Two Days with the Mom Central team

I just spent a few days with the gang at Mom Central in their Boston offices, and I’ve become their biggest fan.    And I enjoy following their community on Facebook, Twitter, and their own site.

I met Stacy DeBroff, the CEO and Head Mom, three years ago at a WOMMA conference.  She impressed me with her charisma, her passion, and her creativity.  We struck up a conversation about the Xbox, and we talked about the possibility of doing some outreach to moms around some of the cool kids games we had at the time.  We never did engage their firm for one reason or another, but Stacy and I looked forward to meeting up at each WOMMA event. 

At the recent WOMMA School of WOM, we had another brief chat.  She mentioned that she was serious about growing their business, leveraging the great work her company is doing with moms.  Since I was on sabbatical (that’s what I like to call the time since I left Xbox late last year), I called her in her Boston office, and she introduced me to the team, and invited me to visit.  My calendar was light, so a few days later, I flew out to Boston to the world headquarters of Mom Central.  

Initial reaction (besides the fact that there was a bit too much purple in the décor) was how professional the office was.  And once introduced to the team, I loved how passionate each person there was about what they did.  Like me, they really love working with real-live customers, in their case moms who have blogs, active community sites, or large followings on Twitter, Facebook, or in Mom forums.

Much of what Mom Central does so well are the same things that I got to do at Xbox, working with Tony, Chris, Nelson, and Sara.  At Xbox, we got to talk about a variety of video games targeted to influential gamers, and Mom Central gets to talk to community influencers about a variety of consumer goods targeted to moms.   With the experience I had building the Gamerscore team at Microsoft, I learned how important relationships are, how vital communication with your customers is, and how building trust between customers, community members, and employees of brands can be invaluable for everyone.

I leave Boston impressed with the caliber of people that Mom Central has, how they’re doing pioneering work in a way that works for the agency, for the community members, and for the brands they work with.