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Moms Represent 20% of Online Users – Is Your Brand Reaching Them?

mom-computerThere is no denying the statistics that repeatedly tell us mothers are one of the most powerful and influential consumer groups.  A new study from Nielsen has found that nearly 20% of the active online population is women between the ages of 25-54 with at least one child. 

What does this tell us? 

First, that the Internet is a great place to reach this highly coveted audience of consumers and influencers, and second, that your brand needs to be connecting with that audience where they already spend time – online.

Next, the Nielsen study identified differences in online behaviors between segments of the audience as follows: [Read more…] about Moms Represent 20% of Online Users – Is Your Brand Reaching Them?

Kellogg’s Sustainability Might Produce Results

Everyone, but everyone, remembers Victor Kiam.  “I liked the shaver so much, I bought the company”.  You don’t get that kind of personal endorsement from many CEOs.

Another business owner who literally branded his product himself was WK Kellogg.  As early as 1903, he personally signed every box of Corn Flakes produced as a guarantee of quality.

He also pioneered a number of areas to promote healthy lifestyles, including endorsing minimal sugar and meat consumption and plenty of exercise.

From such an auspicious start it was disappointing to read that Ethical Corporation has criticised the company’s first, Corporate Responsibility report as “missing snap crackle and pop”.

So I thought I’d take a look at the company’s website offering to see if this mirrored the criticisms of the sustainability report. [Read more…] about Kellogg’s Sustainability Might Produce Results

A Place for Transparency?

transparency-window

“Transparency” has become an echoing buzzword lately, especially in reference to government, politics and corporate affairs.The topic of transparency doesn’t typically trickle down to the corporate Careers site—but it absolutely should.

I started thinking about this while reviewing sites for the diversity series, and wondering whether pictures are showing actual employees, and whether they are accurately suggesting diversity ratios. Then I came across this observation in the very interesting 8th Annual Sources of Hire Study (released February 2009) from Career Xroads:

We are amazed that we have failed to uncover a single firm that transparently shares their internal movement figures on their website to bolster their claims of employee development despite that fact that we regularly review a thousand companies’ staffing pages each year.

I hadn’t actually considered that particular gap. But I have asked myself more than once why I should believe that employee testimonials (even granting that they are honest) actually represent the majority of employee opinion. Wouldn’t it be great to know a little more about employee retention, voluntary turnover, employee survey results, and other factual evidence about employee satisfaction?

So I checked a dozen companies at random from the Fortune 100 Best Places to Work list. It wasn’t a drill-down search, but it was a respectable attempt to find out (spending about as much time as a typical visitor might) whether there was any statistical or quantitative information about employee satisfaction on the site.

And the answer is . . . Nope. The single exception I found in this small sample was the UPS site, where—tucked away in the Social section, discussing the Global Workforce–there actually is a super-simple depiction of retention statistics and a brief discussion of the approach and goals.

transparency-ups

Problem: This information is by now three years out of date. And that’s one probable reason why companies don’t put employee statistics on their sites—i.e., they don’t want to be bothered with keeping the information up to date. Still, kudos to UPS for even a rudimentary attempt.

Cisco has information on its site about diversity in new hires, broken out by percentage, and up to date through 2008. So it would seem that zeal for displaying diversity may trump the issue of information maintenance. But Cisco provides no similar information about internal movement (as brought up by Career Xroads) or retention.

And by the way, it’s not that companies think the word “retention” won’t have value, or won’t be understood. Many sites boast that the company has “excellent” (or “outstanding,” “high,” etc.) retention. But since we don’t know what grading system they might be using, these superlatives are not very helpful. Is 70% retention considered excellent? 80%?

In fairness, it’s always a challenge to communicate statistical/factual information clearly and accurately, providing an appropriate context for interpretation. So companies may prefer to say nothing at all, rather than risk creating a false or negative impression. Or they may not have appropriately current and comprehensive information. Or they may not have a good understanding of how the information would be received. Or . . . they may not have favorable statistics.

Realistically, it may just be too much trouble–or it just hasn’t occurred to anyone. After all, as long as no one is offering this type of information, there’s no pressure on anyone to do so. But it definitely seems there might be something to gain from the attempt. Perhaps–a competitive advantage?

Thanks to greeblie for the evocative window photograph.

Corporate Blogs, Watch What You Say: Stifling the Corporate Voice

In the throes of a social media and social networking online business world, we all know the importance of watching what you say and to whom you say it. It is as immediate as your keyboard the things you say and how quickly they can appear with your name attached.

Places like Twitter and Facebook are veritable breeding grounds for wayward opinions and thoughts on the status of business. There are many websites, blogs and blog authors who very readily and willingly share their opinions on how things are and how they should be as they see it. Within these aspects of opinions lie a relative truth and how things really are. There is so much room for things to become jumbled, misunderstood and even conveyed incorrectly.

Who is then responsible for this misinformation?

Who is then responsible for the information that the readers take and use according to directions?

As a corporation, do you have in place any safeguards to ensure that the information that you are sharing with your readers is correct, accurate and pertinent?

