The study found women rely heavily on both blogs and message boards when seeking advice and recommendations (Blogs: 21% of the total U.S. online population, 63% of the BlogHer Network; Message Boards/Forums: 38% of the total U.S. online population, and 92% of the iVillage community), especially when looking for information to help with the purchase of new products (Blogs: 22% of the total U.S. online population, and 59% of the BlogHer Network.)

BlogHer users are more active with the top three social media platforms vs the average woman online (Blogs, Facebook, Twitter). In addition blogs are only second to online search as the preferred media source for product purchasing information for BlogHer Network users.

"The twenty million users who visit the BlogHer Network favor blogs over every other media source for reasons both personal and pragmatic," said Elisa Camahort Page, BlogHer co-founder and COO.

"Even as the scale of overall social media usage continues to grow, blogs continue to be a highly reliable resource for all women online as they exert their control over the household purse strings."

Other highlights from the study include:

*Among the iVillage community, 73 percent say they are sharing topics on message boards/forums that they would not share on social networks. Of those, relationships (61%), health (45%) and work-related (39%) issues were the main topics they would not share on social networks.

*Message boards/forums are second only to conversations with friends and family as the preferred source of product purchasing information for iVillage users.
 

The Responsibility Project from Liberty Mutual partipated in the recent BlogHer conference, and has put together a nice little gallery of videos in which bloggers talk about the subject. A few samples are below:

Regarding the whole sponsored posts thing, Liberty Mutual cites the following statistics:

- 98 percent of surveyed bloggers believe it is acceptable to receive a free product

- A majority of bloggers mentioned transparency, disclosure and honesty as key caveats to receiving free product and writing sponsored posts
 
- 84 percent said honesty is a key trait of a responsible blogger, followed by transparency (66 percent) and reliable sources (56 percent)

There are quite a few more videos like the ones above at the Responsibility Project site. It’s nice to see an array of different responses to the subject.

What do you think being a responsible blogger means? Tell us.

Enter Ad Age and its video feature “Three Minute Ad Age” which interviews BlogHer co-founder and COO Elisa Camahort Page on the eve of their 5th annual conference in Chicago. While many turn up their noses at the idea of ‘mommy-bloggers’ there is power in numbers whether it is real or perceived. Ask Motrin. BlogHer.com is a online community that gets 15 million unique visitors per month so there is nothing to sneeze at there from a pure quantity measure.

The focus of this interview is ‘blogola’ or the practice of being paid for a review of a specific product or service. Others like Chris Brogan have gone through some significant debates about the merits or demerits of this practice. BlogHer’s Page is anticipating that the subject will be top of mind during the conference because many influential mommy-bloggers can help sell a lot of products for companies if they mention and / or review a product on their blog.

While everyone agrees that full disclosure is paramount, Page is seeing that the context of the review is critical as well. In other words, disclosure is not enough. To that end, the BlogHer community cordons off the reviews in separate review logs where there is no advertising sold. These ‘sponsored conversations’ are clearly defined as such because Page that not only disclosure but context matters when it comes to paid posts.

I agree for the most part. The only real crime to me in this type of environment is if there is literally no mention or a very weak mention of ‘blogola (which by the way is a dumb name, anyone have anything better they would like to ‘coin’ here?). As long as the post is clearly marked as a paid discussion or whatever at the start and the conclusion of the post then there should be little trouble. Where you get into trouble is if the mention is brief and buried in the middle of the text or simply non-existent. Having a title that reads “You Have to Get Brand X!” may be all that someone reads so there needs to be the best shot of someone seeing that the post is paid for. Otherwise, we are in a gray area where a blogger can say they mentioned the nature of the post but didn’t make it really obvious. Starts to sound like a sleazy sales practice at that point.

So Pilgrims, on this fine Monday, what is your take? Should bloggers ever take pay for posts? If they do how should it be handled? What are best / worst practices you have seen? What are the potential consequences? Not surprisingly, the government has chimed in through the FTC on the matter so we better pay attention (I guess).

