Here's A Way To Ask For And Get Support For Personal & Pro Challenges, On An On-Going Basis
Graduates of my program are prepping to bring GlobalNiche's online presence & online community building methodology to their own worlds as servant leaders in peer-based workshops (like this group led by Silvana Vukadin-Hoitt starting in November). With this framework, in six weeks the network is connected and has a model to continue working together and a place to do so.
I've also been brainstorming the groups of people in my life I want to connect with more effectively. (You try it. Bet you can name three groups of people close to you that you want to see succeed.)
My groups share a common thread.
We are peers and colleagues and friends and acquaintances -- and we are siloed in what we know, what we are trying to do, how we do it, and with whom. We don't fully consider or know how to tap the resource we represent to each other.
That's what I'm proposing. A methodology to work in community on our own goals, with a stronger network as a result. A way we can all be cocreators of an effective network using the backbone of the social web. A way to ask for and get help and support for personal and professional challenges, on an on-going basis.
I see you.
You are people whose dreams I've been privy to, whose skills and talents I'm aware of, whose personal and professional pressures I know, whose untapped potential I recognize, and who I feel a commitment to helping put it all together to get where you want to go.
You're also people I would love to be better connected to, and who I'd like to connect better to fellow kindred spirits in my network. People you'd like to know. People who can help you and improve your life.
Groups I'd like to be a servant leader to are:
1) people I've collaborated with professionally or been in peer work groups with, including writers and media pros and publishing world types.
Often coming out of traditional models and feeling the brunt of disruption, I understand your skepticism and why you are slow to adopt today's social web tools and ways of operating;
2) friends whose work and dreams I'm aware of but we've never really brought our full professional selves together to make things happen.
We can go beyond commiserating over coffee and silo-ing the personal and professional in our relationship;
3) people I have a history of interacting with intellectually in the long term, like fellow alumnae of my college;
4) acquaintances who ask me about what I do or how I do it, but don't imagine yourself doing it.
This would include my hairdresser who as an independent professional who moves from salon to salon could use the continuity and discoverability of an online portfolio. The young pilates instructor I met at the Wisdom 2.0 conference who could be establishing her practice with instruction videos online. The woman I met at a cocktail party recently who hadn't heard of local and online gatherings of people who share her cross-cultural experience;
5) people who have followed and appreciated my cultural work like Expat Harem the book and also the blog but don't see how it translates into GlobalNiche's social web training and online community building and personal brand building -- or why any of that is a way to help you live in the world the way you saw glimpses of in my cultural work.
People who haven't yet grasped that your cultural understandings, sensitivities, interests, experiences are assets and guidance you can use to live more fully with the help of social, mobile, and online tools and life. People who don’t yet see how your cultural understanding can help you on the internet, and in fact, give you an advantage online.
I see you, and I can envision what will emerge from our better connection. Don't wait for me to contact you. Reach out right now and let's get started.
Being Hip Offline Doesn't Make You Hip Online
I have bad news for you.
Being a hip person offline doesn't mean you're suddenly hip online.
Same goes for being funny, deep, interesting or another quality you're known for and proudly own offline.
To be so in online spaces actually takes effort and awareness to build up your faculties on the web and with online tools for expression.
To be hip (etc, whatever!) online you'll have to interact in places appropriate for your qualities with a freshness and understanding that telegraphs your au courant nature, for instance. You'll have to display how on-trend you are from concept to execution. You have to prove it.
You can't just declare your qualities in your digital bio and assume because you've logged on you've automatically brought online everything you are offline. No, your work has just begun.
My Advice To 40,000 Professional Services Pros On How to Make Your Digital Strategy Sustainable
Thrilled to contribute my perspective to this month's "Ask The Expert" column on how to combat digital overwhelm in the business-to-business (B2B) space.
I answer this question from the community of executives and services professionals:
"I’m mentally exhausted from my social media responsibilities. What can I do differently with my digital strategy to make it more sustainable? Automation? Passing it to the intern?"
As you can imagine my approach and method for sustainability hinges on making your engagement with your online social networks one that nourishes you rather than depletes you.
