Top 5 Social Media Super Female Heroes In North America

This is a guest post by Joy Paley, a science and technology writer from Berkeley, California. She is a guest blogger from Guide to Online Schools. 
If you’ve seen The Social Network or the cover of Time magazine lately, you'll have heard a lot about Mark Zuckerberg. But although most seem to be focusing on the lone genius or the whiz kid, using his traditional “manly” traits of entrepreneurship, smarts, and cunning to transform social media, there are plenty of women quietly making huge contributions to social media. Here’s a list of the top 5 female social media heroes in North America, to help end that quiet and make a little more noise about these women’s awesome work.

1. Jenn Allen
This savvy lady is the CEO and founder of the site Rtist.com, an online marketplace for artists. On the site, artists can sell their artwork, commission free, and art lovers can connect with exactly the piece they’re looking for. The site is beautiful and functional—you can search for art by keyword tags, medium, artist, price, or rating. The site is the brainchild of Jenn’s love of art and business knowledge--before she founded the site she studied economics at Mills College and worked in business development at several San Francisco startups.
2. Cyan Banister
Ms. Banister has her hands in all forms of social media. She founded the innovative Zivity.com, a social networking site for models, artists, and photographers. She also acted as an angel investor in all many successful social media startups like Facebook, Tagged, and more. Before founding Zivity, Cyan also worked as CTO of a nonprofit and led technical operations at another software firm.

3. Kristie Wells
What do you call a social network for social media experts? Socialmediaclub.org. Kristie Wells founded the site as a non-profit organization that connects social media experts all over the world. Local chapters of the organization meet to discuss industry standards, best practices, and medial literacy. Wells also directs social media at the company Ribbit, which creates web 2.0-esque telecommunications platforms.

4. Joanna Lord
According to her blog, Joanna Lord is a self-described “PPC expert, social media enthusiast, online marketing specialist, coffee drinker” and more. This jack-of-all-trades founded YourJobStop, a site for comparison job hunting.  She also blogs at SocialMediaBiz and has spoken at a number of social media conferences. Her communication and social media bent come from her unique education—she holds a B.A. in journalism and an M.A. in Online Media Studies.

5. Melanie Notkin
Ms. Notkin, “America’s Premier Savvy Auntie” has made a niche for herself in developing social media for the millions of women who don’t have their own children, but who have important kids in their lives. She founded SavvyAuntie.com, an online community for godmothers and aunts. Notkin also works as a professional tastemaker, forecasting the hot kids’ trends of the season on Fox News, ABC, CBS, and other networks, as well as working with kids toy brands like Disney and Scholastic.