Our fascination with the differences between men and women has spawned countless TV shows, hit songs, and best-selling books. And now we’re starting to understand how gender also influences social media use.
I began thinking about this while reading Porter Novelli’s EuroPNstyles research, conducted among consumers in the UK and other European countries by my colleague Melissa Taylor, EVP of strategic planning and research. Drilling down into the facts and stats around social media, several clear trends emerged showing that the same preferences and behaviours are being played out in the digital space just as they are offline.
Of course both sexes are highly engaged in social media, but our data indicates that women are using social channels to reinforce existing social connections, and to interact with friends and family. By contrast men demonstrate a clear bias toward showing or sharing status, and promoting their opinions to the wider world. Never mind Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus – today it seems Men are from Foursquare, Women are from Facebook.
I pulled some of these trends into a presentation that I gave today as part of Social Media Week London, here are a few UK highlights:
- Women are more socially active than men: 65% of women access social media at least once a week, compared with just 51% of men
- Women are more likely to connect with people they know: 93% of women using social media do so to read posts and view pictures from friends or to comment on their friends’ profiles. For men the numbers dropped to 89% and 84% respectively.
- UK women lead the rest of Europe in following brands to access deals and offers – this is the motivation for around 64% of women in social media, compared to a European average of just 52%, and 56% among UK men.
- Men are more likely to use social networks to display status and opinions. In the UK, 45% of men use social media to check into places compared with just 33% of women. Men are also happier to broadcast what they’re saying to the world: 35% of socially-savvy men are Twitter users compared to 27% of women.
- Men are also more active in the blogosphere: 54% of digitally-active men say they seek out other people’s blogs to read, compared with 46% of women. Men are more active bloggers than women too (34% vs 24%).
It’s interesting to see that Forrester, the Wall Street Journal, comScore and even Facebook are all seeing similar trends, although brands and marketers are not always following suit. As Forrester’s Tracy Stokes argues: “Women have the potential to drive a brand’s reputation online because compared with men, they are more connected with each other and like to talk about brands and products, especially in social media. But marketers, particularly in more male-oriented categories like finance, are not making a digital connection with women.”
It sounds simple but in this new era of communications, it’s not enough to know how to “do digital” – we still need to understand people and what influences them, regardless of the medium. Those brands that manage to combine social media savvy with human insights will maximise their chance of success.
Note: EuroPNStyles is an annual study conducted by Porter Novelli among more than 10,000 European consumers in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands (UK sample = 1,700 people). It reflects our agency’s belief that research uncovers insights which can trigger behavioural change.
A huge congratulations to our colleagues who have made Porter Novelli Spain the top PR agency in the country, according to Informe PRScope´11, a research study on the trends in the advertising industry and the perception and performance of PR agencies in Spain. This is an outstanding honor, particularly since the survey was fielded among 308 communications, media and marketing professionals across the country – more than 200 of whom were client-side marketing executives.
Porter Novelli earned the top tanking by scoring above the market average in 34 of the 41 categories that best categorize what a PR agency should be. Moreover, Porter Novelli was ranked first in nine categories, including: Best Knowledge of the Business Customer, Sector and Competition; Dedication and Enthusiasm; Best Team of Professionals; Best Service; Proactivity; Involvement of Managers/Directors; Effective Client Problem Solving; Best Methodology; and Best Value for the Money.
This is the second time Porter Novelli ranked prominently in the biennial survey, having been named number nine in 2009.
The PRScope survey was sponsored by Grupo Consultores, the leading specialist consulting firm in the marketing communications and media industries in Spain.
Congratulations to everyone at Porter Novelli Spain for earning this tremendous honor!
Nicholas Courant and Jurgen Mortier, senior consultant and director at Porter Novelli Brussels, respectively, co-authored a piece on the great art of brand storytelling. Can what’s old become new again for your brand?
