Social Studies Group

While those of us in the research community would love for everyone to have generous budgets for competitive intelligence and knowledge gathering, it’s just not realistic. For start-ups and even for small to medium-sized companies, the knowledge needs are huge and the budgets? Not so huge. Maybe, even, non-existent. I had the pleasure of guest [...]

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If you’re a brand or agency engaged in the business of working with parent and mom bloggers (or influencers, brand advocates–whatever you’re calling them these days) for best results you should really think beyond the blog. What? Courting bloggers and not turning a laser focus on their blogs, their traffic, their subscribers, the other places they hang out online and the like? Those are as critical a component of success when it comes to social outreach yet in our experience these are areas often overlooked by agencies and brands when it comes to outreach campaigns.

The Digital Lives of American Moms

Let’s back up for just a minute and talk about the power of mom and parent bloggers. According to The Digital Lives of American Moms, Nielsen 2012, one in three bloggers are moms and some 27.9 million American moms visited Facebook in the month of March, 2012 (which was a whopping 72% of moms who went online from home computers in the United States). 5.4 million of them used Twitter during that same time period and some 165 million are blogging using either WordPress, Tumblr or Blogger. That’s a whole lot of purchasing power–and connecting with those influential moms is an objective for brands and agencies alike.

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Trend watching fascinates me. I don’t know about you, but I could explore the Trendwatching, PSFK and Springwise sites all day long. (Don’t judge me!) Read the post at Social Media Monthly. (I love that magazine! Do you get it?)

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I really appreciated Nick Petri’s recent post, When Analytics Fail discussing analytics for business decisions. Numbers are great, but there are limitations such as Self-Selection, Missing Data, and Tenuous Proxies that should be kept in mind throughout the process of analysis, recommendation, and action. The post is worth a read if you’re using numbers to [...]

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If you haven’t heard, Shelly Kramer and I are conducting a survey. It’s a short, eight question survey for parent bloggers and it will feed our latest research project. If you haven’t taken it yet, would you? It’d be a huge favor and pop over and take it? The survey is here. We promise to [...]

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Now that adoption of social media and social networking is becoming more common, things that we love – things like data, analysis, context and interpretation –are critical.  Social listening is, most definitely, not enough. Brands and agencies who are serious about producing results for themselves and for their clients must be data driven and they [...]

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We are often asked for advice about how brands can more effectively work with mom bloggers. We’ve researched women bloggers and their likes, dislikes, wants and needs. And we regularly give presentations – to brands and to agencies – on how to get the most out of campaigns that involve mom bloggers. Here we’ll share [...]

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So, I wrote this in 2004. Yes, folks, almost 8 years ago. I could not stop giggling and had to share. Do you remember that old Breck shampoo commercial? The one where Heather Locklear urged everyone to tell two friends about how great the product is and then those two friends would tell two friends [...]

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I really dislike news apps on Facebook. If someone posts a link to an article, I’d like to read it without giving an app permissions. I’ll take the time to find the article elsewhere. Maybe it’s just me.

Well guess what? It’s not just me. There was an outpouring of agreement on this one.
Read More…

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If you know me, you know I’m not a dog person.

And yet, my friends’ dog – Baxter – has crept up into the “okay, I can stand to have you around” category. That’s big.

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