Social Media Timidity In UK Women

Do you often ponder about the finer points of culture? Or more specifically do you consider how our backgrounds and our personal social conditioning (sociological phenomenological process of inheriting tradition and gradual cultural transmutation passed down through previous generations) plays its part in our every day life?

You see, I do, and I do this regularly – I am an academic by trade, nature, mistake, chance, purpose. I’ve never actually gotten in to ethnography in a meaningful studied way, though I regularly research, quantify, dig deep for the answers, I’m one of life’s observers I guess. I’ve always been skilled at looking at the big picture, taking a step back and casting my inquisitive eye over the whole, or as much as the whole as one can see at any point, again depending on social conditioning, expectations, experiences and various other influential conditions.

So why am I starting this Blog post with such reflection, why am I asking you to join me in my reverie?

Well, I’m currently in the development cycle for our second Social Media in Business Conference, and one of the things we are experiencing is, and I have to be careful how I phrase this, an apparent timidity in UK women when speaking opportunities come along. That is way too generalised of me, on many levels, naturally it could just be my own social circle (funny how we use that phrase commonly now) that is lacking, perhaps my circle is male dominated? – I know it is not though.

Just by way of example, we ran a Social Media Mafia MediaCamp, as part of Social Media Week, in NYC last month, and all but one of the sessions that day were held by women. Of course this is a crude comparison as there are far too many variables to draw any proper scientific outcomes, though the “feeling” I got, and of course “feelings” are a large part of social media it seems, was that women in USA (or is it just NYC?) are all over social media like a rash, – sorry bad term! But the women I know in USA adopting social media, really are enthused and very very active and ambitious.

I asked Twitter and Facebook this morning to get some feedback from my friends:

Joanne Jacobs is an Australian living in London, she’s fairly active in some of the London social media niches.

So I asked her: “So what makes an Aussie girl different from an English girl? I’m keen to get to the bottom of this.”

See this is great insight, as that is certainly not the case in UK, to my knowledge.

Anna Hill, from UK, suggested that perhaps schooling, or the differences between boys and girls approaches to the sciences and technical subjects could be the cause of this apparent timidity. I must admit it, having worked in sound engineering for a long time, that industry is heavily weighted with men, it simply doesn’t attract the girls, in general. That could include all sorts of peripheral reasons like a bad career choice for such things as a desire to have a family, sound engineering is not particularly “social” hours, and certainly not a nine to five. I do know many more women that are not interested in the sciences than are, though So.Me is a kind of blend of technology, a new medium, but at its core it’s just people talking – a very naturally female trait, no?

Kerry made a great point, which got me thinking:

And then we have Mitzi Szereto’s comment which oozes studied psychology:

The conversation in Facebook really start picking up some traction.

Jo Jordan made a great comment.

A good comment, though of course no distinction between USA and UK women. Still, an interesting view point, but is that even gender specific?

Some of the big take-away’s following my very non-scientific research:

• Generally speaking women in UK compared to USA are less inclined to put themselves forward for speaking opportunities
• Differences in background and social conditioning have an obvious influence
• UK schooling does not encourage the questioning of authority
• Women in general find speaking a low priority compared to other activities (though this does not concur with my experience of USA)

But what about you, I’d love to hear your views?

Trending towards more social organizations?

Chris wrote an interesting piece today that stems from some of his work being done on ‘The Social Media Playbook’ (out in 2008 or 2009 or 2010…have no idea…don’t ask…I know nothing) called Towards a More Social Organization.  It is a topic close to my heart. It is focusing the point of Web 2.0/Social Media back on the people, not the processes or the technology.

In the article, Chris suggests the need for a Chief Social Officer – someone who would work closely with a CMO/CEO. Someone who believes:

…embracing social media is embracing change management; changing the way teams collaborate; improving our relationships with customers; affecting our interaction with partners; overseeing customer support; empowering sales people to be purchase support; altering our product innovation and creation processes; and ultimately, bringing us out of the industrial age, beyond the information age and into a new age of enlightenment. It requires us to break down, once and for all, the silo walls that separate groups, the moats that have created fiefdoms of power and the interpersonal bullshit that prevents us from seeing that we all want what’s best, even if we have different ideas of how to do it.

What do you think?  Is this a new role that needs to be filled?  Please leave your comments on Chris’ blog.

SMC New York City Meeting Reviews

Thanks to Les Blatt from LB’s Rambles for a great set of notes from last night’s SMC NYC meeting. In his post on “Learning from the Crowd” Les captured much of the discussion that went on as people introduced themselves and were asked to share one site or resource they found useful so that everyone in the group could learn about it.

Then, in “Business Gets Personal Again” Les reviewed Chris Heuer’s slides and the discussion that the group had around how Social Media is making business personal.

