Get the Most from Your Online Women’s Community
Identifying a Great Online Women’s Community
Many online women’s community has popped up in the past decade. Across the United States and the world they seek to attract members and help these women network, develop skills, find support, and reach their goals. Though all but a very few these websites appear as if mired in 1990s web 1.0, all the convincing ones share a few central goals that are essential to providing effective social networking for successful women.
They emphasize the power of women coming together to help each other; they try not to get too distracted by all the issues that other women’s sites have covered, such as parenting strategies, crafting, or personal beauty; instead the offer forums to allow members to discuss issues such as parenting in the context of advancing one’s career while keeping main features focused on professional networking issues; and they have no problem using womanhood as a starting point but then leaving behind gendered issues where appropriate to emphasize the character aspects that help successful and inspirational people be empowered.
This last point is worth examining a little further, though it may be obvious from the job seeker’s perspective. Most of the time, successful career women need to network and advance their careers by interacting with women and with men. So a great online women’s community can be an invaluable resource, especially in developing a stronger sense of one’s strongest qualities and professional value, which in turn makes securing a job and advancing career goals easier, and in offering a go-to venue where women can tap contacts to fill openings – a counterpart to the “old boys’ network” that gets many men jobs. But professional social networking should be gender-blind and use activity on women’s online social networking sites in conjunction with similar activity on the big professional networking portals, such as LinkedIn.
Online social networking for successful women is an invaluable tool, but as a tool, should be used to greatest effect, whether the goal is personal fulfillment, skill development, or professional growth.
