Incidently, big business is still unsure of how to adopt their marketing approach to this very clear shift. Many businesses recognize the power of women but still balk at finding ways to speak to and target this market with the nuance of understanding the various personas, lifestyles and information that can be used to engage and connect their products and services to their female consumers.

As I said in a meeting today with one of Canada’s largest retailers, women are broad based and they are not looking to have everything wrapped in a pink ribbon. They do want to be spoken to in an intelligent way that accounts not only for who they are, but what they want and need and how they live their lives. Best of all, when you market to women it provides men with a better experience too! Now that is an incentive to re-focus on the female consumer!

What are you doing in your business to market and target your women consumer? Let us know.

Best Nicole

Who’s the boss? If we’re talking about small and medium-sized companies, those with 500 employees or less, chances are it’s a woman.

Female entrepreneurs are driving some of Canada’s most successful small ventures, according to Profit magazine in its recently released annual ranking of the top 100 women entrepreneurs.

They’re now also far outpacing their male counterparts.

From 1976 to 2008, the number of self-employed men in Canada roughly doubled, from 873,400 to 1,719,700, according to Statistics Canada. The number of self-employed women nearly tripled over the same period, going from 311,600 to 909,900.

“A lot of women are starting businesses as a lifestyle decision,” says Carissa Reiniger, president of Women Entrepreneurs of Canada.

“They start to have a family, so they’re not prepared to completely give up on their career but they can’t stay doing what they were doing before, or kind of at the end of their career,” Ms. Reiniger says. “[Or] they’re getting towards a point where they can think about retiring or they’re getting further along their career path and they think, ‘You know what, I don’t want to put up with this any more. I want my own rules and my own life and I’m not quite ready to retire.’”

Graphic: Canada’s top 10 women entrepreneurs

Leaving an employer to strike out on your own has become easier, says Ron Close, executive entrepreneur-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario’s Richard Ivey School of Business.

“With the access to information and research, it’s a little easier to do planning and competitive analysis with the internet,” he says. “It’s also easier, I think, to access skills and talent.”

Ideas for products and services sought after by women have also traditionally been overlooked by male entrepreneurs, Mr. Close adds.

Betty Anne Latrace-Henderson, president of Saskatoon-based Airline Hotels and Resorts, who ranked number one on the Profit W100 list, says many women are drawn to entrepreneurship for better work-life balance.

“There’s definitely the option of [setting] your hours, depending on what you’re in,” she says.

Aimée Israel, CEO of LifeSpeak, a Toronto-based work-life balance consultancy firm, who also made the Profit W100 list, says there is a simple reason for the growing number of self-employed women in Canada.

“I think that has to do a little bit with women feeling more liberated to stray off the traditional path and maybe look at opportunities outside of the corporate environment combined with more creativity, more passion around what they’re doing and also looking for more flexibility,” she says.

Of course, self-employment comes with its own unique demands.

“You have in some respects more flexibility because you’re your own boss and you can schedule some things within the parameters of your own needs, but it’s also your own undertaking, so it’s on your mind 24/7,” she says.

The take away from this story is that digital marketing and social media are about meeting the core needs of YOUR business. Not following the trends. Are you reaching the audiences you are trying to connect to?

Best Nicole

It seems every day a new Web 2.0 service pops up and renders another pre-Internet technology obsolete – from old-fashioned stock listings to the lowly phone book.

But no matter how quickly the Web churns out better, faster and cheaper versions of these services, millions of people still rely on the old, real-life versions. Now several Canadian startups are trying to fuse the old and the new – using the Web to make pre-Web services easier and cheaper. In the process, these startups are also creating a host of innovative new business plans that may change the way small firms make money on the Internet.

Few firms embody the fusion of new and old technology better than Hippopost, a Kitchener-Waterloo startup run by a half-dozen former Research In Motion employees. Hippopost’s service is somewhat similar to Skype – except instead of letting users make free phone calls, Hippopost allows them to send free postcards.

Who sends postcards any more? Americans sent two billion of them last year alone, Hippopost head Donal Byrne says. Indeed, the traditional postcard format has been relatively unchanged for 100 years.