A discussion amongst the type of readers that come here could beneficial to all so please let us know your thoughts.

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Over half (55%) of the women surveyed in said they participate in some kind of blog activity (publishing, posting comments, reading), and 53% use social networks.

But here’s the kicker: Women use social networks in the purest sense only; 75% use them to keep in touch with friends and family, and not so much as information sources or for making purchase decisions. That’s a major insight considering this is the half of population making 85% of purchase decisions in the US.

In contrast, women rely more on blogs for the business of life, and are twice as likely to use blogs than social networks as an information source (64%), for advice and recommendations (43%), and opinion sharing (55%). Women are 50% more likely to use social networks merely as a means of keeping in touch.

A third of those participating in social networks are loyal to just one and do no other social media activities on a weekly basis. There are likely infinite reasons for that, but it sheds a rather harsh light on why only 20% of women appear to use Twitter.

It could mean that most want all of the networking under one roof for convenience, and only desire one-to-many communication if it involves people they know and trust. It could also mean that Twittering is still considered a medium for celebrities, politicians, and digital hipsters; the survey found that women who themselves blog are significantly more active across all forms of social media.

"Bloggers have a broad reach in the social media population and the survey demonstrates that women who blog are the most actively engaged social media participants — constantly seeking out new ideas and ways to share their opinions about those ideas," said Susan Wright, president of Compass Partners.

And other women are listening, perhaps more than they are to traditional media. Thirty percent are watching less TV, 31% are listening to less radio, 36% are reading fewer magazines, and 39% are reading the newspaper less. 

Numbers like that indicate a huge shift in the media landscape: the sex making the most purchase decisions are rejecting traditional media in favor of online sources. Forty-five percent of women in the survey said they decided to purchase an item after reading about it on a blog; among the women in the more digitally savvy BlogHer network, that number is 85%.

Women bloggers are twice as likely to share a positive purchase experience on blogs and/or message boards and about 40% more likely to share a negative experience. So it’s a good idea to be very, very nice to women bloggers, especially since they are likely to carry significant influence with non-blogging women.

"At a time when the economy is top of mind for more than 70 percent of these active social media participants, women who blog are turning to online resources, including blogs, to help them make their day to day purchasing decisions," said BlogHer cofounder Elisa Camahort.

The results of the survey are concluded according the answers of 2,821 women in the general US population, 1,008 women in the BlogHer network, and 788 women in the iVillage network.  

So whats my gripe, that Blogher limits their conference speakers to only women. Don’t believe me go to any of the past speaker lists (link, link, link, link) and try to find a speaker who is a man, do an on page search for “his”, “him”, or ” he”, now try searching for “her” her’s” or “she”, and you’ll see what I mean. It’s not that I don’t think that women aren’t qualified to speak, nothing could be farther from the truth, but I do ask the following question, if you want to provide the best conference are only women qualified to speak.

Now Blogher doesn’t completely discourage against men attending, here’s a flickr set of the BlogHer men attendees, including people like Robert Scoble. However if you are a man and you want to attend BlogHer, you’re treated like second class citizen, only to be seen and not heard.

Do you think Blogher should only have women speakers, what if I told you I was organizing a conference and only men were speaking? The only way women can get in was to pay the full admission price, and go sit quietly in the audience. Have a few choice names you’d like to call me after reading that, then why is it OK for blog her to do the exact same thing, and you’re OK with that, or somehow find that empoering?

The most common argument I’ll get is what about the “mommy bloggers” or “work at home moms (WHAM)” and how Blogher has speakers that can speak on those topics better than men. To that I counter Mommy bloggers and work at home moms face the same issues as Daddy bloggers and work at home dads. We all struggle to find the work-life balance. We struggle to run a professional business and to be available to take client calls and go to meetings, but to also be home by 3:30 to pickup the kids after school, bring them to dance class, ballet class, religious instruction, swim class, birthday parties, play dates, do the food shopping and cook a dinner that’s healthy and everybody will eat, without going crazy. And yes I do the food shopping, and I cook dinner, even on the holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving. So those aren’t “mommy” issues those are parent issues.

