Dopp Juice Archive

Genderfork, a community art blog project I started a year and a half ago, has taken off. It’s running three posts a day, each one representing a different face or voice from the community, and has about 5,000 regular readers. From the outside, it seems like this would be an insane amount of work to maintain, but it’s turns out that it’s not, because I’m not doing the blogging — 10 passionate volunteers are. My job at this point is just to take care of them, and to continue making things better.

A bit about how we’ve set this up…

• Everybody who’s helping is doing so because they asked if they could. When I realized I needed help last December, I put out a post asking people to email me if they were interested. Since then, they’ve mostly just come knocking at my inbox without my asking.
• Each volunteer has their own responsibilities, and their commitment can be met with less than two hours of work a week (this usually goes for me, too).
• We separated the tasks of preparing blog posts from deciding when they should be published, so most of the volunteers can blog several weeks’ worth content in one sitting if they choose to.
• Whenever one of us has a question or get stuck, we try to run our ideas past the rest of the volunteers to get feedback on it.  This has helped keep the vision for the site a collective agreement, and it creates a sense of shared responsibility — we’ve really become a team.  (We’ve also started accumulating a stack of silly inside jokes — the inevitable consequence of liking each other.)

Here’s what’s on our technical toolbelt….

• WordPress blogging software
• A Google Groups mailing list so our volunteers can talk to each other
• Several Google Docs set up for sharing submissions between volunteers and keeping them organized
• Tweet Later for managing the content in our daily twitter feed

We’ve souped up our WordPress installation with the following uber-useful plugins:

• Contact Form 7 for our submission forms
• IntenseDebate for better conversations in the comments
• Flickr Blog This to Draft to let photo curation volunteers blog directly from Flickr without it showing up on the site immediately
• Role Manager to let me configure exactly what Contributor accounts have access to (i found this necessary for allowing volunteers to blog photos and videos)

And it’s going well. We know this because our community takes the time to tells us this over and over again, every single day.  Here’s a note we received anonymously last week:

“This blog is wonderful =). Who knows you could be saving peoples lives by doing this.

“I’ve read all the archives, and when i came to the photo of the person with long hair in a brown leather jacket, a strong serious face with a beard and quite obvious breasts, it finally occurred to me, ignore the fact that i am gender queer myself, “this isn’t an exemption to some rule, or people being different – it is people, we’re alive and living, this is who we are”. It is legitimate and beautiful, no different from anything else people do. Thank you because it has taken a long while to be able to feel like that.”

And here’s a handful of the direct messages people have sent us through our twitter account:

“YAY Genderfork! -this site has been one of several things that has enabled me to explore and affirm my gender. Thanks!”

“hi, i’m more than a little forked at the moment, so it’s good to see you around here”

“the tweets are great. Some of them were how I felt when I was 13 so it’s cool that peeps can now share that and not just bottle it up”

“i went clothes shopping yesterday and felt totally confident in both the men’s & women’s sections for the 1st time.”

“Such gorgeous people, such moving words.”

“thank you for existing.”

So that’s what we’re building right now. Neat, huh?

Stick around. There’s a lot more to come.

I recently spoke at Allegheny College in Meadville, PA about the “grey areas” of gender and sexuality. The event was sponsored by the school’s FMLA student organization (a feminist leadership group), and we called the presentation, “Sex, Queers, and Finding Home.”

I mixed up the talk by telling my own story, talking about Genderfork, performing some spoken word pieces about queer identity, and answering questions. Thanks to Sheik (one of my Genderfork volunteers), I have some pretty decent footage from the event, which I’m excited to share.  (This is also one of my first ever attempts at video editing, so forgive the amount of time it took me to get it to you.)

Here’s me answering some questions about where Genderfork came from and how it’s working…

More telling stories and answering questions…

• How do I approach someone when I don’t know their gender?
• About my queer identity
• Androgyny and attraction
• Talking about my gender and my sexuality with my mother

And here’s a spoken word poem that (sort of) clarifies my sexual orientation:

More spoken word…

• “My Uncle”
• “God Hunt”
• Reading selected submissions from Genderfork.com
• “Collision” (not safe for work, see below)
• “Chicago Blood” (not safe for work, see below)

The last two pieces on the list are marked “not safe for work” because they talk about sex.  This means you probably shouldn’t play them loudly at your office.  It ALSO means that if you would rather I didn’t tell you about my sex life, you probably don’t want to watch them at all.  Family members and professional colleagues: I’ll let you make your own call here. I’m including them because they were relevant to the talk.

The night was a LOT of fun with a great audience that was so wonderfully engaged it was humbling. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

And speaking of which… if anyone else would like to lure me out to a microphone somewhere, please send me an email: info at sarahdopp dot com.

(note: if you don’t see two youtube videos embedded in this post, try reloading the page. thanks.)

I’ve been quietly rolling an interesting comparison around in my head for a few months now, and lately it’s been dribbling out onto my work and my conversations. I take this to mean it’s probably time to blog about it, and to ask you to help me dissect it. Wanna have a go at it? Here’s my theory:

Social media consultants are a lot like therapists. Or at least, they should be. Or they are if they’re doing their jobs well.

Or, put differently: when someone is looking for a social media consultant, what they really need is a social media therapist.

Here’s what I’m looking at so far…

1) Since having a social media presence is about reputation and relationships, it needs to be personal to the individual.  A consultant can’t just prescribe an approach and walk away.  The approach needs to be custom-tailored to fit the client’s personality and worldview, and the client needs to have a lot of say in the development of this fit.  Thus, one of the consultant’s biggest jobs is to ask the right questions, shut up and listen, and let the client find their own answers.

2) Having an effective social media presence is different from traditional marketing, and it’s also different from the ways we’ve been using the internet in the past.  So clients need to adjust to a new way of approaching things, and this adjustment takes time.  One of the most effective things a social media consultant can do is be available for regular, hour-long, therapy-like sessions in which the client talks about what they’re experiencing (feelings and all), and the consultant helps them separate out the useful thinking from the off-base stuff…. over and over again, until the client gets it.

3) Developing a social media presence has to be done gradually.  A client has to pay attention to what’s working and what’s not, listen to feedback from the community, and constantly refine their approach with little changes.  If a consultant plans on being around for regular sessions, the client has a regular schedule for examining the feedback they’re receiving and incrementally improving their approach.

4) The social media consulting model is in contrast to the web development consulting model, where you just build something and walk away until it needs to be updated.  It’s also in contrast to the idea that social media consultants exist to give expert advice — if clients think of them that way, they’ll only go to them with the big questions, and try to answer the little questions on their own.  But social media success is in the details, and it’s the little questions that will make or break an online presence. 

Working conclusion: Get over yourselves, consultants. You’re therapists. Deal with it. And do it right.

I’ll be speaking at Mountain Social, a gathering in the mountains of Georgia next fall where we’ll be discussing better uses of internet technologies (you should come!), and I’ve already proposed this as a topic I want to dig into further while I’m there. So I figure that gives me 5 months to figure out just how deep this rabbit hole goes.

What does it bring up for you?