Where are the Women?

A few weeks ago a comment on Mashable regarding the lack of women users of Google+ made me take notice. According to their article, SocialStatistics estimated that in July Google+ had  87% male users, which obviously meant that only a tiny amount of its users were female. This huge male domination Mashable attributed to the fact that Google+ had appealed mainly to techies upon its launch, which I guess unfortunately has some truth to it.

Anyhow, following the huge amount of publicity over the last few months it would have been strange if this percentage would stay as skewed in favour of the male gender as it was so I decided to check up on this again.

So today I checked out SocialStatistics for an update on the divide. SocialStatistics track 83,621 Google+ profiles to reach

conclusions on a variety of issues of possible interest, among them the gender divide issue. And sure enough, male can still be seen as the dominant gender on Google+, but at least the divide is becoming more even as males are now only making up 68.6% of the users, with females closing in on the gap at 30.3%

In Mashable’s article they checked another site as well to confirm the divide so I decided to have a look at that as well. The site they used was FindPeopleOnPlus.com and at that time the percentage of male users according to them was actually “only” 74% compared to SocialStatistics 87%. I would say the discrepancy comes from the fact that at that point Google+ was fairly new and hence the sites compiling the statistics would also be fairly new and possibly facing some small issues in establishing reliable figures, but also from the fact that SocialStatistics uses a much smaller pool of people for their figures than what FindPeopleOnPlus does.

A quick peak on FindPeopleOnPlus shows us that the figures have indeed become more similar, posing a more reliable result for what the gender divide really is. The results here show male users making up 68.9% of all users versus the females making up 30.2%. The question that remains is, how long will it take for us to reach a more equal 50%-50% divide?

Now that we know Google+ worked like a charm for techies (and hence male users), what will the similar success story for females be?

Google + Games vs. Facebook the New Battlefield over Female Casual Gamers?

Most of you must have seen the latest moves in the games market where Google+ has begun to roll out their new Games tab. This tab will include access to 16 different games from 10 app developers and will feature such popular games as “Angry Birds,” and “Bejeweled Blitz”.

Compared to Facebook, this is nothing, yet. With an estimated 25 million users, approximately 3% of what Facebook has, Google+ is not yet ready to rival the popular social platform but it is a nice platform for game developers. Initially Google is only taking  a 5 percent cut of the in-game transactions compared to a much higher 30 percent taken by Facebook. What is left to be seen though is  what the final commission will be.

In contrast to Facebook, who just a day after Google’s announcement on Thursday went even further by adding a bunch of  developments to its games platform, Google’s structure for games will not show the never ending stories that originate from games in the main stream. In a much more discreet style, those interested can navigate to the Games tab and check out what their friends have been up to. What remains to be seen is how the games developers will react to this, especially since Facebook developers reported reduced visibility of their games when the platform recently clamped down on game related spam in the news feed.

Even if the industry has been awash with rumors regarding a possible Games addition to the Google family, there are still a lot of questions around the new venture as well as a lot of interesting possibilities. The Games tab started rolling out to users on August 11 and will be available to all users in the coming days so I guess we will hear more and more from the users and not just the developers with regards to what they think about it.

Another interesting thing to be seen over the following days is what camp the large chunk of women gamers fall into. Will Facebook be favored over Google + or will Google + manage to crack the code and sneak into the virtual worlds and mobiles of women as successfully as Facebook did?

Super Bowl and Courting Women Viewers

This week Nielsen reported on the record numbers of African American, Hispanic and female viewers that helped propel this year’s  Super Bowl XLV to become the most-watched television program of all time. This year’s Super Bowl (111,4 million viewers)  surpassed the ATH set by last year’s Super Bowl (106.5 million viewers) as the  most watched TV program in U.S. history and kicked the leading final episode of M*A*S*H (105.5 million viewers in 1983) off the top.

Part of this success came from the increasing amount of Hispanic and African American viewers. This year about 10 million Hispanics watched the game (surpassing last year’s figure was 8.3 million viewers) while 12.5 million African American tuned in as well (surpassing last year’s figure of 11.2 million).

Part of this success came from the increasing amount of female viewers that Super Bowl XLV attracted. According to Nielsen, about 51.2 million female viewers watched Sunday’s game, compared to 48.5 million female viewers last year, meaning that we are closing in on a 50% – 50% split in gender now for the viewers of Super Bowl spectacle, even if it still continues to be dominated by male viewers.