The next common argument I hear is that women weren’t/aren’t taken seriously, or accepted as part of mainstream media/publishing. This is a common argument from groups that are minorities or perceive themselves as minorities. They feel that by creating a group of only their members they can “swing the pendulum in the other direction” and create some sense of balance. Nothing could be farther from the truth. What it really does is underline and accentuate the differences between the two groups, strengthening the divisive wall between them. For example do you want to be known as the “best woman tech blogger”? I wouldn’t … what that really says is I may be the best woman tech blogger but when you compare me to all the male tech bloggers I don’t make the cut. You should never strive to be the best woman lawyer, best woman doctor, or best woman blogger, you should striver to be the best doctor, lawyer, or blogger, regardless of your gender.

Still not convinced Blogher hasn’t become their own worst enemy? Have you ever been to conference where a panel was made up of all men? How about an entire conference where all of the speakers where only men? Awkward aren’t they? I’m not advocating putting a “token woman” on the panel, because that’s wrong on so many levels. What I am saying is there are just as many smart women as there are men, and both are equally qualified to speak, and conference organizers should strive for balanced representation among speakers, not a lopsided selection to make up for past injustices.

So how bout it Blogher conference organizers can you rise to the challenge and create something more than a modern “old boys network”? If the organizers of “Take Our Daughters to Work Day” can change to “Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day” you can too. Being a visionary leader takes the courage to admit when you make a mistake and take the steps to fix it …

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Check it out. From the BlogHer page:

"We’re excited to announce our latest project, BlogHer’s Guide to Political Bloggers, brought to you by BlogHer’s politics team and our friends at Cerado. While we love the many blog-lists that abound of amazing political blogging by women, we got tired of trying to guess which state bloggers are from and/or which party they’re in or leaning toward. That’s why, as a non-partisan guide to women who blog, BlogHer has developed a widget that you can instantly categorize your blog in and find other bloggers. You can:

• Search by state
• Search by blogger’s first or last name
• Search by political party using the color key:

Blue = Democrat
Green = Green
Gray = Undecided
Khaki = Libertarian
Orange = Independent
Purple = Other/Multiparty
Red = Republican

This guide is incredibly easy to use –both to list your blog and then to post on your blog, too. We’ve pre-loaded it with a few bloggers we know, but hey — we don’t want to make a mistake about where you live and what you think! So rather than pour all 700-ish blogs from the BlogHer Politics blogroll into the mix, we think it’s better if you add your blog."

If you still have questions, use the Help button, let us know or see it in action.

Comments

This past Monday, we saw one example of cyberbullying in the case of Kathy Sierra – a good synopsis came from Lisa Stone of BlogHer, an organization that has been (possibly / probably unfairly) dragged into the controversy.

Let’s take a step back and get to the basics: this should not have happened. Yes, the blogosphere gives us a sense of anonymity – us in PR have been attacked by an anonymous blog, but none of us have been physically threatened with death (as far as I know), but have had to deal with venomous emails and threats of livelihoods – but it is a false sense, and should not be abused. The truth always comes out, in the end.

And, we have seen the blogosphere get up in arms over gender equality, which has cyberbullied conferences to include women in panels. There is an odd bit of irony there.

We are mostly adults in the blogosphere. Well, "adults" behind a computer giving some people a bigger sense of worth (most likely self-inflated worth, as seems to be the norm in blogs), and there is a lot of testosterone in the blogosphere that comes out in immature ways against women that should not be tolerated.

But, like I noted, we are supposedly adults that should act as adults. In this instance, the adults have lost to the immature and anonymous.

At CommunityNext, I was speaking to three women about bullying and cyberbullying. One of the women is writing her graduate thesis on bullying – both offline and online – and has been spending time in a classroom to research. The other two women work at a childrens’ social network, and we were joking about the bullying of our childhood. My point was that in our school yard days – the more carefree 70′s – that bullying was not necessarily a bad thing, as it hardened us and prepared us for the real world. It was not totally malicious, and while some kids cried, the next day brought the next adventure, and we were all friends. And, well, bullying was always harshest amongst the girls – man, they could get catty. One of the women talked about her experience as a camp counselor, and teasing the children, who valued and sought the interaction from an adult.

