Connie Benson recently blogged on the topic of whether women make better community managers.
Whilst I agree with a number of points; women are good at multi-tasking, detail-orientated, relationship-focused, experts at compromise/mediation, I feel it comes down to the type of community you are managing.
As I manage a large parenting community that is 99.9% women, I feel I can bring something to the role that a male may not be able to. Whoah I never thought I'd say something that sounds so sexist! But alas until the responsibilities of raising children are equally shared this may still apply.. I don't think enough men yet face the conundrum of how to balance their career and children.
Although I rarely engage with the community on a personal level, there are definitely times where my personal experience as a mother and woman, have helped resolve or soften the issue I am trying to deal with. And revealing that information reminds the members that yes I am human not an evil rule-enforcer!
There are so many ideologically-opposing beliefs when it comes to parenting, and most revolve around the woman. Including breast vs. bottle, stay-at-home vs work, caesar vs vaginal, controlled crying, co-sleeping and so on. Not to diminish the father's/man's role in raising babies but many of these are exclusively the domain of the woman... (although support from the male often assists the outcome).
So for me personally I feel my gender in this instance really assists my ability to do my job. Not to mention the sheer level of empathy and understanding that helps when dealing with forums that include everything from loss of a child, pregnancy complications, children with special needs, traumatic births, long-term trying to conceive,etc. Our community provides an incredible level of support - and I feel quite honoured as a women - to be able to help facilitate that support.
Is your community skewed to one gender? Are you a female community manager in a male-dominated world? Or a male in a female-one?
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Thursday, September 4, 2008
My Name Is...
Alison. Hi! This is my first post in this blog, so I'll fill you in...
I manage a community of 135,000 women - growing at a rate of approximately 500 newbies per week. The social media component is primarily forums but we also host over 4500 member diaries.
Of our 135,000 members approx. 1500 members are active on the forums at any given hour of the day. Participation inequality would suggest thousands more lurk (almost a certain according to Jakob Nielsen's 90-9-1 rule) and this conversion will form one of many challenges I face.
We have a team of 30 Volunteer Moderators. It goes without saying that they are a priceless asset but managing a volunteer team has its challenges, and add to the mix they are remote, not to mention are all busy Mums with kids to keep them busy.
They have all worked their way up from being members which means they have an exceptional understanding of the 150+ forums we have, but it skews their user experience to our site predominately. Almost all of them came to the site as new parents (many over 5 yrs ago) so they are involved in the site on a personal level.
I’ll be blogging about how much visibility (social/professional) Community Managers should have at some point, as this is something I often ponder.
The forums have been running for over eight years, which means changing the culture is a little more tricky. There seems to be a lot of great info & resources for starting & building a community, but not quite as much for managing huge communities. I could be wrong? Point me in the right direction if so. Either way I’ll be happy to road-test a lot of theories (within reason) on our community.
Background info: the site was started by two women nearly eight years ago and was recently acquired by a large media organisation, so the community (and new staff) are in the midst of adjusting to this change. FYI I came on board post-acquisition as there wasn't any scope to have a Community Manager when run by an independent team.
This blog aims to document some of the challenges I meet along the way... there have been plenty already so there'll be plenty more to come.
As a Community Manager I can often getting bogged down in the minutia so I am hoping this blog allows me to step back, see the bigger picture and help develop overarching social media strategic planning.
I’m starting Connie Benson’s Community Manager training course shortly and am really looking forward to it. If you’re a CM too you should jump over to Connie’s site Community Strategist and join in the discussion… As the Online Community Research Network (OCRN) says “the best source of information (by far) is other professionals”.
I manage a community of 135,000 women - growing at a rate of approximately 500 newbies per week. The social media component is primarily forums but we also host over 4500 member diaries.
Of our 135,000 members approx. 1500 members are active on the forums at any given hour of the day. Participation inequality would suggest thousands more lurk (almost a certain according to Jakob Nielsen's 90-9-1 rule) and this conversion will form one of many challenges I face.
We have a team of 30 Volunteer Moderators. It goes without saying that they are a priceless asset but managing a volunteer team has its challenges, and add to the mix they are remote, not to mention are all busy Mums with kids to keep them busy.
They have all worked their way up from being members which means they have an exceptional understanding of the 150+ forums we have, but it skews their user experience to our site predominately. Almost all of them came to the site as new parents (many over 5 yrs ago) so they are involved in the site on a personal level.
I’ll be blogging about how much visibility (social/professional) Community Managers should have at some point, as this is something I often ponder.
The forums have been running for over eight years, which means changing the culture is a little more tricky. There seems to be a lot of great info & resources for starting & building a community, but not quite as much for managing huge communities. I could be wrong? Point me in the right direction if so. Either way I’ll be happy to road-test a lot of theories (within reason) on our community.
Background info: the site was started by two women nearly eight years ago and was recently acquired by a large media organisation, so the community (and new staff) are in the midst of adjusting to this change. FYI I came on board post-acquisition as there wasn't any scope to have a Community Manager when run by an independent team.
This blog aims to document some of the challenges I meet along the way... there have been plenty already so there'll be plenty more to come.
As a Community Manager I can often getting bogged down in the minutia so I am hoping this blog allows me to step back, see the bigger picture and help develop overarching social media strategic planning.
I’m starting Connie Benson’s Community Manager training course shortly and am really looking forward to it. If you’re a CM too you should jump over to Connie’s site Community Strategist and join in the discussion… As the Online Community Research Network (OCRN) says “the best source of information (by far) is other professionals”.
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