WoW!

I stumbled upon this interesting  report on the female Internet user. The report, entitled Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet, was released by comScore June this year.
I can’t blame comScore for being so interested with the Women on the Web (WoW), their digital habits and their participation in the global Internet landscape. After all,  women are such complex creatures.
Did you know that:

• Over 50% of the population in the internet landscape is male. Meaning women comprise the minority in the global internet landscape. But interesting enough, women spend more time on the internet than men.

• Women in all regions are more ‘socially active‘ on the Web than Men. We spend more time on Social Networking Sites, Instant Messaging, and E-mail than men. And While social networking has increasingly become a part of the digital habits of all netizens, it appears that it is more important to us, women.

• Indeed, men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Men typically use Twitter to find political news and follow sports teams while women usually use Twitter to find deals, special prices, and promotions, and follow celebrities.

• Women are seen as more conversational and relational, however, comScore’s report shows that men post tweets their own tweets more, and Retweet more.
• Men spend far more time than women watching videos online. However, video consumption on YouTube is higher among women than men. I wonder where men watch their videos. Hmmm…

• More and more older women are starting to engage in social activities online. Perhaps this is happening due to the influence of the younger generation? Or the older generations are starting to realize the benefits and accept new social media.

So what?
MEN SHOULD PREPARE FOR WOMEN DOMINATION!!! Just kidding!
All these things may seem trivial to a lot of people but it is this kind of information that everyone from advertisers to content producers to agencies to non-profits to politicians and policy makers should be researching. Information of this sort will certainly help communicators craft and position their messages effectively.

If communicators are able to understand the global internet landscape through a gender-specific lens, or through any specific lens for that matter, it would be easier for them to target specific campaigns. But of course this is only one of the many possible ways of looking at your target audience.

Organizations may also study them according to their demographics, geographics, technographics or psychographics. Depending on what an organization’s goal is, they may analyze their targets’ age, gender, culture, employment, location, behavioral qualities, emotional qualities.

The bottomline is, a good campaign starts with research. Understanding our audience, their needs and Internet usage is key to be able to come up with the right strategy.  Whether your target audience are young females, old males, kids, gays, lesbians, widowers, single moms, yuppies, sports fanatics, fashionistas, techies, foodies, etc, you ought to be specific to know them and understand them.