Next in a series of interviews with female Canadian social media stars! The premise, which you can read about here, investigates how women act towards each other in the quest to be head social butterfly.
Today we welcome Adele McAlear, a Montreal marketer who’s feminist street cred includes being the founding Executive Director of the Vancouver chapter of DigitalEve International, a non-profit organization for women in technology. She also contributes to Technically Women.
In almost 3 years of working in social media, I’ve had overwhelmingly good experiences with women being supportive and helping each other to get ahead. There have been one or two instances that were a little less than pleasant, but I’m willing to chalk those up to people just having a bad day. (Or perhaps I don’t want to bring down the whole gender for the rare instance where all was not smooth.)
For myself, I will help people, regardless of gender, whom I believe are genuine and who treat me with respect. I won’t go out of my way to help people when I’m made to feel like I’m simply a stepping stone to get someone else. You know, the people who look through you to the next person up the food chain as they stare blankly with a false smile. But, I’ve had that feeling from both men and women, so I don’t think that it’s gender-specific.
I’ve found fewer instances of the “Old Boys” club in social media, but it’s still alive and kicking. I was trying to think of why more people of both genders follow men and I think it comes down to men being perceived as more influential in business. Like the concepts of fame begetting fame; of men making more money than women for the same job, of why women pay more at the dry cleaners.
That said, I have some great cheerleaders who are men. And I have some who are women. I think that my experiences in social media are really just a reflection of society at large.
Lucky you! You’re off to SXSW in sunny Austin in a few weeks, to meet other geeks, ogle the internet-famous, and generally get whipped into an interactive froth. Here’s your top 10 tips from a seasoned South By’er to make your webby whirlwind a little more user friendly.
Austin is in Texas. Texas is sweat-inducing even in March. You might still sport jeans and an evening cardi, but you’ll appreciate the built-in air conditioning that accompanies a bare foot. And get a pedi. You’re going to be walking a lot, so decallus and beautify in advance.
2. Pre-pimp your iPhone
Thanks to ubiquitous wifi, in ’08 I got away with carrying only my iPod Touch for internet access! You gotta have:
I’m not kidding, this lets you find where your friends are sitting at each panel. I haven’t used it, but this little piece of Star Trekkian-futurama sounds so useful.
It costs $2.99, but you’ll save at least that much, what with the free beer (see #9). And it’s worth it, because Tweetie 2 has the works: lists, retweets, multiple accounts.
If you ain’t iPhone-enabled, you’ll want a connected device, but for God’s sake bring a netbook. I wept at the weight of my server-sized laptop more than once. There’s beautiful wifi everywhere in the conference centre, but don’t sit outside in the hot Texas sun to blog (however tempting it might be). I did this in ’09. overheated my motherboard, and spent a fortune on a long distance, roaming-charges fraught tech support call that ultimately left me lugging a blue-screened brick. Because they hung up on me.
4. Don’t get the Big Bag
As a marketer I know this is poor sportsmanship, and I get that sponsorship keeps costs down, but you don’t need the Big Bag. It’s a canvas tote with a groovy Adobe logo on it (and makes a dope grocery bag later), but it’s jam-packed with flyers and weighs a ton. Whatever one good freebie it may or may not contain is not worth lugging that thing around the entire first day, or the environmental guilt you’ll suffer tossing all that paper.
5. Carry ye olde school paper business cards
There’s nothing like the personal touch of trading cards with new contacts, especially if you’re traveling solo and looking for some nerd love. Take this opportunity to spiff up your blog or anything else you’ll be herding people towards with said cards. And check out Bump, a cute iPhone app that lets you bump your phone into the phones of cute boys and exchange contact info.
6. Ditch the dSLR
Unless you work for the Big Picture and are really married to depth of field, use a point ‘n’ shoot or your iPhone. dSlrs have 3 strikes against them: they`re expensive if you break or lose them, they’re heavy, and you can never whip them out and focus when the action’s going down. I’ve lugged a full-size professional video camera around that damn conference, and, I mean, just don’t.
8. Travel toothbrush + Colgate = your purse’s new BFF
You’ll have serious coffee breath at some point. Carry a mini bottle of Scope, too.
9. Don’t go pregnant
Beer is a fundamental component of both Austin & SX, and having to pass it up (sometimes it’s FREE!) is a drag. On the flip side, you may find the prevalence of hops revolting. Blogger Dooce was 5 months pregnant at the ’09 extravaganza, & she said the beer stench that passes for air in Austin made her physically ill. So try not to be conferencing for two if you can help it.
