Vibrant Nation offers real-world advice

When women need advice on business, travel, shopping or other activities, they know where to turn – to other women.

That’s the premise behind Vibrant Nation, a new online site started by Louisville entrepreneur Stephen Reily.

The Web site’s target audience is women 50 and older, and it allows its members a forum to share their experiences or take advantage of the counsel of their peers.

VibrantNation.com is not a social networking site like MySpace, where users come to meet and make friends, said Reily, 43, who is chairman and co-founder of Louisville-based IMC Licensing. “We call this a social recommendation site.”

The online community offers members a platform for views ranging from politics to the arts, as well as an avenue to critique and rate companies or product brands.

Users post questions on topics ranging from t’ai chi (“Does anyone know a good instructor in …?”) to shopping (“My sister lives in Brooklyn and I need to find a great present. Any recommendations?”)

Recent postings on the site included a plug for the “best salad in Boston” – reportedly at Pier 219 restaurant – and the benefits of Jazzercise.

Reily said he developed his idea for the Web site because he saw a growing market for women older than 50, many of whom feel ignored or misunderstood by sellers of goods and services.

“There seemed to be this incredible gap or opportunity to bridge,” he said.

According to a report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 75 percent of people ages 51 to 59 use the Internet, and 54 percent of people 60 to 69 go online. Older users are active in online activities such as researching health information, making travel arrangements, sending e-mail, getting news and doing product research.

People older than 50 in general control more than 50 percent of the financial assets in the country, Reily said, and “women control 80 percent of purchase decisions at every age.”

Nevertheless, he said, “you have a marketplace of product and service providers, who, I guess, at best under-recognize this very valuable market, and in many cases just outright ignore them or insult them.”

“There are an enormous number of businesses today started by women over 50, and yet, for example, American Express doesn’t have an ad campaign directed at them,” he said. Over-50 women “feel generally stereotyped as winding their lives down, not interested in new things, becoming more sedentary, and they feel actually the opposite.

“A lot of these women are at this stage of life much more capable to engage in world travel than they were 10 or 15 years before when they were getting the kids out of the door every day,” he said.

The United States is geared to the “very young,” said Jane Goldstein, assistant dean for development at the University of Louisville College of Business. “You see it everywhere you go.”

But women in their 50s are hardly ready to settle into rocking chairs, Goldstein said. “I think there’s an interest on the part of women of an age to experience things, and I think Vibrant Nation can help them do that,” she said.

Michael Cammon, a strategic marketer who has worked with Fortune 500 companies such as Time Warner, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Citigroup and Procter & Gamble, is president of Vibrant Nation.

Cammon, most recently vice president of e-commerce and business development at AARP, said he was introduced to Reily by a mutual friend and was excited about the new company.

The Web site will provide “a tremendously useful and important” service, he said. The site will carry targeted advertisements and will also aggregate feedback from members to sell to marketers, he said. No information about individual users will be shared.

The idea of collecting such data and using it “as a voice to marketers” is intriguing, said Bridget Wathen, one of the Louisville women who helped critique the initial versions of Vibrant Nation.

It’s better to have “honest paths” such as Vibrant Nation, rather than “surreptitious paths” of sites that are less candid about their aims, said Wathen, who has worked in business and education. She often visits entrepreneurial sites and blogs and hasn’t found any quite like Vibrant Nation. “It appears that they’re sort of at the forefront of tapping into this demographic.”