I found this really cool infogrphic. Gender balance in social networks? Chicks Rule! Women seem to be in general more sociable. This would make the social networking sites more appealing to them as places where to connect and share experiences.
I believe that the number of users may equalize in future. However, if we would look at the activity on the social site my guess would be that women rule even more.
Marketers must understand that women are directly or indirectly behind most household spending decision. Also, women lead 4 out of 5 stages of the buying process. Three of these stages are closely tied to social media sites: research, ownership and word-of-mouth.
To summarize: in social networking sites it is a good idea to target women and try to influence the non-purchasing stages of buying process. Women don’t buy brands. They join them (Understanding Women — Eight Essential Truths That Work in Your Business and Your Life). From the marketers point of view this is very important. So, adapt and get some women in your marketing team.
Here are some more facts about women spending (via she-conomy.com):
Senior women age 50 and older control net worth of $19 trillion and own more than three-fourths of the nation’s financial wealth. – MassMutual Financial Group–2007
Over the next decade, women will control two thirds of consumer wealth in the United States and be the beneficiaries of the largest transference of wealth in our country’s history. Estimates range from $12 to $40 trillion. Many Boomer women will experience a double inheritance windfall, from both parents and husband. The Boomer woman is a consumer that luxury brands want to resonate with. – Claire Behar, Senior Partner and Director, New Business Development, Fleishman-Hillard New York
Women account for 85% of all consumer purchases including everything from autos to health care.
92% pass along information about deals or finds to others.
76% want to be part of a special or select panel.
And still women feel misunderstood:
59% of women feel misunderstood by food marketers;
66% feel misunderstood by health care marketers;
74% feel misunderstood by automotive marketers;
84% feel misunderstood by investment marketers
91% of women in one survey said that advertisers don’t understand them.
This post is serves as a mental note to myself. To concentrate and not to do too many things at the same time.
Yesterday I talked to a friend who tries to get an online shop up and running. They have done this for a year now and don’t seem to have much success with it. So we met to discuss what might be the problem and how to get this thing started.
The first thing that hit me when looking at the site was that I didn’t understand where I was and what shop was it. Different unrelated categories and not much choice in individual categories. You could buy a standard windshield wiper and a average decorative candle, but you couldn’t dig in and browse hundreds of candles or windshield wipers.
The rational behind selection was that if they come for windshield wipers and see a nice candle they might buy that, too. They other point the brought up was that their shop was for everybody. I does not work this way.
Most people shop for convenience, selection or price. That shop tries to offer selection but is too shallow. The prices are OK but not spectacular and the convenience is similar to most other e-commerce sites.
In the world of limited resources you have to make a choice. What is that you do? Block everything else. This way you can be the most convenient, have the best selection or price.
I have had my share of doing too many things at the same time. When you have a lot of ideas then there are always distractions. You feel that you should do this and that and a bit of third and fourth thing. You can’t sustain that. Select one thing and be the best at it.
Being the best is a good way to differentiate yourself but it is not required. You can be just different. Your clients should be able to say “I buy from them because they X”. If you make green balls and your competitor makes red balls then you are not better just different. If someone asks, your clients can say they bought from you because you make green balls.
The successful people around me have been initially concentrated on one thing. Yes, some of them do a lot of things but that’s because the first one thing is already paying dividends.
If you are good at something concentrate and give it you full focus. There’s always a new shiny object on the horizon that seems to demand your time and attention.
Resist!
So, decide what is this one thing you might really shine in and do that. (I’ll try to remember that, too)
Free Social Media Marketing Kit. Expert guidance on setting social media strategy and how-to articles on social media tools and tactics in the Social Media Marketing Kit. New marketing articles and social media content published daily.
Social CRM: The New Frontier of Marketing, Sales and Service (PDF). The emergence and increasing usage of social media and other Web 2.0 tools has dramatically altered the ways in which companies interact with their customers. For instance, buying advice, product information and technical help is increasingly being disseminated from consumers to other consumers, in some cases without involvement or oversight by the provider.
Using Facebook fans to improve automotive marketing. Facebook Fan Pages have become the most recent in a long line of social media “must-haves” for automotive marketers –- but what do they really tell you? And are they even helpful?
All together now. Diageo, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft and Procter & Gamble are among 10 companies taking part in an ambitious project that invites brands to work together on developing new brand and product ideas and new avenues for research through in-depth analysis of existing data.