But, there is the difference – that was about children. And, children are not equiped to deal with such bullying, and are now being pushed beyond the norm by being cyberbullied on MySpace comments, IM, and text messaged threats. There is no escaping Cyberbullying, as it follows you from device to device – it is the true idea of presence, taken to a horrific level with horrific results. Cyberbullying takes what we did as children, and ramps it up to a whole new level. That "take their cookies" mentality – one that I still subscribe to – is different, as it is not about being tough, but about pushing the other child down in the dirt as much as possible and pushing them over the brink.

What happened is a travesty and embarasing as a male and a long-time blogger. It was an adult-on-adult bullying, but that is the point: we are adults, and should recognize that too big a part of blogging is sandlot bravado. As a PR person, that is part of my counsel to clients: be prepared to defend your line in the sand, and sometimes you need to be prepared to be attacked and defend.

This crossed the line, but are we going to see a backlash where the sentiment is going to be "get a thicker skin"? While that is not the right answer, the blogosphere is fluid, and unfortunately, at times it can be cruel. But, at least we have the hardened years of adulthood, and can sigh a breath of relief that we are not growing up in a world where cyberbullying is the norm.

Comments

Three things to thing about, with respect to building traffic:

• Community
• Syndication (RSS)
• Search Engine Optimization

Community is the best leverage point you have. Engaging with an audience will do more to build traffic, and build audience, than anything else. The more you engage your community, the more they’ll link to you, and the more traffic you’ll get.

"It isn’t about you. It’s about engaging a community."

Blogging vs. a newsletter: It’s the difference between "broadcasting a message" and "engaging a peer group."

Tactics to build traffic:

• Link out to other bloggers
• Leave comments on their sites
• Plan and participate in blog events
• Contribute to the community

If someone comments on Elise’s blog, not only will she respond in the comments, but she will also go out to that blogger’s site, find something interesting, and place a comment on ::their:: site.

In no uncertain terms: Link to your competitors.

Question: But that drives traffic to your competitors!
Elise: There are probably 2,000 other food blogs. All I care about is the value of the content that I put on the page. If a link to one of my competitors enhances my reader’s experience, I do it. I am helping out my audience. It also helps with SEO (search engine optimization) — if someone searches on Google for that competitor’s name, they are more likely to find your site instead!

On RSS: Elise has over 200,000 (yes "two hundred thousand") subscribers to the Simply Recipes RSS feed. Of the 200K readers she has, 180K are through Personalized Google. One of the things she did early on was to make it easy for someone to add her subscription to Personalized Google or MyYahoo.

Full or partial feeds? Elise puts full photo and head notes in the feed, but does NOT put her recipes in the full feed. "If you do choose to do a partial feed, you need to put enough into that feed to keep them interested. You will lose subscribers if you do partial feeds that are insubstantial."

Also talked about search engine optimization, hosted by Vanessa Fox, from Google. Interesting insight: "Search is actually reverse advertising; the searcher is broadcasting what he or she is looking for" (ed. kinda sounds like VRM, doesn’t it?).

Having a blog will drive more traffic to your site. How to make it work better?

• Discoverability — search engines have to know the site exists
  • Following links from other pages
  • Through a Sitemap submission
• Crawlabilty – search engines have to be able to access the pages
  • Are they allowed to access the pages
  • Can they technically access the pages?
  • Can they extract text from the pages?
• Relevance – Is a page from the site the most useful result for the search query
  • What is the page about?
  • What words are used on the page?
  • How well is the page linked and how is it described by other sites?

Text is good.

Flash…not so good.

Images…not so good.

Use the "TITLE" tag — it’s extremely important.

If the site uses a lot of javascript or AJAX, Google won’t be able to access it.

