Women's New Media

The Scoop on Video Training

When I started my first real job as a counter waitress at Howard Johnson's a few years (decades?) back, the only training I received was a 2 minute show and tell around the counter. I knew where the ice cream and soda fountain were and where the bowls and glasses were but that's about it. The first customer that asked me for an ice cream float got a big surprise. The ice cream was floating but I'm not sure what it was floating in to this day. I am sure however, that the customer never came back to HoJo's looking for a float. Today, companies concerned about ramping up new employees faster are turning to online games rather than relying on other employees to do informal training.

Coldstone Creamery, Cisco and Canon are using video games to get more employees engaged in training programs. Business Week reports that the 'serious games' market makes up about 15% of the online gaming market and will grow to roughly $100 million in revenue in the next five years. A manager at Coldstone claimed that over 8,000 employees downloaded their ice cream scooping game in the first week it was available.

Real Estate & Social Computing

Charline Li has an in-depth post about her recent experiences with online real estate tools and the impact of social computing on traditional real estate business models. The post is worth reading just for the thorough review of real estate sites and tools, but she also makes several interesting points. The real estate industry is going through a major shift driven by social computing. The power is moving from the realtor to the consumer and surprise, surprise, many of them are women.

Tips for Coping with Stress

There's been a lot of talk the last few days about the effect of stress on women. Need to figure out how to deal with stress? Well if you're a woman and even barely alive, I'll guarantee that you're dealing with stress in your life, career or relationships. Here's some help for those with a budget and a little time and for those with just 10 minutes to spare:

1. Sign up for the next Camp Bombshell, a 3-day camp run by six women from Miami where harried women can bond over archery and canoeing or "sit on the porch and smoke cigarettes".
2. Visit the Health section of BBC's website for tips on Coping with Stress - As the BBC put it 'We're not weak or neurotic because we're stressed - we're stressed because we're human.'
3. Watch a quick Video program from the National Geographic on the difference between physical stress and psychological stress - yes the latter form is reason why you gain weight when stressed.

Disney to Launch Podcast Ads

AdAge reported that Disney is going to begin placing Ads in their weekly Disney Radio podcasts targeted at children starting in June 06. While it isn't surprising that they are finding another way to monetize their content and their brand, it raises an interesting question: Should advertisers create their own podcasts or jump on the backs of other companies? 

Disney reports that they have had over 170,000 downloads of their podcasts already.

It's Not News to Me

The other day I warned the online news industry that if they didn't start providing deeper content, they were not going to appeal to the large numbers of women hungrily looking for rich information across news sites, blogs, podcasts and online communities. The Project for Excellence in Journalism just came out with a new study on the state of the media showing the decline in jounalism where more and more outlets repeat fewer and fewer stories. The lack of original thinking and minimal effort placed on new investigation has driven many people like myself away from relying on traditional news sources, seeking information from ever more niche non-traditional news sites and blogs.

Forrester Lauds Social Computing

Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion pointed out a new Forrester report that describes the importance of social computing and communities to companies and their employees:

To thrive in an era of Social Computing, companies must abandon top-down management and communication tactics, weave communities into their products and services, use employees and partners as marketers, and become part of a living fabric of brand loyalists.

I haven't read the report yet but if you are a Forrester customer, I'd recommend reading it. If you don't have access to the report, Steve provides a really interesting graphic from the report on his site that highlights a wide variety of social computing technologies (RSS, blogs, search engines, podcasts...) and data points about usage today.

Online News Appeals Equally to Women and Men

The Center for Media Research released a new briefing on March 10th that included data from Nielsen/Netratings Netview showing that men and women are practically equal in their consumption of current event and news information at online sites. Viewership for males is 50.04% vs. 49.96 for females.

The study also reveals viewership by age group but doesn't indicate gender breakouts by age group which would have been very interesting. While reach metrics are not accurate indicators of true viewer impressions they provide a good benchmark for trending. Women prefer deeper content on news they care about yet the top 3 online news and current events sites by impressions (Yahoo! News, MSNBC, CNN) generally don't go too deep in their online reporting often posting brief summaries from broadcast news or passing through news releases and wire stories. With the increasing presence of female viewers to news sites, it's time for some good old fashioned reporting to make a comeback.

Online Ads & Communities Help Marketers Reach Local Audiences

Heidi Cohen, who is a columnist for the ClickZ Network, raised some interesting points in a recent article about local advertising. Many retailers, local news organizations and regional businesses still haven’t done much online advertising yet because they feel that people will find them through word of mouth, store visits or the yellow pages. While they are sitting on the sidelines, many of their readers and patrons are being influenced by online discussions rather than local print and TV ads. People are reading about their favorite stores, local events and service providers on blogs, community forums and discussion boards that are available 24x7.

Not everyone may be online yet but in most households, someone is online everyday with access to local information for teens through seniors.  So what are people looking for in local information? Just about everything you can think of:

Women with Money to Spend

Marketing to teenage girls has pre-occupied many mainstream retail clothing stores since the burst in buying power of teens in the 90's. Thanks to the aging boomer population, marketing to their mothers is the next big thing.

The Boston Globe reported on this phenomenon yesterday with an interesting chart from NPD Group showing the age distribution of women and the growing importance of the over 45 crowd for fashionistas.

Two locally headquartered national retailers, Talbots and J. Jill may join forces soon to create the nations largest specialty chain focused on women over 35.

Who's Feeling Rushed? Just Ask A Working Mom

Pew Research Center just released a report today titled "Who's Feeling Rushed? (Hint: Ask a Working Mom.)  The report focuses on how much people report feeling "rushed."   It's sad to say, nearly one quarter of all Americans feel rushed.  Not surprisingly, people who always feel rushed say they are not as satisfied with many aspects of thier lives - even when hiring outside help.  The aspect of being rushed impacts more women than men with working mothers taking the prize for being the most affected.  Twenty six percent of working fathers "always feel rushed" vs. forty one percent of working mothers.  No doubt there is a correlation between Americans feeling rushed and the growth in new media and internet usage - with time savings being cited as a major benefit.  Women's are a driving force in the growth of both cellphone and internet use - it's no coincendence that both are major timesavers for women.