Here is a collection of case studies and social media examples. The cases have been selected so that they would show how social media is being adopted in large organizations.
Marketing in the Age of Social Media – Examples from Procter & Gamble (video), by Stan Joosten. Hear how P&G’s brands integrate social media into their marketing activities, what lessons they’ve learned, and how these efforts have made them better able to serve their consumers.
General Mills Goes Social Media (video), by Mark Addicks. Mark Addicks, General Mills’ Chief Marketing Officer, shares how social media is changing they way they communicate. Mark’s presentation covers how when first getting started, General Mills built internal portals to demonstrate the power of social to senior management and peers, how many of their brands had an inherent offline “social network” behind them and these new tools are making it easier for them to connect, and several specific social media case studies on brands like Betty Crocker, Fiber One, and Progresso.
From Grass Roots to Global Scale: The Four Phases of Social Media at Intel (video), by Ken Kaplan. Intel is a big company with over 80,000 employees in hundreds of countries around the world. It may not be able to turn on a dime, but its culture of innovation mixed with a dose of paranoia has empowered its employees to walk, run and leap ahead into the world of social media. Ken highlighted four phases that moved Intel to a stronger role of participating online from blogging to communities to advertising: Pioneers, Settlers, Shift to Online, and Global Scale.
Intel Developing an Enterprise Social Computing Strategy, by Laurie Buczek and Malcolm Harkins. Intel IT has deployed an enterprise-wide social computing platform that combines professional networking tools with social media such as wikis and blogs, and integrates with existing enterprise software. Read how Intel IT transformed collaboration across Intel while addressing top business challenges such as helping employees to find relevant information and expertise more quickly, breaking down silos; attracting and retaining new employees; and capturing the tacit knowledge of mature employees.
How Nokia is Connecting People with Social Media (video), by Molly Schonthal. Molly Schonthal explains that, for the world’s largest manufacturer of cell phones, ‘connecting people’ is much more than a tag line — it’s a focus of business. Social media communication is a top priority for Nokia, both internally and externally.
The Impact of Social Media for The Home Depot (video), by Nick Ayres. Nick showed how the company uses social media to expand these tenets, and how social media is fundamentally changing the ways in which it engages with its customers. Social media is a growing part of what The Home Depot calls its “digital orange apron.”
Boston College, by Jeff Brainard. Boston College required social software to stimulate the education process & create lively interactions between students and faculty; Socialtext provided easy-to-use platform for wiki collaboration that seamlessly integrated with email, RSS feeds, search and other popular web-based technologies.
UPS: Protecting your brand through social media (video), by Debbie Curtis-Magley. UPS will give a first-hand account of how it recently dispelled rumors by using social media. Learn about crisis strategy, tools used, and lessons learned.
Zero to 60: Ford’s Social Media Story (video), by Scott Monty. Scott’s presentation covers how they’ve worked to “set their content free” by making it available for download and sharing, how the Fiesta Movement has put a bunch of talkers (and their unfiltered opinions) behind the wheel of new cars, and how Scott has connected fans directly to CEO Alan Mulally via Twitter.
AT&T Collaborative Integration, by R Todd Stephens. This case study provides an overview of the first 5 years of an evolving journey with Enterprise 2.0 applications within a large telecommunications company.
Vitamin Water’s newest flavour created by Facebook fans, by Matt Rhodes. Vitamin Water’s latest flavour, launching in March this year, was developed and named by the brand’s Facebook fans. The black cherry and lime flavoured drink will be called ‘Connect’ and one Facebook fan, Sarah from Illinois, won $5,000 for her role in developing this new product.
Social Media Engagement During a Financial Crisis (video), by Joel Nathanson. Joel’s presentation focuses on whether in crisis or during everyday business, fundamentals are critical: 1. Social media should be used in coordination with other channels; 2. If you’re not there, someone else will be; 3. Take advantage of the high value, low cost benefits; 4. Start building now — you don’t want to be building the infrastructure when you’re in a crisis.
Case study: Scott Brown and social media, by Larry Kim. While it is difficult to explain exactly how Scott Brown’s social media campaign went so viral, some basic social media marketing best practices may have tilted the race in Scott Brown’s favor.
