I attended a Social media Club event this evening organized by @ThinkMaya . The meeting consisted of a panel conversation on “moms, Bloggers & brand – how to use social media to market to moms not at them with the following moms in the panel: Jyl Patee , Jenni Hogan , Leslie Flinger , Carol Schiller and Stephanie Robinett.
There were about 80 people in attendance with the event being streamed live over the web. It was interesting to see the crowd composition which was made up of 95% women (the exact opposite of the tech startups events. Maybe the 2 should be cohosted to bring the balance back. Are not there more men who care about marketing to moms/women? I think that both sides would be more successful if working together… Just my 2 cents). There were many interesting people to meet, the panel knew what they were talking about and the conversation was informative.
Here were some of the key notable takeaways from the conversation for your reading pleasure:
- “Hire people who understand and can relate to your target audience” : Cozy was founded by technical folks who built a product for women and moms yet they kept hiring other men with a technical background wondering why crows were not flocking to the site. Another example given was that of a nonprofit who hired a 22 year old social media person to build a community and help with the fundraising from their top demographic segment: women 35-55.
- “When reaching out to your audience , just be yourself“: too many people worry about their brand going down the drain if they share the wrong thing, it is ok to be vulnerable. Build a relationship with your audience, treat them as friends not just as your target audience.
- “Trust your community“: let your community guide the brand, do a lot of surveys and keep a close pulse on the community. You have to sometimes recognize that community members are experts and that you are just there to enable them. Engaging with the community often only costs you your time and you will get great information that can be much better than a focus group ( + it will be free)
- “When reaching out to influential bloggers as a brand, connect with them as a person“: the more influential the blogger is the more emails he/she gets and the more developed their sense of recognizing canned emails becomes. Take the time to learn about their blog and get to know them as a person before asking to work together on your brand. Be transparent about what your budget is if any and explain what you have to offer (remember that bloggers want to build their brand too)
- “To market your brand, go beyond just connecting online and go to offline event“: first networking events are like going to the prom by yourself several times but that is how you start, once you get to know a few people it gets easier and more fun so get out there, meet people in person and build relationships. Make sure to of also nurture these relationship with proper follow ups and regular engagements.
- “Leverage the power of testimonials“: this is especially important if you are a service provider, give your customers an incentive to broadcast their opinions about you and word of mouth will take care of the rest (this of course assumes that you are providing your customer with an outstanding service)
Here is another interesting data point that came up: Allrecipes.com is the most popular website for women and it gets more visitors than oprah.com with about 14-20M visitors per month( Here is the graph comparison with the estimated traffic volume from compete.com