Jennifer Roberts / For The Globe and Mail

Donal Byrne, Bob Millar and Rob Shields of Hippopost, the company that allows you to send free postcards through the mail by tagging each card with an advertisement, pose for photo in Toronto on October 6, 2009.Hippopost works by tagging every postcard with an ad. Users pick a photo from a list, or upload their own, write a message, type in the address of the recipient and Hippopost sends the postcard for free. It arrives about five business days later – Hippopost works with several regional distributors across North America – with an advertiser-branded frame around the front side and a small ad on the back.

“From an advertiser perspective, when was the last time your brand ended up on somebody’s fridge?” Mr. Byrne asks. “It’s almost like smart direct mail.”

One of the most interesting aspects of Hippopost’s business model is the user-selection system of advertising. Once a user enters the address of the recipient, the website offers them a selection of advertisers who sell their product in that area. The idea is that users are more likely to select an ad that’s more relevant to the person they’re sending the postcard to, and advertisers are more likely to want to pay for that added relevancy.

“It’s user-created content meets user-selected advertising,” Mr. Byrne says.

Several big-name advertisers have already signed up, including Expedia and Coca-Cola.

Not surprisingly for a company founded by former RIM employees, Hippopost has already created a BlackBerry application that lets users design and send postcards on the go. The company is working on apps for the iPhone and other platforms too.

“You can be on a ski hill or at a beach, and you can take a picture, write a message and hit send,” Mr. Byrne says. “That’s it.”

And while a five-day wait may seem like an eternity in an instant-messaging age, Mr. Byrne says it does have some advantages for advertisers, allowing them, for example, to extend the marketing lifespan of an event or campaign that would otherwise end much sooner.

While it’s still unclear whether Hippopost will be able to drag the 100-year-old medium into the digital age, early customer reviews are positive, driven in large part by a wired generation’s fascination with the concept of sending a real-life message, for a change.

Press ‘1′ if you’re frustrated

But real life can often be a frustrating place. In Toronto, a small startup is generating big buzz for its work on relieving one of life’s biggest headaches – the much-dreaded customer service phone line.

Just about everybody has experienced the futility of navigating a big company’s telephone system. More often than not, the sound on the other end of the line isn’t the voice of a human being, but a robot or hours of Muzak.

Fonolo, a six-person Toronto startup, wants to change all that. The concept is simple – company CEO Shai Berger calls it “deep dialling.” Users go to the Fonolo website and search for the company they’re trying to call (the Fonolo database has about 500). Once they’ve selected the company, Fonolo presents a list of the most popular destinations for users calling that company.

For example, the listing for Dell includes dozens of entries for customer support and technical assistance. Users choose the department or number they’re trying to reach, enter their own phone number, and Fonolo does the rest. The website dials the number, and when it gets through to the right department, it calls the user, saving them the hassle of going through the phone menu system manually.

“We wanted to tackle a frustration that somebody understood, something really universal,” says Mr. Berger, whose company started with backing from angel investors and is now looking for more. “When we started talking about things that bother us when it comes to using the phone, the concept of phone menus quickly rose to the top.”

Fonolo’s consumer service is entirely free. This summer, the company rolled out a corporate product that uses the same technology, but provides a revenue source. In effect, it allows companies to embed Fonolo’s technology into their websites or mobile applications, thereby improving their own customer experience without doing the expensive and time-consuming work of changing their phone systems.

Much like Hippopost, Fonolo uses a free customer service as a way to attract paying corporate clients.

“The consumer service doesn’t generate revenue, but it serves as an excellent demonstration of the technology,” Mr. Berger says. “It’s a fantastic way to generate awareness and drive potential customers our way, much more effective than me trying to cold call or buy banner ads.”

Best Nicole

Interactive media will represent nearly one of every five dollars spent by marketers on media in the U.S. next year, according to estimates released Wednesday by WPP’s GroupM unit, the largest buyer of media in the world. The agency holding company’s new global ad spending forecast predicts interactive media, primarily online, will represent 17% of the U.S. advertising marketplace in 2010, up from 15.4% in 2009, and making.

