Social media show feminine side
I came into the new media — and social media — worlds after years in the trenches at print newspapers around the country. One mystery I could never resolve in my head was how print newspapers, even in their heyday, could never sell many ads for the sports section. Sales people always claimed that advertisers shied away from sports because they wanted to reach women, and they said women didn’t read sports sections.
I never totally bought that argument. Newspaper sales staffs could have been more creative in educating advertisers on how to attract women and not just settle for male sports readers wanting a tire sale. And sports news staffs were too drenched in testosterone to recognize that a large number of those filling the stands are women and many can read a box score.
But that was yesteryear and the media landscape has changed. Newspapers now struggle to keep readers of any gender — and advertisers — in the advancing digital age. However, the advertising truism still exists — in sales, women are still the coveted audience
Where are businesses looking for female customers going to find them these days? Social media, of course. A new study by the IT firm Royal Pingdom finds that 84% of the 19 social networking sites have more female than male users (53% females, 47% male). If Digg, Reddit and Slashdot were removed from the study, ALL 16 major social sites would have a majority of female users on them. Even LinkedIn, which has reportedly been the only site with a larger male audience, now is more predominantly female, according to the study.
This finding follows on another study last year by online research firm Rapleaf which found that women have more friends in social networks than men.
The newest study provides yet more evidence of how social media can help meet business goals. Most of your customers are using social media. They increasingly expect to be interacting with businesses while on their favorite social sites. If your business strategy especially targets women and you’re not interacting with them through social media, then hopefully this study will serve as a wake-up call.
You can thank me later.
In business, social media can’t be an
afterthought
Two unrelated recent posts on Social Media Today got me thinking again about how large companies and small businesses still need education on understanding the purposes and value of using social media.
One post described the flawed attempt by college football’s Bowl Championship Series to start a Twitter account, ostensibly to communicate with fans, answer questions and spruce up the image of the much-maligned bowl system. Heck, fans, most coaches and even the president want a playoff system to crown a football national champion. (Me, too.)
The result? A PR nightmare, according to Social Media Today, as @InsideThe BCS tweeted about 30 times (now up to 57) while screenload after screenload of critics weighed in with negative comments. And SMT wrote whoever was tweeting (they suspect a PR firm) misquoted Florida coach Urban Meyer as being a supporter of the BCS system. He’s not.
While I salute the BCS folks for attempting to enter the social space, it’s clear they needed to think through a strategy and prepare in advance. They should have known they would face an onslaught. Now that the bus has hit them, it’ll be interesting to see how they respond.
The second post focused on a conference where discussion centered on how companies are turning to Gen Y employees to handle their social media marketing.
My take: As we previously wrote, age is no longer a factor in social media. Facebook is gaining more Boomers; Twitter is now attracting Gen Yers. In a bad economy, people of all ages are turning to LinkedIn. So why would companies look to Gen Yers only to handle their social media responsibilities? It’s not like they all have a special gene that makes them marketers.
Whoever handles your company’s social media profiles reflects upon your company. If that employee, intern, contractor, consultant or PR/marketing firm doesn’t know what they’re doing, they can do harm. Many companies have already been burned by well-meaning, low-paid and inexperienced people representing their brand.
I’m reminded of the large Atlanta law firm who advertised earlier this year for someone to manage their social media identity. These lawyers, who spend their days carefully crafting legal arguments for large amounts of money, were paying a miniscule salary and clearly wanted a recent college grad. Nothing against recent college grads — I have two children graduating in the next year — but it was clear this firm wanted the benefits of social media without a seasoned professional. Why would a group of lawyers open themselves to such risk? Let’s hope they were lucky.
If you own a business and you need help in launching — and sustaining — your social media profiles, you should think through who you put in that role. Do you really leave it to an intern? Or the IT guy/Webmaster who can code great things, but can’t spell or write a comprehensible sentence?
Updating Twitter or a Facebook business page doesn’t require technical skills. Anyone of any age can do it. If you don’t have time to do it yourself, the challenge is finding someone with a mature-enough marketing and business sense to meet your needs.
There is great value for businesses to gain through social media. Don’t underestimate that value if you need help. Hiring or contracting someone on the cheap could end up being very costly.
Facebook features boon for small businesses
We gave Facebook credit yesterday for planning some changes that show an apparent savvy business strategy. Let’s take a closer look today at how those changes affect small businesses and their marketing efforts.
First, let’s be clear. I wasn’t anywhere near Facebook HQ when they recently shared their six-month product roadmap. I’m depending on trusted, reliable social media strategists, such as Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang (formerly of Forrester Research), for details. Second, some of the major Facebook changes will really be more suited to bigger companies with large budgets for marketing and developers who can create customized apps for them.
So let’s get that news out of the way. Developers creating Facebook apps will be able to ask Facebook users for their email addresses. And so companies who create such apps will have a whole bunch of potential new data to work with. They’ll be able to socialize their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems with real contact information from social media and distinguish between existing customers and new prospects. So companies can further integrate their social media data into e-mail marketing.
But that’s the world of big-volume products and services. What do these changes mean for small businesses and professional service firms? And how should they be preparing for the changes?