Think about some of your favourite brands and the first things that spring to mind. Are they key messages, a company vision and mission? Probably not, right? Like most consumers, you’ll probably think of stories that characterize the brand for you: great customer experiences or moments in your life where the brand mattered to you.
And still, when you look at what most brands and companies provide on their websites and company literature, it’s all about vision, mission, strategy and press releases. No stories, just hard facts. No real emotions and real characters to which people relate, but very rational documents with well-crafted key messages.
Conquer the hearts and minds of your stakeholders
The real key to engage customers on a deeper, more emotional level lies in the ancient art of storytelling. No matter how many gadgets and hi-tech gizmos we might carry around, in the end we are living anachronisms: modern day mass-consumers with stone-age minds. And that mind, as evolutionary psychologists like Steven Pinker have argued, is particularly receptive to narratives.
So is it any wonder that in the age of social media, with its yearning for authenticity and credibility, brands are looking for ways to tell their own stories? Apple is probably one of the best examples of a company that has understood the importance of creating stories that resonate with customers. From the iconic 1984 Super Bowl ad to the Get a Mac series to Steve Jobs’ heartfelt Stanford Commencement Speech, Apple and its late CEO have a track record of great storytelling.
Many of the so-called “love brands” are in fact serial storytellers. Rather than trying to convince and explain, they inspire, share emotions and focus on authentic experiences. It’s often what differentiates them in the hearts and minds of their customers.
Keep talking
What’s more, you don’t have to be Apple to tell a great corporate story. Johnny Walker managed to turn a brand in decay into an inspirational brand with the Keep Walking campaign and Coca-Cola changed its marketing strategy when it realized its customers already tell more stories then they as a company ever will.
Within every organization, the stories are usually there, with each of your colleagues. The challenge is to open your eyes and ears and capture the stories. Go talk to your colleagues or listen to your customers and ask them how they perceive your brand. Take the critical perspective of a journalist to discover the various stories that are connected to your brand and start sharing them in your presentations, magazines, social media, etc. You might just find out that the ancient art of storytelling will revive your brand in today’s modern world.
Congratulations to Porter Novelli’s Sonia Sroka, senior vice president and director of Hispanic marketing, on being named a finalist in the PR News “CSR Professional of the Year” awards.
The awards “honor the most outstanding communications efforts powering corporate social responsibility and green initiatives. The finalists of the CSR Awards program set new standards of excellence and point the way for other organizations to follow.”
The full list of finalists includes:
- John Brock, Chairman and CEO, Coca-Cola Enterprises
- Zafar Brooks, Director, Government Relations and Diversity Outreach, Finn Partners
- Lewis Fix, VP, Sustainable Business and Brand Management, Domtar Corp.
- Michael Kempner, President and CEO, MWW Group
- Sonia Sroka, SVP, Director of Hispanic Marketing, & National Chairperson, National Diversity Council, Porter Novelli
The winner will be announced at an awards luncheon on April 17th in Washington, D.C.
Congratulations Sonia! 
The social media word of the week is “sharepocalypse.” Serial Internet entrepreneur Nova Spivack just launched Bottlenose, a tool designed to remedy the information overload induced by tweets and Facebook status updates. Tech pundits cite Zuckerberg’s Law, the prediction that the rate of information sharing doubles every year.
Facebook has encouraged this growth through subtle tweaks and wholesale overhauls of its platform, native content, and privacy settings. Increasing reach of status updates has been a key part of its strategy, beginning with the launch of an “Everyone” privacy setting June 2009 and followed by a new set of controls “encouraging” public sharing behavior in December 2009. The most recent changes to Facebook’s privacy controls came this past September, but so far no one has stepped up to the plate to investigate their effect.
Facebook is using social engineering to stimulate more sharing, but how successful have their revisions really been? We decided to investigate patterns in the growth of public status updates posted to the site.
