Corina’s Concerns Be lowly wise, think only what concerns thee and thy being.– John Milton, Paradise Lost

Chris Brogan threw the gauntlet, proposing 100 topics he hopes other bloggers will write, and as this blog is struggling to find a voice distinct from my former writings, I took him up on his challenge.

HOW WOMEN USE SOCIAL MEDIA

The simple answer to the question is: I don’t really know. Out of the 6 billion people on Earth, more than half are women, and their patterns of interaction with the world around them are as different as their size, shape, hair or eye color. But as a woman who embraced blogs early on, twitters madly and has been doing so for more than a year, and is using Facebook to keep tracks of her friends, I believe I can venture some answers.

1. Women = more

Check your Facebook friends. The likelihood of them being predominantly women is extremely high, and a Business Week article explains why. In brief: there are more women aged 30+ online than there are men, married men tend not to join social networks whereas married women do, and when online, men are biased towards transactional behavior, rather than the relationship-building that such networks are predicated on. The figures come from a Rapleaf study of social network users, and the gender and site by site breakdown is revealing, albeit US centric.

2. Women = later

In the last report I’ve seen of women versus men online, it was made clear that the innovators and most of the early adopters of new online technologies are still men, although that may be a little bit dated. The trend was towards narrowing this gap, and of course, women made up in numbers what they lacked in intensity and speed of adoption. I’d be interested in seeing an update on the Pew research, though.

3. Women = broader

Most data on online behavior, as well as my private experience, is that women’s use of social media encompasses larger segments of their life than men’s use. Thus, women frequently use social media to share personal news, whereas men prefer business connections, and they are also more attuned to the events and changes in their network, which they actively seek out and react to, than men are. Much of that is related to staying power: men can join an online network  at the spur of the moment, and never keep up their membership, whereas women, once online, tend to cultivate their presence. This, of course, is opinion, but i bet it won’t be long until it’s validated by research.

Posted under Random opinion

Back in 2005, my friend Dani proposed a meeting with a friend who was building a PR portal. I liked her. I proposed a blog within the portal (I was infatuated with blogs, and was at the time writing one for my employer), and she accepted. Thus, the PRwave blog was born, and I had a platform to share all the I thought communicators should know. After a couple of years, the blog became restrictive. I had set too narrow an outlook for it, and as I was growing, it was not growing with me. Then came the time constraint: new job, a full set of courses at the MBA, and the private pleasures of salsa and tango. My blog was languishing, and I was always feeling guilty for not posting new material. I had a lot to say, but little time to express it in the elaborate, rigorous form that was typical of that blog. My friend was patient, but the blog was on her portal, under the portal’s name, and in the end we decided it was better to recruit another writer, with a different voice, and more available time. The end.

Well, not quite. Having blogged for so long, I could not remain blogless. Hence, Corina’s Concerns, a blog on communication, marketing and PR, about which no promises are made, except to keep it informative, and to keep it real. Enjoy the read.

Posted under Random opinion