The Socializers | the human heart

Facebook could be an IPO of the heart. Humanity deserves that.

admin March 28, 2012 No Comments

ON CRISIS – THE PRESENT MOMENT FOR MANY: An individual has a choice in the face of crisis to either flourish and create OR to diminish and criticize. This is also true for a family, a community, a nation, and a continent. The people who are moving forward in country like Greece have chosen to create, have chosen to flourish, have chosen to put aside griping and whining and blaming and to take their best skills and apply these skills to what is directly in front of them.

ON THE HEART VALUE OF SOCIAL NETWORKS: One of the greatest lessons in life is that family and friends and community are more powerful than all of the money in the world. That’s the value of tight knit and vital, living social networks….the people. It’s not about identifying the next sucker. It’s about reaching out to the hand next to yours in the circle of life and offering a smile across the circle to the ones who are most in need. We’ve all got gifts to give. And these are unique. So go today and just give your gift, without fear and without anxiety. Someone holding your hand and someone in eyesight will get it and will be grateful. And that’s the basis of true and powerful social networking.

FACEBOOK – A HEART-BASED IPO – THE WORLD’S FIRST: Do you really think that another fancy program on how to glean every last cent from consumers is the right direction for an organization like Facebook or Google? No way!! In fact, a truly powerful IPO from Facebook is where everyone gets one share for every friend they have, every group they follow, every like they’ve ever clicked, every comment they’ve ever made. We, the humans of this planet, created this network together. And we, the humans of this planet, deserve a return on that investment of our time, of our extremely personal information, of our memories, of our images and of our deepest longings, fears and stories. When that happens at the Facebook IPO, then our species will have transcended the previous and defunct financial models. And we will have entered an age un-imagined.

Why choosing light is vital!!

admin March 27, 2012 No Comments

Humanity has just entered Spring. The light is brighter and the possibilities are endless. Seeds and blossoms will begin to burst forth from the physical earth. And each one of us, as we have pondered and nurtured through the cold winter months, has blossoms and fruit to bear this year. The right choice in such circumstances is simply to shine!

One of the first actions to take in shining is following your heart. Your physical body is telling you where the branches and flowers and fruit are within you. In fact, that ache in your body, that yearning, is associated with images. And those images are a path to fruition. Try creating a painting or a collage of images from magazines as a method for seeing your inner path. Try that out today!

Light reveals images. Choosing light at this time of the year is the right action to take. You’ll see your path more clearly and you will make better decisions as a result. So if you have a choice between being negative or being positive…choose the latter in this season. You’ll gain more clarity. And you will see that inner path like a yellow brick road.

If you need any more inspiration on this, check out this old gospel song called This Little Light of Mine. It’s fantastic!!!

Listening technologies aid heart-based initiatives

admin March 25, 2012 No Comments

Love does not dominate, it cultivates. – Goethe

Creating an organization characterized by heart-orientation requires leadership to implement listening technologies and human-run analyses of conversations. These analyses can lead to extremely effective internal and external focus groups geared towards bringing employee and customer needs to the forefront. Such research also exposes potentials for excellence previously unnoticed. This “positive shadow potential” can be just what an organization needs to move forward into the next level of excellence.

Unconscious processes are a central reality of organizational life, just as in individual life. Effective market research using social data can reveal such processes. When I peer into the conversations surrounding an organization and within an organization, much is revealed about the workings and doings of that team. A primary value for large enterprises in hiring a market research team to work internally is discovery of shadow aspects within the silos. When unseen trends within staff are revealed through conversation research, leadership can take steps to elevate positive potential and heal negative propensities.

Seeing into the heart of an organization via social listening projects is a very effective measure for weaving the strengths of the silos together for total organizational success. For example, the customer-facing staff who are involved in servicing complaints and solving technical difficulties are often at odds with quantitative, sales-driven staff. The results-orientation around money in the sales department runs contrary to the nurturing orientation in the customer service department. Sales leaders need to hear the chief complaints from customers via the market research staff. This will help the sales staff to bring their pitches into closer alignment with what the customer truly wants and needs.

To cultivate a heart-based organization, leadership must itself be willing to invest in a unit focused on listening. This is the first step in nurturing deep growth and consistent attention customer need.

Growing Community: the KPI of the heart comes first

admin March 1, 2012 No Comments

Growing community in social networks begins with a passion for shared experience. If you want to be part of something exciting right now, put a few words associated with YOUR favorite activity into a search field at any social network. You are sure to find living, breathing human beings awake and actively discussing your passion RIGHT NOW.

The metrics of growing communities have to be related to heart first. We all want and love specific people and activities in life. And that passion dictates how and where we spend our hard earned dollars. Community managers who understand this very real truth about human beings do not push products, events or services. They initially engage in conversation with others about a shared passion. The offerings within a dynamic community generally emerge out of a collective wish list or a mutually desired experience. Those highly attended events are birthed from noticing where people like to congregate. Great community managers are passionate about the niche topics related to their brand and lead others into mutually gratifying experiences.

When we lay out a plan for growing a community, our initial goals ought to center around creating meaningful content and discovering individuals who feed passion. A community manager who has lived, eaten and breathed a topic finds this naturally and is excellent at listening and encouraging members of the community. Everyone in a community has their own unique way of expressing interest, insight and observation. Good community managers facilitate a collective story fed by everyone in the “circle”. This weaving of stories is how cohesive communities form and provides a context for spreading awareness of a product/service. We need those thousand true fans as our initial base to carry on the work of the Community Manager.

It is the job of a Community Manager to nurture conversation. A Twitter stream, a Facebook wall post, a comment thread on a blog, a winning presentation on Slideshare, a location on FourSquare, a widely pinned photo on Pinterest, a video on YouTube that gets passed around: these are ALL seeds to be watered and nurtured by a Community Manager. JESS3 has given community managers a very precise map of content that different consumers interact with when considering a product or service (The Content Grid). It is a community manager’s job to identify, create and spread each of these pieces of content into the social fabric of the Internet.

For more on people-centered Community Management read this interview I did with Eleftherios Hatziioannou, former social manager for Mercedes Benz.

Social networks can be "mise en abyme", a lived experience of stories within stories

admin January 14, 2012 No Comments

A story within a story, also rendered story-within-a-story, is a literary device in which one narrative is presented during the action of another narrative. Mise en abyme is the French term for a similar literary device (also referring to the practice in heraldry of placing the image of a small shield on a larger shield).

In Wikipedia, it is written that a story within a story (“mise en abyme”) can be used in novels, short stories, plays, television programs, films, poems, songs, and philosophical essays. But I argue that such artistic devices may be used in our real fleshly lives as a means of discovery, innovation and evolution. And I propose that digital social accounts like Facebook contain nested stories, all of which are doorways into alternative experiences or possible existences…a living fabric of “mise en abyme” that you have assembled for any purpose under the sun…

For more on the device “Story within a story” see the Wikipedia entry here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_within_a_story