The company doesn’t publicly release data on the ratio of public data to restricted data. The split in sharing has consequences for anyone mining Facebook for consumer insights, since the messages they have access to may not be representative of broader opinions. Like the drunk stubbornly looking for his keys under the lamppost because that’s the only place he can see, analyzing a flawed dataset may provide support but questionable illumination. So how can we start to understand how the new privacy options are changing sharing behavior?
To find out, Porter Novelli measured the volume of publicly posted English language status updates. Shockingly, the most recent changes have transformed sharing behavior in a way that seems to send Zuckerberg’s Law into retirement. Comparing average posting volume for the three-week periods pre- and post- settings change, public posting of status messages declined an astonishing 93%.
As new privacy controls launched the second week of September (the first dashed red line), the rate of status update sharing immediately declined as Facebook addicts opted-in to the update. The major changes announced at the F8 conference September 22nd (the second dashed red line) halted the slide, and sharing briefly increased. But the changes gradually rolled out over the span of a month, and the continued slide in volume indicates that users confronted with the new options tended to adopt more stringent privacy settings.
It would seem that Facebook’s changes are curbing sharing. Our hypothesis is that it’s much more likely that this behavior is not going away so much as it is transforming, from status updates to “frictionless sharing.” As Mark Zuckerberg noted in his Q&A session after this summer’s announcement of group chat and video calling, apps and mobile access increasingly drive social sharing. Ticker posts from applications broadcasting Washington Post news articles and Spotify tracks seem to be replacing deliberately posted status updates; only the most share-worthy updates are being deemed fit for public consumption.
What else can slow down social sharing? Facebook only rolled out their new privacy controls in September, which raises the question: What caused that big dip in activity in late August? This timeframe, signified by the yellow section of the line graph, is concurrent with Hurricane Irene’s journey up the Eastern Seaboard and subsequent landfall in the Northeast. Apparently, it takes an act of God to stop people from sharing on Facebook.
This post originally appeared on Commpro.biz on January 10, 2012.
At the end of 2011, a lot of people asked me for predictions on what 2012 will bring. I tend to shy away from questions like that, since I’m not an economist nor do I have a crystal ball. However, I do believe 2012 will be another interesting year and I expect many factors to shape it, including: the U.S. presidential election, the geopolitical landscape in the Middle East, the West’s debt crisis, stock market volatility, growth from the BRIC, the rise of the next 11 nations and consumer confidence – to name a few.
At the agency level, however, I can speak boldly. I believe that creativity and innovation must feature prominently in everything we do to serve our clients, and must co-exist with the ability to capture cost efficiencies. And I believe that we must focus on the following five pillars – and ensure that they are rooted in creativity and innovation – in order to maximize performance in 2012.
Diversity
Globally integrated markets and consumer bases—brought into sharp focus by digital and mobile’s ability to provide access to worldwide communication platforms cheaply and instantly—have redefined the principle of diversity for all organizations. No one can afford to hold on to the misperception of diversity as something that has to do with quotas or staffing window dressing.
Diversity now resides at the core of success, particularly for brands and agencies. If the world is truly now flat, then the ability to think strategically and holistically, while understanding global behaviors and customs, is going to be critical. Organizations must transform their definition of diversity to mean inclusion—not only along race, religion and gender lines, but at all skill sets and levels of experience—to drive greater participation and wider perspective.
Talent
Make no mistake: The war for talent is still upon us. Even during periods of recession or slowing economies, good people are always going to be in high demand. But 2012 is going to be less about attracting talent and more about engaging talent. Over the past few years, many organizations capitalized on widespread economic turmoil and financial uncertainty by hiring talent at a lower cost, but then didn’t really know what to do with the people they had onboard.
Consequently, there a lot of extremely talented and qualified people who now feel disengaged. They don’t really know where they fit in their organization or how to contribute at the top of their skill sets. So they put their heads down and focus their efforts at keeping their jobs by maintaining a status quo, rather than engaging in the kind of innovative thinking and creative risk taking that will put them on the radar—and drive success. For organizations to move forward in 2012, they will need to find more effective ways to utilize and engage talent.