Your network should delight and challenge you; bring you fresh insights and curated news you can use; it should activate you and engage you.
Once you start receiving true value from your network by curating your connections, you’ll have a better sense of how to provide value in return.
As your online communities begin to sustain you, participating in them will become sustainable.
Thanks to my fellow editorial pro Meryl Evans (who I met on Twitter many years ago!) for the invitation to share my perspective with the 40,000 subscribers of this 11-year-old newsletter for consultants, lawyers, accountants, architects, and other professional services professionals.
What Happens When You Connect Without Meaning
Culture hacker and 'social alchemist' Seb Paquet noted this phenomenon: in an explosion of connection, too few of us have found any belonging.
I believe that's exactly what happens when we connect without meaning.
Mashable Lifestyle Features My Social Media Advice To College Students Applying To Grad School
Thanks Mashable Lifestyle -- part of the Mashable news site for the connected generation, one of the largest blogs on the Internet-- for featuring my social media advice to college students in your new weekly Twitter chat on the digital life!
Other guidance for college students applying I shared during the live tweeted #mashadvice column this week:
- demo via social media (activities, blogs, commentary) strengths you'd include in your application
- besides showing interest in a topic via social, also show *engagement* (what you DO about it)
- Twitter, LI, any service: what's findable should reflect you/path you're on, match up w/what you present in applications
- think about using Pinterest to create portfolios of your work (actual, or imagined-future), curate your vision
- photos can be used as complement: to create atmosphere, demo aesthetic, show history
Fast Company On Creative Career Reinvention For GenY & Boomers Through Social Media Savvy & Storytelling, Sounds Like The GlobalNiche Recipe
Loved to see this "Second-Act-Career Success Stories" article in Fast Company today by Lydia Dishman, focusing on non-digital-natives who have been using digital tools and social techniques to dynamically reinvent themselves.
They're not at a disadvantage because they're non-native digital beings. In fact, as these examples show -- we digital immigrants have more to work with for our online transformation.
The second-act career successes Dishman writes about sound very much like GlobalNiche recipes. It's what we've been pioneering in our own lives, creating training and showing others how to enact. For instance:
Reframing your experiences for value
- using your previously produced content/material to reach goals you set today
Embracing the power of the social web to grow
- to find communities of mentors, peers, employers, clients, and customers, as well as to rapidly educate yourself in leading edge business techniques
Dishman also notes that 94% of recruiters are using or plan to use social media to find candidates and 78% of them already have placed people they found online. That only underscores my point here about the need for career counseling and training personnel to meet rising expectations....wonder what the percentage of trainers for mid career counseling are embracing these new realities.
Online Self-Loathing & Surveillance
Personal branding online sure gets a bad rap, like this New Yorker post by Tony Tulathimutte, which warns us "You Are What You Tweet".
He's talking about the self-loathing variety of personal branding online -- heavy on the self-censorship with no mention of integrating what matters to you with the vulnerability that actually connects us as people, both concepts we emphasize at GlobalNiche.
Tulathimutte concludes, "The more immediate threat may be the surrender of private identity: to perfect the total image of an impressive life, we prune off the parts of ourselves that can’t, won’t, or shouldn’t be seen."
Meanwhile, The Guardian writes about the psychological effects of surveillance. Research shows being surveilled fosters distrust, conformity and mediocrity.
I can't help noticing that the most deleterious effects of being watched seem to track with the defensive, inauthentic personal branding approach Tulathimutte writes about. As if when we reveal ourselves voluntarily we're avoiding actually being seen.
"Science can lay claim to a wealth of empirical evidence on the psychological effects of surveillance...indiscriminate intelligence-gathering presents a grave risk to our mental health, productivity, social cohesion, and ultimately our future."
That's serious business not to be taken lightly.
But do we have to approach the online presence we build as if we are being watched against our will? As if all we aim to communicate is 'successful' conformity (which is of course mediocre and gives the rest of us nothing to connect to).
Can we make being seen (when we choose it, that is) a path to our own resilience?
