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Archives for July 2010

Women Spend 30% More Time on Social Network Sites than Men Worldwide

woman_computerComScore released a new report this week called Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet, which offers enlightening statistics and trends related to how men and women use the Internet around the world.  Considering that women make most purchasing decisions, this is a report that brand managers need to read.

One of the most interesting findings in the comScore report tells us that women spend 30% more time on social networking sites than men do.  Not only do they spend more time on social networking sites each month (5.5 hours per month for women vs. 4 hours per month for men), but more women are using social networking sites then men with 75.8% of women around the world who access the Internet visiting a social networking site compared to 69.7% of men.

Not only do women spend more time on social networking sites across the globe, but the statistic holds true in specific regions as well, as shown below:

  • Latin America: women 94.1%; men 91.9%
  • North America: women 91.0%; men 87.5%
  • Europe: women 85.6%; men 80.6%
  • Asia Pacific: women 54.9%; men 50.7%

Furthermore, women spend more time online overall then men do globally.  In fact, women spend a full 8% more time online than month with an average of 25 hours per month (this includes all Web use, not just social networks use).  Women also spend 20% more time on retail sites than men, and women spend more time on comparison shopping and review sites.

Brands that want to connect with the female audience have a significant opportunity to do so online, particularly through social networking, comparison shopping sites, and review sites.  If your brand isn’t there, you’re missing a huge opportunity and leaving it open for your competitors to leverage making it more difficult for your brand to find space later.

You can follow the link to download a full copy of the Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet.

Image: stock.xchng

What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 22: Tell Investors When They Can Expect Things

Many years ago, I had a sell side analyst tell me, “One of the hallmarks of a well managed company is when you see they publish a calendar of earnings releases… and they stick to their dates”. This leads me to today’s thought on effective company investor relations sites: tell your investors what’s coming up on the calendar… and stick to those dates.

Investors need to know about certain dates, particularly as they relate to dividends, earnings statements and annual general meetings. A well-organized financial calendar will help them find things quickly and with a minimum of fuss. And it will cut down on the number of calls coming into the investor relations department from investors who are interested in those dates. Particularly individual investors concerned about when the dividend is payable. More particularly, retirees living on a fixed income who rely upon the dividends.

With respect to dividends, investors need to know the record date, the ex-dividend date and the payment date. Financial results should be released according to a schedule established before the start of the fiscal year. And just as obviously, the date for the Annual General Meeting should be established well in advance of the event and published on the calendar.

Marks & Spencer financial calendar

A good example of how to do this is the Financial Calendar placed on the Marks & Spencer web site.

This is not rocket science; it’s just good planning and the communication of that planning to those who need to know. Take it from someone who used to run an investor relations department for a company with a high percentage of individual investors in the days before the internet – a company can save itself a lot of pain and suffering having to do with volume of phone calls if they clearly place on their web site when they expect important, but routine, corporate actions to be taken.

In this series:
Previous post: Annual Reports
Next post: Strategy

New FritoLay Website Gets Good Grades

A recent article on BrandWeek brought to my attention the redesign of the FritoLay website.  FritoLay, a division of PepsiCo, is known for its snack foods, including popular items like Lays Potato Chips, Doritos, Tostitos, and more.  You’d expect to find a fun website for a snack food company, and the redesigned FritoLay website certainly feels less corporate and more “homey” as you can see from the home page pictured below.

frito-lay-website-home-page

Rather than using the expected top navigation bar, the new FritoLay site uses colorful buttons and a soft color palette.  The predominant links on many pages within the site highlight the same content about health, the environment, and the company’s socially conscious efforts, as you can see from the “Our Snacks” page pictured below.

frito-lay-website-our-snacks-page

I think the site is an improvement, but I think it could use a stronger focus on consumer interaction rather than speaking at consumers and telling the story.  The link to the company’s blog is buried and there are no evident links to ongoing conversations, Facebook pages, Twitter profiles, and so on (until you find the blog).  These days, this is a big miss that I hope FritoLay will rectify in updates in the near future.

Furthermore, there is no information about the brand promises, logo use, and so forth.  The company vision is accessible through the “About Us” page shown below, but a vision is very different from a brand promise, and for a company that has multiple, well-known and powerful brands, the website should include a section about branding, the history of the brand (rather than just the company history), logos and packaging through the years, and so on.  In other words, the brand stories are important for FritoLay, and they should be given the space they deserve.

frito-lay-website-our-story-page

All-in-all, FritoLay is on the right track.  The streamlined site that uses little flash is a welcome change in a time when most websites are still flooded with flash that does nothing to enhance the user experience.  The new design is less cluttered than many corporate sites, which is another positive outcome of the redesign.

What do you think of the new FritoLay website design?  Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Something to learn from BAE Systems?

In May this year BAE Systems launched their new website – a website dedicated to education. Aimed at fostering an interest in engineering from an early age, the site features a selection of fun online educational resources. These complement the ongoing activities that BAE Systems do in schools around the UK: road shows, school challenges and BAE Systems Ambassador visits.