Social Media Case Study: LEGO CLICK, by Matt Rhodes. They have launched LEGO CLICK, an online community that brings together innovators, designers, artists and creative thinkers to develop new ideas related to toys. The site is designed to bring together ideas in written form, images and videos. They want to capture and catalogue ‘lightbulb moments’, ideas that are relevant to toys and to the market LEGO serves.
General Motors Case Study. Often referred to as a great example of a successful corporate blog, General Motors FastLane was one of the first blogs personally written by a senior executive. On FastLane, GM’s Vice-Chairman Bob Lutz and others share their thoughts and opinions about the automaker’s product line.
Pizza & Beer – a successful E2.0 launch, by Rickard Hansson. Recently we launched Incentive as a part of the E20 roll out on SBAB. SBAB is a government owned bank in Sweden. Let me emphasis GOVERNMENT OWNED. You direct response – I assume – is… stale, complex decision processes, rules – on and on, and on.
Carnival Cruise Lines, by Guy Hagen. Carnival Cruise Lines has been a pioneer in leveraging social media to build customer loyalty and satisfaction. Interview with Carnival’s Senior Manager for Interactive Marketing Strategy Jordan Corderra and Social Media Strategist Stephanie Leavitt about how they built such a successful and loyal online community.
And whe you are through with those then: WOMMA’s Case Study Library. A how-to resource intended to help you gain a better understanding of the different types of word of mouth marketing that exist, as well as how to put them to work for you. We’re showcasing the best work from the best marketers, giving the people who create noteworthy word of mouth campaigns the recognition they deserve and providing an educational tool for those who want to learn a little more about this thing called WOM.
“What you do for a living is not be creative, what you do is ship,” says bestselling author Seth Godin, arguing that we must quiet our fearful “lizard brains” to avoid sabotaging projects just before we finally finish them.
Keep shipping! Ideas are a dime a dozen. Only the ones that get shipped have chance to make an impact. If the time runs out ship. If the budget runs out ship. Trash at the beginning, when it’s cheap, not before sipping.
Every time we get to shipping time the lizzard brain say: they’ll laugh at me, I’ll change this a bit… and then that… and that… never shipping. The genius part is making the lizzard brain to shut up untill you ship.
In our 2010 trend post we predicted that Facebook will have 700 million users. Well, let’s look at some numbers.
According to checkfacebook.com 43.03% of US on-line users are on Facebook. In UK this percentage is 51.5, Canada 47,24%, Australia 42.88% and this data is three months old. Then there are countries like Chile where 66.54% of on-line users are on Facebook and Venezuela with 68.97%. Seems that Facebook penetration, in countries where it is the leading social network, moves towards 50 percent of internet users or even beyond that.
Currently there are about 1.733 billion internet user in the world. When Facebook gets half of that then their user base would balloon to 850 million. Amazingly there are still some countries that have some other social networking site dominating. As we wrote in our post World Map Of Social Networks. The keys to Facebook’s world domination lay in Brazil (Orkut), Russia (V Kontakte) and China (QQ).
I would say that using a single social networking site would be beneficial to all internet users. In smaller countries there is constant pressure from across the borders to leave the local socnet and join the global one? However in large countries you may now feel that the language restricts your social sphere. Still, if you subtract the users of Brazil, Russia and China from 1.7 billion, you are left with about 1.3 billion I internet users.
There are several factors that drive Facebook domination. The network effect will make the value of the environment to go up as more people use it. More people are inviting even more friends, using Facebook will be the norm. Business use will legalize social networking during working hours. Older people join to keep in touch with their young relatives but also form their own sub communities. Businesses promoting their Facebook presence bring in more users. Initial success of the early adopters will move Facebook to marketing mainstream, but at the same time this will decrease the effectiveness of the channel as breaking through the clutter will become harder.
But the basic drive is universal, people want to belong and talk to each other, to connect. Most of the social networks’ content is social chatter, nothing terribly important or of timeless value. But social chatter is what we do and the site that can best mediate it will take everything.
700 million users is 54.6 percent of internet users excluding China, Brazil, and Russia. Maybe note by the end of this year, but it’s entirely possible. Next, 1 Billion.
A friend of mine listed the social media ebooks he’s reading at the moment. There are dozens of social media ebooks around free and otherwise. So, I decided to make a list of the ebooks that seem to stand out. Here are nine of them:
The New Rules of Viral Marketing, David Meerman Scott. The smart marketers profiled in The New Rules of Viral Marketing: How word-of-mouse spreads your ideas for free tell you exactly how they used viral marketing and provide advice in their own words.