+++
Sarah Kendzior makes a related point in Al Jazeera September 9, "The danger of data: Not the information, but the interpretation".
She writes: "Our online self-expression - selective and self-censored, complicated and contrived - is being mistaken for the summation of our being. The great existential fear is no longer not knowing who we are. It is not getting the chance to find out."
The Bellyflops of Social Media Mismanagement
On the precipice of war, overreaching false cosmopolitanism continues. Plus, parents plan for unsustainable digital abstinence.
The overreaching false cosmopolitanism continues. Read my sadly-still-fresh take here.
Today the Kenneth Cole Twitter account tweeted something thoughtless about "Boots on the ground" or not, don't forget about sandals and loafers.
Nope.
Boots on the ground are soldiers going to war possibly to be maimed or killed, and to wreak havoc on the lives of others. The precipice of war is not an opportunity to remind people you make loafers.
Feels like deja vu for Cole. Because it is. The brand flopped just like this in 2011.
At that time I made the connection between global mishaps of high profile brands and the false cosmopolitanism we’re all suffering
There was Groupon’s SuperBowl ad fiasco, when the company attempted to mix consumerism with sensitive political, environmental, cultural, economic and social issues, and the Kenneth Cole Twitter debacle which appeared to make light of unrest in Cairo.
In 2010, I wrote about earlier instances of the phenomenon of false cosmopolitanism, inspired by Ethan Zuckerman and Jen Stefanotti's work on the topic.
We've got a culture problem on our hands. Access to the worldwide web makes us imagine we’re global thinkers. But we’re not. Not even close.
In order to truly be global thinkers, we’d have to be xenophiles, actively and constantly bridging cultures, immersed and knowledgeable about multiple worlds.
Most people hang out in “like-minded microcosms” and when we cross a boundary online the new light shed on everyone’s prejudices and assumptions can take us by surprise.
This “xeno-confusion” is happening more often in the virtual realm, with higher and higher stakes.
Today’s other big story of social media mismanagement has been swiftly answered by Alexandra Samuel of Love Your Life Online. It falls into the category of unsustainable digital abstinence to solve problems that may crop up in the future.
"Don't be scared to Facebook your kids," she responds to Amy Webb's piece at Slate "We Post Nothing About Our Daughter Online."
Samuel writes: "Parenthood is such a central experience that there’s no way to cut it out of your online life without profoundly compromising your own ability to have authentic, meaningful connections online."
That’s exactly right. Plus, digital abstinence doesn’t prepare you for the world your child will grow up in.
How are you preparing yourself for a wider world?
If No One In Your Industry Thinks Online Presence Is Important, Could That Be Your Competitive Advantage?
If people in your particular career field or industry don't 'do' meaningful/extensive/basic social media do you think you might make it your competitive advantage?
If no, why not?
I ask because I've been adding to the GlobalNiche homepage the reasons people don't invest in their online presence, and that's one I hear from a lot of people. The people around them aren't doing it.
Something to consider: you might be mistaken about this perception that no one else in your life is doing it. If you're not online in expansive ways you probably aren't in a position to gauge if other people are.
Do any of these reasons sound familiar to you?