Just like so many other industries (gambling and casual games especially) the sports industry has started looking towards women and ethnic groups when trying to grow their viewer numbers.

As previously reported by Nielsen, more American women watch the NFL than any other team sport, and not just the Super Bowl.  The NFL (regular season) has by now surpassed Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association in percentage of female viewers, to a large extent thanks to the extensive investment in various marketing ploys catering to the female viewer.

One can only hope that the slightly embarrassing female targeted version of ESPN,  ESPNW will soon start picking up on some of these “radical” marketing techniques (coaching clinics, apparel that fits women…) that seem to have worked for NFL.

Super Bowl Goes Casual

It’s that time of the year again. Or that’s at least what I am being told from anyone who is a) an NFL fan, b) an American, c) a gambler as they are gearing up for this year’s Super Bowl.

Having grown up with ice hockey and ski jumping, I was never really subjected to this American sports and family get together tradition. But that changed radically following our move closer to the land of the free and brave as well as with the change in target audience within my work.

But as the big event is getting closer (and Texas is trying to get its power sorted to make this years SuperBowl into the usual brightly shining beacon of all sports events) I have started to really look forward to it. Not the game as such, but this is also the marketing event of the year when companies spend millions on getting their ad showing to the millions of fans watching the game.

What caught my attention this year was the new type of ad that will be airing. The ad I am talking about will be featuring the stars of one of the most popular iphone games in 2010 – Angry Birds! The Super Bowl Angry Birds 30 sec ad will feature a secret code that will apparently unlock a special level in the mobile game and will most likely have thousands of fans desperately inspecting each screen for any clues as to where this secret code lies.

Everyone who watch the Super Bowl ad, who find the secret code, unlock the special level and reach the special level in the game will be entered into a sweepstakes for a grand prize. Mashable mentions it being atrip to Rio de Janeiro to see the Angry Birds Rio movie premiere on March 22, when the Angry Birds movie will be released along with its mobile app.

What I find interesting is that it has taken this long for casual games to push through and into the “big boys ad league”, hosted during Super Bowl halftime, considering its massive and continuously growing popularity everywhere. It will also be interesting to see how big the participation and enthusiasm will be for this game and its ad following its release, and if they will be able to keep it under wraps all the way until Sunday as has been tradition among advertisers at Super Bowl.

Put your votes in at the AdBlitz YouTube Channel immediately after the game – And let the best bird win!

How Business Men and Women Differ in Their Actions Online

Time flies. Especially recently I have noticed it going even faster than usual, and it is painfully clear when looking at how I have been neglecting this blog for quite some time already. To start off again, I will post something I actually already wrote ages ago, but that I hope is still of interest. I promise to be better with regards to keeping you all updated on a more regular basis from now on about women, games, marketing and in general the happenings in our ever more gamified wild world and web.

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When it comes to online ads and the upper levels of the professional world, men and women interact very differently, and if we are to believe a study by online ad targeting company Bizo, women tend to click while men tend to act on them.

The study was done between January and July (2010) and included a survey of over 80 million business professionals.  In addition to the above mentioned finding, the study also showed that both genders tend to interact with online ads at vastly differing times of the day and night.

Women apparently deliver a 23% higher clickthrough rate than men, while men are 53% more likely to actually buy, start a free trial, download or complete another action related to the ad than would their female counterparts. Interestingly enough, guys tend to click at at 3:00 a.m (EST) while women are more likely to click at 5 a.m. In contrast to this, it takes men until 4:00pm to be most likely to act while women act sooner, already at 11:00 a.m. Obviously, these times are slightly skewed based on different timezones and are only indications, but they seem to show an interesting difference in how we act online depending on our gender.

But gender isnt the only thing that matters when it comes to who clicks and when, just like Rebecca Lieb lays out in her blog entry on eConsultancy. Job Roles and industries also show an affect on people, with people working in publishing, accounting, drug stores/pharmacies, veterinary services and agriculture serving up the most clicks. The least-likely to click work in car rental, aerospace and defense manufacturing, media/music, boats and marine manufacturing and higher education.

