Did you wince when you heard Leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott plead ignorance about the peak broadband speeds last Tuesday evening when quizzed by the 7.30 Reports Kerry O’Brien?

I did because it also reminds me of the response I hear from many senior marketing executives when I raise the subject of connecting with women on line.

Many just go blank.

I know those execs may have already read my column in ConnectedWomen this week and posted below, relating the curious tale of Valerie Khoo’s social media experiment with her cat Rex.

I suspect many would have glanced over this, had a laugh and then gone back to working out how they can continue to pump thousands of their company’s dollars into traditional media.

But some smart ones may be thinking: “ If she can achieve that sort of reach and success with a blog about a cat, then I may be able to do the same with my new  beautiful shiny product” (or at least I hope you are!). Because if you aren’t and you are in possession of your company’s marketing budget, then you are steering that company towards oblivion.

Projecting into the next five years, the continued migration of women to the social media channels and their high level of skills in being able to create these channels for themselves (Valerie is a good example and she teaches executives how to do this) means that businesses who don’t start to connect now will be left out of the conversation.

For example, do you know right now what is being said about either your product or your company in the social media right now? If you don’t why not?

Reasons that I hear for not paying attention to the social media range from “not enough time” to “I don’t think it really works”.  And these come from executives with the word ‘marketing’ in their title and who earn well over $150,000 per annum.

What I really imagine they are saying is that, “I am too afraid to look at that because I may have to change my thinking and learn something new. And I may get it wrong”.

Just as we all reeled back when  Abbott bluntly told Kerry O’Brien last Tuesday night on The 7.30 Report that he wasn’t Bill Gates when it came to the Australia’s broadband needs, I often feel the same when I hear business executives continuing to ignore this critical communication platform.

We know that 72% of Australian women control the household budget and we know that they would prefer that companies hear them and engage with them authentically.

So I pose this challenge to CEO’s: ask your marketing heads why they haven’t created a blog for women about either your company’s expertise, or for its greatest product and let me know what they say.

And if they don’t know why they haven’t done this, find someone who can.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 13th, 2010 at 10:04 am and is filed under My Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.