Everyone is talking about “social media” as if the media is anything more than an enabler. It’s not. The media, and channels, are only as good as the people leveraging them to "share." Sharing requires two things: being a good listener and developing openness regarding your value. In business terms, it’s accepting the other person’s IP, offering your own, and sharing an experience. It’s a brave new world. Remember the generation of trade secrets. I remember clearly in the late 1990s when the National Football League was trying to get their trademarks off fan sites.
The sharing world seems to be made up of six kinds of people (according to Forrester): creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and opt-outs. Within these groups there seem to be two personas: 1) those folks who get compensated (financially, spiritually or emotionally) to blog, tweet, re-tweet, comment, and critique all day, every day, even as they sleep, and; 2) those folks who have day jobs.
My organization, Groove 11, is full of the latter persona. We are busy – really busy some weeks – and often feel understaffed and underappreciated. It’s the nature of a services business. We are not publishers, by trade, and have never run a press room. Like most agencies we produce whitepapers and do speaking engagements, but this brave new world requires a much deeper commitment to sharing than we have experienced in our careers. So how, then, do we migrate ourselves and our clients into a mode of “sharing?” How do we build, or participate in, community? How do we infuse the new paradigm into our way of being? How do we view it as pleasurable and rewarding? How do we translate what we learn to our clients' businesses? How indeed.
Groove 11 is embarking on an experiment in sharing. I am going to capture the results here. Hopefully we’ll learn together how change management, passion, and discipline come together to help a culture adopt a "sharing way of being." It is a brave new world and many people with day jobs are having difficulty navigating it. We're going to walk the talk to help those folks along.
Mike Kuniavsky:
Daniel H. Pink:
Bill Moggridge:
Tom Kelly:
Andy & Grethe Mitchell:
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