Interestingly enough, the people most inclined to act on advertised offers work in business services, media/internet, hospitality, advertising/marketing, industries that have a lot of contact with this format of communication. Least likely to act are again the professionals in car rental, aerospace and defense manufacturing, but also those in weight/health management, construction/residential building and graphic design.

Top clickers are employed in the following roles: operations change management, IT database, government sales support and operations compliance. The most actions are taken by C-level executives, IT, Marketing, medical/health and advertising professionals.

So, where do you fit in? And are you a “stereotypical” male or female clicker?

Women Increasingly Using Male Oriented Sites

Women have started increasing their presence on traditionally male oriented sites online. Today women are showing an increasing interest in areas such as sports, cars and technology, opening up interesting opportunities for advertisers as well as website content creations.  

Interestingly enough, online sports sites today show similar visitor patterns for females and males. The study by ComScore, published on MarketingCharts shows that among women, the reach is slightly less than 30% for 15-to-24-year-olds. It then grows to 30% for 25-to-34-year-olds, only slightly increases for 35-to-44-year-olds before it peaks at close to 40% for 45-to-54-year-olds and women 55 and up.

Looking at the male figures, the reach of sports site is slightly less than 40% for 15-to-24-year-olds and hits 40% for both 25-to-34-year-olds and 35-to-44-year-olds. It then surpasses 40% for 45-to-54-year-olds and stays virtually flat for men 55 and up. Slightly higher figures than what is recorded for women, but still not that far off.

Something that is still as it alwasy has been is the substantially higher amount of time that men spend on sports sites compared to women in every age bracket. The average total per month for men peaks at 70 minutes per month among 25-to-34-olds, a figure that is roughly double the average monthly time spent of women in that age group.

In online gambling a lot of the advertising is still somewhat male oriented. It will be interesting to see if this will be modified at all to reach out to sports interested females as well as to fit the gambling habits of the female punter.

Women More Expensive Than Men

This post starts off by stating a somewhat obvious fact, but women have conquered another area with regards to this and are now more expensive than men on Facebook.

Having looked into costs of advertising on various platforms for my day job, I realised that there is an element here that would be an interesting discussion for my blog as well. Apparently women in general are more expensive to advertise to than men when it comes to social media. I have heard that Women use social media more than men and are more community oriented in general, but now publishing platforms have really caught on to this and are charging more to reach these women. 

Facebook is a good example for this. The platform charges advertisers a CPC of $0.98 to reach women, but only $0,95 to reach men within the  US market. An interesting price difference. It would be very interesting to see further analysis on this and if the justification for this is that women end up spending more on Facebook than men.

In case anyone has any further research on this I would be very interested to read more!

Reclaiming your Privacy (and Virginity) Online

Yesterday I tried to reclaim my privacy online.. I know, I know.. This is a bit like Paris Hilton trying to reclaim her virginity, but I guess its still worth a shot!

Anyways, back to my privacy. Reclaim Privacy Org is an organisation that claims their mission to be to promote privacy awareness on Facebook and elsewhere. In order to do this they have developed a scanner that you download from their site which then operates entirely between your own browser and Facebook while it checks how open you are about your personal information.

Check out the status of your Facebook page by dragging the grey button on their site to your browser bookmarks bar, or by clicking here to Scan for Privacy

Next you need to Go to your Facebook privacy settings and then click your new bookmark once you are on Facebook. The software will add a frame to your Facebook profile where you will see a series of privacy scans kick off that inspects your privacy settings and warns you about settings that might be unexpectedly public.

I realised I had been pretty good with my info, except for a few details such as location and availability of some photos to be seen by “Everyone” instead of just my “Friends” like I prefer. But in general I was pretty pleased that I was not dissing too much of my own dirt publicly. Conclusion: Definitely worth a check!

And P.S… If you are really keen on reclaiming your virginity as well, check out Certified Virgin…

Google Analytics for Facebook

I have just set up Google Analytics for my Facebook Fan page and it is working wonders! This is definitely something every business with a Facebook Fan Page needs to look into for enhanced statistical insights into what is actually happening on your Fan page and more importantly if all your hard work in the social media sphere is bearing any fruit!

What lies behind this is a little tool called FBGAT. FBGAT is a free and opensource tool created by Webdigi to work around Facebook’s Javascript restriction on Facebook fan pages which prevents Google Analytics from working correctly.  