10. Schedule your bliss
You can use the tools to build yourself a kick-ass schedule, but how do you know what, from the dizzying array of options, to attend? You don’t want to miss anything great!
Follow your gut and attend things that sound cool to you. Don’t bore yourself with technology or industry-specific talks, if your eyes light up when you see something about community-building. I’ll never regret deciding on the fly to go see something that sounded funny and getting to experience the madness that is Eric Nakagawa, original pre-Ben Huh creator of I Can Haz Cheezburger. Or attending a talk with Hugh MacLeod and having a genuine Gaping Void cartoon on the back of a business card thrown at me, now framed in my studio.
SXSW is about the culture of the web, so go to panels that define that for you. Trends and technology will leak into everything that happens, so focus on what gets you stoked. And have a blast for me
Photo by jefield | Flickr Creative Commons | CC BY 2.0
I know, I know, I’m an enigma wrapped in a riddle. On the one hand I love social networking, work in social media marketing, and check in with Foursquare. On the other, I’m righteously indignant that Facebook insists on publishing my fan pages and friends list to make a buck. I think geolocation is so cool, but I’m worried that we’re cutting down the privacy forest faster than the hairy-legged tree planters of social convention can reseed it. If there’s no trees, we’ll all be able to see each other going to the bathroom.
Wired experimented with it, arming one poor writer with an armada of GPS-enabled tech & watching his psychological breakdown. Mashable terrified us with it, making us consider the looming specter of personal injury & property loss. Location sharing is the big cool thing for 2010. But is location awareness just TMI for the careful constrains of society as we know it?
It’s weird on a fundamental level to think that one day soon you might be found, contacted, hassled, marketed to, located at any time. People like time off. People need to pull the covers over their head at some point during the day and say “enough”. Blackberries, cell phones, the ominous eye of the Google Streetview car, all intrude on our personal domain and connect us, however inconveniently at times, to other people.
It’s not just that people know what movies you like and what pages you’re a fan of. The new location-aware web will let them know where you literally are. How to get to you at all times.
This is more than a breach of a general sense of decorous privacy. This is an encroachment into our most personal resource, our time. Our attention, our thoughts, are diverted, captured, required by others. A rising sense of panic accompanies the sensation you might never be alone again. Read the rest of this entry »
Next in a series of interviews with female Canadian social media stars! The premise, which you can read about here, investigates how women act towards each other in the quest to be head social butterfly.
Very loaded topic. Before I address this, I need to remark that I’m a feminist. It should go without saying (but it can’t) that I believe in equality for women – and that I am fully aware of the issues we face. And now to the stuff that will get me hated. Sadly, in general, women aren’t always each other’s best allies. In some cases, there is competitiveness that surrounds the way some women interact with one another. Also, there is not much to be gained from excluding men – while there is a great deal that can be learned from working together. And, in my experience, exclusively female groups have their own issues.
The thesis that women are better at social media than men… well, I think this is one of those “I want to believe that we’re better” statements. Even if we are to assume that men and women have these stereotypically distinct approaches, there are great advantages to the other angle. Sure, women can be chattier are sometimes more intimate – but men are often more willing to state their opinion and allow themselves to remark on things with humour. While this may not always translate as “likeable” it does lead to more instantaneous connections – and a deeper feeling of collusion.
Of course, what it comes down to is the person. I really try to stay away from the “popularity contest” aspect of Twitter etc. The concept of “head butterfly”, rubs me the wrong way. I try to help people who are respectful (among other qualities) – and I make a sincere attempt not to judge someone based on their social web popularity or lack thereof. It would be profoundly ignorant of me to assume that a person’s value is based on how many followers or connections they have.
Certainly, I’ve seen the concept of cattiness present itself on social networking sites – and I’ve seen men react in embarrassing ways too. I’ve also had a great deal of support from both genders – recommendations for talks, endorsements and the like.
But, if I’m going to make a huge blanket statement – overall, men have been more willing to accept my sense of humour – at least at the beginning. But times they are a changing.
You get to rub (possibly the wrong way) elbows with the smart and famous! Steve Rubel, Senior Vice President/Director of Insights for Edelman Digital, lifestreamer, AdAge and Forbes columnist and avid sports fan, has personally told me to ‘buzz off’. I earned it for protesting that he nearly roped me into signing up for Google Buzz, when I (kind of ironically) went to comment on his ‘buzz’ about social media overload.
