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."

Linda Janssen's Emotionally Resilient Expat

Thrilled with a new release from my expat publishing kin! I've had the pleasure and privilege of working with and getting to know both these formidable women in the past half decade. Author Linda Janssen just released via Jo Parfitt's Summertime Publishing the masterwork The Emotionally Resilient Expat: Engage, Adapt and Thrive Across Cultures.

The book is filled with personal stories from experienced globalists and cross-culturals  -- Third Culture Kid pioneer Ruth Van Reken, global nomad authors like Tina Quick, global mobility experts, psychologists and family therapists, expats, and me!

Its aim is to provide you with practical tools, techniques and best practices to live a healthier, more positive, emotionally engaged, culturally connected global life.

This book promises to be an enduring and proactive guide to the unique challenges of living in a wide, wide world -- experiences that often have the power to take apart and rearrange a person on an almost molecular level. I've been there. So glad TERE is now available for global operators everywhere.

Massive congratulations Linda and Jo.

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.

Use Social Platforms As Your Web-Wide Contact Book

No more address books. No more contact files. Here's something I've been doing for years. It's a way to organically grow your networks online, increase ambient awareness of people you've run across in person, AND keep entropic clutter to a minimum. Take that inert stack of biz cards on your desk. You're hoarding them to contact those folks when the need arises, or when all your ducks are in a row, or something. You're waiting for the day the cards will work -- but don't wait.

Find and connect on (multiple) social sites with each of them. Toss the cards.

Believe that you will be able to find these people without the physical card. Believe that you don't actually need their phone number or fax or street address -- it's all findable!

(Flipside: make your own contact details findable by the people you want to be found by. That's a settings issue at your profiles.)

Know that by connecting* with these acquaintances ambiently via online networks, you're taking a small action that will help bring them closer for mutual benefit now, and in the future.

You're now starting to use social platforms like a web-wide contact book.

*And if you freak at the thought of requesting a low-pressure connection online at the most appropriate sites, then how were you intending to reach out to this person in the future when you actually have something to ask or propose?

Putting A Global Entrepreneur's Priorities Thru The LUXr Molecule

Pleased to take part today in user testing at LUXr which builds practical tools for today's global entrepreneurs.

I tested product designer Kate Rutter's priority-clarifying tool The Molecule, supplying factors from my work with the GlobalNiche startup.

The idea is that you do this exercise on a weekly or daily basis to help you better focus your energies and efforts. As you can imagine, there's usually more than one answer for each of those atoms of PEOPLE, PROBLEM, SOLUTION, but on any given day, the elements that you find most compelling are the ones you need to push forward (by not acting on the other ones!).

Personal Branding Interview By Peter Sterlacci

Peter Sterlacci, an American expat and personal branding expert in Japan, included me in his Brand Mechanics video interview series.

Peter writes: "As a long-term expat, she had to learn from the ground up how to build a global life and work solutions to survive. Her years of experience led to the creation of a holistic approach in building one’s global niche, or what she also calls a global personal brand.

"Her formula is simply: Personal Discovery + Professional Expression = Your Global Niche. The foundation of her formula rests in the fact that each of us already has what we need to be successful and we can use it wherever we are."

Thanks, Peter, it was fun!

Shared Worst Business Advice In Spark Minute Video At Women 2.0 Founder Friday

Happy to contribute to this Spark Minute video taken at Women 2.0's Founder Friday at Google headquarters in San Francisco where producer David Spark asked attendees, "What’s the worst business advice you’ve ever received?"

My answer: "Incorporate in Wyoming."

Why's that bad advice for a new entrepreneur?

Because however well-meaning and forward-looking and clever the suggestion may be, it practically precludes getting investment if you're operating, like I am, in California.

It's just too avant garde. Out of the ordinary.

Investors aren't going to do extra legwork to educate themselves on the rule of law in a state they're not familiar with.

Faced with an unknown entity, investors (and other people you want to work with) will simply pass.

For whatever special benefits you might reap incorporating in Wyoming (less complex filing with the least administration costs, taxes, and state oversight were the main reasons), you make your enterprise too much of a puzzle for just about everyone else you hope to deal with. That's a hidden cost of being unconventional.

Thanks to David Raynor of Accelerate Legal for putting this into perspective for me at the reception of Catapult 2013, a conference about 21st legal career tools where we both were speakers.