The tool they created is comprised of two key parts:

1) The code generator that will help you generate a code for each individual area/page that has to be tracked on Google Analytics
2) The tracker, which instructs Google Analytics to log visits, IP address, browser,  country, etc on each page load.

But in order to get this going, we need to backtrack a bit and check if you have a Google Analytics account.. If you do not, then setup one! If you already have one, create a new website profile. You can name it facebook.com or facebook.com/your_page_name or whatever you want as long as you can identify it. Once you have set this up, you will get your hands on a tracking code which looks like this UA-3123123-2

Secondly you need to create your custom img tag for each of your pages that you would like to track. This can be for any part of your page that you would like to track such as the wall, the info section etc. Use this tool to create the Google Analytics link generator for Facebook pages, remember, you will need your Google Analytics tracking code for this!

Once you are done with that, you need to add another excellent application to your facebook page, Static FBML. This application will give you the possibility to set up things such as Google Analytics on a page that normally does not support tags or other tracking features by basically using a box on your page as a platform to where you can add HTML or FBML (Facebook Markup Language) for enhanced Page customisation.

Once you have Static FBML on your page you need to click on the FBML tab and edit it. Paste the custom img tag created earlier via the Google Analytics link generator for Facebook pages, save it and choose to place it on your “wall” for tracking your wall activities. And thats actually all there is to it! Just remember that you need to make the conscious choice of putting it on your wall rather than just keeping it on your tab.

Since Google Analytics is not real-time, you will need to give it some time to start tracking the traffic. But I promise you, you will not be disappointed!

Women Want More

The sellers of the first washing machines managed to get the marketing message out to women in a way that still strikes a chord. Their strategy was highlighting the benefits it would bring by listing various items that could be saved by the user; things such as time, labour, nerves, clothes and strenght…

Interstingly enough, these are all things that today’s woman is still desperately trying to find more of. Unfortunately this highly relevant marketing message has gone from being explicitly clear in the early 20th century, to becoming vague, irrelevant and pushy at worst in today’s world.

A new book from  Boston Consulting Group has now pinpointed what the washing machine salesmen of the 20th centrury were already on to. Their new book “Women Want More” looks at the new “female economy”, a massive economic force that will drive $5 trillion in incremental global spending during the next few years and simultaneously make any marketeer salivate at the possibilities of getting a share of that pie.

The book aims at providing marketeers with an overview of this massive female demographic out there, pointing out facts such as that 1 billion women are currently working worldwide, that more than half of college students are women, and that actually women control more than half of the wealth in the US.

But mainly, the book tries to point out what major challenges are currently affecting women and aims at providing marketing insights into how to go about appealing to women by providing solutions to their problems rather than pushing irrelevant products on them. Lack of time was stated as the biggest challenge by most women along with the feeling of being pressured to balance all necessary tasks in every day life. MarketingCharts summarises the problem with time into the following three segments:

1. Too many demands. Almost half of women surveyed felt there were too many demands on their time.
2. Too many conflicting priorities. Many of the demands felt by women directly conflict with one another.
3. Not enough time for me. Women have a lack of leisure time with the lack of “me time” coming out as the top time-related concern of 45% of women surveyed.

In addition to looking at challenges perceived by women, the Boston Consulting Group also categorized female consumers as broadly belonging to one of the following six broad archetypes, offering marketeers the opportunity to address the common problem of time, but from a point of view of each archetype. 

• Fast Tracker: A high-driven perfectionist who wants to make the most of everything she does.
• Relationship Focused: A woman who may live with a romantic partner and spends most of her free time with them.
• Managing on Her Own: A divorced professional who likes being independent but hopes to marry again someday.
• Pressure Cooker: A married mother with a full-time job who lacks the time to manage everything in her life and the resources to obtain help.
• Making Ends Meet: A low-income woman who may have health problems and struggles with frustration and debt.
• Fulfilled Empty Nester:A married homeowner with grown children who no longer live at home.

Following this interesting overview of various aspects that need to be taken into consideration when dealing with women from a marketing point of view, “Women Want More” also dives further into segmentations and what segments are actually serving the female target group properly. 

While most marketeers will jump at the chance to find out a bit more about how this is done, “Women Want More” emphasises the old but valuable lesson about the importance of having a relevant product with the right message going out to the right target group. Just like the waching machine sales men in the early 20th century managed to do, and mostly to great succes.