Here at Fenton we’ve had the honor of working with New York Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn (they’ve previous won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on Tiananmen Square) on the movement they’ve sparked around the release of their latest book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity World Wide.

They’ve been covered by Oprah, NBC, the New York Times Magazine dedicated and entire issue to what they called “Women: The Issue of Our Time”. We’ve worked together to created #halfthesky on Twitter and recently launched @halfskytues (we’re dedicating Tuesdays to all things half the sky and working with more than 30 women’s non-profits to flood Twitter with stories of hope, outstanding organizations, ideas on how to get involved, profiles of courage, etc.)

Most recently the campaign launched a button campaign that encourages all those that support the Half the Sky movement…

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A new study out by SheConnected, “The Power of Social Networking For Women Research Study” shows how women use social networking sites. It’s important to note that these women were recruited from social networking sites so the numbers are skewed but still informative.

Some highlights include:
- 59% are are visiting sites multiple times per day.
- Facebook was the most popular social network among these users, with 83% belonging to the site.
- 55% were on Twitter.
- 93% said that control over their own privacy settings were very important.
- 71% said using social networks to network professional was very important and 62% said to stay up-to-date with friends.

More women use social networking than men and if your organization doesn’t understand the trends and strategies on how to maximize them you’re missing out on a key audience.

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Highlights from the new social media study by BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners:

• More than one-half (53%) of the US female Internet population of 79 million actively participated in some type of social media at least weekly.
• 55% of women participate in some form of blogging activity75% participate in social networks such as Facebook or MySpace
• 20% use Twitter
• 45% of survey respondents decided to purchase an item after reading about it on a  blog
• Of the female social media participants, 75% took part in social networking and 55% used blogs.
• But many women went beyond merely reading: 12 million posted to blogs and 8 million published them.
• In fact, women who used blogs were more than twice as likely to do so when they were seeking information, advice and recommendations than were women who participated in social

…

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