Turkey's Top Selling Novelist Elif Shafak Recommends Expat Harem in The Telegraph

Thanks, Elif!

Turkey's highest selling novelist Elif Shafak recommends Tales from the Expat Harem, the anthology I coedited with Jennifer Gokmen, in the United Kingdom's Daily Telegraph.

In "Flights of the imagination: Elif Shafak on books about Turkey", she writes about Expat Harem:

"It brings out the voices of Western and Eastern women in Turkey. Travellers, students, teachers, housewives – the cultural shock that some of them went through, their personal encounters and how they made Turkey, or perhaps limbo, their home."

Elif also wrote the foreword to our book back in 2005 for the Turkish Dogan Kitap editions in both English and Turkish!

GlobalNiche's Winning Strategy For Building A Global Platform For 5 Million Women

My global community building-tech-women-leadership work of the past four years with GlobalNiche and my partner Tara Agacayak has been recognized as helpful to 5 million women worldwide.

GlobalNiche wins the Global Women's Leadership Alliance InnoCentive Brainstorm Challenge 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.

What we've learned about building and managing global community with social web technology:

"Glob‬al Niche partners Tara and Anastasia have learned several important lessons in their work to build a global community over the last four years. In their opinion, 'people need both synchronous and asynchronous ways to gather, they need prompting and encouragement to do so and they need a common purpose for gathering. An active community doesn’t just need a place to gather, it also needs community leadership and active moderation to stay relevant and vital.'  Tara and Anastasia recommend using Google Plus Communities as the primary platform for establishing the virtual community space and provided many specific examples of how to leverage this platform."

Read the full proposal for GlobalNiche's winning strategy for building a global platform for 5 million women change agents in the next five years.

Being Global Requires Understanding, Not Just Presence

This week I was pleased to be a member of the San Francisco audience in a private equity roadshow for entrepreneurs. I was there as an entrepreneur grooming myself to become investment-ready. The event was produced by a global investing network that stressed we must exercise due diligence before getting involved with a venture.

Warming up the crowd, the founder of the entire network announced the opening of its new Israeli branch.

He asked us, "Does anyone here speak Israeli?"

That's not global.

Local, regional, geographic, ethnic culture should be an aspect of your own due diligence when you’re a global operator, if for no other reason than to be personally aware.

I take from this experience the lesson that even investors who are planning to make equity commitments in the wider world need a lot of help understanding it.

Ex-Wired Editor Arikia Millikan Launches LadyBits Media Group For Tech-Savvy Women

Glad to attend the San Francisco launch by Arikia Millikan, who's on a global trajectory since leaving Wired magazine. The evening cosponsored by Michael Gold at TechDrinkUp and Christian Perry of SFBeta at Monarch (yes, that's a trapeze above the bar) introduced a new media group founded by Millikan where tech-savvy women create the content they want to consume.

As Millikan describes it, LadyBits is a collective of tech journalists and a media experiment to source, commission and edit writing of interest to tech-savvy women -- a new layer between the writers and the publishing venues (which mostly serve the interests of tech-savvy men).

You can expect a curated collection of "literary musings about technology, science, business, culture, sex, and politics by writers who actively engage in intelligent discourse about how technology is shaping the future of our civilization".

I'll be contributing to LadyBits, which you can see here at Medium: LadyBits On Medium. They'll also be expanding all over the web, including at Refinery 29 and Popular Science.

Making This Site A Reconstruction Blog

This portfolio site is the #1 Google result for my name. This month I've started a reconstruction blog here.

It's going to be the blog that would have existed if I'd known then what I know now.

...if I'd been telling my personal and pro story all along with today's perspective on where it leads, and what matters.

Few little edits, but mostly going in as it already exists. Later I'll start linking all the pieces together, and developing further some of the content.

I'm also pulling together my material that's been scattered around the web, plus adding unseen pieces that germinated in the dark social of email, and in general, bringing out unpublished and otherwise fallow pieces of all kinds.

I'm thinking it'll be a way to refresh my own interest, and, with the help of web search, eventually connect me with others who are interested in those topics or treatments. They may even be future collaborators to bring the work to fruition. A public filing cabinet of sorts.

Have you tried this, or another retrospective approach to building a blog?

Update: Social media marketing pioneer Chris Abraham posted this related and detailed suggestion to "Fill in your entire social media and blog history", July 26, 2013.