Allen Stern had a slightly more critical review of the meeting at Center Networks. Chris responded in the comments, and so did I but that one seems to have gotten lost or hasn’t been moderated as of yet. Allen’s feedback is appreciated, and we are looking for more folks to lead more topics. The challenge of the room’s layout -which didn’t allow for people to see each other (classroom format) – will hopefully be one of the things we fix in future meetings.

Steve Eisenberg recorded the meeting.

Social Media Workshop on UStream.tv

I am very happy to report that a good portion of the Social Media Workshop we are doing on Monday at SAP will be broadcast live on UStream. While we will be able to take some questions during the course of the day from the chat room, our attention will be mostly focused on paying participants in the actual room.  To tune in on Monday from wherever you are in the world, go to our Social Media Workshop Channel on UStream at 9am PST on Monday June 11, 2007.

We could really use some help running the camera and monitoring the chat room for questions, so if you have experience with managing some light Web A/V and would be willing to volunteer, please leave a comment here and I will contact you about arranging a free pass.

What’s this Knowledge Market Thing?

One of the things I have not written about much, but I talk about till blue in the face and running out of air, is this idea of a Knowledge Market, which is at the heart of my vision for Social Media Club.  It’s nothing overly odd, pretty much as you might imagine it based on common language usage – a place where people exchange knowledge – sometimes for free, sometime for money and always for reputation.  We donate it to non-profits, share it with our colleagues and occasionally sell it in the form of books or consulting.

Thanks to the wonderful vote of confidence of a couple hundred paying members, we have begun to invest in building out the Club site on Drupal to make this vision a reality.  While the vision is much larger than the first humble steps that will be visible in the coming weeks, the heart of the new site will clearly provide value to paying members.  More importantly, I believe it will become a shining example of how things should be done within intentional communities of practice such as Social Media Club.

Very very soon, I will begin to talk about more details, and invite all members to join me in forming the tools we use to communicate and collaborate with one another…  In the meantime, if you have some ideas of what we might need at the heart of the community, or you have some Drupal experience with version 5.1 or you know of some great Drupal based communities out there like http://www.gimme20.com/ which we might be able to learn from, drop me an email to chris [a-t] social media club dot com.

Conversations take time, managing them takes energy

There are a lot of people I have met over the past few years who have asked the proverbial question, “Who has time to blog?”

For me, the answer lately has been ‘not me’ – though I continue link blogging here, photo blogging and Twittering because it takes little effort and can be fit in between other tasks and activities. In a meeting with Shel Israel this afternoon, Shel pointed out how woefully out of touch I am with what he has been writing about lately – which is embarrasing because I am working with him on our first Social Media Club Workshop series and I genuinely find his blog well written and insightful.

As some of you know, I don’t regularly use an RSS reader, though I probably should – the thing is, not being a regular RSS Feed Reader works as a blanket excuse for why I am not up to date on the happenings of the 1,000+ people I have met and would like to follow if I had the time. For the past few months, I have not had the time to do 80% of what I would like to be doing and about 60% of what I must be doing. In fact, I had a conversation yesterday with some friends about how we have had to expend so much energy in managing the Club to host conversations about Social Media, that we have little time to actually produce it or to be fully engaged in the conversations about it, eventhough it is all around me every day.

This brings me back to one of the drums I have been beating for a long time – the purpose of an organization is to organize resources (human, capital and systemic) to complete tasks that serve the needs of a group of people. The organization should be managing resources to complete activities that ensure desired outcomes. The trouble is, that most organizations are managing too few resources in support of too many activities, resulting in the inevitable opportunities slipping through the cracks, and a lower level of quality in the outcomes being produced. This requires decreasing the number of expected outcomes (focus) and gaining better utilization of the resources at your disposal, which actually takes more time to do effectively…

So this is where I come to the title of my post – the conversations take time, which there is little of while investing the majority of your energy in the management (and development) of a (fledgling) organization. This is ultimately one of the main reasons why many business people ask the question about having time to blog. Given the fact that they are already employing too few resources against too many activities, how can another communications channel, that takes real time to cultivate, be properly engaged?

From my perspective, this points to a real need to ensure that everyone understands the roles they fulfill, and that they are part of a team with adequate authority and available time to participate in the conversation, with enough energy dedicated to manage where and when and with whom conversations should be taking place. I know of a few companies out there that are starting to properly staff and realign their management responsibilities to do this right such as Lenovo and Dell, but am wondering who else is out there investing the time and energy it takes to not only do this, but to do it right.

Do you know of any good case studies in regards to staffing for conversations with customers? What about organizations that understand the value of conversations with customers and the need to invest the management energy in cultivating better conversations?