In many online sectors, there is a stifling of sorts to keep at bay any unbridled or wayward opinions that may damage the company. Take a look at this article about how one company must watch their Twits or suffer at the hands of the SEC (Security and Exchange Commission). If all of our Twits, wall posts and links are going to be saturated with politically-correct lingo and verbiage, where then is the true spirit of good journalism and fair reporting? If all of our online discourses have to pass a “test”, how will readers know what is and what isn’t good stuff? Are we to be bought or stifled at the expense of being fair or worse, borderline?

What do you think is the place for corporate stifling? Does it even have a place in our online community?

From Klingons to Kingons – Star Trek and Burger King Team up for Promotion

Burger King is investing a lot of its marketing budget into blockbuster movie sponsorship this summer.  According to The Wall Street Journal, Burger King will tie its products to Paramount Pictures’ Star Trek, Transformers 2 and G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra.  The 3-film partnership is new for both Burger King and Paramount Pictures, and it seems like a home run for Burger King.

Burger King has released one of the company’s new ads for Star Trek glasses, which will be available at Burger King locations soon.  Certainly, both die-hard Trekkies and anyone who hasn’t lived under a rock for the past 30+ years, will recognize the parody of Star Trek Klingons appearing as Kingons in the new ad.  It’s clever, and as much as the Burger King character freaks me out, this rendition does seem to work. 

So often product placement seems haphazard and inappropriate resulting in a missed opportunity.  I think the Burger King and Paramount partnership is a good one.  It’s nice to see fast food restaurants tying their brands to movies that don’t have a G rating.  In other words, there does appear to be a place for fast food sponsorships in movies that aren’t cartoons (it worked for Burger King and Paramount for both the original Transformers movie and Iron Man).  I suppose these movies are based on comics and cartoons, but the audience for these movies is not likely to be made up primarily of the preschool demographic. 

What do you think?  Is the Burger King-Star Trek partnership a good one?

Image: Flickr

Diversity on the Corporate Website: Disability and Unvisibility

I promised (in the third post of this series) to wrap up with a look at disabilities and unvisible differences. “Disability” is a freighted word in itself, but it’s still the descriptive term used most often, so I’ll stick with it. But I’ve invented the word “unvisibility” to refer to minority groups that can’t be distinguished in a visual portrayal.

The primary unvisible community is lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT), but other groups would include the invisibly disabled, as well as those of a minority ethnic group that isn’t visually obvious. The American with Disabilities Act of 1990 defines disability as “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities,” which includes a wide variety of conditions that wouldn’t show up in a photograph. Similarly, many Native Americans and Americans of Hispanic descent are not visibly distinguishable from non-Hispanic whites.

I looked for a company that does a good job of talking to and about these communities, and came up with Ernst & Young. Search “disability” or “LGBT” on their website, and you’ll find a variety of informational articles and other communications, including: a brochure about their AccessAbilities program offers an excellent guide to understanding disabilities in the workplace, and another called Making It Real, “moves beyond corporate policy” to look at the “day-to-day lives of LGBT employees.”

Ernst & Young uses the term “inclusiveness” to refer to all its programs taken together, and “diversity” to refer to ethnic groups. In some ways that’s an attractive approach, since “inclusiveness” seems more about integration than about difference. But on the other hand . . . “inclusiveness” seems more passive. It suggests that folks will be welcomed if they turn up, whereas “diversity” implies actively inviting folks in order to create a more broadly representative workplace.

Ideally, a company should choose the terminology that best reflects their approach and culture. But whatever word is used—there’s still the matter of how to get the message across on the website. Disabled and unvisible groups are more difficult (and sometimes impossible) to represent in images, so there is more dependence on text.

Ernst & Young does a thorough job of covering this territory, but they take a pretty subtle approach! It unfolds like this:

  • Go to Careers, then choose Life at Ernst & Young from the left nav.
  • On the “Life at” page, choose the text link “people from different backgrounds and cultures.”
  • Now you’re at a page titled “Inclusiveness and flexibility.”
  • From here you can click on text links for “gender,” “ethnicity,” “sexual orientation,” and “physical disability.”
  • Each of those links will take you to a page with a pleasantly vague title, like “Supporting women’s leadership” (gender) and “Bringing people together (physical disability).
  • Each of the sub-pages talks about Ernst & Young’s approach to the particular topic and provides links to a variety of communication materials, like the brochures noted above.

Too subtle? Hard to say. But it seems like a good fit for the site, which is restrained, and for the employer brand. Besides, subtlety may well be the trendy direction . . .

Demographic projections indicate that the concept of “minority” will be irrelevant in the not too distant future, because no one racial group will compose more than 50% of the U.S. population. Meanwhile, the LGBT community continues to be more and more equalized, both in law and social custom. And globalization means that the person in the next cube is just as likely to be from another continent as from another race, gender, sexual orientation, or physical condition.

So we can look forward to the time when all these concerns will have been forgotten.

But in the meantime—my takeaway from working on this series is: Companies should give very serious thought to how they present and portray their working culture, both verbally and visually. Are there unintentional “diversity” messages on your Careers website?