Welcome to the social media...

an introduction to social media & women in social media

By Anish Shah
VCU Brandcenter | Creative Brand Management Track
03/31/2009 | www.anishvshah.com | avshah@vcu.edu
What is
Social
Media?
Social Media isn’t media in traditional sense. All
the traditional media — print, broadcast, search, and so on — provide
platforms for delivery of ads near and around relevant content.

Social media are platforms for interaction and

relationships, not content and ads. Twitter,
Facebook, LinkedIn, and all the others are platforms for interaction
and networking.
What is
Social
Media?

Social media isn’t an advertising and branding platform; it’s a

hyper-interactive relationship-builder. Social media is used
to deepen longer-term relations.

When you engage in social media, you enter into an unspoken social
contract. You are in a relationship; it goes both ways. Respect and
trust must be earned.
Social
AUDIO

WHITE LABEL SOCIAL NETWORKS

Media
COLLABORATIVE TOOLS
VIDEOS

EVENTS SOCIAL BOOKMARKS

BLOGS PHOTOS

PROPERITORY SOCIAL NETWORKS WIKIS

MICRO-BLOGS
Internet Usage...
100
Makeup of adult internet
91% 90% population by age
75 79%

50 56% 4%
7%
30%
13%
25 29%

0
18-30 31-42 43-61 62-71 71+
US Adults who use the internet, June-September 2007 (% respondents) 22%
23%
As of July 2007, 83.8 million people were in the 25-to-44-year-old
age bracket. During the the same time, It was estimated that a full
90% of this group used the Internet.
18-32 33-44 45-54

{male... 78% female... 75%}

55-63 64-72 73+

Over half of the adult internet population is between 18 and 44

years old. But larger percentages of older generations are online
now than in the past, and they are doing more activities online.
- Pew Internet & American Life Project, Jan 2009

Source: US Census Bureau statistics, eMarketer,

Pew Internet & American Life Project
Young Users (18-44) Old Users (45 & above)

Instant Messaging
Email, to mainly
Social Networking
stay in touch
Applications
Internet is more
View internet as a form
utilitarian
of entertainment
tool for banking, shopping
e.g Video Sharing,
and researching their
gaming, downloading
health
music, reading blogs, etc.
 Americans on Internet

Facebook.com LinkedIn.com Eons.com

Youtube.com Myspace.com Twitter.com

Cafemom.com Cooking.com Walmart.com

 Gender gap in Social Media
Male

Female
The future of social media is going to be all about the women. So if
you're going to create the next hot Web 2.0 site and you want it to
go viral, you'll target women. -Auren Hoffman, Business Week, Special Report, May 19 2008
According to a Rapleaf
Interesting Insights
study, while both sexes
still use social •Facebook, MySpace & Flixster are extraordinarily popular with men &
networking sites in huge women in their 20’s.
numbers, women far
outpace the men.
•Men above 30—especially married men—aren't even joining social
networks.
•Women between ages 35 and 50 are the fastest-growing segment.
•Men keep gravitating to transactional sites, especially those that make gaining access to news,
sports, and financial information easier
•Women's behavior online, on the other hand, is less transactional and more relationship-driven.
They spend more time on social networks building
relationships, communicating with friends, and
making new friends.
•Married women use social networks to share
pictures and treat their network profiles as family
home pages to share with friends and relatives.
About
women &
Social Media
a look at some existing social networks targeted towards women
 Some very valuable
Information
Information sources ranked by percent
sources ranked
of moms indicating is was very valuable
by moms

