• Reaching Women Voters
  Susan Molinari
• The Googling Mom
  Gur Tsabar
• Women 50 to 70 are the Golden Bull's-Eye
  Marti Barletta

The Googling Mom

Mothers are known for searching for solutions – whether it's a recipe for a quick meal or a way to stop the kids from fighting. But a certain kind of mom is in a constant state of searching. Instinctively, she seeks out answers for herself, her family and others. She is the “Googling mom.”

Predictably, search engines are one of her primary tools. Women in general tend to use search engines slightly more than men. According to the 2007 media usage survey conducted by Ketchum and the University of Southern California, 69 percent of women use search engines, compared to 66 percent of men. But the Googling mom does more than use search engines; she treats online resources like friends and family – turning to the Web for wisdom on questions that she is certain someone must have had before her.

However, she doesn't rely on search engines alone. Online or off, the Googling mom is constantly searching for answers. And the answers can come from a longtime friend – or the person she's standing next to in line at the supermarket – or just as easily from a useful Web site, a social network or from the words printed on the packaging of a product.

This presents a great opportunity for marketers who want to reach moms. Take the e-retailer that gives mom everything she needs to return unwanted purchases, including an adhesive return label and a sealable return pouch she can simply stuff into her mailbox. By eliminating yet another undesirable trip to the post office, the marketer's actions do more to address the Googling mom's concerns than most words ever could.

Similarly, companies also must rethink the way they position themselves online. First, they must realize that having a Web presence is, at most, 1 percent about showcasing their wares to the world and 99 percent about fulfilling the needs of their target constituencies. And toward that end, companies must produce content that is both relevant and conversational.

Public relations can help companies and their brands evaluate the wide array of conversational assets they have at their disposal and prepare them to use those assets in two ways:

1. To maximize dissemination: Content must be created in a way that effectively taps into society's conversational realities, ensuring it spreads like wildfire – online as well as offline.
2. To take advantage of the Web's native indexing mechanisms: The next time a Googling mom is searching for answers online, the brand should be easily accessed as a ready resource, with content that is relevant to moms' concerns.

Simply put: Companies that successfully provide answers to Googling moms at their most critical moments of search are guaranteed to engender a lifetime of loyalty.