LaughlinOutLoud

What do women want? So goes the question of movies, marketers and men. What Women Want, the movie, was named after this eternal query. It featured Mel Gibson as Nick Marshall, an advertising exec who experienced professional and romantic success once he was able to read the minds of women. The predictable plotline followed Gibson’s rise to demise, then back to everyday guy when he learned his lesson. (Bonus lesson:  Don’t cross-dress during a thunderstorm).

Nick relied on stealing ideas from his female colleague for campaign concepts that would appeal to women consumers. And according to She-Conomy.com, appealing to women consumers is important: Women are responsible for 85% of all consumer purchases – ranging from food to vacations to PCs.

If ‘What Women Want’ was made now, Nick would probably be better off checking Facebook statuses, downloading videos from YouTube or monitoring his TweetDeck; the rise of social media gives marketers a broader reach of what women really want. So, Nick Marshall, here a few brands you could learn from:

Medela
The breast pump brand’s site offers many ways for expectant and new moms to connect with each other and with experts in the field. There’s also plenty of information about breastfeeding, and a link to an active Facebook page featuring lots of mom interaction. Aside from being able to provide an incredibly dynamic outlet for their consumers, Medela is able to watch and learn from these interactions in order to shape the way they do business.

Kotex
The feminine care brand is complementing its “tell-it-to-me-straight commercials” for its new line of tampons, U by Kotex. A microsite with consumer interaction functionality allows women to engage in a space that feels secure and intimate for this private issue, and get questions answered by a health expert, a mom and a peer. Kotex is able to position themselves as a resource on the topic while also collecting market intelligence.

Coach
Holiday “Blog-a-day”

During the 2009 Holiday season, Coach enlisted popular fashion bloggers and vloggers to boost their holiday sales. The “Blog-a-day” program lasted 30 days, and featured a different site or video link with merchandise overviews, reviews and best of all – giveaways for the readers.  Coach was able to activate many new networks of ambassadors, interact with their audiences through credible sources and drive online sales through direct links from the featured sites.

These are just a few of many examples and we can anticipate that the way brands can speak to and interact with female consumers will continue to evolve. So marketers take heed – we are no longer just telling women what they want – they can tell us. We just need to listen.

Earlier this week, we had the pleasure of presenting the “State of the State of Digital” to a bright, interested and engaged audience. In pulling the presentation together, I was served my daily reminder of just how much things have changed. To wit:

“If Facebook were a country, it would be the 8th most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan.” — Mark Zuckerberg, January 7, 2009

To be clear, when I say I was reminded how much things have changed, I mean since January 7, 2009. According to Facebookʼs most recent numbers, it has over 250 million members. Which would place them fourth on the most populated countries in the world list. Now ahead of Indonesia. Nigeria, we hardly knew thee.

Thatʼs quite a jump in seven months. And it raises an important question. In these exponential times in which we live, how fast do numbers become irrelevant? If Wikipedia can have trouble keeping up, what are the rest of us to do?

One surprising exception – time spent online. Forrester reports the amount of time spend online per week by the average American is 12 hours. Last year that number was… 12 hours. Thatʼs not exponential at all. According to analyst Jackie Anderson, “Engagement with the online channel has deepened. Web users are becoming savvier and are better multi-taskers.” So while hours online arenʼt growing, productivity is. And competition for their time has (potentially, exponentially). Savvier users will look for savvier solutions. And, with this deeper engagement and apparent comfort, the internet is starting to “more closely resemble a traditional media channel.” Oh, how quickly things change.

Facebook has been quite adamant that they would not allow people to change their “Username” after you have selected it. However, it seems Facebook may have taken a step back because they have updated your “Account Settings” to allow you to change you username, as a one-time only service.

One has to wonder if the influx of change requests and complaints have made Facebook change their mind. Will they do so for “Pages” as well?

Digging a bit deeper in the interface, Facebook has not yet given Page administrators this ability. While changing your username may be valuable to those who made a mistake or chose one without much though, this is likely one of the more valuable features for an administrator.

Another important note, if you have been unable to secure a preferred username you should check with your Facebook account team. They may have black listed trademarked names to proactively protect your brand. With a little help from Facebook we were able to change the username for one of our client’s “Pages”.