- DON'T KNOW WHERE TO START
- NOTHING OF INTEREST OUT THERE FOR ME
- I'M HESITANT TO BECOME VISIBLE
- DON'T WANT TO BE EGOTISTICAL & TALK ABOUT MYSELF
- NO CONNECTION BETWEEN WHAT I DO ONLINE & EFFECTS OFFLINE
- MY OPPORTUNITIES COME FROM CONNECTIONS I ALREADY HAVE
- I'M CONFUSED ABOUT OWNING MY ONLINE PRESENCE
- CAN'T AFFORD TO MAKE MISTAKES ONLINE
- I'M NOT A CREATIVE/TECHY/SOCIAL PERSON
- DON'T WANT TO BLOG OR JOIN A BUNCH OF SITES
- JUST USE SOCIAL MEDIA FOR ENTERTAINMENT
- MY CONTACTS ALREADY KNOW ALL ABOUT ME
- TOO EARLY OR LATE IN MY CAREER OR LIFE TO GET STARTED
- FEEL THE NEED TO BE ONLINE *LESS* NOT *MORE*
- IT'S JUST ONE MORE THING TO DO
- I'M NOT ACCOMPLISHED ENOUGH TO GO PUBLIC
- WAITING TO BE PUBLISHED/DISCOVERED/HIRED/INVITED
- PLAN TO DO IT RIGHT WHEN I NEED IT
- CAN'T RISK HAVING MY WORK STOLEN
- TAKES AWAY TIME FROM MY WORK/FAMILY/RELAXATION
- MY CUSTOMERS/FRIENDS/COLLEAGUES AREN'T ON WEB
- DON'T KNOW IF I HAVE ASSETS NOR HOW TO USE THEM ONLINE
- UNCLEAR ABOUT MY SERIOUS PURPOSE ONLINE
- DON'T WANT TO MIX MY WORK & PRIVATE LIFE
- DON'T WANT TO ANNOY MY CONTACTS BY POSTING A LOT
- NO ONE AROUND ME IS DOING IT
- ADVISED TO WAIT UNTIL VALUE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IS FIGURED OUT
- NO ONE IN MY INDUSTRY THINKS IT'S IMPORTANT
- CAN'T MANAGE IT ALL BY MYSELF
Consider getting started anyway.
Media Empire Building For Women, What We Can Use Our Platform For & Why We Need To
Regarding an on-going kerfuffle in an area I follow pretty closely (media & journalism plus gender disparities in those fields), this post by magazine editor and journalist Ann Friedman on media empire building has a lot of lessons in it for those of us building platforms and what we can use them for, and why we need to.
We need them for leverage, if we're thinking bigger or one day will. We need them as evidence. If we're women, many of whom are relegated to supporting roles in our fields, we need our own platforms to grow strong as marquee figures.
"I’m doing pretty well at building a following for my work that’s mine alone, not reliant on the individual outlets I write for. But I’ve never approached a publisher or editor-in-chief to ask for my own vertical, or the funding to create my own mini-empire."
When she decides to pitch a funder to finance her own media empire, Friedman writes, "There will be footnotes about my own Twitter following and the number of newsletter subscribers I have and my proven ability to cultivate a strong editorial voice."
Learn How To Curate Your Various Social Web Networks To Deliver Value
The entrepreneur-turned-venture capitalist Mark Suster tweeted Why I Unfollowed You On Twitter, a blog post by Ian Rogers of Topspin. "I want Twitter to be for news and information from trusted sources. My dream is that I open Twitter and can quickly consume 15-20 interesting stories from around the Web, curated for me by people who know how to sort the wheat from the chaff. I want high signal, low noise."
He plans to follow people he actually knows on Facebook, and professional contacts at LinkedIn.
It's exactly what I've been saying for years: curate your various social web networks to deliver value.
Deriving value is a function of what the network and platform does best, and who you know (of) and who you want to know and what you want to know about.
That includes not following friends or other known entities on Twitter unless what they tweet is justifiably interesting to you.
It's been my policy on Twitter for the past five years. In fact, I rarely follow newcomers on Twitter -- even if they're a personality I find extremely intriguing because I recognize there's a learning curve and it can take a VERY long time before a person starts tweeting value.
I'll follow later since a timeline filled with irrelevancies is not what I'm looking for right now, or ever. I also use Twitter lists to store potential accounts to follow in my main feed.
Your Network Is Your Net Worth By Porter Gale
Fun morning at the Social Media Breakfast East Bay Meetup.
My GlobalNiche team member Tanya Monsef Bunger and I were at the headquarters of Lithium to meet former Virgin America marketing head Porter Gale talk about her new book Your Network is Your Net Worth: Unlock the Hidden Power of Connections for Wealth, Success, and Happiness.
Porter gave us all free copies of her book because she knows influencers when she sees them.
Takeaways:
Smaller degrees of separation with social tech users (only 2 or 3 degrees separate us from each other now) + larger spheres of influence = accelerated networks.
That's only going to increase with upgrades in the technology, said Porter.
