My Complete Handbook On Slideshare

Pitched visual storytelling app to MBAs from South Korea

Had a great time today presenting SELFish, a social & visual storytelling mobile app in open beta for the next few months, to 30 MBA student-professionals from LG CNS visiting from South Korea, at RocketSpace. Thanks RocketStudios and LG!

I created and delivered the company's first live, public presentation of the product, the team, and our roadmap to market.

The event organizers asked each of the three RocketSpace startups which presented (social smartphone camera app Shoto.com and social betting app Youbetme.com) to include a particular challenge we are facing so the MBA students can address it in their afternoon session. I chose the challenge of selecting only one UVP as we go to market. At SELFish, we have several. Which should we emphasize to consumers? Is it our controls that allow us to pick who sees or contributes to our stories? Or is it our connection of moments into ongoing stories?

Thanks too, to Ronan Roche, a business analyst at RocketSpace, for making this homestyle video for me on short notice.

Shirley Rivera Takes On GlobalNiche Community Outreach, Compiling Case Studies

.@globalniche i am excited to be surveying, collecting, and sharing case studies of #globalniche experience. gotta love building #community — shirley r (@anthrocubeology) June 24, 2014

So excited, and grateful, Shirley, for you to apply your special skills to this massive task.

pick me pick me :) RT @globalniche: coolest: @anthrocubeology will be collecting #globalniche #casestudies! hit her up w ur stories..

— Silvana (@SilvanaMondo) June 24, 2014

Shirley will be collecting good news and specifics from everyone. Hope to hear more, like the below...

@globalniche Thank you! It all started with the #globalniche course! A wonderful #community of kindred spirits! xxx

— Sandra Gea (@SoulsNavigator) June 10, 2014

congrats to @brandylucky1 for making it happen with your Evolve Aikido & Movement Center in Antioch!! #globalniche

— GlobalNiche (@globalniche) June 20, 2014

' @globalniche The surprise is in the #eBook in brand #storytelling section. Please download and share feedback. :-) http://t.co/wYGJKtOZjC

— Dr Amit Nagpal (@DrAmitInspires) June 13, 2014

congrats to #novelist @jessicajjlutz, whose A Bride From Holland will be released by #Dutch publisher DeGeus in October! #globalniche

— GlobalNiche (@globalniche) June 7, 2014

From our mailbag: "#GlobalNiche helped me get focused and get better. What do I want/already have/need to make."~ #author @WendyJeanFox

— GlobalNiche (@globalniche) May 3, 2014

A fantastic time with @globalniche @TMonsefBunger @anthrocubeology @SilvanaMondo & more #GlobalNiche #community! Looking fwd to more!

— Amit Raikar (@lifunfe) April 26, 2014

check out freshly launched @theglobalsort http://t.co/bXitHsmufq for inquiries into being #global & how #immersiontravel changes you

— Anastasia Ashman (@AnastasiaAshman) March 4, 2014

Biggest Startup Lessons, Fun Tech Coworking Spaces, A New Product's Superpower

Thanks to RocketSpace for interviewing me for their Startup Spotlight series this month about SELFish, the new social network I joined earlier this year. We're based at RocketSpace, a really fun coworking and office space for high growth tech companies.

An excerpt from the interview (you can catch the whole thing here:

What’s your favorite thing about RocketSpace?

I’ve been working remotely as a cultural entrepreneur for many years so my favorite thing about RocketSpace is the energy and the serendipity of meeting others who are on a similar journey. After living globally for 14 years, I especially appreciate the borderless, international nature of RS. And I have to give props to RS’s sense of humor. The “wtf@” and “omg@” email aliases for reporting issues or happy occasions are your brand voice. You manage to be substantial and lighthearted at the same time.

What is your product’s superpower?

I’d say it’s that there are no social conventions to worry about at SELFish. We give you control, so you can indulge your self expression. Share what you want, how much you want, with whom you want. Since I’m a high volume publisher with very disparate interests and communities I want to interact with, I especially like that aspect of the product.

Your Entrepreneurship Goals Are Your Online Presence Goals

Your entrepreneurship goals are your online presence goals and community is how you get things done.

