Blog

The gender divide of the online kind

Men are from Mars and Women from Venus or so the saying goes. Turns out the different genders are worlds apart in our social media consumption habits too. A study by BrianSolis.com, BlogHer and iVillage in association with Nielsen & Ketchum found Women to be the more social of the sexes, significantly outnumbering their male counterparts on profile-based social networking sites such as Twitter, Myspace, Bebo and Flickr. Men on the other hand form the majority user base on more status or content-orientated networks including Digg, YouTube and LinkedIn.
This has been attributed to the fact that women are using social networking to keep in touch with friends and family and 68 per cent using them to ‘connect with others like me’. Men, however, have a stronger preference for information and media consumption which goes some way to explaining why Twenty per cent more men than women visit video network YouTube every week.
Despite the study being conducted in the US, there are definite traits we share with our friends across the pond and lots of good nuggets of info of which advertisers and marketers alike should be mindful – click here to view the full report here.

NME Breakthrough

NME today launched NME Breakthrough, a community for new bands and fans. They have teamed up with Blackberry to create the platform for users to share music, videos and photos. As well as providing users with the latest music news and reviews, they can have direct interaction with bands. NME aim to use the community to unearth new talent to showcase in the Radar section of their magazine. David Moynihan, editor of NME.com said “It also acts as an important medium for bands to listen to what their fans want, through a simple rating feature. In addition, we are going to offer amazing opportunities on the site; the rewarded artists will perform at an NME Radar event as well as a key festival this summer.”

Twitter launches embeddable Tweets

Those great comments and conversations taking place on Twitter about your brand have, in the past, been difficult to capture and quote elsewhere. There is, of course, the option to cut and paste the comment, although the likelihood is that once taken out of situ the Tweet no longer resembles a Tweet and you lose that visual impact. To keep the Tweet visually accurate, option two is to take a screen grab and fiddle around resizing it, but let’s face it, it’s a bit of a nuisance. Moreover, in both instances it’s a frustrating user experience and you lose some functionality including clickable hashtags and @mentions.
This week the Twitter Media team announced embeddable Tweets saying “It’s very simple. Just a snippet of code you’ll be able to use to generate simple, selectable flat-HTML tweets like the one we used here.”

Google Analytics apps gallery

This week, Google announced the opening of a new full app gallery for Google Analytics.  offering exciting new ways to get richer insight into your website traffic. Apps are available in 12 categories including Business Intelligence, Campaign Management, Content Management, Data Collection, E-Commerce Marketing and Mobile Solutions. At the time writing around 40 apps were available, but as you would expect the platform is open to developers so expect an even greater choice over the coming months.