BAE Systems educational games

http://www.baesystemseducationprogramme.com/

The BAE Systems UK Education Programme website extends above and beyond the call of duty in recruitment, nurturing the next generation of engineers. In order to do this successfully, BAE Systems tailored the site to cater for the 5-8, 9-13 and 14+ age groups.

Taking advantage of interactive technology the site offers young people the chance to rate news stories, play games and watch videos to learn about the history of engineering. It adapts the BAE Systems corporate image to appeal to young people – trying to showcase its cool side. It also has educational material available for teachers to download.

BAE Systems previously offered games and educational materials but it wasn’t all together under one roof, so to speak, instead constituting a collection built up over time and spread out over different sites. The new site brings all this together in an accessible way; well-planned and easy to navigate. The new site mirrors the main corporate site in its layout but varies in its colour scheme – a slight tweak of image.

The games and multimedia section includes, amongst others, an addictive blockbuster game which requires you to answer science questions to make your way across the board. A recommendation could be to enhance this gaming experience by offering small postal rewards (key rings, model-building kits…) for successfully completing the games – providing an incentive to get involved and generating even more brand awareness.

Jumping on the education bandwagon is something that most corporations can do, as no matter what the industry is, surely there is a wealth of information on science, history and certainly business case studies that can be shared. Not only does this boost CSR credentials by giving a little back, but putting a familiar brand and snazzy website alongside learning can make it a lot more exciting for young people. Who else is going to take the time to target young people with the development of interactive educational software on engineering other than the industry leaders?

Since young people are all digital natives they are a good place to begin in using digital channels to develop not only a high level of brand recognition but also creating a long-lasting positive image.

So, should every big corporation divert a little of their funds into producing some educational material? It gets their name out their in a positive way; to customers, suppliers, investors and job-seekers of the future, as well as supporting their corporate responsibility programme. What do you think?

Domino’s Pizza Hopes to Strike Proverbial Gold with New Contest

dominos-pizza-proverbsThis month, Domino’s Pizza launched a campaign in the United States that asks consumers to submit entries into the Domino’s Pizza Proverbs Contest.  The winning proverbs will be printed on Domino’s Pizza boxes in the future.

The contest is fun in and of itself, but Domino’s, whose brand image has been tainted in recent years, is adding a social media element to the campaign that should spread the Domino’s brand love even further.  Not only can people submit their own proverbs, but they can also share their proverbs and the proverbs they like with a simple mouse click via Twitter and Facebook.

Judging will be based on creativity, originality and proper use of grammar.  However, the biggest miss in this contest is not allowing people to vote for the winner.  The prize is small so within a few days since the contest launched, only 535 proverbs had been submitted.  If this contest had a bigger prize and additional social media elements, it could be huge.

A few of the recently submitted proverbs are particularly favorable for the Domino’s brand image, including, “Beauty is only cheese deep, but true deliciousness comes from within.”  Others are simply entertaining, such as, “To leave the last slice is to be loved. To eat the last slice is to be happy.”

The lesson to learn is this: asking consumers to participate in events, activities, campaigns, and contests that can help to build your brand image is a great idea, but don’t be afraid to take the initiative to the next level of social sharing and interaction.

What do you think?

If You’ve Got It—Flaunt It!


CTP Website

Recently, the Boston advertising agency Conover Tuttle Pace started its second annual Summer Sublet desk swap.  As reported by the Boston Globe, the Summer Sublet is a combination lottery/draft, in which employees maneuver their way to better quarters for a month.  This year’s big winner traded his spot in the communal workspace for the president’s glass-walled corner office–complete with TV and a garden view

Summer Sublet requires everyone, from the newbies to the bosses, to sit in a different place until Labor Day.  As a small company (just 35 employees), Conover Tuttle Pace is in a position to move folks around without too much hassle, and obviously, this kind of exercise would be logistically impossible in a big corporation.  But Summer Sublet is a playful idea that stimulates cross-functional interaction by mixing up the creative types, the techies, and the execs in new ways.  According Amara Bassiri, the company’s “workflow, wellness, and broadcast guru,” an “exchange of ideas happens organically.”

When the Boston Globe wrote up the Sublet caper, Conover Tuttle Pace swiftly put a big link to the story on their company’s home page.  (That’s it in the post illustration.)  Which brings us to the point:  This is a knockout story for their employer brand.

Again—this particular idea would not translate easily to a corporate milieu.  But there are plenty of clever, creative activities going on in big companies, and as a rule they are not exploited.  A few typical reasons:

  • The Careers/Jobs section is in a silo, not integrated with overall PR and marketing efforts.
  • The PR and marketing folks don’t pay much attention to employer branding.
  • The Careers/Jobs section is focused on job posting and application gathering, with only sporadic attention to the employer brand.
  • The Careers/Jobs section is updated infrequently, and may have no easy way to add newsy items.

Takeaway: The (very) slightly more relaxed pace of summer offers a good opportunity to find out about innovative ideas and activities in your company.  Even if there is no currently convenient way to report these activities on the corporate website, they make great blog posts, and can be included in social media—Facebook loves this type of item, especially if there are photos.  And “cool” stories provide an opportunity for recruiters to tweet something other than routine job postings.

To see fun done right, it’s always worth stopping by Southwest Airlines.   Check out the SWA Facebook page.