Fish Where the Fish Are- Mapping Social Media to the Buying Cycle, Chris Brogan. An ebook meant to get your mind started on how social media ties to the more traditional buying cycle. These are some thoughts I’d put together immediately after my presentation, fleshed out, lined up, and with some takeaways that you can use to dig in once you feel comfortable.
The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008, Philip Sheldrake. If you could go back to the mid-90s and offer a marketer a little box that could sit on her desk and let her listen in on thousands of customer conversations and participate in those discussions regardless of geography or time zone, it would appear so farfetched that she’d probably call security. This eBook is about that reality.
Customer Service, The Art of Listening and Engagement Through Social Media, Brian Solis. Transforming people into a surrogate sales force is the dream of any service organization. The difference today is that the landscape has shifted to the point where good customer service is no longer the minimum ante to play the game.
Getting a Foothold in Social Media, Amber Naslund. you don’t have any idea where to start. It starts with a strategy, rooted in a desire to forge better relationships with your customers.
The Social Media Starter Kit, Amber Naslund. Several times a day, I hear folks asking about how to get started with all this social media stuff. What tools they need, what sites they should look at so as not to get overwhelmed. This is the nuts and bolts stuff, not so much the “why”.
Social Media Time Management. Strategies for Tackling Information Overload, Amber Naslund. How many hours do I have to spend in social media each day? Do I have resources/people other than me? What can I expect of them? (Note: if you’re serious about doing social, you need to find an hour a day to start with, at least.) Which 2 or 3 tools and social networks make sense based on my listening efforts? What is my goal for participation on those sites? What is the culture of those communities and how will my participation line up with that?
Game mechanics are behind the successes of the biggest social networks and online role playing games. But game mechanics is not only for the online, it applies to all interactions between people on-line and off. Today I read Robert Scoble’s post and decided to make a list of resources that have caught my eye in this field. Following these principles can really make a difference. So here we go:
Applying game mechanics to social media. From Peter Kim: If you think games are frivolous, think again – they help us accomplish the simple, like getting an infant to eat, and the complex, like warming up surgeons or disaster response. But as in all things, moderation is key and some people have died when taking games too far.
How Simple Game Mechanics Can Impassion People To Do More Business With You – with Amy Jo Kim. After listening to Amy Jo Kim in this program, you’ll see that there’s more going on under the surface. You’ll understand the levels of activity that you need to build in. And you’ll get a virtual toolbox full of tools that you can use to add game mechanics to your business and build a passionate audience that competes to take more action on your site.
Motivating consumer behavior through game mechanics. Often users of applications need to be encouraged to perform actions for the system to work, or in some cases for it to work better and improve the experience for others. Startups know this all too well – I’ve rarely come across one which doesn’t require some sort of input from their users on some level.
So here you go, start making your own project addictive!
Olympics’ Social Rings. TV may still be the big marketing vehicle around the Olympics, but sponsors use social media to build buzz and get fans involved.
“People are blogging with their phones and taking photos with them,” says David Steel, svp of strategic marketing, Samsung Electronics America. “The timing seems perfect to have a program oriented around mobile social networking.”
A Third of Adults Now Post to Sites Like Facebook, Twitter Once a Week. The ranks of these networkers, dubbed “conversationalists” in a report released today by Forrester Research, have grown in the past couple of years. They’re mostly women, and they aren’t only young people — 70% of the adults in this category are 30 and older.
Retailers Lure Moms with Social Media, Free Stuff. The study found that women with children at home are more likely to use Facebook (60.3%), MySpace (42.4%) and Twitter (16.5%) than average adults (50.2%, 34.4%, 15.0%, respectively). Moreover, 15.3% maintain their own blog.
Study Reveals Facebook Better Than Twitter for Marketers. Can’t say that it surprises me. Facebook encourages users to aggregate external content on Facebook to be viewed within the network, while Twitter encourages users to link externally, viewing content outside of the network.
People in the U.S. continue to spend more time on social networking and blog sites as well, with total minutes increasing 210% year-over-year and the average time per person increasing 143% year-over-year in December 2009.
I found this really cool infogrphic. Gender balance in social networks? Chicks Rule! Women seem to be in general more sociable. This would make the social networking sites more appealing to them as places where to connect and share experiences.
This post is serves as a mental note to myself. To concentrate and not to do too many things at the same time.
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