A Week Later: Reflections on RootsCamp 2008

by Jen Nedeau

Published December 20, 2008 @ 11:46AM PT

Last week I wrote about how I attended Rootscamp 2008 and presented a panel with Julie Blitzer from Advomatic titled "Why Women Should Be Your Target Audience & How To Reach Them." A week later, I am finally getting the chance to share a few reflections about how the panel and Rootscamp 2008 went overall.

Panel Analysis

The group who listened to the panel really embraced the idea that women as the target audience for any campaign will offer a higher return on investment because of their natural ability to market for issue advocacy, the high click through rates women offer and the ability for women to be active users on a wide variety of sites. The individuals who sat in on the panel also shared great ideas and experiences about how to create websites and online campaigns to be more female friendly:

Think about how to make website interfaces more approachable for women.

• If you are building a social network, make sure that there are various levels of privacy to help women feel safe from online predators. This means building a functional means for consumer feedback, blocking individual users, or reporting malfeasant activity within the site itself.
• If it is a website that needs a login or profile - allow the user to integrate other online entities and be creative with her profile. The idea of Gamma Women vs. Alpha Females is that Gamma's see the online space often as an extension of their personalities. Consider this when building any website that requires a personality profile of some sort.
• While women are often less likely users of video sharing sites like YouTube, once they do sign up for a site, they are some of the most active and loyal participants. As written about in The She Spot- it takes a lot for a female to trust any online entity, but once they do you have a fan for life.

Always offer a diverse range of default avatars for your users.

• Women are often more hesitant to upload a photo right away onto any profile page. With this in mind, it would be helpful to have a diverse range of default avatars that women and men can choose from so that they don't feel pressured to expose their identity right away. This can help them participate in the site passively until they feel like becoming an active user. One example of a site that fails to offer a gender diverse set of default avatars is Facebook.

Make your site safe from online predators

• Many women fear the online space because of online predators. This has created an extra hurdle that every website design professional must consider when building any site that captures user information: you need to ensure that online predators do not use the site and that those who are on the site can be assured to be safe from such types of people.
• Think about the generational digital divide and how to maintain loyal female consumers. It is becoming a trend that mothers are trying keeping their daughters off the internet because of the fear of online predators. While girls eclipse boys when it comes to building or working on Web sites for other people and creating profiles on social networking sites (except for Video Sharing sites) - it would be a shame to lose these tech savvy women later on because of a bad experience with an online predator. Mothers are right to want to protect their children from this experience, but we can also work to prevent these negative user experiences from happening as an online community by building website with the right privacy and monitoring tools.

So, essentially what the panel taught everyone is that it is not enough to just target women in a marketing campaign by posting content on iVillage or building a website that is painted pink. You need to think about HOW you are targeting them and how a female will experience with your product. It's as much about well-researched, targeted content as it is a well-researched, targeted interface.

Rootscamp Analysis:

Since the underlying theme of Rootscamp is politics within the online space, I found that despite my efforts to broaden the scope of discussion, the question always came back to: How can these ideas work in the next state, local or federal election? How does this apply to issue advocacy? How can this be used in the political landscape?

While I understand this reaction, it would be nice to see more conversation within the progressive landscape of how political campaigns can take a few notes from the Fortune 500 companies that have been making their brands a success for decades. It is no secret that the political world is usually behind the curve when it comes to innovation compared with the corporate world, and fairly enough - this is a result of funding. Other times, however, it's a result of being afraid to think outside the box and engage a new, but less known audience.

Some of the suggestions we came up during my panel and the Rootscamp weekend for how to cross-breed the corporate model into the political model:

Expand the Audience

Instead of creating the next "My Barack Obama" - especially if your campaign cannot afford to do such an online campaign - try and leverage existing online communities where people are already engaged. As stated before - I think women should be your target audience online and offline for political/advocacy campaigns because they are the likely candidates to pass your message along for free. Here are few ideas of where you can target women, but engage a new audience online:

• Targeting: Go to an active cooking website, such as Epicurious.com and engage with the users there. Create a political potluck for these individuals to organize and expand the political cause network into this recipe based community.
• Engagement: Talk to mommy blogs such as Queen of Spain who have some political interests, but also connect with the larger mom-o-sphere. Once you find these influencers, find out what issues are important to them and host a blogger Q & A with a candidate.
• Contesting: Approach fashion/style websites such as Team Sugar and host a contest with a famous designer who will dress the candidate and his/her biggest fan for a day.

Aim to please, rather than offend.

• Behind every good marketing campaign - corporate or political - is a well researched messaging plan. In order to send out the right message to the right groups, one must gather online intelligence and find out where individuals are talking about a candidate, issue or competitor. This will help frame the message so that is it natural to the existing conversation, as well as inform opportunities or danger zones.
• Realize who will react to a poorly bad campaign. If for some reason your campaign is not executed properly, be sure to know who you will offend first and by how much.
• Always think about this rule when trying to create a marketing campaign: DO NO HARM. Even if you want to be catchy or fun - you may also offend someone. Be careful and tread lightly. A good campaign with a good strategy and content behind it will surely succeed no matter what.

Create Influencers For Your Issue

• One way that issue advocacy can succeed online is by networking with existing online influencers who are sympathetic to your cause and have them disseminate information on your behalf.
• Make sure you are fostering your own influencers within the online space. Make sure to encourage constant activity in all the online networks that you want to be seen in - the blogosphere, message boards, micro-blogging, video sharing, social news and social network sites. This will maintain your authenticity within the space and avoid being called out. It will also assist the over all success of any campaign if you can use an existing network, rather than starting one from scratch.

In general, Rootscamp 2008 served as a great place to discuss new ideas, rehash the 2008 campaign and make great connections. Seeing the influx of interest in the Web 2.0 space after the Barack Obama campaign was both very encouraging and discouraging at the same time. My hope is that with all the enthusiasm in web 2.0 that we are teaching best practices, looking at what went wrong and instead of duplicating past efforts - always reaching out to create better ones.

For those who went - feel free to share your reflections here. For those who didn't - continue to expand on the discussion in the comments thread.