Always use ALT tags in images. And don’t use things like "LOGO" as the alt tag; instead use the name of the company.

Tools for keyword research

• Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool
• WordTracker.com

Both inbound AND outbound links are important.

Avoid link exchange / link farm programs. Those programs will get your banned from the index.

SEO Case study:

• Zappos.com gets 21% of the traffic for "shoes."
• Nike gets 1% of the traffic for "shoes."

Why? Nike’s site is beautiful – and a big chunk of Flash and images. Google can’t index it. The only thing that Google knows about Nike is the anchor text from other sites that link to it.

Comments

There were people from Sun, Cisco, Text 100, Fleishman Hillard, Weber Shandwick (well, me), Stowe Boyd, Brian Solis, Podtech, Andy Lark, Jory Des Jardins / Blogher that were in attendance (plus others), and Jeremiah Owyang from Podtech helped germinate the idea and Daniela Barbosa from Factiva ran with it – and, in a way, yes it was a Factiva focus group.

The measurement of social media – how is the best way to figure this out, and Factiva reached out to figure out how to measure such social media the best way.

Do you want a centralized algorithmic or a localized, emergence type data. Is it just about interesting data points or simple data points – but since there is money being moved, you need to figure out what people are asking for, and what data they need to bring back to the bosses. In deploying social media, you need to figure out how to best measure the results.

What needs to be measured: relevance, influence, reach, audience …. What is the high influence, what is the audience measurement? Niche blogs might not have a high audience, but they are reaching the right people.

Relavence, influence and reach all have to do with the goal – what might be influential for one person and / or company might not be for other groups. It’s the metrics (a la Nielsen Netratings) versus goals and objectives (what the company is looking for as an end-result is probably most important). A community activation – a call-to-action from the blog or post. A conversion rate, a download of a PDF or maybe a podcast.

But is there a difference between reach and influence? Someone might not have reach but is influencing the right people. It’s the attributes of the audience. And participation – social media platform via comments, post a blog ….

How is traditional marketing transitioning into social media and marketing. Can you measure the same way? Is it possible to measure?

Should we even call it consumer generated media, or social media – or for that point, is it new media? Not everyone is necessarily a consumer (according to Stowe) – but I disagree. We are a consumer society, dammit. When you participate, there is no consumption but more production – it’s a wrong, silly term (Stowe again). But, he has a nice hat on today (see photo).

We broke out into brain storm sessions – here are those notes.

Beyond metrics – there needs to be a standard on how they are produced out there. Statistics are radically different – if there was a standard set, a consistency, there is an issue in reliability that needs to be addressed. A working standard on social media – getting people to adhere is hard to do to begin with.

Click-thrus, who are we reaching is the important question. How do we define this in social media. Podcasting – who is watching, how long they watching, what’s the dropoff rate? What’s the engagement there within Podcasts – a “lurk” index, in a way.

Very basic web metrics tools – if you have those – you apply it to a blog, you get nothing truly valuable. To connect the domain name to a user behavior or a company would be great – like the top 500 people that you want to reach.

Should CGM be measured and is it important?

For us, yes, of course we want to be able to measure it.

Who is creating social media? What are they creating? And is the “who” more important than the “what”?

Blogs, wikis for how-to sites, newsgroups, message boards – all to help each other use products. Have to consider who the company – there are 100′s of millions of people that are probably creating the content that is just for family, that is just being done for fun. Do you mean relevant to commerce and business, or who is just creating social media? You have to figure out and distinguish the relevance versus the cabin blogging person who no one is currently reading. How do you find those bloggers that you want …. So, tagging does become an important role. Isolate who is relevant discussions – by being involved that does help.

Somehow create a filter to tag the blogs, in a way of importance. Media itself is very structured. Quantity does not necessarily equal quality – specific influence.

If you are producing social media as part of your PR marketing plan, how do you measure ROI? Answered above.

Do you think that social media needs structured, mutually agreed upon measurement techniques and metics (eg MSM’s ad value equivalenceand article impressions) to make monitoring a more serious practice?