As we wrote Wednesday, sites will be able to choose the types of Facebook functionality they want on their sites. For example, Facebook users can become “fans” of your Web site while visiting there. So that means their friends learn about your site from these new fans. A business can create a news stream visible on their site which would also appear on the Facebook pages of their fans — and also be visible to the fans’ friends.
If you have a small business that depends upon a Web site for business (and that’s a large percentage of them), you should:
• Be thinking about what Facebook features you’d like to have on your site.
• Be setting aside some money for your Webmaster to make sure you’re ready when it’s possible to integrate that functionality on your site
• Be thinking ahead on what types of creative ways you can interact with new users coming to your sites. Special deals? Coupons? What can you do to get users to come back to your site? And bring their friends with them?
• Be thinking about ways to harness the Facebook news stream. For example, if I want to promote this blog, I now use a Facebook page giving a short summary of what I’ve written and a link back to here. In 2010, I’ll be able to simply flag Facebook friends or site fans that my latest post is done. It’ll show up in their live feeds. Bloggers can expect increased comments because people are more likely to comment through Facebook functionality than traditional blog commenting. (I get far more comments about this blog through Facebook than I do here.)
So business sites with active updates and content will be in the best position to take advantage of the Facebook functionality. If you can share compelling content and helpful information with your site visitors, you can use the tools to drive more eyeballs and repeat visitors to your site.
Small businesses, this is a great opportunity. Facebook is bringing the social Web to you. Be prepared to take advantage of it.
Will Twitter be its own worst enemy?
“Essentially, Twitter left a ball and a stick in a field and lurked on the sidelines as its users invented baseball.”
– From “Mob Rule! How Users Took Over Twitter,” Wired Magazine
That sentence from a new Wired piece by Steven Levy sums up perfectly the history and growth of Twitter. The simple microblogging service has grown from the work of its users. Users created its conventions — @ symbols with names, retweeting and hashtags. Developers created countless third-party applications to boost the functionality of the simple product — many with names playing off the Twitter name. (Tweetie, Twazzup, Twellow, anyone?)
However, Levy’s article also clearly states the challenge Twitter faces as it wrestles with becoming a mature business. He points out that changes suggested by the company have historically drawn fire. For example, Twitter created a Suggested Users List in February, with about 200 recommendations for celebrities/companies/etc. that new users could follow. As Levy correctly writes: “Outrage ensued.”
And behemoths Google and Facebook don’t help Twitter’s business planning by adapting similar real-time functionality into their services.
Small-business owners undoubtedly could look at Twitter’s history and say this is no way to run a business. However, any business owner can recognize the company, despite its early lack of clear direction, has enormous potential if it can keep the “mob” somewhat happy as it evolves.
Will Twitter be its own worst enemy?
We won’t know that for some years to come. In the meantime, Levy’s piece is a great reflection on how Twitter got to where it is today.
Small businesses on social media: ‘Show me the money’
Catching up with some odds and ends from the social media world:
• Thanks to Steven Moore of Marietta, Ga. (who, by the way, shares great small-business advice on Twitter) for passing on some interesting news. A new survey finds a growing number of small-business owners are using social media to promote their businesses. The survey, by Internet2Go and Merchant Circle, found about 45 percent of those surveyed are using Facebook or Twitter. Writes John Jantsch of DuctTape Marketing in his analysis:
“… small business owners are coming to understand the power of social media and the relative low cost vs. high return opportunity. However, the survey further suggests, to me at least, that while it’s easy to get on Facebook and Twitter, there’s still a gap in understanding how to make them pay. The danger in jumping into social media networks, with no barrier to entry, without a strong “hub” foundation of a blog or content portal is that it’s difficult to convert someone from the awareness that might be gained through Facebook to the trust needed to make a sale.”
Absolutely, John. Social media by itself will not help you, unless you have a clear, integrated strategy that drives people to your blog or Web site and you build a business connection. Social media are emerging as a major piece in the business puzzle. However, “puzzle” is the operative word here; small businesses are still trying to make sense of how social media can rock their world.
In short, social media consultants better always be prepared for one request from potential small-business clients. With apologies to actor Cuba Gooding in the movie “Jerry Maguire” — “Show me the money.”
• TweetDeck released an upgrade today which already has proven it significantly reduces the drain on your computer and is much more stable. TweetDeck is the most widely used third-party application to get the most functionality out of a Twitter account — seamless retweets, direct messaging, link shortening, etc. Previously, I would have to load it a second time to get all the columns to load. This version is a great improvement. I wish TweetDeck were available for BlackBerry. iPhone users have a great choice between TweetDeck and Tweetie.
• Interesting Wall Street Journal piece today on MySpace (both owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.) The article’s headline: “MySpace Tries to Recover Its Cool.” Says the WSJ:
In a strategy shift, MySpace is striving to become an online hangout for people to connect with friends over entertainment content, whether it’s the new Pearl Jam album, blogs from celebrities like British pop singer Lily Allen or a karaoke contest for the Fox musical comedy “Glee.”
The site is experiencing flat growth (especially compared to Facebook) and declining ad revenues (the article states eMarketer estimates U.S. ad spending on the site will be down 15% from 2008.)
The challenge for MySpace is how they are going to remain “cool” as users age and move elsewherewhile younger users face an endless selection of entertainment choices. We shall see.