Social Media
At this point, social media is clearly not a fad, a game or a distraction. It has changed the landscape of engagement immeasurably, it is here to stay, and it needs to be learned, embraced and—most importantly—leveraged effectively. Of course, the ever-intensifying discipline of analytics and the critical role of influencers will continue to be paramount. But as social media now inexorably intertwines itself into our daily lives, those concepts and roles will occur at a fundamentally more micro level.
The concept that everyone is a brand is not a new one—but social media has truly intensified the potential to leverage personal branding to drive influence in increasingly tighter and concentric social circles. Particularly for agencies, this presents unprecedented opportunity, but also significant challenges. Since significant influence will take place within ever-smaller networks, communications professionals must balance specific and appropriate insights without devising the strategic equivalents of angels dancing on the head of a pin. Understanding and improving ROI is not going away, so it will be critical to dovetail micro strategic understandings into larger efforts that can drive real business results in meaningful and substantial ways.
Leadership
There is never a year where sound leadership is not important, but in 2012, strong leadership will be more critical than ever. As the concept of crisis moves from headlines to the new normal, leaders must now have an almost innate ability to guide talent through change, ambiguity and uncertainty—on a daily basis. Effective leadership is making sure that your staff has a clear understanding of where the organization is going and that they feel excited about their roles in helping the organization get there. At all levels, leaders are going to need to be more engaged in order to deliver the level of clarity needed to succeed—and to make sure that there is both accountability and recognition of efforts.
The past several years have been marked by a severe lack of leadership. There has been much talk and very little action. And while a lot of managers are going to have to take a hard look in the mirror in 2012, the upside of all this is that in many organizations, leaders have emerged from unexpected places. These leaders are the future of their organizations, and their efforts need to be recognized and encouraged. It is exactly these traits—the ability to step up and drive results, the understanding of how to track success and when to course correct, the initiative to assess opportunities and take measured risks—that will mean the difference between success and failure moving forward.
Growth
Managing cost structures and increasing operating efficiencies will always be an imperative—but most organizations have already done that by now and will continue to manage their structure. It is simply part of today’s normal business process. Moving into the New Year, attention must turn to growth, the key to which will be found in three specific areas.
The first is product differentiation—either through total innovation or improvement to existing services. The second is creativity, truly the lifeblood of success, which has been consistently deemphasized in the rush to reduce costs and increase efficiency. The third is exceptional client service and quality. Always incredibly important, the level of client service has not been dramatically improved upon in the past few years. Certainly tighter client budgets have played a role in this. But in 2012, it will be critical to strengthen trust—between clients and agencies, and between consumers and brands. That trust will be built on the principle of great service—internally and externally. Without it, growth will be difficult, if not impossible.
All organizations are looking forward to a year that rewards efforts with success, and exceptionally executed strategy with results. In 2012, I would not be surprised if the degree of success an organization enjoys is in direct proportion to how quickly and effectively it is able to incorporate these core principles at all levels.
I was recently interviewed by Sageworks, a leading publication for financial professionals, about my thoughts on what CFOs must do to balance growth and capture efficiencies.
In the column “CFO’s Corner,” I discuss challenges we’ve faced and how we’ve overcome them with financial leadership, my point of view on how to make the company stand out and be successful, and how to retain strategic vision in the face of daily operations.
Click here to read the interview in full.
Congratulations to our network partner C&F Porter Novelli for being named PR Agency of the Year in Nigeria! The award was presented by MarketingWorld, a leading African marketing publication, in a ceremony held on December 9 at the Federal Palace Hotel in Lagos.
According to the organizers: “C&F Porter Novelli was named winner due to its impressive and varied client list, creative work and strong results. C&F Porter Novelli boasts a number of long-term clients. We have also looked for financial growth, client roster growth, client and employee retention, client satisfaction, good HR practices, innovation and creativity. C&F Porter Novelli has shown consistency, and excels in all these.”
