Archive for July, 2008
Move over Queen bee. That consumer who expressed her status through the clothes, homes, and cars she purchased. Even through career and family. A new force for the new media age has arrived: the Gamma woman, or girl as the case may be.
Who is she? Using Hollywood as a guidepost (with all the caveats that apply), forget Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada”– major Alpha. Think the hip and tech-savvy Ellen Page in “Juno.”
The new hero/archetype on the silver screen may also be the new prize for marketers. At least that’s one of the implications of the latest news from media powerhouse Meredith, publisher of such established and far-reaching women’s titles as Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle, Ladies’ Home Journal, MORE, Parents, Fitness, and American Baby.
A Gamma, the company reports on its new microsite, is one of 55 million American women whose “choices are about expressing their creativity and personal style… and doing their part to preserve the environment.” She is guided by her “internal beliefs, passions, and priorities… [and] motivated by the desire to interact, rather than to impress.” Take that alphas.
Now if Juno is not who leaps to mind when you read about Gammas (especially in light of that, um, teen pregnancy thing), that’s OK. What stands out for me is the emphasis on expression of creativity and personal style. As it apparently does for the ever increasing number of women and moms publishing blogs and Twitter tweets. In this sense, the difference between Alpha and Gamma does feel a lot like the difference between Anna Wintour’s Vogue and, say, a Heather Armstrong of dooce.com. (see previous post Mom as the Truman Show for more about dooce)
Gammas are “creating a groundswell in today’s new media and marketing landscape,” says Meredith on its microsite and materials. “Using multiple media—both online and off—to share ideas, information, and recommendations with her vast network.”
Perhaps not totally new news to some consumer marketers who’ve followed this emerging discussion over the past years. But the deeper dive they provide gives shape to what looks like a trend–if not a conversational or a cultural shift–that’s worth a harder look at. Particularly the social networking virtues Gamma women possess.
Sounds like another part of the new wave of advocacy to me. And whether it’s a Greek letter like Gamma that helps define your audience mindset or something else, the key is to understand the conversation that engages them. And if your audience is anything like Juno, what she’ll tell you is that: “I could so go for like a huge cookie right now like with a lamb kabob simultaneously.” I’m hungry how about you?
Image: Sheryl Nields
We always wondered what might happen. If someday the undeniable power of advocacy were combined with the irresistible taste of cheese. Well, that day has finally come, according to this on-the-lighter-side story in Advertising Age this week. At least as far as this one local Chelsea neighborhood market in NYC is concerned.
Rogue word-of-mouth for rock band Van Halen (whose song lyrics adorn the label) or an altogether better marketing cheddar? We honestly may never know.
The year was 1995. The then first-term mayor of New York city Rudy Giuliani was making his third nationally televised appearance on the CBS program “Late Show With David Letterman.” They were doing this bit where Mr. Letterman offered the mayor a chance to select a new slogan to increase tourism in New York City. Speaking to camera with great gusto, Mr. Giuliani picked from among the slogans and famously uttered these words, which were simultaneously flashed live on the Jumbotron in Times Square: “We can kick your city’s ass.” This, as David Firestone wrote in the New York Times at the time, was one of those moments that helped to “burnish [Rudy Giuliani's] reputation for creative political pugilism.”
Of course, as is the stock and trade of late night television, this was all just “schtick.” A joking motto. Yet it captured, in Mayor Giuliani’s own words, “the spirit of the city.”
What’s up with the throwback trivia? This recent post from Heather Dougherty, director of research at Hitwise, about the geographic divide of social networks caught my eye. And, as you will soon see, gives the mayor’s famous quote brand new meaning for today’s MySpace and Facebook crowd.
While it’s never taken much to fan the flames of local city pride, not least between New York City on the East Coast and Los Angeles on the West, it now appears top social network sites MySpace and Facebook are not as borderless or as untethered to the offline world as we might have thunk. Especially when it comes to the big US cities.
To review, MySpace continues to be the largest social network in the US, according to Hitwise. It’s market share of visits was 3.5x that of Facebook for the week ending July 19, 2008. But Facebook is gaining. It’s traffic grew 23% when compared to the same week last year while MySpace was down 29%. But size is one thing. Where the users are located, blogs Heather, is another:
We have recently launched a tool at Hitwise where our clients can access DMA® level data for both websites and categories to understand the share of traffic from local regions. As an example… for the 4 weeks ending July 19, 2008… the top DMA for MySpace is LA while the top DMA for Facebook is NYC- which is not surprising considering that these two cities are the 2 largest DMAs in overall size and tend to be significant for most national websites.
