Women's New Media

Tune in to Mom's Rising

Actually, tune in tonight to ABC's 20/20 and you will get a chance to see an interview with Joan Blades, co-founder of MomsRising.org. MomsRising is a terrific grassroots organization championing political, social and economic issues in support of families.

They've recently released a new film called The Motherhood Manifesto featuring facts, stories and humor about motherhood.

If you don't have time to watch the show tonight like many busy parents, you can watch a YouTube trailer for the film or buy a copy for yourself for only $6 from MomsRising.org.

momsrising motherhood parenting

 

Women Use The Web for Health, Fitness and Nutrition

Women are using the Internet in increasing numbers to visit top Health, Fitness and Nutrition sites.  The top 6 sites visited are WebMD, Weight Watchers, About Health and Fitness, drugstore.com, Walgreens and Yahoo!Health. Women make up a total of 57.3% of visitors to health and wellness sites. It's interesting to see the breakout of visitors by age bracket:

• 50% of them are 45+
• 37% are 35-49
• 25% are 55+
• 16% are 25-34

Not your typical internet user demograhic. 

See the MediaPost Report

Gift Giving by Women

VoiceQuilt, a company that creates audio albums to share with friends and family, released a survey on Trends in Gift Giving, noting that:

• Fifty percent of women say they purchased one to five gifts online in the last year
• Thirteen percent say they purchased six to 10 gifts online in the last year
• Three percent say they purchased 11 to 19 gifts online in the last year
• Four percent say they purchased 20 or more gifts online in the last year

They also found that while women say it’s easier to buy gifts for children, they often save the ‘best gift’ for their spouse or significant other. For more interesting details on gift giving, you can download the survey summary at VoiceQuilt.

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.

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.

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.

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.

News on HER Time

News on HER Time – Women need to be able to pick and choose the time of day they consume news and information. Many TV/radio news shows are missed because it simply is not convenient to watch TV or listen to the radio when they are being broadcast.  The stories may be of extreme interest but the timing is poor.  The chances of a woman being available for the 6:00 news is about as likely as a blizzard in Hawaii.  Six o’clock at most houses are a time of mass chaos - women are getting home from work, kids are demanding help with homework, dinner is being prepared, etc... Newspapers can be read when the reader chooses but a woman might only have 15 minutes of free time to get the news and it happens to be while she’s in the car driving, which might make reading the newspaper a bit tough.  And…there’s a good chance that she will get in the car after the hourly news broadcast has already gone by. 

Lessons Learned from TV Players - Time Shifting has caught on in a big way with the slew of “On Demand” TV offerings on the market.  Time Shifting is defined in Wikipedia as the recording of a television show to some storage medium to be viewed at a time that is more convenient to the consumer.  In cable television broadcasting, time shifting may also refer to the availability of network affiliate from different time zones, serving a similar function of making television programs available at multiple times throughout the day.  The news industry (newspaper, radio, TV) could benefit from applying the lessons learned from the success of their content peers.  It’s likely that time considerations have driven the trend towards people getting more of their news from the internet – they can get news when they want it and they can get it quickly.  Women would consumer more news if they could get it on thier timing.