Consider the wo-man factor
Anyone that works in PR knows that it’s filled with women, and notably, there were a number of top women from the industry speaking at PRWeek’s NEXT conference on Wednesday: Marian Salzman (Porter Novelli), Christine Cea (Unilever), and Shoba Purushothaman (NewsMarket), to name a few. My morning roundtable, “Womenomics - The Rise of Women as Power Influencers” was led by Gail Heimann of Weber Shandwick. Calling it a topic of personal interest, Heimann asked the group to consider how to harness the economic power of women given that they control $14 trillion in global wealth. (I stuck that notecard on one wall of my cube.) A number of ideas arose, including a grassroots campaign on par with breast cancer organizing that would focus on poverty and the earning power of women. Something that would address why women still make less than men. Another idea was an influencer index to find the right women to reach, like the active PTA mom. (more after break)
One woman at the conference who left more than a few of the women in the audience chattering in a less than positive way was Bonnie Fuller. Fuller, who thanked Britney Spears’ legacy of disasters for getting her to where she is today, started out her panel, “Killer Content,” by saying women are needy and emotional, which has led them to buy lots of her magazines. It wasn’t clear whether Fuller was trying to court controversy, or if she truly had no idea how much those two words turns off any woman when it’s attached to her gender. She continued on to say that neediness, though, causes women to frequently turn to online sources of news for “immediate relief.”
