Week 3 Homework

Clever Hawaiian Mom Enriches Her Kids' Lives -- and Her Bank Account  -- with Her Brand Ambassador Blog


Kailani is not running a typical business; nor is she raising her family in a typical way. A mom of three young girls, she cleverly personifies what looks like the blogosphere's version of Jon and Kate Plus 8. Using brand-name products, some which she receives for free from companies who approach her, she creates experiences for her children and serves as a brand ambassador for family-friendly products by blogging about them.

In addition to her text product reviews, her real children are videod as they do things like play with a Scrabble Alphabet Scoop game, have "Dove Self-Esteem" weekends, and consume dairy products on a picnic for Safeway's National Dairy Month.

Youtube videos are sometimes embedded in her product reviews which appear on her blog via a "featured content" gadget. Once the relevant featured-content video ends, a screen with multiple other promotional videos she has uploaded to Youtube appears. The dairy spot's Youtube video comes complete with tag lines and a contemporary Hawaiian song encouraging viewers everywhere to "spread a little aloha around the world." The uplifting song itself is enough to draw a viewer back multiple times!

I couldn't resist embedding her National Dairy Month video:



To explore the many things this mom has done with her blog, click here:

Island Life808

The service she appears to be promoting is her creative approach to brand ambassadorship. Her page is loaded with links to Web sites like Amazon.com and,the right hand side of her blog is a gadget that allows her audience to link to a plethora of businesses that sell everything from furniture to child care, from costumes, to gourmet coffee. Some of the links are text links while others are logo links. Further, any blog she writes becomes a laundry list of things to win, things to try, things to buy, and things to do. For your first taste of any of it, all you have to do is click on the link(s) you find interesting.

Her home page has a "subscribe" gadget -- and many people have clicked on it. As of this writing Kailani has 4,540 RSS subscribers. Additionally, she has 4,028 Twitter followers, and 2,211 Facebook friends. It is also possible to subscribe by providing your e-mail address. I believe these are the tools that help her generate some income from her blog as she must have a some amount of regular traffic based on these numbers. Additionally, I think she has return traffic because her page gives families many reasons to come back to it as she provides links to giveaways, posts about island activities, holiday gift-buying guides (2011's is already posted!), and too many other things to list here.

Kailani is one smart and creative woman who appears to have her finger on the pulse of blogging's possibilities. Her blog has proven to be a fascinating and unexpected find. I think I'll become one of her followers!