The life of an influencer seems wildly glamorous: You take photos of yourself doing fun things, you get free stuff from companies and you make boatloads of money. Easy, right?
Jo Piazza — a journalist, author of the bestselling book "The Sicilian Inheritance" and Philadelphia mom of three — decided to find out.
As part of her podcast, "Under the Influence," Piazza tried to become a "momfluencer," a social media content creator who tailors their online presence for a mom-centric audience.
It gave me a lot of anxiety, because I wasn't able to just actually enjoy my real life."
jo Piazza on her time as a momfluencer
At the end of her 2021 experiment, Piazza concluded that the world of momfluencing is here to stay. That has certainly proved to be the case, as illustrated by Hulu's hugely popular "The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives." The show demonstrates that an influencing career can make moms the breadwinners in their families, and thus give them more power and control.
On her podcast, Piazza said, "This is not a parenting story. It's a business story," and she doubles down on that idea in a recent conversation with TODAY.com.
"It's a business story. A hundred percent. It is something that impacts mothers, but also, mothers are the ones who drive the majority of buying decisions in almost every family household in America."
How did Piazza discover momfluencing?
After she gave birth to her second child in 2020, Piazza says she couldn't help but notice that "mom influencers were thrown in my face constantly by by social media." Many of them exuded an aura of perfection with long, blown-out hair, stunningly serene homes and deliciously smiley children who would never even dream of throwing tantrums.
Both fascinated and annoyed by the phenomenon, Piazza originally thought her “Under the Influence” podcast would be “a takedown” of the momfluencer industry. She was curious to try her hand at influencing — a profession that, like writing, appeared "easy" from the outside.
“I hear this about my own job all the time,” she says of her writing career. “People are like, ‘I can totally do that.’ And then I’m like, ‘No, you f------ couldn’t.’”
After several weeks of posting photos of her "authentic" life, applying for the shopping platform RewardStyle (now LTK) that pays influencers commission for promoting products, and begging her family to cooperate, Piazza threw in the towel and ended her run as a momfluencer-in-training.
"I realized I don't have the skills to be a creative director of my own brand," she says of the experience. "It's hard. It is work. It is a full time job, and the women who are very good at it are being compensated very, very, very well for that full time job."
How much money did she make as a momfluencer?
There's no need for Piazza to refer to a spreadsheet to track her momfluencer earnings because she knows exactly how much she made: zero dollars.
"I am the worst influencer ever," she admits. "I tried using affiliate links and all of the things that back then were the influencer tools of the trade."
In fact, she was actually in the hole for what she spent in her attempt.
Knowing that influencers hire photographers, Piazza "shelled out a lot of money" to hire a photographer to take pictures of her family that she could post on social media. She had wanted to get seven "days" of content from the session, changing clothes seven times during the shoot, but unsurprisingly, her kids weren't enthusiastic about the idea.
In the end, she only got two days worth of content from the photography session, which cost $1,000, and when she tried to use an affiliate link to "sell" her family's adorable matching jammies, she found out that the PJ set was no longer "shoppable," meaning that she couldn't make money using an affiliate link.
Why did Piazza ditch her momfluencing career?
"It didn't work for me for a lot of reasons," she says. Piazza says she prefers writing a story rather than being the story, plus her family didn't enjoy the spotlight.
"I found it exhausting," she adds. "Constantly streaming my life and putting out content about everything was exhausting, and it also gave me a lot of anxiety, because I wasn't able to just actually enjoy my real life."
What does she think about Mormon #MomTok influencers?
Influencers are successful for a reason, Piazza says. "They have an 'it factor.' They're either scratching an itch because their fashion is great, or they're funny or they're so absurd that you can't turn away."
All of the above seem to be true of the eight Mormon mom influencers from Utah who make up the cast of "Secret Lives."
"First off, the women are very entertaining. They have charisma in spades. It's hard to look away. But beyond the hair extensions and the fake boobs — all of which I support; you do you — these women are showing their work," she says.
"They're showing the behind-the-scenes labor of producing content for #MomTok. They're showing how they make money. They're showing that they're making a lot of money in a society where women are not supposed to be working outside the home. They're showing the friction and tension with all of the men in their lives over how much money that they're making."
Where will momfluencing go from here?
Just as she did on a 2021 episode of her podcast, Piazza predicts that influencer culture "is only going to get bigger."
Even in her work as an author, she relies on book influencers to sell her books, the latest of which is "Everyone is Lying to You," a murder mystery featuring momfluencing tradwives.
She notes that even though momfluencers hold a massive amount of power, they're often underestimated. "It is a world that is constantly dismissed as frivolous and not really a job, because it's mostly created by women for women, and that's to everyone's detriment," she says.
Through momfluencers, like those in #MomTok, Piazza says, "We're seeing what the world looks like when women make more than men, and we're all trying to grapple with what that looks like. We don't have a road map."