These are the slides from last month's workshop for startup founders that Tanya Monsef Bunger and I conducted at the Women's Startup Lab in Menlo Park.

Founders Have Vision & Goals, Need Community To Get Things Done

Click here for the slideshow. Last month we had a great day at the Women's Startup Lab in Menlo Park, workshopping online community building for founders. (See details here.) The questions these entrepreneurs asked got us off to a good start:

• "How do I reach people I don't know?"
• "Which tool can I use to bring together two communities and get them communicating?"
• "My community lives on Twitter but what if my end users are on Facebook?"
• "How do I combine my posts in two different languages?"
• "How do I maximize social networks to grow community, and where I do find the time for content creation?"

#Startup founders @wslab building community online through #socialmedia @AnastasiaAshman pic.twitter.com/WeeHkNwtFb — Tanya Monsef Bunger (@TMonsefBunger) May 13, 2014

idea from today's workshop: #community starts with you. #globalniche — GlobalNiche (@globalniche) May 13, 2014

It was wonderful to meet and get a peek into the businesses of founders Dedra Chamberlin (Cirrus Identity, for social identity management in the higher education space), Cynthia Litchi (she's launching Tejul, a social learning site for Latin American female artisans to teach each other), and Vicky Zhang of Fledgg (a company to connect young entrepreneurs and mentors globally).

#startup #entrepreneurs at @wslab building online #community! pic.twitter.com/ySd8TflyOl — GlobalNiche (@globalniche) May 13, 2014

@chelit @dedrachamberlin @TMonsefBunger great morning at @wslab work shopping online community to grow your #startup — Anastasia Ashman (@AnastasiaAshman) May 13, 2014

Cultural and personal sensitivity issues we covered in this workshop included how to strike a balance between one's CEO presence and personal presence online since "it's risky!" We also talked about optimizing your profiles at all the social media services and sites you're a member of. Cynthia Litchi mentioned that in Mexico, where she's from, professionals don't use LinkedIn because of security issues -- so if you want to connect with Mexican pro counterparts online, more closed settings are where you're going to find them. Thanks to Tanya Monsef Bunger, a coach at the Women's Startup Lab, for coleading this workshop and Ari Horie and everyone at the Innovation Lab for hosting.

I want to do more workshops with entrepreneurs about how they can use social media, online presence building, content creation, curation and content marketing and personal branding to grow community...

because entrepreneurs come to the table uniquely prepared to use their online presence to meet their goals.

They have a huge vision, they have distinct goals, they have content, they have a platform of some kind. And they are driven to make the most of their resources. And that's exactly what they need to combine in order to connect with their peers, their customers, mentors, advisors, investors.

Sneak Peek At New Social Networking App To Collaborate On Your Life Stories

Sneak peek what I've been working on as a community and content person at the Selfish startup since February... we go live in the Canada and Russian app stores this summer and the USA app store soon after!

If you want to beta test this new social networking app for collaborating on your life stories with your favorite people, let me know and I'll send you a super special link.

Happy Memorial Day!

Speaking At The Innovation Lab For Silicon Valley Startup Founders

Looking forward to speaking about social media for entrepreneurs along with Tanya Monsef Bunger at the Women's Startup Lab's Innovation Lab on May 13th. Innovation Lab is an intensive and interactive learning lab for startup founders "to develop the skills and competencies needed to be effective leaders/founders."

Tanya and I will be leading a 3 hour workshop in the ‘Grow your Startup’ section of the lab.

To complement six other ’how to’ subjects offered in this series, such as essential sales techniques to close deals, lean marketing strategy, lean startup training, UI/UX design, IP Strategy and Valuation/Financial modeling, we will be instructing the group on using social media to build an online community.

Tanya is my GlobalNiche team member, and for the past year has been a business coach at the Women's Startup Lab founded by Allison Chapman and Ari Horie, who's pictured below.

Faye Brann Addresses The Gap In The Market For Narrative Expat Literature

Question for the #expatwriters, #expats and #writers out there, do you think expat lit differs from travel writing, if so, how? #research — Ruby Slippers (@rubyslippersdxb) March 27, 2014

@AnastasiaAshman yes, it's what inspired me! What made you specifically speak out about identifying expat lit as a genre in its own right?