On winning the award, Nn’emeka Maduegbuna, C&F Porter Novelli’s chairman, noted that this recognition would serve to motivate the agency to constantly deliver cutting-edge service to the Nigerian business scene.
Though overall online conversation doubled for both, Black Friday still leads Cyber Monday as the dominant holiday shopping tradition in social media conversation with 3.5 times more mentions. To kick off the holiday shopping season, the Porter Novelli Digital Analytics team measured public social media conversations to see how people talked about Black Friday and Cyber Monday online. For both shopping days, we looked at any mention of Black Friday or Cyber Monday on Facebook and Twitter on that day in 2010 and 2011.
Some of the key findings from our analysis:
- Despite widespread news coverage of in-store incidents on Black Friday, these incidents did not dominate online discussion on that day.
- Most retailers increased their coverage from last year. The growth in conversation far outpaced the increased sales.
- Walmart led conversation on Black Friday, while Amazon was the winner for Cyber Monday volume.
- Retailers with digital as a primary sales channel (Amazon, Apple’s iTunes and App Store and Groupon) had a higher share of voice on Cyber Monday than Black Friday. Conversely, for “big box” stores like Walmart and Target, more conversation took place on Black Friday than Cyber Monday.
- Barack Obama and Ellen DeGeneres’ Twitter accounts reached the most people with information relevant to Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Barack Obama and Ellen DeGeneres led the list of top Black Friday and Cyber Monday tweeters for 2011 (by reach) with Ellen’s Cyber Monday tweets getting retweeted almost 1,000 times more than the President’s. Other celebrities and news outlets filled out the rest of the top five with Jimmy Fallon and CNN among leaders for retweets.
The team also identified some of the top retailers within the conversation. All of the top brands that emerged within social media conversation saw an increase in volume of Facebook and Twitter mentions on Black Friday and Cyber Monday from 2010 to 2011, except Groupon which was buoyed last year by Google buyout rumors. Walmart, Apple, Amazon, Target and Best Buy had the highest total volume. Even though its conversation volume was low compared to other brands, H&M had the greatest percent growth in post volume from 2010 to 2011 with an increase of 276%.
2011 Grady Fellowship Inductees, left to right, Conrad Fink, Bill Simpson, Julie Moran, Julie Winskie and Arnold Punaro. Photo courtesy of The Grady College of the University of Georgia
Congratulations to Julie Winskie, our global president, clients, for being named to the 2011 class of the Grady Fellowship, from The University of Georgia Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. According to the university, The Grady Fellowship “honors individuals whose lives and careers of service and inspiration contribute measurably to the reputation the College enjoys and lead us forward.”
Seventy-eight of the 20,000 graduates of Grady College and UGA have been named to the Grady Fellowship since its inception, and are recognized for their long-standing service to the college’s mission and the media professions, from journalism to the creative industries to the creative world. For many years, Julie has mentored Grady students and just this past summer she met with a team of undergraduates who had traveled to France to witness the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.
Porter Novelli boasts a long and proud relationship with UGA’s Grady College, as several current and former colleagues have served on the Grady alumni board.
Brad MacAfee has been a member of the board of trustees of Grady College for the past two years and serves as an advisor-in-residence for the college. Porter Novelli is a proud sponsor of ADPR Connection, the college’s advertising and public relations thought-leadership event which attracts 450 students and 80 professionals each year.
Just this week we announced the formation of the Omnicom/Grady Future Leaders Fellowship through which students and graduates of UGA’s Grady College can now gain first-hand, comprehensive multidisciplinary marketing experience through a six-month fellowship hosted by several Omnicom Group agencies including BBDO Atlanta, Porter Novelli, Ketchum and Fleishman-Hillard.
Julie’s honor, and Porter Novelli’s dedication to supporting a variety of programs at the college, signal our lasting commitment to nurturing the next generation of communications experts.