 That makes interactive the third largest medium in the U.S., behind television’s 44.2% share, and magazine’s 18.4% share of 2010 advertising budgets. According to GroupM’s estimates, interactive media will overtake newspaper’s U.S. advertising share this year. Newspapers, which had a 14.8% share of U.S. ad spending in 2008, will fall to a 13.6% share this year, and a 12.4% share next year. Interactive media had a 13.9% share in 2008.

Radio’s U.S. advertising share also continues to erode, dropping to 5.6% this year, from 6.0% in 2008. GroupM predicts radio’s share of U.S. ad spending will drop to 5.2% in 2010.

Out-of-home media spending remains steady at 2.7%.

While the U.S. isn’t the largest interactive media marketplace in the world in terms of penetration, it is the biggest in terms of advertising volume. While the GroupM report does not break out the components of interactive media, it estimates that marketers will spend $23.9 billion on interactive media in the U.S. in 2010, representing 39.9% of the world’s $59.9 billion interactive advertising marketplace.

The largest market in terms of interactive media penetration is the U.K., where British marketers will spend 30.9% of their advertising budgets on interactive media, followed by Denmark, where interactive media will have a 28.4% share next year. Ireland has the smallest interactive advertising penetration of any major Western industrialized nation, with a 3.0% share in 2010, up from just 1.8% in 2009.

Globally, marketers will invest 14.6% of their worldwide advertising budgets on interactive media, up from 13.2% in 2009.

GroupM Futures Director Adam Smith, the author of the new forecast, said the only other major media to increase share during the global advertising recession are TV and outdoor media.

“TV and out-of-home have both added share of global ad investment, while newspapers continue to shed a point of share a year,” he noted in the report. “It may also be the case that TV and out-of-home’s relative cheapness compared to newspapers has encouraged this, and perhaps newspapers have been less willing to flex pricing too.”

Everyone needs to get on the band wagon. “They”—yes your customers are talking about you even if you are not engaging—aren’t waiting. So why are you? Get out and engage them—because they want to engage you.

Best Nicole

When Larry Rudolf became vice-president of marketing at Markham, Ont.-based Strategic Connections Inc. (SCI) last year, he took on a challenge.

A 2006 deal with General Motors Corp. had made SCI North America, with 85 employees, the biggest provider of software for tracking and managing sales leads to the auto industry. But GM private-labels SCI’s Torque system, so even auto dealers who use it may not have heard of the company.

Mr. Rudolf’s goal was to raise the company’s profile, especially outside North America.

“What I needed to do was to use every single tool,” Mr. Rudolf says. “Today, social media marketing is one of the fundamental tools, or it’s becoming a fundamental tool.”

 Gifford Watkins, founder and chief executive of Atlantic Webfitters in Mount Uniacke, N.S., uses Twitter to keep up with news and rumours

First Mr. Rudolf established a blog at www.idriveleads.com. Then he opened an account on Twitter.com, a social networking site that has gained popularity. He also set up a page on Facebook.com, the leading consumer social-networking service.

Twitter, the latest example of a social networking site turned business tool, is a “microblogging” site where members post 140-character “tweets,” or updates on their activities, comments and links to websites. Twitter gets about 10 million unique visitors a month, up from barely a million at the beginning of 2008.

SCI uses it for marketing, with tweets like: “Dealership was with us 2 years. Left late summer for a competitor. Came back (yesterday) and asked for a 3-year contract. Results matter.” Other tweets are teasers for company blog posts, which doesn’t necessarily sell SCI’s products directly, Mr. Rudolf says, but help the company present itself as a thought leader in its field and drives traffic to its website.

This may sound dangerously close to spam, but Twitter makes it easy for people to opt in or out of following your tweets, says Tim Hickernell, lead analyst for Info-Tech Research Group, based in London, Ont.

That puts the onus on the business, which must make people want to follow its tweets. So there must be valuable information and not just self-promotion.

