Hunting Mom-Netizens

Highly enthusiastic mania members are the prerequisite for the success of Internet Web sites.

In this respect, “Child Nursing” is a bright example of a Web site that can successfully activate each of its corners, such as club, video, consulting, shopping mall and bulletin board, because any nursing mother cannot help becoming a mania of everything that has to do with her child.

Formula and infant product distributors have embarked recently on re-designing their Web sites into childcare portal sites, applying every effort to attracting young Moms. Such portals find it very effective to attract even the fussiest customers because online shopping brings high profits and products are effectively advertised by word of mouth on bulletin boards.

Namyang Dairy Product last month changed its Web site that used to focus on the overall company introduction into a childcare portal site (www.namyangi.com), which features ultrasound pictures of the fetus by pregnancy period, video clips with child delivery scenes and 11 consulting rooms supervised by professionals. The site is daily visited by nearly 50,000 people and has over 540,000 members.

“Uri I” run by Maeil Dairy Industry (www.urii.com) is also targeting young mothers of newborn babies to 7-year-old children by providing childcare information. Members are offered such benefits as booklets and birthday gifts, invitations to all kinds of lectures and a 20-percent discount for all products in the site’s shopping mall. Monthly sales generated by shopping mall are estimated to be 1.2 billion won.

Happy Land, a company specializing in children’s wear, has been running its Web site, Happy Land CS (www.happyland.co.kr), which offers such services as childcare diaries, information suited for each age period, family albums, bookkeeping, etc. Over 80 transactions are held daily on the site’s “online marketplace” where customers buy and sell children’s wear and other childcare necessities.

Over 100,000 members of Agabang community Web site (www.agabang.com) share their child nursing experience, with male members accounting for a large part of overall membership and showing great interest in child nursing.

Seung-Jin Kim sarafina@donga.com