And, I would add --> upgrades in how we're using the existing and coming technology. We the users are going to make the most difference in how accelerated our networks become. It's about that whole connected divide conundrum.
And, basically, since all good things come through our network (in a tough economy more jobs are landed through internal referrals) and we're now relating to people based on online personas, it's imperative to take online network building seriously -- and our online personal brand as the valuable evolving key that it is.
That's pretty much my mantra too, as you may have guessed. Porter's speaking my language.
I came to it very differently than she did in corporate marketing. I was using online presence, personal branding and global community building as a survival skill during my 14 years as an expatriate, and tapped my entertainment industry & media background to arrive at content marketing as a method. But here we are, on the same page.
Becoming Media Literate
Saw someone on Facebook bemoaning how "the entire internet" fell for the claim that the Turkish government was using "agent orange" against its citizens in the Gezi Park uprising.
The spread of mistruths is not a reason to distrust everything you see reported on social media (nor to decry it as a "menace to society"). It's a reason to do better about parsing the information and its sources.
Just like threatening chain letters and Bigfoot hoaxes, we're supposed to grow out of this kind of dupedom.
I see the growth taking place before my eyes in the Turkish use of social media. It helps to have skillful journalistic people covering the news. (Here's a new Twitter list of English language tweeters on Turkish current events by cultural journalist Robyn Eckhardt for a one-click follow of 20+ accounts. Here's my Turkey protests Twitter list with more than 80.)
The first mention of agent orange I saw was associated with the debunking of that claim, on the twitter feed of NPR's Andy Carvin.
Becoming (social) media literate is a process, and especially messy in a crisis.
But many people have already been through major crises while using social media (for instance, Carvin pioneered the crowdsourcing of citizen journalism during the Arab Spring as I, Jillian York of Global Voices and TIME pointed out in April 2011), so to portray us all as rubes -- and social media as "untrustworthy" -- is inaccurate.
Social media is a tool. It's up to us to use it wisely. As web anthropologist Stowe Boyd says, "The single most important decision we make in a connected world is who to follow."
Being An Advanced Oddity: Between A Rock & A Hard Place
Here's a conundrum I've been discussing with potential business mentors as we try to find ground where we might meet.
Being the advanced oddity that I am -- that is, an independent scholar and entrepreneur on my own evolving path -- when I seek out specific help from established/establishment entities, I meet resistance to my very own realities.
I told the regional head of a national businesswomen's organization recently that my combination of being way out ahead in my thinking and operations yet a fledgling in business seems not to compute for most organizations with resources.
I may be a startup but I've got 25 years of professional and personal experience. I'm the age of people with established businesses but I don't particularly want to backtrack to become resonant with them, or adopt dying practices or conventions in the process of being disrupted.
So, receiving training on how to be professional or being moved by perks like "can bring your dog to the office" or recognizing myself in the accelerator organization's language of f-bombs or "join the movement, dude" (which is what international digital agency Unison.net's career page used to say), are not really in alignment with the kind of support I need.
On the other hand, more mature cultures of support I gravitate toward often ask for benchmarks I am nowhere near, like "$2M in revenue" and don't yet value (to judge from their own operations) many operational strengths I bring, nor necessarily grasp my outsider, international perspective.
And I note other rock and hard place factors I'm dealing with. I'll go into them more deeply another day but here are big ones: working around and with tech but not offering a "tech solution"; and being global in focus but not considering "global = somewhere outside America".
Still looking for the mature, forward-operating, early-stage business resources out there best suited for global women entrepreneurs.
Blueprint For Building Global Community With Free Web Tech
When the Global Women's Leadership Alliance announced a brainstorming challenge* to gather ideas about how to create a platform for five million women change agents, my partner Tara Agacayak & I were excited to share what we’ve learned about using technology to build global community over the past four years. We've experienced that the way to impact change is with an activated global community connected through social web technology.
Our biggest lessons for creating an activated global community are that people need
- synchronous and asynchronous ways to gather
- prompting and encouragement to do so
- a way to get to know one another
- a common purpose for gathering
See GlobalNiche's blueprint for building global community using free web-based technology (G+! YouTube! Linqto!).