“Make sure you give them something of value. Don’t parrot [by repeating what others have written] and don’t fill it up with noise,” Mr. Hickernell advises.

At the same time, he says, Twitterers must know their audience. Some people want information, some want interactivity and expect you to reply to their tweets. Gauging this can be difficult, Mr. Hickernell says, and success can only be judged by feedback or whether people stop following you.

Using Twitter as a business tool means listening, too. Businesses can monitor public opinion about their products or services and keep up with what’s happening in their markets.

Sarah Thompson who recently established the Toronto public relations agency CoeurIdeas, says Twitter’s search feature, which lets her hunt for tweets containing a word or phrase, is a great way to monitor public opinion about a product or announcement.

Gifford Watkins, founder and chief executive of Atlantic Webfitters in Mount Uniacke, N.S., uses Twitter to keep up with news and rumours about DotNetNuke, the open-source software his company uses in building Web portals.

Businesses should also look at Facebook and its business counterpart, LinkedIn, Mr. Hickernell adds.

LinkedIn bills itself as a professional networking site, where users create profiles and forge links with others. Ms. Thompson likes it for locating “all those people that I’ve lost the business cards of along the way.”

The LinkedIn Answers service lets subscribers post questions and receive answers from other subscribers — “almost like opening a problem ticket that the public can give good answers — or bad answers — on,” Mr. Watkins says.

Facebook is still seen largely as a consumer site, but Mr. Hickernell says “many people are indeed using Facebook now — the 30- and 40-somethings — for professional networking.”

Mr. Watkins uses Facebook to talk about his concept of Web portals — sites that non-technical people can update, compared to conventional Web pages. “All I do is basically pontificate about the job I love,” he says, but it helps educate customers.

Mr. Hickernell advises care in using social networking, though. Employees must be careful what they post, and mixing business and after-hours identities online is “an accident waiting to happen,” he warns.

Best Nicole

January 13, 2009 at 5:09 PM EST

SAN FRANCISCO — Yahoo Inc. confirms that it has hired Silicon Valley veteran Carol Bartz as its new chief executive.

The decision ends a two-month search to replace Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang.

His short reign as CEO was marred by his refusal to sell Yahoo to Microsoft for US$47.5 billion — about $30-billion (U.S.) more than Yahoo is worth now.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company would be luring Ms. Bartz, 60, from Autodesk Inc., which specializes in making design software for architects and engineers. Ms. Bartz was the San Rafael, Calif.-based company’s CEO from 1992 until 2006, when she stepped aside to become executive chairman.

Ms. Bartz’s appointment could set the stage for Microsoft to renew its efforts to buy Yahoo’s Internet search operations as a way of mounting a more serious threat to Google, the market leader. Microsoft had been reluctant to deal with Mr. Yang because he rebuffed several previous overtures, including a $47.5-billion offer to buy Yahoo in its entirety last May.

Microsoft subsequently withdrew that bid, valued at $33 a share, and now Yahoo’s stock price hovers around $12. Mr. Yang had hoped to placate shareholders by using Google’s superior technology to sell some of the ads alongside Yahoo’s search results, but that idea unravelled in November after federal antitrust regulators threatened to block the deal.

Investors didn’t seem convinced Yahoo would be better off with Ms. Bartz. Yahoo shares fell 27 cents to $11.95 in Tuesday afternoon’s trading.

Ms. Bartz’s track record indicates she likely would act quickly to build upon Yahoo’s strengths while doing her best to shed the weaknesses.

“She is able to see the essence of things because she doesn’t spend a lot of time worrying about how people are going to feel,” said Nilofer Merchant, a former Autodesk manager who is now CEO of technology consultant Rubicon. “She is driven by doing the best thing for the business.”

Under Ms. Bartz’s leadership, Autodesk’s annual revenue has ballooned from $285-million to $2.2-billion. Perhaps more importantly to Yahoo’s long-suffering shareholders, Autodesk’s stock price rose by an annual average of nearly 20 per cent during Ms. Bartz’s stint as CEO, beating the 10.6 per cent annual average for the Standard & Poor’s 500 index.

