I can’t even tell you how awesome it was to spend the day at the Women Who Tech Telesummit, digitally hanging out with, talking to, and listening to some truly geektastic, strong, mighty women. You might think that just kicking back in my comfy Poang chair all day with my laptop on my lap was an easy day, but really, it was as intense as it was awesome. So many ideas flying back and forth, between what the presenters brought to the table and what the attendees were sharing amongst ourselves, it was a brainiac time.
Much of this is not new to me (you may have heard me say some of these things before here on the blog, in person, or on Twitter), although not all of it is old hat. All of it was listening to, and sharing. I’ll try to be brief and frontload, but it won’t be easy…
- The key to all things tech right now is building relationships. You cultivate relationships with key local bloggers, organizations, and supporters of all kinds who might be interested in your message to get your word out, then maintain those relationships for continued success. This also applies to relationships with contacts on LinkedIn, “friends” on Facebook and MySpace, and anywhere else you (or your library) hangs out online. It’s not a one-way application, it’s a two-way relationship.
- Everyone has a personal brand, outside of one’s employer. Managing your personal brand means managing your career, your professional relationships (inside and outside of your profession), and your image. If you’re doing it right, you are living your brand, but you’re also still being true to yourself and who you are to get what you want, which mean picking what you do best and doing that. In one of my tweets about the session I noted that it’s no wonder that the librarian stereotype persists when we still have so many people who live the stereotype: the stereotype has become our brand, and we really need to work to change that. One way to do that is to allow the librarians in the profession who are being held back from really succeeding to flourish, and another way is to recruit people who are truer to the brand that we want to project.
- Letting go and sharing is one secret to success. The more you allow other people to, say, create and share their own applications/campaigns/online social networks in support of your organization or cause, the more your constituency and supporters will love you. It’s the way of success in the world right now, especially online.
- Participating where your voice adds value is a way to promote your brand, personal or professional, as well as keeping your brand from getting stagnant. Get outside the library blogs and hit other blogs that are related to the kind of work you do, where your comments can be heard, and post stuff. Join other groups on Facebook, hit other types of professional development workshops that can add to your repertoire but aren’t librariany.
- When it comes to social capital, research shows that women prefer the bonding capital flavor, which focuses on close-knit, safe ties in a predominantly homogeneous group. Meanwhile, men find bridging capital, which tends more towards making connections and forming relationships in many different types of groups, tastier. Hidden within bridging capital is the delicious, rich, creamy center of growth, and that’s where the magic happens. That growth leads to progress, change, great relationships, and multifaceted skills. Librarianship needs a healthy helping of bridging capital.
- The open source community of developers tends to be aggressive, confrontational, and direct, which might explain why there are so few women in the open source community overall, nevermind in the coding realm. However, don’t let this put you off; a woman’s tendency is to back off and walk away in these situations. Don’t. Get strong, stay in! And, even if you’re not a coder, there are plenty of things you can do to help the movement: write documentation (coders don’t generally like this part, and writing the docs can help you understand what’s going on), help with usability, or design, or wrangling projects, or learn to code, or whatever needs doing. It’s an excellent place for librarians to help; for example, who better to help wrangle documentation archives?
- Text messaging is apparently the next big thing in promotions and communication. It’s needs to be entirely opt-in, but being able to send messages, alerts, news, and calls to action via SMS is really, really big. It’s one of the best ways to make something go viral; just add the “forward to a friend” link to a message, and it moves along like buttah. If you’re new to the text message revolution and you want some tips and guidelines to see if it’s a good direction for you or your library, getting started, and staying sustainable, check out MobileActive.org and the Mobile Marketing Association.
It may seem like I spilled all my beans, but really, it’s just a nibble of what the day was about. I don’t want to take the fun out of listening to the *free* podcasts of the archives that will be up on the site shortly, because really, you should listen to them. All of them. I’ll be listening to all of the sessions I missed during the day, especially since it was really hard to choose one of the two sessions in each time slot. Why? Because we have a lot to learn from other industries who capitalize on the use of technology, as well as a group of women who overcome adversity everyday by being a minority in their field (I know how it is, I used to be one of them).
Want more? Check out the tweets tagged #wwt, the Women Who Tech tweeters they follow page, the Women Who Tech site (podcasts will be up soon!), and the Women Who Tech Facebook group. And, I’d love to hear what you think. 
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