When comparing the DMAs of the 2 websites to one another, an interesting trend pops out – MySpace visitors are more likely to be located on the west coast while Facebook has heavier representation on the East Coast (the coasts where each company was started). The 20 DMAs with the highest representation index for MySpace when compared to Facebook, meaning the likelihood of the visitor to go to MySpace vs. Facebook… are all located on the west coast. The trend is also illustrated… when looking at the top 10 DMAs for MySpace, where the West Coast DMAs dominate. When the situation is reversed to compare Facebook to MySpace, the East Coast and Midwest becomes more prevalent.
Does this mean MySpace is a social network that is like, omg, totally hot and Facebook is a place where it’s better to fuggetaboutit? Could Facebook make good on the former mayor’s motto and kick, in a digital minute, some MySpace gluteus maximus? Me, I’m a New Yorker and a Facebook member. So how you doin’?
Wherever your networking takes you, the Hitwise’s DMA research helps to underscore a point that often gets missed in the social media discussion today: how there’s actually a strong link between offline social networks and their online counterparts. Between citizens and netizens. Grassroots and netroots. Between those we friend and those who simply are our friends.
And while I couldn’t agree more that the world is increasingly flat, it’s clear our burgeoning digital shoots still have some very real world roots–and possibly some geographic limitations. Even for the top social networking sites going in the US today.
For more background on the inter-relationship between offline and online social networks, see Now that you’re blogging, don’t forget face-to-face. And let us know your thoughts about MySpace and Facebook. I’ll be doing some friends-and-family research of my own in the meantime starting with our New York and LA offices. Now how do you think that will go? Fuggetaboutit!
Image credit: www.thephoenix.com
In the wake of the massive earthquake that devastated parts of western China, another powerful force — badvocacy — has been responsible for wrecking reputations.
We’ve all heard the story of schools that collapsed. But the most destructive case of badvocacy comes from a school that remained intact.
Students in Dujiangyan, 100 km from the epicenter, emerged from their school without a scratch. But the student’s teacher, surnamed Fan, made an ill-fated escape minutes before them. As soon as the ground started shaking, Teacher Fan had ran out of the classroom screaming “earthquake,” leaving his middle-school pupils paralyzed at their desks.
Then came the aftershocks.
As millions of Chinese went online for the latest quake coverage, the tale of Teacher Fan spread across the Internet — where netizens gave him the nickname “Runner Fan.”
In response to an online jury of his peers, Runner Fan wrote on popular Chinese BBS, Tianya, that neither his students nor his mother merited self-sacrifice, only his own daughter. Netizens, and presumably his mother, were outraged.
That Runner Fan will receive a fair trial by China’s netizens is doubtful. He probably did not break any laws — especially the law of evolution — by ensuring his own survival. But his cowardice and unconvincing comeback can teach students of advocacy (and badvocacy) something about the “cloud of witnesses” that now surround us.
Someone once told me that integrity is doing the right thing when no one is watching. But in the Internet age, integrity is obsolete. With everyone logging on, there’s always someone watching. And the sharing abilities of social networks, blogs and BBS means that any tale — true of false — can have a destructive ripple effect.
How one responds that will determine the damage.
I was meandering around Google today and came across my colleague’s blog that featured a cool video on digital advocacy. I thought it would be a good addition to the site so I am including it here too. My colleague in London, Jonny Rosemont, will probably say it is okay. He is an interactive and media consultant with Weber Shandwick London and in fact, designed this great looking web site. So we are used to stealing his great work and ideas.
Click here for a brief history of digital history to present day. It is very interesting and describes how far we have come as digital advocates and believers. Digital advocacy had just about reached the White House until the secret service put a stop to it. Watch and learn why.
