Men are still ahead in Social Media… Women are communication mostly in an emotional way, and are not utilizing blogs for their professional development, while men are attracting a bigger audience by writing about politics or the economy.

This is what I heard at the panel discussion I attended when I was in Vienna. It was organized by E-Business Community and was called “Web 2.0 trägt Dreitagesbart” – a discussion on whether or not Social Media was domineered by boys or not. Well, here’s what was said, followed by my review…

The gist
According to recent studies men are publishing the most well known blogs. The panel agreed that the reasons behind this are probably the style of language that is predominantly being used, the topics, and a higher affinity to technology.

Women make more use of their intuition when arguing a case, while men are using hard facts to back up their arguments. This is not very engaging to the reader though; the only options are to either agree or attack the author. Female blogs seem to attract more reactions.

The topics that women choose are more of a private nature as well; but to further their career, they should choose topics that are more professional. Women are also less interested in Technorati-Rankings, but they care about the exchange that happens in the blogosphere.

The inherent Social Media qualities of interaction and communication are enforcing a “feminization” of the web, but there are still some technical access barriers that need to be considered. Female user numbers in Europe – especially amongst the younger population – are however catching up on male users.

Overall, there is still a lot to be done to make Social Media more accessible to women. The benefits to them, especially to women working from home, are not to be underestimated and should be an incentive for them to get cracking.

My 2 cents
The people on the podium were interesting and seemed to know what they were talking about – at least in their respective areas of expertise. The talk was domineered by people’s opinions on blogs though, but some of the speakers did talk about podcasts and wikis. Social Networking was not discussed as much as I would have liked.

The audience had a very mixed knowledge of the sphere of Social Media. Many of them seemed to only really know blogs, MySpace and YouTube. Some comments were even rather uninformed and prejudiced (one gentleman stated that YouTube et. al. are just for teenagers and juvenile people looking for naked ladies and trashy entertainment…). People did have the desire to ask questions and contribute though, which made for a lively, if not very coherent, discussion.

I think that a good point about women’s use of Social Media was made, though it really cannot be generalized that way. Social Media applications and networks give people, no matter what background they come from, new possibilities to connect and expand their networks – professionally and personally. I do work in a sphere where I help people and organizations determine the appropriate Social Media for their professional use, but personal preferences in communicating always influence professional use as well. And with platforms like Facebook taking off as they do, the lines between professional and personal communication are blurring.

I therefore think that an approach to Social Media needs to incorporate both: the “female” way of communicating as well as the “male” way of backing up one’s statements with data.

I enjoyed the evening, even though the discussion was a bit all over the place. I met some very nice and interesting people who I am keeping in touch with. And it was certainly good to get an impression of what a selection of Vienna’s E-Business community thinks and knows about Social Media.