the office!

It’s official: The world has gone social and women are more social than men!

In the simple words of Facebook’s COO – “The world’s gone social. And women are more social then men”. It couldn’t be more clear that women and men socialise differently, even online. In the Forbes article, What Men and Women are Doing on Facebook, Jenna Goudreau discusses the different reasons men and women use Facebook and other social sites, as well as the different reasons that men and women use social media.

First of all, women rule Facebook…no doubt about it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The 400-million member site, which is the largest social networking tool in the world, is 57% female*. Also, Facebook attracts 46 million more female visitors than male visitors per month.* Not only are there more women on Facebook, they are more active on the site than men. According to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, women on Facebook have 8% more friends then men and they account for 62% of the sharing.

“The social world is led by women,” Sandberg says.

It is very important to know which sites women are visiting most frequently. According to Goudreau, women frequent sites that are more focused on discussion, rather than content such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Bebo, and Flicker.

Doesn’t this make sense? Women love to share and communicate with each other, which is the key purpose of all of these listed sites. Men, on the other hand are driven to sites like Digg, YouTube, and LinkedIn – sites which focus on content and not discussion.

If you’re trying to market to women (and you should be), this means you have a better idea of where to focus your efforts when creating a social media campaign. For example, if you’re building your website to appeal to women, it will probably be more effective to include a Twitter button versus one for your LinkedIn account.

Also, and even more importantly, you must know how women use social media, which is different to men. According to Goudreau, experts presume that the differences in how men and women socialise online mimic their offline intentions.

While men use social media to “wheel and deal” by gathering information and making social connections to increase their status, women use social networking to connect and share. As Jodi Kahn, the head of iVillage says, “we’re women – we like to talk about things.”

iVillage and BlogHer recently joined together to conduct a study and found that 75% of women use online communities like Facebook to stay up-to-date and in touch with friends and family, and astoundingly 68% use them to ‘connect with others like me.’

What an opportunity. Women are using social networking to find and connect with others that they feel share their motivations, feelings and opinions. Want to connect with women? Give them something or someone to connect with. According to Kahn, “Women are online solving real-life issues.” They want to learn about and connect with others who are experiencing similar problems. Men, however use online communities as a means to research and make contacts. As Lorrie Thomas, a social media marketing professor at UC Berkeley, says, men use social media as an “interactive Rolodex.”

This difference in social media usage is closely related to how men and women are raised. Men are raised to be hunter-gatherers and women are raised to converse and connect. Elisa Camhort Page, co-founder and chief operating officer of BlogHer, believes that men “leverage social media for broadcasting their ideas and skills vs. women, who find connections with others by sharing the ups and downs of their daily lives.” In a recent survey done by ATG, an e-commerce software firm, twice as many women as men said they frequently share purchasing information on social sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Myspace. This is a long and detailed way of telling what you what you may have suspected. If woman recommends a brand online, it is more likely to influence her friends.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What are the areas of commerce that we, women, tend to get a little nervous about? Male dominated professions that are perceived as a little bit grimy and prone to specialised knowledge: such as car repairs, plumbing and electrical, carpentry and building, and, to some extent, mortgages and real estate. Well enter Female Friendly Accreditation, where you can be assured the business won’t speak to you like you are a ‘stupid woman’, who won’t try and charge you for work you don’t need to have done, and most importantly, who are expressly recommended by other women as providing exceptional service.

Go the pink tick, use the Female Friendly directory site to find businesses where you know you and your husband won’t get different quotes for the same work.

Now back at this commercial. Old Spice has released yet another brilliant (sure to go viral spot) with actor and former NFL player Isaiah Mustafa as “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.” We guess it was shot in a single take using very little CGI like the previous one. Got to love the magic touch of totally mesmerising women whilst also motivating men. Pure spice genius – sure to get another award for Weiden + Kennedy.  Perhaps they could work their genius on the smell of the product next?

And another kind of Man….

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We know its old, but…hell it’s still relevant!

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It’s a voluntary code of conduct, which means that while media and advertisers are incentivised through numerous initiatives to adopt the code, they’re not forced into it.

The code is in place to support the youth of Australia in growing up safe, happy, healthy and resilient through encouraging the following be upheld across all media production:

1. Positive content and messaging

2. Diversity

3. Fair placement

4. Realistic and natural images of people

5. Healthy weight models

6. Appropriate modelling age

7. Fashion retailers supporting positive body image

Ideally, when one publisher jumps in, others will follow in their footsteps. But given a cover is often the selling point for many magazines, and photos make up so much of a typical magazine’s content, some ballsy decisions will need to be made in terms of priorities for in particular, women’s lifestyle and fashion titles.

Do we consider promoting positive body image and making a stand to be of greater importance than only using retouched images and glossy glamour?
Will we be seen negatively by the market if our competitor adopts the code and we don’t?

Change needs to happen internally within media publishers and broadcasters before any difference is made culturally. And a holistic approach needs to be taken.

Though on the flipside, while perfection is not a reality, flawless images and nice-looking photos sell.

It’s interesting though, some brands seem to have achieved tremendous success through campaigns that are up front and honest about reality. They don’t try and hide the imperfections and the flaws, because in covering them up, a human aspect is simultaneously lost. People like real life. The success of real life magazine titles is testament to this. People want to relate to what they see and read, and they’re offended by brands that pretend life is perfect.

The Kotex Reality Check TVC is a successful branding exercise because it pokes fun at other brands who try to make something that is, quite frankly, not at all light and fun, be light and fun. You can’t roll a turd in glitter and expect people not to notice what’s really underneath.

