stream — with tweetage from ‘trusted partners’. Our bloggers are also curating the best links and tweets from the rest of the web, so the Twitter aspect is largely self-moderating (although we obviously built moderation workflow into everything anyway. With this model, we avoid getting Skittled!).

As with every real-time conversation, feedback is crucial. We’ve invited Ready for Ten readers to feed back via comment, Twitter or a feedback link. We are keen to develop the site in line with what its users want and expect, and we’re hoping that the conversational tone we have set in its design and functionality will encourage this to happen. We also really want to know what our community of creative peers thinks about this project. Has anyone done anything like this? What do you think of an FMCG taking this on? How would you develop it further?