What kind of standards – transparency. How are stats created in a clear way … a level of confidence that this information is confident – the executives can pull it apart, and it still stands – it needs to be digestable . Start creating advanced statistics, such as reach, media signal (prominence, etc). What are the metrics, creating of algorithms. There needs to be some structure – but there is a softer side of measurement, some guidelines … flexibility, adapted by …. There is that pie-chart desirability, but is it possible. Resistance and uncertainty from advertising to PR, as the money switches hands. There are a ton of companies that are getting into measurement of social media, but needs to be an understanding. It depends on what you are doing – from the PR side, we are the first adopters bc it is lower risk and just part of outreach. Influencers is what PR is trying to figure out. CYA metrics – that’s what the corporate side also. The idea metrics – it’s a PR thing that wants.

So … what should be measured and how do you want it to be delivered?

In a simple way that can be modified for each companies / corporates needs. And, RSS to cut and paste into an email.

Thoughts from other breakout groups:

The metaphor that matters – a blogger is a blogger, even if he is a journalist.

ROI – no metrics, beyond engagement. None for new acquisitions, call to action, click throughs. Is there importance for these metrics, or is anecdotal information yet. Next year (prediction) is when company’s get over it – they are all looking for a decent metric, and page views is not the one. There has to be some better measurement, and 2007 is where it is going to likely going to come from. Engage or die.

Does ROI even matter – no one is going to ask for ROI on email or IM.

Who and what varies on the situation. Nothing is equal, not everything is quantified the same way, depending on the needs and interpretations.

Salesforce dashboards – the next board meeting, where you explain how many days it took to sell what and why. Should we measure – it depends, and why comes into play.

Open networks – open source metrics – the metrics to be embraced by them all. Need standardization, in order for there to be success. Paying for measurement is for the rich and the famous (it costs cash).

One of the who’s – it’s not about big far reaching community, but about narrow, gated community around the “who” more so than the “what” and vice versa.

There was a final overview at the end – see photo – that capsulated the whole thought about measurement and tracking, which is important in social media. It is something we all talk about, but are not thinking about solutions. Hopefully, there will be better than anecdotal solutions.

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Jeremy Pepper is the CEO and founder of POP! Public Relations, a public relations firm based in Arizona, USA.

He authors the popular Musings from POP! Public Relations blog which offers Jeremy’s opinions and views – on public relations, publicity and other things.

This year’s event is sold out and there’s an excellent mix if speakers. With lots of sponsors this year, there are a ton of giveaways as well.

One of our pr firm clients, The Web Marketing Association and Web Award will have their CEO, William Rice start things off with the morning keynote presentation. Bill has run the Web Award competition for 10 years and the program has reviewed over 9,000 web sites in that time. His presentation will offer insight into what makes an award winning web site and he’ll also present industry vertical data compiled over the past 10 years.

I will be introducing Elisa Camahort, co-founder of BlogHer, a community and conference for women bloggers. She also runs a marketing agency called Worker Bees. Elisa will be presenting, “10 Techniques for Web Writing”. I could certainly use a heavy does of that! I am looking forward to meeting her in person.

In the afternoon, I will be introducing Jake Baillie from TrueLocal. I’ve seen Jake speak many times at Search Engine Strategies and Webmaster World Pubcon conferences and even had the opportunity to speak with him at a DMA conference in New York this summer. Jake is one of my absolute favorite speakers on search marketing. He knows his stuff up and down. He’s also a really interesting guy with deep interests in photography, flying airplanes, poker, black hat SEO and competitive intelligence. We’re lucky to have him as a speaker and I’m looking forward to his presentation on site architecture.

The afternoon keynote presentation will feature Michelle Collins, a blogger for VH1′s, Best Week Ever who I have not met but I hear she is a fantastic speaker and a great comedian. We’ll have 8 members of the TopRank M&O team there as well and it should be a great event.

I’ll be taking photos and maybe a few short video interviews and will post to Online Marketing Blog in the evening.

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Lee Odden is President and Founder of
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