A study conducted by Razorfish & Cafe Mom - Digital Moms

Social Media=Mainstream
with more than 75% of Internet users actively participating in some form of social
media in 2008. That’s up from 56% in 2007.
36.2 million women in the U.S write and read
blogs every week and approximately half
consider blogs a “highly reliable” or “very
reliable” source of information and advice.
The 36.2 million women who actively
participate in the blogosphere is composed of:
(a)15.1 million who publish at least one post a
week (b)21.1 million who read and comment
to blogs a week.
50% of the women surveyed say blogs
influence their purchase decisions
Source: survey conducted by Compass Partners LLC, 2007,
Forrester Research October 2008
Six profiles of personalities present in social media:
1. The Creators, the consumers who produces, posts,
maintains a web page, uploads photos etc.
2. The Critic, the consumer who reviews and
recommends
3. The Collectors, the consumers who collects and
aggregates information
4. The Joiners, those consumers who maintain participate
and main profiles on social networking sites
5. The Spectators, those people who consume what the
other produce
6. The Inactives, those who do not participate at this time
• The number of “spectators” in the social web grew from
48% in 2007 to 69% in 2008.
• The number of “critics” grew from 25% to 37%.
• The number of “collectors” (reading RSS feeds, tagging
online content, etc.) grew to 19%.
• Blog or personal website publishers (i.e., “creators”) grew
from 18% to 21%.
• Participation is dominated by younger users, but use among
35-44 year-olds is growing rapidly, particularly among
“critics”, “joiners” and “spectators”.
- Forrester Report on Brandweek, October 2008
The Social Technographics
ladder according to how they use technologies.
Social Technographics classifies people
Creators make social
content go. They write
blogs or upload video,
music, or text
Collectors organize
content for themselves or
others using RSS feeds,
tags, and voting sites like
Digg.com
Spectators consume
social content including
blogs, user-generated
video, podcasts, forums, or
reviews
Source: Forrester Research, Inc. 2008
Publish a blog
Publish your own web pages
Upload video you created
Creators
Upload articles/stories & post them
Write articles or stories & post them
Critics respond to
content from others. They
Post ratings/reviews
post reviews, comment on
blogs, participate in Comment on someone else’s blog Critics
Contribute to online forums
forums, and edit wiki Contribute to/edit articles in a Wiki
articles
Use RSS feeds
Joiners connect in Add “tags” to web pages or photos Collectors
social networks like “Vote” for websites online
MySpace and Facebook
Maintain profile on a SN* site
Visit SN* sites Joiners
*Social Networking
Inactives neither create
nor consume social
content of any kind Read blogs
Watch videos from other users
Listen to podcasts Spectators
Read online forums
Read customer ratings/reviews
None of the above Inactives
 The Social Technographics
ladder
Creators
80
Age Group: 35- 44 years
75
71
68
Critics
60
Figures in %

40 42
39 Collectors
37
34
32 33
27 Use among 35-44
20 22 21 22 22
24 year-olds is
21 21
19 growing rapidly, Joiners
particularly among
“critics”, “joiners”
0
and “spectators”.
Creators Critics Collectors Joiners Spectators Inactives
Spectators
Male Female Not Specified

Inactives
Source: Forrester Research, Inc. 2008. Base: Forrester's North American Media & Marketing Online Survey, Q2 2008, 5,002 respondents.
Brands in
Social Media
a snap shot of brands in social media
 Graco has built a community around it’s products.
They have taken their strategy one step further by
introducing offline marketing in the form of
Flickr
community gatherings.

Graco Blog The pictures from these meet-ups are posted to the
Flickr page, further humanizing the community
around the product.

Graco has a blog and leverages Lindsay Lebresco (the

corporate blogger for Graco) to be active on Twitter.

The Ambassador Program brings the citizens of

Graco Nation closer & on a single platform

Graco Ambassador Program

http://eondm.com/graco/web/MemberMap.php
Barack Obama's online campaign for 2008 presidential elections
Starbucks created this site
to connect with customer
& get a better handle on
consumer feedback.

The site allows users to

submit suggestions to be
voted on by Starbucks
consumers, and the most
popular suggestions are
highlighted and reviewed.
Starbucks then took it a
step further and added an
“Ideas in Action” blog that
gives updates to users on
the status of changes
suggested.
“Sacrifice ten friends campaign on Facebook”

Recently, Burger King has really been

pushing the envelope with their
marketing. They first started with
whoppervirgins.com, then entered the
social space with the “sacrifice ten
friends” facebook application. The
campaign quickly went viral and was
adopted by over 20,000 users,
sacrificing 200,000 friends for free
Whoppers.