+++
*This challenge was also sponsored by Global Fund for Women, Global Leadership Advancement Center at San Jose State University, Mills College, Monterey Institute of International Studies, Public Health Institute, World Pulse, and Salzburg Global Seminar at San Jose State University.
On the GlobalNiche Bookshelf: Global Dexterity. Reinventing You. The Impact Equation.
Building your global niche is a 21st century skill. For work. For life.
International business, human resources, the future of life & work bestsellers and new releases from Harvard Biz Review are stacking up on our bookshelf at Pinterest.
Finding cultural effectiveness. Career reinvention through social media and your own content. Achieving impact via your platform and social networks. Adopting an entrepreneurial mindset.
These are all GlobalNiche mainstays going mainstream. Click here to tweet about this.
What does it mean to be a global worker and a true "citizen of the world" today? asks author Andy Molinsky in Global Dexterity: How to Adapt Your Behavior across Cultures without Losing Yourself in the Process.
It means you're able to adapt your behavior to conform to new cultural contexts without losing your authentic self.
"Not only is this difficult, it's a frightening prospect for most people and something completely outside their comfort zone," writes Molinsky, an associate professor at Brandeis University's International Business School. He straddles the psychology and organizational behavior departments.
"What's needed now," he claims, "is a critical new skill: global dexterity."
Global dexterity? It's what we do here.
This critical 21st century skill is exactly what we've been pioneering at GlobalNiche and expat+HAREM group blog and the Expat Harem book before it, as we have striven to make the limbo state and high cultural stakes of expatriate life a strength instead of a weakness. How to navigate your surroundings in culturally appropriate ways while also honoring the truth of who you are. That's global dexterity. Thanks to Andy Molinsky for the term. Back in 2009 we couldn't find many people talking about it at all, so we came up with our own term: "psychic location independence."
At GlobalNiche we've also come to the conclusion that this approach to a dexterous, global version of yourself increasingly works for people everywhere, whether you're 'actually global' or not. You might be in your own backyard and need to navigate your surroundings in culturally appropriate ways and have your own, distinct truth to honor. You might not have a passport but can still benefit from becoming a global operative. In fact, being globally aware and globally functional has become an imperative in today's connected world.
"Use social media to build connections" is one of seven steps branding expert Dorrie Clark lays out to reinvent yourself professionally, in Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future.
"Show what you know" is another of Clark's steps. She suggests you use your content to show the world what you care about.
Again, sound familiar? It should. Using your content online and off to get where you want to go is exactly how you build your global niche. It's why the GlobalNiche program at its heart is about content strategy. Your content and your online presence is the key to creating your place in the world.
Another title that is particularly useful for people building online presences to reach offline goals is The Impact Equation: Are You Making Things Happen or Just Making Noise? by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. Brogan is a favorite of ours here at GlobalNiche.
The impact of our ideas is a function of the quality and similarity-but-distinction of the ideas, our ability to reach people and be understood, trusted, appreciated.
Impact = C x (R + E + A + T + E)
C = Contrast – having ideas similar to existing ideas, yet different enough to stand out
R = Reach – connecting higher numbers of people to your idea
E = Exposure – knowing how frequently you connect people to your ideas
A = Articulation – ensuring that your ideas are easily understood
T = Trust – based on multiple factors, such as credibility and reliability
E = Echo – connecting to your community in a personal way
As Brogan explained in a fun January 2013 Twitter chat I participated in (#BizBookChat a virtual book club for the actionable books community by Alyssa Burkus), "The Impact Equation is about how to turn your goals into ideas, & how to get those ideas absorbed and actions taken."
To build a platform, Brogan says, "you've got to find how you can best tell the story and where you can reach the people you hope to reach."
"Start where you are," Brogan counseled us in the fast-moving Twitter chat. "But look for growth. Move your chips to the next table. Strive to reach who you need to reach."
Start where you are. That's your only option. Oh, and start your evolution today.