Ms. Bartz had established her management chops before joining Autodesk. She spent nine years at Sun Microsystems Inc., where she eventually became the No. 2 executive behind the server maker’s then-CEO, Scott McNealy.

Despite Ms. Bartz’s resume, she will likely face questions about whether she is a good fit at Yahoo because she lacks any background in advertising – the primary source of Yahoo’s income.

Yahoo also is far larger than Autodesk, with annual revenue of more than $7-billion and roughly 13,000 employees, nearly twice the size of Autodesk’s work force.

As one of the first women to run a technology company, Ms. Bartz is used to being underestimated. Even after she had been Autodesk’s CEO for years, some of her male counterparts occasionally mistook her for an administrative assistant while she was attending industry conferences.

Before graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1971 with a degree in computer science, Ms. Bartz was a cheerleader, homecoming queen and a cocktail waitress – a job that helped pay her college tuition.

In her corporate life, Ms. Bartz talks more like a sailor, said Mr. Merchant, who recalls Ms. Bartz starting days with profanity-laced phone calls demanding to know why a sale hadn’t been closed. After dressing down a worker, Ms. Bartz usually found a way to end the conversation on an encouraging note. “She always wanted to make sure the job got done,” Mr. Merchant said.

Ms. Bartz hasn’t hesitated to get rid of employees incapable of executing her strategy. Within six months of taking over at Autodesk, she had purged its management ranks.

If Yahoo turns its search operations over to Microsoft, many analysts expect the company to lay off thousands of workers to save money. As it is, Yahoo just dumped 1,500 workers to help shore up its profits during the recession. The company also has lost many top managers during the past two years as Yahoo’s malaise worsened.

Yahoo’s decision to bring in an outsider could alienate its president, Susan Decker, who also was a candidate for the CEO job. Ms. Decker’s close ties to Mr. Yang and Yahoo’s previous CEO, Terry Semel, probably worked against her, because her appointment wouldn’t have appeased shareholders clamouring for a shake-up.

Ms. Decker, though, already has a working relationship with Ms. Bartz because both women sit on the board of chip maker Intel Corp.

Ms. Bartz also would have to coexist with Mr. Yang, who will revert to his titular role of “chief Yahoo” while remaining on the company’s board. Those two also share a boardroom together as directors at Internet gear maker Cisco Systems Inc.

This wouldn’t be Ms. Bartz’s first daunting challenge. When Autodesk hired her in CEO in 1992, the company was facing a shareholder revolt amid concerns that Autodesk was overly dependent on a single software product that accounted for nearly all of its revenue. Now, Autodesk offers an array of design software as well as computer programs that help add special effects to movies and TV shows.

To compound her initial problems at Autodesk, Ms. Bartz was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly after taking the job. She had a mastectomy and was back in the office in four weeks.

Our conversation was fast and furious: Nicole roaring out of her “Give me Social Media or Give me Death” corner; me throwing punches to “Protect the Right to Print”.

Nicole raised the point that PC magazine is dropping their print format. My response: it’s relatively safe to assume that the majority of PC readers are likely to be computer literate. So why not go the extra step, cut out the middleman (aka print publication) and let your already web happy readership get their news straight from the source?

After a flurry of ducks and jabs—not to mention more than a little fancy footwork—we exploded into the centre of the ring. Face to face, “wo-mano a wo-mano”, fists began to fly over the final topic: why her friend seemed insistent on print PR in The Globe, instead of hitting the Internet.

Nicole’s right-to-the-point uppercut: free publicity. Twitter PR galore. Global audience!