"Spend this week digging through memories predating the moment you joined the online conversation and start posting them," Abraham writes.

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."

Repurpose (Poorly Performing!) Content To Refresh The Conversation

"I recommend recycling poor-performing posts," suggests social media trainer for entrepreneurs Karen Clark. "Give a post at least a month or more, but by then it is OK to re-post the content, but in another way." I love Karen's advice here.  It's in line with what I am trying to practice with my own content: conserving, reconstructing, evolving, syndicating, and refreshing the conversation. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. Try working with what you've already created. And, just because it didn't catch fire the first time doesn't mean it has no value and no one is interested.

The more you slice and dice the material, and incorporate insights from traffic data, repurposing your content can be a way to split-test headlines, post times, social media services, images and all sorts of other factors that make a difference between engagement and obscurity.

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.

Turkish Unrest Makes My Facebook Timeline A True Interest Graph

My Facebook timeline has in past 8 months become full of irrelevant sponsored posts and ads but before that was not an activated global neighborhood posting on interrelated topics.

What's happening in Istanbul and Turkey and the Turkish diaspora around the world this week has made my Facebook timeline suddenly a relevant, activated global neighborhood.

• I am seeing posts this week from contacts whose posts I have never seen in my TL. (Turks were early and enthusiastic adopters of FB so many connected with me back in 2007 as I told Intel Free Press here.)
• I am seeing posts from people who are saying they never have posted on this topic before.
• I am seeing groups of people I know from different locations, settings and times actively share and comment on a related set of posts.
• I am seeing people from my high school trying to parse a topic that other people in my feed (people I've met over more than 10 years, some I worked with, others I spoke to their class, others I know socially, etc) know about intimately and are reporting first hand.

This week has been what Facebook should and could be to make it a place I want to go in the age of Twitter, but so far never has been.

This phenomenon is due to the severity of the news, and the fact that my network is seeded with a majority of people who care about that type of news.

If Facebook has been making the shift from social graph to the more valuable (commercially, and for readers) interest graph, this week my TL made that shift on its own.

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

1. synchronous and asynchronous ways to gather
2. prompting and encouragement to do so
3. a way to get to know one another
4. a common purpose for gathering

See GlobalNiche's blueprint for building global community using free web-based technology (G+! YouTube! Linqto!).

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*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.

Being Small = Going For It Despite The Odds

My startup GlobalNiche equips women to use their online presence to build broader networks, connect to opportunities and be the agent of their own development. Six months ago we launched our product based on 25 years of experience, and we have customers. I submitted it to be featured in a directory of companies empowering women listed by a high profile women's empowerment organization. No dice.

"Come back when you have 1,000 Facebook likes and 1,000 Twitter followers." That was the response. "Oh, and when you have a full-featured website."

Seriously? Didn't see any of those stipulations in the directions to submit. Lot of big companies are listed. Guess they didn't think they needed to specify limits for who's empowering and who's not.

But here's the thing: being a small operation does not mean we are not seriously trying to accomplish our goals. It doesn't mean we will not grow. It doesn't mean the value of our enterprise is suspect. It doesn't mean we aren't empowering women.

Being small and scrappy can mean you're just starting out. Maybe you're seeking funding, incubation, acceleration, and entrepreneurial mentorship. Maybe you're taking the time to apply to be listed in women's empowerment organization directories alongside big name companies. Being small can mean going for it despite the odds.

The organization in question is looking for a baseline of commitment in the space, but they're asking the wrong questions.

Likes and follower counts are known to be gameable metrics. They're called 'empty metrics' by leaders in social media and entrepreneurship with The Lean Startup's Eric Ries shaming them as 'vanity metrics'.

And what is a full-featured site for a bootstrapped startup? What's required beyond a home page, an about page, a blog, an email sign up form, and some pages about products, services, social proof?

Does our site look like we've spent $100k developing it? Nope. We use a handful of industry-decent services and products to produce the site. Even when we institute the fresh look a designer is working on for us right now, we'll still look like a bootstrapped company until we have at least $15k for upgrades we envision.

We need help to take our work to the next level. We're asking for it. We have to start somewhere.

For a women's empowerment organization devoted to inspiring, educating and supporting us to reach our goals, the least it could do is recognize that very fact.

