Posts Tagged ‘gender’

Americans for UNFPA (disclosure: client) works in the U.S. to support the United Nations Population Fund, the world’s largest multilateral source of funding for global women’s health. And tomorrow they are hosting a chat on Twitter to share ideas about global women’s health and rights.

(You can participate by adding #forwomen to the ideas you tweet, and you can watch the conversation at: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23forwomen.)

I’m excited to see where it leads and what the participation will be, as I have a hunch that there are a lot of people out there, particularly on Twitter, who will have a lot to say about the topic.

What does this have to do with digital business trends?

The connection is that there are new ways for companies to look at demographics online. The temptation with a topic like this would be to look first at the demographic and then at how to engage them.

But how we look at demographics is be changing. Online activities blend across demographics, and as Ruder Finn’s Director of Social Media recently noted in an op-ed for PR Week, intent is the new demographic.

This means is that age, race, gender, etc, are not the only ways to determine how to reach a targeted audience online. First you have to look at what people are doing online, and only then can you get a better idea of who they are.

As PR Week’s Nicole Zerillo pointed out in her recent Marketers continue to fall into gender-stereotype traps article:

criticism demonstrates how companies – including well-funded, marketing-savvy ones – still struggle in determining the right way to market to women.

The article highlights how “woman-targeted campaigns” don’t necessarily look at the underlying issues that create a need for the campaign in the first place.

The Wall Street Journal asked last week in “The Forgotten Market Online: Older Women“:

Are online marketers so youth-conscious — because it “feels right” — that they’re ignoring lucrative markets just when they’re most needed? The Internet is neither new nor young. The fastest-growing segment of Facebook users is women over 55, according to the Tracking Facebook blog. And the underlying assumption that young people are still the Web’s most fertile market doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

This underscores the need to look first at what people are using the Internet for, rather than who they are.

A recent study from BlogHer, a leading online network for women, looks at where women go online to find trusted information. They found that women are twice as likely to go to blogs as opposed to social networking as trusted sources of information.

This survey combines the ideas of intent and demographic, by looking at intent within a demographic.

How do you think this research can help formulate your next PR campaign?