So today Mashable confirmed that women are the rulers of the social media space.
http://mashable.com/2009/10/03/women-rule-the-social-web/
Having done quite a lot of thinking on this topic this year it came as no great surprise to me to see this. I also loved the fact that digg was the only anomaly. That made a lot of sense which I will explain.
For years people have been trying to get the girls to engage more with technology. Playstation and Nintendo have never really been able to figure out a game that really appealed to girls. We just weren’t into playing games. Even if the games were about fashion, fairies and unicorns or cute farmyard animals. They were still games about stuff you played by yourself in most cases. Girls would still much rather spend 2 hours on the phone talking to her mates. Why?
Because is really is pretty simple. Since the beginning of time women just love to talk about people. It is our sport.
I am pretty sure women gossiping about each other and their friends is pre-historic. Jane Austen being one of the first to really write about what she and her mates were getting up to. Who was getting it on with who. Who was jealous of who. Who was prettier. Who was going to get the man. This is the stuff girls love. We will always have a fascination to follow and talk about people we know, or nowadays people we feel like we know.
When I was growing up there was a weekly newspaper that came out every Friday. Every week everyone would scour the pages - not because of the great witty journalism or because there happened to be a load of news about the town - because believe me, not much ever happened there. No, it was to look at pictures of people that you knew, read any gossip about who had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly in the Court round up, see who had got engaged to who and who’d had babies with who. Then you would go to school and talk about it with your mates.
Then there was the advent of the celebrity magazine. Suddenly my Friday morning local news fix grew into a Tuesday morning craving to find out about Posh Spice and David Beckham.
Big Brother was the ultimate hit of getting to observe people unedited. Our need to analyse other people’s behaviour had never been so satisfied. We were gripped and then spent hours debating what we had seen in the pub afterwards.
Lastly, we cannot forgot Sex and the City here either. Those girls almost became other people we knew and could bitch about. How angry we all were when Carrie dumped Aidan!
Social media now gives girls the ability to follow anyone they want from all around the world (without them having knowing about it) and publicly comment on it, facilitating the conversations online. It’s media built around people talking about themselves and then other people talking about that. It can be scary, we do control our own personal brands to a certain extent, but one unfortunate tag can ruin everything we try to project. Those are the tags that are most interesting to other people. And, in fact, the albums they are most likely to delve into deeper to see what else they can find. We want to find the interesting juicy stuff to talk about.
It has given us girls the technological platform to do what we always loved best online and aid our conversations in real life For girls, its true addictive brilliance.
Amanda Stevens has done some really nice thinking about this in her book ‘She Marketing’.
http://www.splashgroup.com.au/book-review-she-marketing-the-science-of-marketing-to-women.html
She talks about the fact what is really comes down is that girls’ brains fundamentally think different to boys. We are wired differently. Girls talk about people, boys talk about things. Which is why digg is the odd one out here. Because it is to tag cool stuff.
Its exciting - girls are finally the dominant force in a digital space, and now there is lots of opportunity now to think about how else that can be built on. What or who else could be created to talk about or a way to evolve how we talk about each other? Because we always will. It’s how we are built. (And because I wrote this I am now really late to meet my friend and I know she will be talking about me….)