My 1-2 punch: Sure. I don’t disagree with any of these points. I think they’re all part of a legitimate, potentially successful approach. However, despite the fact that many social media-aholics believe that print is quickly going the way of the dinosaur, the reality is that social media only works if your key demographic uses it. And in the case of The Globe, yes: they’ve clearly been working hard to attract new blood in the form of “intellectually curious” women and men ages 25-54 with the launch of their LifeStyle section two years ago and their increasing development of social tools and web-friendly content on globandmail.com. But the fact is that a good part of their demographic still lies with the elder statesmen of their fan base—the 50+ crowd. This is a predominantly male group who are already successful in their areas of expertise and (to some extent) probably don’t feel it necessary to get involved in social media such as “Twitter” or “Facebook”. Men who are of an era that still regards computers with deep suspicion—considering them a barely necessary evil only to be used when absolutely necessary. Men who just don’t have the time, or simply refuse to see the benefit in making new friends and/or contacts online (they’ve already developed a large cadre of their own well-heeled cronies over their illustrious careers, thank you very much). Or, more simply, they may just be lovers of the printed word who happen to enjoy sitting back and reading the paper in the morning…going through and sorting out their favourite sections as they make “enlightenment” a part of their daily routine.

Finally, after a long, brutal match, I met Nicole’s bleary gaze and delivered a devastating KO punch: certainly, The Globe is doing a wise thing in nurturing a new breed of readers to supplement (and replace) the old. But they can’t completely disrespect or disregard those avid black ink on paper supporters who have helped them—and continue to help them—grow and maintain their prestigious title as Canada’s most read National newspaper. Therefore, print media (in this instance) is still alive and well and is still a legitimate way for your friend to get the PR they crave.

And “Give me Death or Give Social Media“ is down for the count. The crowd roars as I successfully “Protect the Right to Print” while still agreeing with Nicole’s defense of all that Tweets!

So you see, the reality is that print may fade away. Papers may die; magazines may disappear. But somehow, I doubt that. I think that somewhere, there will always be those who desire to have the word in print. People who are fans of having something tangible that they can hold, feel and experience with all their senses. And I plan to be counted among those few, those happy few, this band of brothers and sisters…who happen to love the smell of newsprint in the morning.

Torn between two lovers,

Margaret.

To read more about whether print is dead, check out this article from Mediabistro.com.

If you’re one of the uninitiated, just go to Google and type in, “What is Twitter.” The first response that comes up offers a pretty clear explanation: Twitter, a free social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time.

The focus of this piece is Twitter’s ability to follow news items in real time, such as the most recent terrorist attack in Mumbai. In his article, Mathew Ingram speaks about tracking this unfolding story using all of the social media formats—blogs, youtube, flickr, etc.—to gather a steady stream of news from people close to the source. There is one school of thought that speaks of the authenticity and veracity of real time messaging as many messages go up so fast that they cannot be verified. But as quickly as these unverified, slightly skewed conversations occur, there is a stream of people that can equally weed out the fiction from the fact. For some, the question then becomes whether the information being received is valid and does that make Twitter a valid news source? However, in all fairness, much of the information reported on cable news is also unverified and in need of correction. The brilliance arrives at the end of the article where Mathew says “Twitter reports are a valuable “first draft of history” and that is a pretty great definition of news”.

One of the real challenges for firms like mine is to find a way to spread the news that social media and social messaging is a form of spreading the news on as many topics, ideas and thoughts as one can imagine. And all of this information can best be shared by the use of this social messaging utility. Did these companies and their decision makers hear, read and see that Twitter is free? In a conversation I had with a brilliant and successful executive the other day, we talked about channels for the launch of a new marketing/PR mandate. Ultimately, the first thought that came to their mind was to get media coverage in a publication such as The Globe and Mail. Wonder if they’re aware that The Globe and Mail, a very important and respected news source that they want to have cover all of their PR initiatives, is actually encouraging all of their readers to follow them on Twitter?

Imagine the number of people that would have 24/7 access to their news if they participated in a process that allowed them to announce initiatives in real-time to a global audience—instead of limiting themselves to a predominately Canadian business focused market. What about all the media, communities and passionate people who are looking to join in and spread the word about, and for, like minded products, services ideas and values. Just imagine how the use of social media tools, such as Twitter, could lead a public relations campaign. Best of all, the money spent on utilizing traditional media sources could be spent setting up an infrastructure that would cost them nothing more than the time it takes to type 100 words or less. Just imagine it…..tweet…. tweet…..tweet.

Click on this link to read Mathew Ingram’s article.

Best Nicole