— Ruby Slippers (@rubyslippersdxb) March 31, 2014

Thanks to expat author in Dubai Faye Brann for interviewing me about #expat #literature and the #publishing world's opportunities to capture expat lit's readers.  She blogs about it here. Here's the interview as it was conducted on Twitter this week -- which is where Faye and I met!

Faye is working on her first book, There’s No Place Like Home, to "look at the often misunderstood life of the ‘trailing spouse’ abroad". At her blog she explores the gap in the market for narrative expat literature.

Executing Global Rollout Of A New Social Networking Collaboration Tool

Selfish: Capture, collaborate on, and share life's important moments http://t.co/0o2jSACIz4 — BetaList (@BetaList) April 6, 2014

BetaList highlights to thousands of tech-savvy early adopters the upcoming mobile app of Selfish.me, the San Francisco startup I joined in February as director of community...

So fun strategizing and executing the global rollout of this new social networking collaboration tool! Sign up now to be notified as soon as it hits the app store.

Inspirations & Friends & Mentors = The Kind Of Relationships I Want To Have

@AnastasiaAshman Always learn something amazing from our chats. You're an inspiration, a friend, and a mentor. — billie mason (@DoxyGal) April 5, 2014

 Thanks Billie, you made my day!

Building Meaningful Community With Social Media

Watch a video here, thanks to videographer Stacy McKenzie. Thanks to the organizers, sponsors and participants of the Exceptional Women In Publishing conference. Here's just a tiny peek into an inspiring day. More to come, including resource links to the things we mentioned during the below panel.

Ready to go with the Building Community Using Social Media! #ewip2014 @AnastasiaAshman @pubslush @AmandaBabs1 pic.twitter.com/vV2wj42M03

— Karen Jaw-Madson (@KarenJaw) March 6, 2014

Someone's attention is the most precious thing you can have says Pamela Day @ZibbyZ #ewip2014

— Kristin Brownstone (@kbrownstone) March 6, 2014

Awesome talk w/@ZibbyZ @AnastasiaAshman @AmandaBabs1 on sharing the public & private you via social media to foster community. #ewip2014 1/2

— Frances Lee Hall (@fleehall) March 7, 2014

Who are you following? @AnastasiaAshman says that's most important. Follow the people YOU want to talk to for better engagement. #ewip2014

— Lila LaHood (@lilalahood) March 6, 2014

@AnastasiaAshman great job providing useful, actionable info about building social media community #ewip14

— Lisen Stromberg (@LisenStromberg) March 6, 2014

So true RT @thebubblygirl: One of the best ways to make community online is a @TweetChat @twitter #ewip2014

— Kay (@nappyheadblkgrl) March 6, 2014

Great point by @AnastasiaAshman: the old media view was that you "save your best stuff" for offline media. No longer true. #ewip2014

— Sarah Granger (@sarahgranger) March 6, 2014

Speaking About Community Building With Social Media at Exceptional Women In Publishing Conference

Along with behavior design entrepreneur Pamela Day -- who's a researcher at Stanford's Persuasive Technology Lab -- and Amanda Barbara from the global crowd-funding publishing platform PubSlush, the "Kickstarter for books" and another pro from a major social media platform you all know about, in March I'll be speaking on a "How to build meaningful community with social media" panel.

This event at the Julia Morgan Ballroom will be the 6th Annual Women’s Leadership Conference with a theme of How to Move Forward: Women Leaders in Media, a day-long event of discussions about successful business and content models of today and tomorrow.