It is important to recognize that companies can be advocates too. An article in today’s Sunday New York Times Business section described how advocates’ P&G, Colgate-Palmolive and Unilever worked with anthropologist Val Curtis. Curtis was interested in getting people in underdeveloped countries to regularly wash their hands with soap. Many diseases and disorders are caused by dirty hands (a child dies every 15 seconds from diarrhea) and many deaths could be prevented if people only washed their hands consistently. But it had to be turned into a learned habit. Dr. Curtis, now in charge of the Hygiene Center at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, approached the three multinationals because she realized that they have been successful at ingraining habits among consumers to use their products. She figured that with their knowledge of consumer behavior they could help her make hand-washing part of people’s daily routine– just as we brush our teeth, chew gum after meals, etc. The companies’ knowledge from product development and selling helped Dr. Curtis understand how to create messages and design ads for Ghanaians to increase hand washing with soap. And the figures are showing that hand washing is up dramatically. These companies became advocates by helping solve a social issue that had been unobtainable till now. As Dr. Curtis says in response to criticism about using marketing tactics to change behavior, “But those tactics also allow us to save lives. If we want to really help the world, we need every tool we can get.” It’s worth reading the whole story. But the lesson to be learned is that companies can use their intellectual capital to change behavior and save lives.
The name of the game today is community.
Whether your mission is to grow a brand or strengthen a corporate reputation, an increasingly important goal is not just communicating or marketing to an audience. But developing the relationships and conversations that create a true community. Stronger community means stronger advocacy, research continues to demonstrate. Which leads, ultimately, to stronger future growth.
Well, like Yogi Berra said, the future ain’t what it used to be…
The nature of community–where, how and why we connect and relate to one another in society or don’t for that matter–is changing. Dramatically. And not necessarily for the better, according to the authors of the recent book The Big Sort. Who see in three decade’s worth of data signs that America is no longer the national melting pot it once was. But a group of increasingly like-minded, self-selecting individual communities. Homogeneous as much in the lifestyles we choose to pursue as in the political beliefs we hold. The result, they argue, makes cultural understanding harder and politics more bitter. Familiar taste?
Says Big Sort author Bill Bishop, as quoted recently in the The Economist:
“We now live in a giant feedback loop… hearing our own thoughts about what’s right and wrong bounced back to us by the television shows we watch, the newspapers and books we read, the blogs we visit online, the sermons we hear and the neighbourhoods we live in.”
Now, our interest in the ideas raised in the Big Sort is not about politics, though the implications are concerning enough. But in how communities of customers and consumers can be forged around brands and businesses–where advocacy can be fostered and flourish–despite our increasingly fragmented society here in the U.S and potentially abroad.
This difference in focus, however, doesn’t change the bigger picture all that much we find. The world of consumers, like that of politics, is becoming dramatically different and fragmented, too. If not altogether older and more risk-averse, according to Advertising Age’s The Changing Face of the U.S. Consumer. The article by Peter Francese, who founded American Demographics, provides an in-depth look into the key demographic trends, many of which point to a “big sort” not just between neighbors and geographies, confirming what Bishop found. But between generations and what we could call mindsets:
The online youthful and mostly wireless consumer inhabits a world far apart from the older consumer who subscribes to a newspaper and uses a telephone directory. The college-educated consumer with a white-collar job in a wired office has much less in common and much less interaction with the high-school-educated, blue-collar worker than in the past. Their product and brand preferences can diverge just as widely as their views on issues such as free trade, gay marriage and global warming… It’s hard to overstate the attitudinal gulf between a Prius-owning, environmentally aware consumer and the driver of an [SUV] who thinks global warming is just a bogus scheme to take away his or her 3-ton tank.
A key tenet of advocacy often discussed on these pages and with our clients is how people are increasingly looking to each other for news, information and recommendations today (see: Dox populi for a discussion on this trend in healthcare). This fundamentally changes how we must communicate and engage. Works like the Big Sort and by Peter Francese show that demography does appear to be destiny. We’re melding less in America and splintering more. Making national politics, on the one hand, look a lot like Humpty Dumpty with a bad case of cement poisoning.
But is that the case when it comes to building communities that build everything from simple connections to deeper knowledge and stronger brands? Books like Forrester’s Groundswell make a powerful case for how social media is not about technology (follow someone like Jeremiah Owyang for a few laps around Twitter and you’ll soon see why). But about people — like-minded people who are reaching across traditional barriers to create powerful communities and networks in growing numbers. Putting the shattered shell of society back together again. Or creating an altogether new kind of Phoenix as some might argue.
The challenge, of course, is that it’s not all one thing or the other. There’s both gridlock and groundswell out there in abundant quantities. Since the most powerful communities–and by extension advocacy–involve both the offline and the online world (see: Now that you’re blogging, don’t forget face-to-face), our challenge is to chart the smartest course between.
Image credit: www.adage.com
