If you’re looking for a demographic that needs reliable answers fast to tough questions, and doesn’t necessarily mind if they come equipped with some trustworthy product recommendations, then you could do a lot worse than to cater to parents, particularly new ones.

And that’s the thinking behind the new social community that has been layered on long-standing parenting content site BabyCenter.com, which has been around since before social networks existed on the Web.

BabyCenter.com got its start back in 1997 as a Web-based information resource for parents and those about to be, offering original content about baby development, medical information concerning pregnancy and conception, and oh yes, product information and an e-commerce store. The site passed briefly through the hands of dot-com flameout eToys before being acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 2001. The baby-product manufacturer has taken an extremely hands-off approach to managing the site, allowing it to run without branding and to maintain its editorial independence.

But the new generation of parents—oh, heck, let’s be honest and say mothers, since fathers make up a single-digit percentage of the site traffic—want more than advice handed down from experts; they want to belong to a more horizontal community of peers, and to have the kind of social networking tools for posting personal data and entering discussions that they’ve come to expect from social networks such as Facebook and MySpace.

Those tools take time and effort to construct from scratch, and BabyCenter was in danger of being overshadowed in member growth by newer mommy-centric Web communities such as CafeMom.

Then last August the company bought upstart Web social net MayasMom.com, founded in March 2006 by Ann Crady as a place for parents to share information on the Internet.

‘I was at Yahoo! and working with Caterina Fake, who founded Flickr, on creating an automotive enthusiast site, and learning a lot about online communities in researching and launching that product,” says Crady, now senior vice president of the consumer experience group at BabyCenter. “I started to think about my own life and what I was passionate about. I was part of a lot of mother’s groups that had incredible people but really poor tools, and so I combined my passion with what I knew about Web communities to create MayasMom.com.”

MayasMom.com will continue to operate independently as a question and answer center for parents, but the acquisition gave BabyCenter.com access to the back-end tools it needed to set up a fully functioning social network.

“The former community on BabyCenter was similar to the ones I’d been dealing with before Maya’s Mom: really great people having great conversations, but with really old tools,” Crady says. “The majority of our user engagement was with the content side of the business. Our new offering makes the tools behind the community side of the site much more robust.”

The new BabyCenter Community, available in beta at www.community.babycenter.com, will offer many of the communication and content feature users have come to expect from social networks, such as the ability to create personal profiles, to share photos and video among online friends, and to extend “shout outs” to other member and pass simple icon-based “notes”.

As in real life, passing around recent pictures of the kids is a big activity in the virtual BabyCenter community.

“When I become a member of the BabyCenter community, I can choose to connect myself to other members as friends,” Crady says. “Once I do that, whenever I log on, the first thing I see is a photo slider with any new pictures that my friends have uploaded.”

They can also get an instant update about recent activities and threads in any groups they belong to on the site, catch up on what their friends are currently doing, and get a selection of the most recent “kidisms”—darnedest things said by members’ children.

Users will also be able to construct public or private discussions around a topic and to add tags to their personal journals and photos. If they wish, they can use the network tags to find other members with whom they may share interests or other factors, such as geo location or children of the same age.

The BabyCenter community feature goes beyond other social networks to incorporate user content created outside the community’s walls. The new platform lets member easily incorporate blogs they may be running on Type Pad or WordPress and add photos stored in Flickr.

“We recognize that Mom has a digital life outside of her BabyCenter world,” Crady says. “She’s also busy, and we don’t want her to have to recreate content on BabyCenter that she’s already got somewhere else. So we let her incorporate that digital life into her BabyCenter profile with basically one mouse click. “Members can add their blog URLs to their profiles and have that content fed into BabyCenter via RSS feed whenever it’s updated outside of the community.

On the question of staking a claim on the famously rare free time that moms enjoy, Crady is confident the new BabyCenter social net will offer what it takes to draw their attention regularly and frequently. “Everyone needs a social experience, and for moms today, an online social experience is often as easy as or easier than an offline one,” she says. “They’re dealing with naps times, or the kids are home playing, and coming online is a convenient outlet, even for the busiest moms.”

BabyCenter LLC group publisher Michael Fogarty came to the company in June in large part because of the social networking initiative, he says. Fogarty had been executive vice president of online properties at another family-oriented Web site, Kaboose, where he was responsible for ad sales and business development.

“Probably more than at any other content-based site, this addition of a social platform has the potential to have a huge impact with marketers and advertisers,” he says. “People come to fulfill content needs as expectant or new moms, and we have a deep, rich repository of that content for every life stage. But you want to validate with other moms. And it’s notable how open this segment is to messages from marketers, as long as those messages reach them at the right time and in the right way.”

Marketers will be able to tailor display ads and other messaging opportunities to members’ parenting stages in the community area, just as they segment audiences in the content portions of BabyCenter.com. The site will also be able to do some targeted marketing around interest areas such as photo-sharing or around the context of discussion groups.

There may also be enhanced opportunities for brands to solicit feedback from influencer moms. BabyCenter’s older content areas have already dipped a toe in these waters, running a bulletin board discussion early this year on kids growing up too fast that was sponsored by kid clothing line Garanimals (with an ePrize sweepstakes for a $2,500 shopping spree attached.)