So pleased to be joining speakers including

• Deanna Brown (CEO of Byliner with whom I've recently had a chance to discuss the future of digital reading as an entertainment channel to rival Netflix and HBO)
• my fellow author Sarah Granger (founder of Center for Technology, Media & Society, who has the distinction of being the person I've been following on Twitter the longest and finally we met in person at TEDxBay Area in 2012! Her book "The Digital Mystique" comes out from my own publisher Seal Press later this year.)
• Yumi Wilson (LinkedIn for journalists)
• Rose Aguilar of KALW radio (who came into my world back when I was planning the Expat Harem book tour through the Bay Area!)
• and others from AOL, Flipboard, The Bold Italic, Upworthy, Disney, San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones, The New York Times, Sunset, Pacific Standard, Quartz

The day's honoree is Kara Swisher, formerly of the Wall Street Journal's AllThingsD and now founder of Re/Code, while the host Michelle Fitzhugh-Craig is an award winning journalist with more than 15 years in print and online reporting, editing, social media and design.

It promises to be a great day. Here's where to register. If you can't attend, follow along on Twitter (starting now!) with the hashtag #ewip2014. Open a window on the day's speakers by following EWIP2014 Speakers Twitter list by Erin Browner.

Watch a video of my panel here, thanks to videographer Stacy McKenzie.

2014 Marks 2 Years Of Offering The GlobalNiche Program: An Update & Shifting Of Gears

An update from me, my GlobalNiche cofounder Tara Agacayak, and our team member Tanya Monsef Bunger. 

Today over 3000 are taking the course, with 13 study group leaders working to bring the program to their own communities of artisans, expats, servant leaders, writers and academics, and women entrepreneurs.

It’s been a privilege and a pleasure to have worked full time on this endeavor for the past 24 months.Today we’re excited to share what we’ve achieved -- as well as how we’re shifting gears.

Back in 2009, we envisioned a professional alliance of people connected online sharing ideas and supporting each other’s work.

We began speaking to groups about how to use social media to develop professionally by building an online web platform. We conducted on and offline seminars and workshops, masterminds and community-building programs.

By committing to work in community, we evolved the GlobalNiche program as an easy, systematic, iterative way to build a platform for opportunity to happen. We realize that our individual platforms open us up to opportunity -- not by magic, but by connecting us with our global community via the social web.

In the past two years, we’ve won an award for our global community-building methodology, hosted 20+ live web conversations with emerging thought leaders on cutting edge GlobalNiche issues, designed, created and delivered email tutorials, program pilots, a self-study workbook, a high-touch 6-week coaching program, on-demand multimedia programs, 2 online study groups, a peer study group training, supported 3 peer study groups with more on the calendar and published a Kindle handbook. We’ve also provided our platform building tutorial to the Global Tech Women conference, become a LeanIn platform partner, spoken at numerous events and broadened the GlobalNiche network to include women leaders, content creators, social business people and entrepreneurs everywhere. We’re proud to have contributed to, participated in, and added GlobalNiche’s definition and practice to these global life/work movements:

• every-day entrepreneurial thinking and acting, creative entrepreneurship as a solution for everyone
• location independence and lifestyle design in populations beyond expats, travelers and life hackers
• recognition of the importance of digital identity, personal branding, digital footprints and online social networking for personal and professional development
• re-envisioning the future of work with online collaboration and co-creation
• the adoption of global communication best practices
• the tidal wave of online content marketing
• the rise of the transformational consumer and transformational online communities

Working on GlobalNiche educated us in what it takes to build a business. We’ve gained a new appreciation for what we know, as well as identified gaps in our own knowledge, skills, abilities and experience.

Our early stage founder experience took us into the startup world. We opened and maintained profiles at accelerator and incubator application platforms like Gust.com, Angel.co, and F6s.  We attended founder events, applied to accelerators, got VC training for elevator pitches, learned the investment landscape. We learned about the role of mentors, advisors, and equity positions.

We tried our hand at investor presentations, worked toward that elusive thing called “product-market fit”, learned about choosing vendors, designed logos and website look & feel, investigated shopping cart and affiliate network solutions until we ran screaming in the other direction.

We worked on what seems like a lifetime about brand messaging - writing taglines and elevator pitches on a weekly basis (and still not there yet).

We discovered what it means to be a globally distributed team managing a variety of time zones, test driving collaboration software.

Looking back on all that we’ve achieved and learned, we realize that we’ve reached our 2009 goal of building an online global support alliance. More than that, we developed a curriculum that teaches people the skills they need to do this for themselves.

