How to Tap Into Mom-Centric Mobile Marketing The millions of mom bloggers can make or break a new product -- so it pays to play by their rules.

"Motherhood is the ultimate test to see if you can survive a startup," says Esther Crawford, a blogger and young mother of two from Milwaukee, who got to put her startup to the test at last year's BlogHer conference in San Diego. She had singled out the show to launch her innovative photo app--Glmps, which captures five seconds of video immediately before snapping a photo--because BlogHer arguably brings together the highest concentration of mom bloggers in the country.

As conventions go, the crowd of about 4,000 wasn't a huge audience, but that didn't bother Crawford. "My partners, both men, had no concept of the power of social media reach among mom bloggers," she says. They quickly found out.

The first four to five days after Crawford introduced her self-funded app, it was downloaded tens of thousands of times (she won't reveal exact figures), as the BlogHer attendees tweeted, updated Facebook pages and blogged about her product to millions of loyal readers. The Glmps server crashed three times from the traffic. "I already had high expectations for our launch," Crawford says, "but the mom bloggers tripled them."