Similarly, the Weight Watchers Approved By Life campaign resonates because it’s accepting of real life. It doesn’t pretend women have time, no kids, no social life, or hate chocolate. It doesn’t pretend life isn’t exactly that. Consumers respect the honesty.

Brands and publishers will earn respect for being authentic and honest. And at the same time, do wonders for the body image and self esteem of women and men alike.

Toy Story 3 is one of the biggest movies to come out this year for little ones and big ones alike. So on Sunday we trundled off as a family to the cinema so my little boy, 2 and a half, could experience his first time in a big cinema. Toy Story 3 popcorn box in hand and the “special glasses that make magic happen” securely in place we settled in to watch the movie.

But rather than the movie being our first 3D experience, the Target toy sale ad was.

It never even occurred to me that advertising would become 3D, and here it was. And so beautifully tied into the movie experience with little ‘targets’ hard at work, like Santa’s little helpers, creating the toy experience for us to all enjoy.

They really have done a great job, so to see the 3D ad in its glory get yourself along to Toy Story 3 in 3D… and take your tissues for the end (or am I just a sap?).

It’s not often that I burst into tears when listening to the news, but today was a stunning exception. I suppose you would assume, as I am the founder of a company called sister, that I might champion the beliefs and career advances of women. But there was something just so altogether cool about the way “brand Julia” pulled this off.

She played her cards so close to her chest until the last minute and then with calm humility she walked into Parliament house this morning as a the Deputy, then out two hours later as the Prime Minister. She didn’t subject the public to a long drawn out, nasty campaign of bitterness and back stabbing (which has become the norm in Australian politics).

For that, we are truly grateful and hopeful that this is a sign of the new era of female leadership.

Not only is Julia our first female Prime Minister and God forbid, in a defacto relationship, today she is being sworn in by the first ever female Governor General. This day is momentous for all females, from 0-100.

Now, let’s work towards more female CEOs in the ‘big end of town’ to help keep Julia there. Harold Mitchell…maybe you could help? You did announce that the ‘Future is Women’ this week…

I’m concentrating purely on the cookies (some things will never change) and ignoring the bigger brand picture Girl Scouts frames in this post. And what a fantastic brand it is.

You won’t see Tim Tam presenting a case for having helped build communities or grow confidence in young girls. Its strongest cause is probably for adding width to thighs across Australia.

So I don’t know about you, but this sweet little clip just shifted my entire thinking around the humble biscuit. And is a fantastic case study on how ROI has been directly attributed to marketing via social media.

Girl Scouts America are teaching their padwans how to market wheaty goodness online with YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and e-Vites. And the kids are the marketers. Instead of delivering sales speeches to the old lady across the road, they’re utilising existing online social networks to share their products with friends and friends of friends.

Some argue this shift is tarnishing the Girl Scouts brand, a brand that has heritage in the way products have traditionally been distributed: scouts walking door to door around their local neighbourhoods. There’s a nostalgic element to it. Fondness.

But times are a-changing. The world we live in today is not the same as it was when Girl Scouts first boxed their biscuits. This now means that parents often tag along with their kids to sell the cookies, out of a valid concern for safety. But many mums no longer have time to run along after a cookie mission. As shocking as that sounds. Whether you think it’s lazy parenting or accept that it’s probably because women’s roles in the workforce and in the home are still changing, there’s less time to do things than there used to be.

Couple this with the ever-increasing amount of time people of all ages are spending with the internet, particularly on social networking sites, and it’s a pretty fair call to shift at least some of the business online. And it’s paying off.

Since launching its social media strategy at the beginning of the year, previously declining cookie sales have improved by 9%.

Not bad, is it?

The year was 2004 and Nike’s approach to online with AKQA was to create beautiful and engaging website communications … in Flash. Absolutely all of their properties are done in Flash, from basketball, to football, running, Nike + iPod, etc, etc. They have invested an incredible amount of money producing beautiful web presences that have often been awarded ‘best in class’.

So I wonder what Nike make of Steve Jobs (head of Apple) and his commitment to kill Flash by not supporting this technology on any Mac product (particularly the new iPad). Well, it seems at least, Nike were prepared for the iPad with many of their properties providing a cut down, HTML version of their Flash content, which fulfills the need to provide content on this new platform, but what a terrible user experience when compared with the beautiful and emotive content that their “computer browser” versions afford us.

While Steve Jobs has some fair arguments as to why they are not supporting Flash, those mainly being:
-          Flash is old technology where the future is HTML5  which is an open standard
-          Flash is the number one cause of Macs crashing
-          Flash has very poor performance on mobile devices – chews through battery life
-          Flash websites aren’t (generally) touch compatible

… other web technology (from what I have experienced) just can’t match the movement, resolution, and glossy presentation of brand content that you can achieve with Flash (you only have to browse all the Nike sites to see that). That is, as I understand, until HTML5 is released and adopted by the masses … but that is still a technology that is the future and not the here and now.

What’s your view? Would you like to see the death of Flash along with Steve or should Flash be better supported by Apple?

So I was touched to hear about the incredible lengths my friend Stef went to to surprise Kay for her birthday, proving both chocolate combined with technology is really the way to a girl’s heart.

But don’t take it from me, take it from Stef and read his short, but very entertaining post.

Firstly, about how fabulous Madge looks even with out the Photoshop. In fact, if I were 52 and looked like that I would be beside myself (even though we know that there may have also been a knife or two involved). That aside, imagine if a cosmetic brand had the tenacity to run a similar campaign idea – with the ridiculous retouched face on one side and the ‘naturally’ beautiful face on the other.

I’m guessing women 40+ who are bombarded with these ridiculous retouched, unrealistic and insulting images would rejoice and praise the authenticity of such a statement and I am sure they’d flock to the brand.