My 40-Over-40 App

The 40-over-40 Women To Watch celebrates women over 40 who are disruptors, role models and makers...creating momentum and changing the world.  It's an initiative by Dare, Dream, Do author Whitney Johnson and 40:20 Vision founder Christina Vuleta. Excerpt from my application.  

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How are you disrupting professionally, whether in business, tech, media, entrepreneurship, social good, science, academics, creative arts, or politics?

Are you creating growth, jobs or new products, ideas or services?

My startup GlobalNiche works to train women to use the social web and mobile technology (what we call digital literacy) in alignment with their vision for the world they want to live in order to make that vision a reality both through their own work and through the connections and collaborations they make with others through their web platform. We show them how to do this.

In showing people how to build an effective online presence to connect with broader networks and opportunities, and build social capital, I help people appreciate and tap their own assets and the potential of online spaces to find or make their own jobs.

Along with my cofounder Tara Agacayak, I created a 6-step multimedia program and training system that shows women how to lay a foundation on the web for the work they want to do and the life they want to live.

In our experience, even with the availability of technology, extremely capable women stumble when it comes to sharing their expertise, knowledge, ideas, cause, or voice on the web because they feel uncomfortable using the technology or they feel vulnerable calling attention to themselves or joining a public conversation or taking credit for their ideas. We address these issues by bringing them together in a virtual environment that allows them to interact with one another, learn digital literacy skills and test them out in a supportive community, and encourage them to take the steps toward realizing their vision.

When offered to individuals, our program works to empower their vision for their own life. When offered in community, our program supports the community’s shared goals.

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What are some of the outcomes of your work?

What would suggest your greatest achievements are ahead of, not behind, you?

The world is just waking up to the future I’ve been living in. The future I’ve been solving for, and have now created distributable, teachable, learnable, actionable steps for.

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How are you a positive role model to younger women: innovating around work/life issues; promoting women for leadership?

Are you innovating around work/life issues; promoting women in leadership, or simply willing to make tough choices?

As a longtime expat and pro in culture, media, I’ve been forced to create my OWN GLOBAL LIFE/WORK SOLUTION …because it didn’t exist yet.

Younger women share that I have validated their instincts, helped them contemplate their own possibilities, and provided them much needed support & structure to operate.

• A young work-at-home mother says “I am getting organized both in the real world and in my mind. For the first time I am making visual representations of my work and my ideas.”
• A 30-something author and educator says my support community “became my think-tank, support group, go-to team, and more.”
• A 30-something global curator tells me “When I hear you talk about identity and multiple cultural personalities and finding your creative outlets no matter where you are, I feel understood.”

I wouldn’t say I’m a positive role model to just younger women. I work with women older than I am and they tell me

• I “Love the personal & pro growth spurt it’s providing!” in the words of a 60 year old women’s life-transition coach.
• A university instrucutor also my senior says “I felt smarter and more empowered to make decisions” after receiving my training.
• While a 50-something global mobility expert and real estate agent says training “generates introspection. It will open your eyes to the potential of online spaces.”

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How have you disrupted yourself personally?

How are you personally reinventing or creating a new path? Are you applying your prior experiences in new ways?

My current town of San Francisco may be a tech-forward location but that’s not why I’ve increasingly been turning to technology to help me be where and who I am today. Since living in 30 homes in 4 countries -- talk about personal disruption, try serial personal disruption as a lifestyle -- I’m a globally mobile individual and rely on social & mobile tech for my total, global operation.

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Why do you think you are about to 'take off'?

Because after a lifetime of existing in the wilderness, I am finally on-trend.

My custom life-work solution seems torn from today’s headlines and bestseller lists on the topics of future work skills and work-life fit solutions.

• “Leaning in” to your own life, your own preferred way of living and working.
• Optimizing your online presence in the age of the personal platform & personal branding, the global microbrand of you, content marketing, the social era.
• Being recruitable (quotable, invited to speak, hired, you name it) based on the appeal and impact of your web activities in the beyond-the-resume Google age.
• Your digital footprint IS your resume.
• Building global community through expression of your interests in the age of resonance and new world order of the interest graph — people who share your interests.
• Taking charge of your life’s trajectory in the age of the Start-up of You & disrupt-yourself and the ‘everyone’s an entrepreneur of their own lives’ times we all now live in.

Why am I about to 'take off'? Because I have turned to entrepreneurialism, education, and online spaces in order to share what I know more widely.