Erica McGillivray

Every year, we have community speaker slots where people can pitch to speak. These talks are shorter -- 15 minutes -- and this is the only time where people can pitch. We put the call out on our blog, and this will go live likely the first week of April. Pitches only stay open for a week and a half because competition is fierce, and we typically see 150+ pitches. Keep an eye out in April!

@takeshiyoung As @hallstigerts mentioned, do take a look at the resources I left in the post. There are some great stats about women working, in general, plus deeper dives into our industry or closely related ones.

That's great that you feel your experience has been opposite, but unfortunately, collective experience shows that your experience is the exception, not the rule. I was going to speak to some of my own personal stories, but instead I thought of the things that we don't always knows about our coworkers or our team.

Some questions to think about:

• Do you know that your coworkers all make fair wages, relative to each other and to their skills/experience and to market-rate?
• If your team manager would leave, would there be an equal chance that the qualified candidate could be from either gender?
• During reviews, are our both genders or no one given criticism? Do women's reviews focus on personality flaws (she was too abrasive) while men's only address skills or other directly work-related criticisms? 
• Do the men on the team have stay-at-home wives? (Studies have shown that men with stay-at-home wives devalue the work of women.)
• Have you had conversations with your female coworkers where they were open to sharing their experiences with you or you asked them about it?

I don't do a ton of SEO anymore, except personally or to help in Moz q&a, and more do community management/content/event work. I use a combination of the following:

• Google Analytics / WMT 
  
• Google Apps for spreadsheets and docs + offline access ftw
  
• Excel for when Google spreadsheets doesn't cut it.
  
• IFTTT - so helps with certain automation
  
• Moz - especially love Fresh Web Explorer alerts (so much better than Google alerts) and Followerwonk (disclaimer that I work for them)
  
• Buffer + Tweetdeck (personal)
  
• SproutSocial (professional)
  
• PowerPoint (and Keynote and PDF readers) for slide deck creation
  
• Feed.ly (I'm still an RSS reader junkie)
  
• Rescue Time to track what I'm doing
  
• Dropbox
  
• Evernote (mostly to transfer info from my phone to desktop)
  
• Rapportive to better connections / know who I'm emailing (however, since LinkedIn acquisition, I think they're not as great)
  
• Boomerang, gmail plug-in, if I didn't have this, I'd forget everything that I'm supposed to do / follow up on in email. Or I'd take up too much brain space remembering.
  
• Trello for major projects
  

What Keri said. Mifi's only make the wifi density issues worse, and they run on such a wide broadband that they badly disrupt the regular wifi service. There will be 900 places to plug into ethernet if you have wifi issues in the main stage room, so between the two you should be covered at the actual conference. 

What sorts of tools do you give new and upcoming community members? Guidelines, faqs, just seeing other community members? (We all know that nobody reads the TOS when they sign up; I've probably given away my soul a few times in TOSs I didn't read.) And how would you set up that sorts of expectations when you're ending a network that maybe traditionally doesn't closely align with your established community's values?

For example, Moz is currently growing our community on LinkedIn with groups. We have a terrible time with spam that's generally of a promotional nature. Some folks get extremely upset over moderation because it's attached to their livelihood, and often they don't understand why their contributions are spammy. And then if we don't moderate, long time Moz community members don't want to be there because self-promotion is not what we do. (This is compounded due to LinkedIn's terrible moderation tools.)

I find vulgar YouTube comments are so much easier to moderate because I don't have to really explain to someone why their behavior's unacceptable.

15 things you absolutely must know about social media or your face will melt off and get eaten by goats, if you were looking for the full title.

YES!

With Dana on #2, I don't like sites where it feels like the competition is to post FIRST! It should be to post quality articles. I am also someone who often banks time to read stuff, so I feel a bit behind the curve. (Which causes my anxiety where I feel behind on everything in life, a personal issue that reflects in my drop from using Inbound.) 

In most cases, quality inbound marketing articles aren't flash-in-the-pan news and seem like they should have a bit of a longer life.

I've tried to write about it, but it hasn't come out quite right. When I look back, it seems like a simple time as I didn't have a lot of responsibilities or things to do beyond show up for work. But there was actually a lot of emotional complexity. We'll see. I'm sure it will all come out some day. :)

I was hired as an intern at my local newspaper when I had no job post-high school and no college career in my future. There I was surrounded by a ton of super smart, college-educated folks (odd then in my somewhat rural hometown) who helped me think about my future. I did things that year like learning how to drive, discovering yoga, learning CSS, evading corporate dress codes, and knowing I didn't want to be a journalist. I probably needed therapy for all the things that landed me in the no job, no college path, but instead I wrote obituaries, interviewed politicians, and just got to be.

It's going to be rumble to see who gets to go. ;)

Just like Chairface Chippendale: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeKH-N3mh0w

Glad you liked my MozCon announcement. See you there! :D

Or big-eyed cows. :D

The iPad certainly would've had another name if there'd been a woman on that maketing team. :)

Indeed! Most have their own searches. (Though the downside is that some are being scammed. Search "SEO" in people on LinkedIn for some good examples.)

It kind of makes me wonder what they do if you already put your own affiliate link in your URL...

Or build your own quality, text-based content that easily calls out the one keyword you're targeting for.

I think a lot of what's happening is people are starting to realize that even if you don't think you need to apologize, you need to recognize that you upset someone. There's a different being saying "we messed up; sorry" and saying "sorry you're upset; here's what happened and here's what we're doing to address this."

I think you're missing something about creating inclusive environments and supporting safe spaces. And that because "mainstream" conferences (especially in tech) = those marketed to/run by/spoken at by cisgender, straight white men, changing them and going to them is hard emotional work. In order for "mainstream" conferences to make women and other minorities feel welcome, we need to see ourselves reflected in speakers, in the marketing, and in attendance. People need to be called out when subtle (and overt) discrimination happens. Inclusive environments are created deliberately by organizers; conferences with 50-50 gender ratios in both speakers and attendees don't magically happen. These have to be deliberate actions. Unfotunately, there's a folly in the progressive liberal community (I'm someone who's also left of Obama), that because we have strong values against discrimination that it shouldn't be "dwelled" on or focused on. Yes, we're probably all a little more alike than we care to admit, but we do have differences and those differences should both be treated with respect, acknowledged, and further more celebrated as something that it okay. (Not all differences are negative things.) As far as conferences aimed toward women and minorities, there are needs for safe spaces and spaces marketed toward someone like you with your interests. Safe spaces can invite those are not part of that group, but some choose not to. In safe spaces, you can have dialogs you can't in "mainstream." For example, I run a conference called GeekGirlCon, which invites all geeks but focuses on celebrating female geekery, and at GeekGirlCon, I would never have to explain a need for a space space or the need for a conference targeted toward women. Space spaces do empower people to see they're not alone in their feelings/struggles and that they do have more power than they thought as a group. It's been 4 months since GeekGirlCon's last conference, and I still have people come up to me what a wonderful experience it was and a place where they could just be themselves. It's very powerful thing.