Marti Barletta has written in here classic “Marketing to Women” about the different importance of communities for men and women:

“Men think competition is fun. … It’s how they communicate. … Women make a distinction between the two core elements of competition: interaction is fun, conflict is not. Playing is fun, but losing isn’t – somebody’s feelings are going to get hurt.”

In fact community for men is often about competition. To collect as many friends as possible on social media or to make as many tweets as possible seems to be a pretty male way of using internet communities. There are other ones on the net as shown in the white-paper “The female Internet”:

Give them a community

Women compare in order to make affinity links. It is important for them to identify a peer group, understand whether acquaintances match this peer group and value them. Three patterns are important to understand:

• communicate: The communication between women often happens within a limited number of persons and often enough with only one friend. Telephony, E-Mail and SMS are the accepted electronic communication forms.
• generate content: Women contribute when they feel it is appropriate. Many companies however are afraid of giving their customers a public voice
• contact peers: The size of these communities apparently is not too large Women not necessarily want to communicate to other customers of a brand; they want to talk to someone with the same background or problem.

The Tupperware model could be more appropriate than Facebook pages although Facebook has impressive usage figures worldwide. I am not sure about the use of “real-time” aspect of internet communities like Twitter. Further evolution could turn it into a useful tool for women.

Involve them

Women want to be involved, some say. This can be disputed. However it is proven, that involved customers are more likely to promote a company. The more promoters a company has, the more economically successful it is (Advocacy Drives Growth, Marsden, Samson, Upton, 2005, LSE London School of Economics). The internet is well suited to involve. Not only by using contests, competitions, chargeable services or cost reduction by self-services. Promising approaches are to

• recommend: women ask friends more often for recommendations or referrals than men do. They ask their friends, because they trust their opinion
• self-disclose: women get attracted by personal reports on experience and feelings
• innovate: women could contribute to the development of new products or services, for instance by determining colors they want

Some of the leading blogs like Perez Hilton, Seth Godin or www.techcrunch.com are making extensive use of comments and sharing services (for more examples see appendix  ). They can generate up to 1000 contributions per day which is a volume major corporations only can dream off.
Open innovation approaches are run successfully for instance by Procter & Gamble with www.vocalpoint.com or Dell with www.ideastorm.com.