Now we’re turning the method over -- to you, and to your communities, and to people far beyond those in our current networks -- to let it grow.

2014’s shift toward a community-based movement not only makes the method available to more people but it also allows the founding team to focus on applying what we’ve learned, what we built, and the skills we developed on new projects and in ever wider communities. This is the next chapter for GlobalNiche thinking and methodology. Tara is leaving her position with GlobalNiche. She is putting her strategy and analytical skills to work doing market research for a London-based company and she has been contracted as project manager on an upcoming socio-cultural book about Turkey.

Anastasia continues to lead the GlobalNiche movement by holding the vision and on-going operations. She has taken a community-building position in a new social storytelling startup being incubated at RocketSpace in San Francisco. As a speaker and consultant, this spring she’ll be talking about platform at the Exceptional Women In Publishing conference, and leading a workshop with Tanya about the GlobalNiche Method at Women’s Startup Lab.

Tanya is continuing business development related to the GlobalNiche movement. She is working with female founders/entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley to accelerate their businesses and has also accepted a professorship at Santa Clara University where she’s exploring opportunities to use the GlobalNiche curriculum. She will act as director of the Global Fellows program.

As we shift gears, we’re grateful and proud of what we’ve created together, how the GlobalNiche movement continues to support our growth through the principles we’ve established in the program and using social technology.

And as ever, we appreciate being on this journey with you.

Another Storytelling Venture Sheds Old Media Constraints For 21st Century Creativity & Context

Blogger and columnist Ezra Klein (formerly of the Washington Post) just announced in The Verge his new news venture "Project X" at Vox Media. It aims to address the question: "why hasn't the Internet made the news better at delivering crucial context alongside new information?" "New information is not always — and perhaps not even usually — the most important information for understanding a topic," Klein writes in The Verge. That's the way news has functioned in the past, often due to space restrictions. "The web has no such limits. There's space to tell people both what happened today and what happened that led to today."

As a 21st century content creator with an old media background, I'm familiar both with the restrictions Project X's founders (including Melissa Bell and Matthew Yglesias ) have been bristling under and the avenues they want to pursue.

News is a natural field for building a rich new ecosystem of information around content.

For the past decade I've been committed to doing on a personal scale what Project X aims to do for news: Plumbing the content of deep interests and creating transmedia stories that can live and grow online.

Our time is coming!

Curating My Influences On Entrepreneurship, Global Women Entrepreneurs, & Future Of Work

Just started this curation topic at Scoop.it and I've already got more 100 links of evergreen value and cutting-edge thinking.

I've been harvesting all the links I've been discovering, sharing, posting and discussing for the last couple of years in the dark social of email and private (and some now defunct) discussion settings.

That includes material I discovered and shared over the past four years at my LinkedIn GlobalNiche group, my Facebook Creative Entrepreneurs group, my Facebook GlobalNiche graduates group. I'm also posting my original comments on each of those shares.

Expect more as I pull links from more than a year's worth of postings at Basecamp, a collaborative service I've been using to discuss entrepreneurial issues with my GlobalNiche team members.

If you're interested in these topics and the thinking from around the web that has most influenced me, it's easy to subscribe to the collection in one click over at Scoop.it.

SEO Yourself By Filling Out Your GooglePlus Profile

Your G+ profile page is a web-wide cheat sheet for you & everyone else.

And when it’s time to update your avatar, your bio, your tagline, or whenever you’ve got fresh content to share, it'll help you remember where you are online too.

By hot linking all the places you need to update you’ll make your task so much easier. Since your G+ profile is prioritized by the Google search engine, when someone searches for you, they’ll also find all the other places you exist online too.

That's from my latest guest post for Jan Gordon's Curatti: Editors of Chaos.

I've been writing a weekly series about online community building at this social business and marketing site. My posts so far have incorporated aspects of curation, storytelling, branding, content strategy, conversation, cocreation, collaboration, discoverability, persuasion, fascination and engagement -- as well as highlighting best practices and work of industry figures I see leading the way.