Steve has tweeted 10,095 times (as of this tweet), so that means .009906% of the time, he’s talking about me!
I should also take this opportunity to note with gratitude that I get a large amount of traffic (for me) from comments I’ve made on Steve’s lifestream, and that Steve’s readers spend by far the most time of any visitors to my site reading content—an average of 12 minutes each over 5 pages! Some smart fans, Steve Rubel’s lifestream has.
Next in a series of interviews with female Canadian social media stars! The premise, which you can read about here, investigates how women act towards each other in the quest to be head social butterfly.
Kelly Ruskis Manager of Marketing and Communities at Ottawa media analysis and PR measurement firm MediaMiser, and she blogs about community and conversations at Web 2.What? She has nice hair.
While women may be more inclined to social media, it seems in terms of influence (i.e. number of followers, subscribers, fans etc) men still seem to win every time. I’ve seen tons of links leading to that conclusion and it’s been bothering me lately about why that’s the case. NYU professor (and social media author) Clay Shirky did an interesting post that theorizes about it.
I think on a macro level, women want to be supportive of other women, when it comes down to individuals “cattiness” can exist (and I definitely don’t think it’s intentional).
This past September myself and two friends co-founded Girl Geek Dinners Ottawa which is a spin off of Girl Geek Dinners London (and now takes place in over 45 cities in 22 or so countries). And as such I made a conscious decision to be more open and supportive of other women… Not that I wasn’t before (and I certainly was never publicly critical of any women), but if I found myself thinking negatively about another woman in a professional capacity, I now make an effort to reach out or try to meet her with an open mind.
What I learned from talking to Kelly
The idea that women who self promote are perceived as “bitches”, and that inhibits them from speaking up, surfaced a few times the comments of Clay Shirky’s A Rant About Women. It’s a good idea to examine your preconceptions once in a while.
Winnipeg now has its very own version of Girl Geek Dinners, so get yourself over to Facebook and check it out. The inaugural dinner just went down, featuring Coree Francisco of Girl One Interactive. I hear it was both girly and geeky Why not put yourself out there and speak at the next event in March?
The first in a series! The premise, which you can read about here, investigates how women act towards each other in the quest to be head social butterfly.
Here’s Kate Trgovac, Vancouver social media star and co-founder/President of LintBucket Media, which sounds like a very cool place to work. Kate blogs about social media over at My Name Is Kate.
Provocative topic and series of questions! Well … while I am the first person to complain about the lack of prominence of women in marketing in general and social media in particular in Canada, I’m concerned when we start saying things like “women are more suited professionally to social media b/c of ABC” because that leaves the door WIDE open for statements like “men are more suited professionally to be a doctor, be prime minister, be a brigadier general b/c of XYZ (or PMS, as the case may be)”. While, historically, women in society may have had more call to develop and use skills that are aligned with social media, in general, anyone, regardless of gender, can work on their people skills and start to turn a taciturn nature to a more social one (we only need look to Austen’s Mr. Darcy for evidence of this )
Regarding the cattiness, I have not personally noticed that women are harsher to their own. I have witnessed both genders being catty to their own sex and to the opposite one. And I have experienced incredible generosity from both genders as well. We are in one of the most narcissistic and self-involved industries around. Heavens, we use our product (media) to talk about our product (media) – our professional lives as social media marketers are the very definition of “self-referential”. Combine that attitude with the money that flows around the marketing, technology and media industries, and you have a recipe for cattiness that has nothing to do with gender. Frankly, we’re ALL waving our chubbies (natural or strap-on) around to compare size and ultimately grab a piece of the pie for ourselves. Read the rest of this entry »
Next in a series of interviews with female Canadian social media stars! The premise, which you can read about here, investigates how women act towards each other in the quest to be head social butterfly.
In almost 3 years of working in social media, I’ve had overwhelmingly good experiences with women being supportive and helping each other to get ahead. There have been one or two instances that were a little less than pleasant, but I’m willing to chalk those up to people just having a bad day. (Or perhaps I don’t want to bring down the whole gender for the rare instance where all was not smooth.)
Before I address this, I need to remark that I’m a feminist. It should go without saying (but it can’t) that I believe in equality for women – and that I am fully aware of the issues we face. And now to the stuff that will get me hated. Sadly, in general, women aren’t always each other’s best allies. In some cases, there is competitiveness that surrounds the way some women interact with one another. Also, there is not much to be gained from excluding men – while there is a great deal that can be learned from working together. And, in my experience, exclusively female groups have their own issues.
