They also rarely are critical. Christine Young, owner of the From Dates to Diapers blog, has a closet full of free baby products she never liked. She hasn't mentioned them in her blog.
They're still there, sitting on the shelves, waiting to be donated.
"My business is not to bash companies," said Young, 32, who lives in the Sacramento area. "My business is to create buzz for the products and services we enjoy."
That philosophy has created a rift in the parental blogosphere, between those who take freebies and those who don't. And companies have learned that backlash over corporate pampering can quickly turn explosive.
The recent Nestle trip was designed to let the bloggers "get a better feel for Nestle" in exchange for consumer input, said organizer Becky Chao, director of the company's Moms With Kids Insights program.
Nestle set up a Twitter tag and created a website with pictures of the invited mom and dad bloggers to encourage them to talk to their readers.
And the company intentionally made its recent event a lavish one "to make the bloggers feel comfortable while they were here, away from their families," Chao said.
But critics of the company countered that the event was a public relations ploy in reaction to an ongoing boycott of Nestle for marketing baby milk formula as a substitute for breast feeding in developing countries.
In fact, before the trip, critics reached out to the bloggers invited to California and urged them to not go.
No one canceled.
As the event got underway, the online conversation quickly turned into an online battlefield. The company's Twitter channel was so inundated with anti-Nestle messages, and nasty accusations aimed at the attendees, that it was essentially shut down. The company, caught off guard, let the parents field questions aimed at executives until finally stepping into the fray.
Afterward, thousands of people joined Facebook groups dedicated to boycotting the company, according to critics of the company.
"I do think they should have done a bit of due diligence in researching the company before choosing to be associated with them and to accept a free trip from them," said Annie Urban, author of the PhD in Parenting blog and the person credited with kicking off the Nestle brouhaha.
"It is one thing to cluelessly pick up a Nestle chocolate bar in the store, but it is another thing altogether to accept an all-expenses-paid trip and agree to have your face and name on a Nestle Family Bloggers page."
As for those who just say no, they fret about their credibility being tainted. Tales of unreported luxury suites and cross-country trips made Liz Gumbinner cringe so much that she helped launch Blog With Integrity. The goal is to rally support for demarcating the line between personal observations and paid posts.
"It's easy to paint everyone as product whores," said Gumbinner, 41, who lives in Brooklyn and has run her Mom101 blog since 2006. "They're not. I think sometimes they're just naive."