Some of my Curatti guest posts:

• Who You Follow is Important and Here’s Why
• How to Use Twitter Chats to Build Dynamic Online Communities
• Who Should You Follow Back and Why?
• Here’s How to Use Social Media To Build Powerful Networks
• The Great Big Social Networking Experiment
• How To Find And Share Content That Makes You Distinct
• Go Public With Your Process To Attract Like-Minded People

1,000 People Just Joined The GlobalNiche Program. Did You?

That's right, 1,000 people around the world said yes to free access to my self-paced training to achieve your potential online.

Were you one of them? No? Got a few minutes and care to get connected and effective in 2014? Do these 2 things NOW.

1) Claim your complimentary seat. That'll give you 24/7 access to our on-demand multimedia curriculum. The training will help you navigate the social web to get closer to who and what matters to you.

Invite anyone you want to bring along with you. Our treat. Just share this link.

2) Then give me a shout on Twitter so I can be sure to add you to our list of your peers. That makes it easy for you to connect and work together! Plus, we're already talking there using the #globalniche hashtag.

...and welcome to all the lovely people I glimpsed in the new roster, including Leslie, Linda, Nicolas, Lindsey, Bonnie, Rachel, Katja, Eleanor, Julia, Chris, Simone, Shirley, Wendy, Christine, Harma, Stephanie, Oshikan, Myrthe, Jonelle, Aisha, Nicole, Kathy, Nilgun, Teike, Milo, Michaela, Monique, Sher, Craig, Jennifer, Karlijn, Roberta, Lynn, Michelle, Suraya, Andrea, Jeane, Bia, Neil, Zlatana, Linda, Laurie, Ebru...

I'm looking forward to getting connected and effective with you this year.

January 26 update: make that 2,600 new people. Welcome!

Prediction: You'll Be Your Own North Star On The Web in 2014

Pleased to be quoted in last night's #GetRealChat 2014 Social Trends with IBMConnect Speakers. Take a peek at the Storify slides from this on-fire tweet chat.

The first question of the night came from social business consultant and #GetRealChat leader Pam Moore. Moore asked Forbes columnist and author of SOCIALIZED Mark Fidelman about the convergence of social, mobile, analytics & the cloud in 2014. "What does this mean for consumers?"

Fidelman replied, "It means intelligent information will be delivered in context, wherever and whenever you want it. People will become even more sophisticated consumers and co-creators of technology and content."

That's my mantra of digital/media/info literacy, purposeful & intentional online presence, and community building through content and culture!

My answer to what's waiting for us in 2014 as our connection to each other strengthens and expands, as we gain insight into and direction from our data, and are relieved of its storage:

Convergence means we'll be our own North Star on the web.

Most-Anticipated Launch Of The Season: Jan Gordon's Curatti Editors Of Chaos

New York-based Jan Gordon (a consummate curator on the social business scene) has created a one-stop shop for B2B business people looking for clarity and direction through the digital overwhelm. A longtime Twitter acquaintance of mine, my fellow attendee of GetStoried's Michael Margolis' inaugural 2010 Reinvention Summit and my fellow expert generalist, Jan just launched the Curatti salon.

The site is for entrepreneurial business people looking for meaning in the chaos of all this information, looking to reinvent the way they do things to get better results.

She told me she feels like Gertrude Stein, a catalyst and a conduit to draw together social, curation, content and community thought leaders (like my beloved #Ideachat's founder Angela Dunn) to help entrepreneurs find their own way.

"I live in the digital world, and help people navigate that and reblend it into the actual world," she says. The woman is my doppelgänger.

"We're going to be focusing on how to turn conversation into conversion," Jan says, about today's business quest to reach a moving target online through content and engagement. "Knowing who you're speaking to, setting up great content, and helping them gain knowledge and insights is how you're going to build a following."

The idea for the site came out of her own overwhelm as an early adopter. Now she's facilitating a platform for content, people to watch, news and trends, case studies, tools and training.

"People are desperate for context. That's what data can't give you, context. People want it straight. What do I need to know, what do I not know that you can teach me?"

I'm pleased to say that I will be a content partner to Curatti, charged with supplying a series of provocative thinking about community building on social networks, especially for businesses going through their own second acts (that's my thing, isn't it!?) and offering tips to navigate the disruption.