Evolution is exactly what Nacie Carson urges in The Finch Effect: The Five Strategies to Adapt and Thrive in Your Working Life. The Portfolio.com blogger and founder of TheLifeUncommon.net says it's your best bet in today's high-pressure economy.
Traditional career strategies spell professional extinction, she writes, but the fluid new gig economy offers tremendous potential for anyone willing to adapt.
Carson's five steps for ensuring professional success are all part of the GlobalNiche mindset and skill set.
- Adopt a gig mindset.
- Identify your value.
- Cultivate your skills.
- Nurture your social network.
- Harness your entrepreneurial energy.
Among many other notable titles on the shelf about navigating the world today is Mitch Joel's Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends On It. I hope to tackle this sometime soon. In the meantime, tell us which books on your shelf echo these 21st century life and work skills.
New World Order Deja Vu
"We have built around us a borderless global society, without the need for proximity to connect," announces social business strategist Bryan Kramer in today's post "A New World: Proximity Redefined". "Social, mobile & online today has redefined how proximity inhibits our abilities to connect anywhere & anytime."
Globally unbound. Unconfined by traditional limitations. That's exactly what I've been saying and demonstrating for many years as an expatriate devoted to using social and mobile as a survival skill and tool.
But borderlessness is not just about using the tools. It's a mindset. And it's a need.
At GlobalNiche.net I teach others how to adopt this stance -- which, as Kramer points out, is a future work skill -- by committing to an intentional online life in which we see ourselves as unlimited, and build our social capital and connect to our broader networks for personal and professional development.
Kramer calls it a new world order.
That's exactly what I termed the phenomenon in 2009, of common interest and experience connecting us more than geography, nationality, and even blood when I introduced the group blog ExpatHarem.com to discuss the issues of hybrid identity, global citizenship, mobile progressivism, Third Culture.
With wider adoption of the technologies, more people can be here now. They join those of us who have been operating with this mindset for a long time already because it's a survival skill.
Thinking About Community Study Groups
my rough notes for GlobalNiche community study groups, the obstacles they mean to solve:
not sharing what i am doing with community. not sharing what the community is doing with my wider network many to many, leader doesn't need to be there for ppl to talking to each other
leader has identified set of interests, etc. ppl gathered for that. we're going to facilitate access community gets to itself. connecting to ppl regrardless of where there are on ground and regardless where they are on line -- reason for connection is relevance/community=relevance.
we're faciliating connection. out of those connections come collaboration, dissemination
problem community leaders have ppl drift away or dont have time for them fight is for attraction and relevance nad activity and energy. growth. sustainability.
were going to make your community successful. the ppl inside it fulfilled and connected. were giving them the tools for that.
the community is distributed and virtual itself.
the movement the commtnyt meant to foster becomes visible and palpable. and its distributed everywheere. where all its ppl are. not just in this walled space.
high octane together, but what they bring out side is valuable to others
they are not alone/
Being A Year Ahead Of GigaOm On Future Of Communication
Mathew Ingram of the emerging tech & disruption of media site GigaOm.com tackles a topic close to my heart in his column today: "The Future Of Online Etiquette Is Already Here, It's Just Unevenly Distributed". Ingram comes to the same conclusion we arrived at in our GlobalNiche webchat series more than a year ago with our guest speaker and world citizen, international worker and multidisciplinary strategy consultant Shefaly Yogendra on Communication Styles of Mobile Progressives.
In that hour-long live discussion (listen to the recording at the link!) we asked,
Do your friends and family and colleagues think you enter an 'international cone of silence' when you leave their physical sphere?
Out of sight, out of reach. Apparently, that’s how our global existence sometimes feels to people who aren’t in the habit of connecting every which way like we’ve grown used to doing. Someone left me a message on my new American phone line in 2012 saying “I’ve been waiting 10 years to talk to you” — yet I know I’m more connected now than ever.
The GlobalNiche community talked about this literal and figurative disconnect, and how forward-looking, world-flung types like us can maintain our connections across vast geographical — and perceptual and behavioral — divides.
Our conclusion, which GigaOm just got to?
The more progressive party has to communicate with people where they exist, and that may be somewhere in the past.