Facebook Fan Page

whoppervirgins.com
 Twitter You Tube

MySpace Profile

Digits Community

Virtual Character

Facebook
Monitoring
Reputation
Some tools to monitor brand’s reputation
 1. Google Alerts 4. Social Comments
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest
relevant Google results based on your choice of
query or topic. You can subscribe to each alert
through email and RSS. The alerts track blog posts,
news articles, videos and even groups.

2.Blog Posts Yacktrack lets you search for comments on your

content from various social media properties. You
can search “Chatter” tab, which allows you to
perform keyword searches on social media sites and
then notifies you of instances of your brand name.
[www.yacktrack.com]

5. Twitter

Search for your brand on Technorati, and subscribe

to RSS alerts so that when someone blogs about you,
you find out. [www.technorati.com]

Conduct a search for your name, your company’s

3.Blog Comments name, or various topics you’re interested in and then
subscribe via RSS. [www.twittwe.com].
www.Twilert.com and www.TweetBeep.com are
additional tools you can use to receive email alerts.

6. Interactive Search
Filtrbox only delivers the most relevant, credible
mentions of things you need to track. Its “FiltrRank”
technology scores content based on three dimensions:
contextual relevance, popularity and feedback.
Backtype is a tool for monitoring blog comments. If
- Free Trial: 15 days. [www.filtrbox.com].
people commented on various blog posts, citing your
- Pricing range from $10 - $50 / month
name, you never used to have a way of tracking it,
until now. [www.backtype.com]

Source: http://mashable.com/2008/12/24/free-brand-monitoring-tools/
 Search the
7. Social Search “mentions” in all
categories!

This is the overall

ranking

Tag cloud on
mentions on
blogosphere

These are the

sources of
Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content
such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging mentions about
services. It allows you to track mentions of your brand across all of these areas. ‘Hamilton Beach’

The results are aggregated from the top social media sources, such as Flickr,
YouTube, Digg, Delicious, Twitter and more. Like the other services, you can
subscribe to your results by RSS or email. Other social search engines include Serph
and Keotag. [www.socialmention.com] [www.serph.com] [www.keotag.com]
things to remember:
Be transparent. Share the good and the bad.
Be real & authentic. People want to connect with real people, not with plastic
packaged images.
Don’t breach the social contract by doing nothing but selling your wares.
(remember, social media is about interaction & building relationship)
Take interest in others and share valuable information, even if it doesn’t benefit
you directly.
Listen. You can learn a lot.
Be patient. Let things grow organically.
Viral campaigns can and do work, but they are the exception to the rule. (In
other words, only the masses have the power to deem something viral).
Being active on Twitter is great but tracking and seeing who’s mentioning you,
is the next step. Social media allows for the possibility of great customer
service, and with it, better brand loyalty.
Social Media is continuously changing, adopt quickly to leverage opportunities.
 s o c i al
y o u r
o t i n g v es
Pr o m it i a t i
d i a i n i n g It is very important to get the
m e v ert i s
h a d to
th r o u g
at d e a l whole organization behind it
a g r e
he lp s p l e , so before you prepare to get into
h pe o y
re a c s v e r
c i n gi Social
M social media
balan portant canno edia
t be
im silo’d
fro
compa m
ni
broade es
r
marke
ting No matter what you
activit
ies are out there to say,
consumers will
interact in any way
they want to.
Social
e r t a i n i n g you
More en t Marketing has
, b e t t e r i t w orks low media cost,
get
but high man
power demands

- Amy Worley, Director Digital Marketing, H&R Block, discusses the triumphs and pitfalls of H&R Blocks’ first ever social marketing initiative -
The four step approach
to social strategy
The POST Method

P PEOPLE: Assess your customers’ social activities

O OBJECTIVE: Decide what you want to accomplish

S STRATEGY: Plan for how relationships with customers

will change

T TECHNOLOGY: Decide which social technologies to use

Source: Forrester Research, Inc. 2007

 By Anish Shah
VCU Brandcenter | Creative Brand Management Track
03/31/2009 | www.anishvshah.com | avshah@vcu.edu

Will be eager to hear your comments!