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The Declaration of Social Media Business Interdepence

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Forgive Me Thomas Jefferson …
but we do share the same birthday.

declaration-of-independence

On the Internet, July 4, 2010

The Declaration of Social Business Interdependence

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for people to band together, to connect, and to assume among the powers of the market, the innovative, competitive, and collaborative marketplace to which the Laws of Economics and of Human Behavior entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of all — customers, vendors, clients, coworkers, partners, competitors, consultants, C-suite executives, family members, friends (excepting the unethical, the liars, thieves, and gamers of the system) requires that we should declare the causes which impel us to the do business.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that life online and offline are both real life, that each is endowed with certain unalienable connectivity, that among these are conversations, relationships, transactions, and the pursuit of bandwidth to build dreams into realities.

–That social networks are instituted among creators, curators, crowds of fans, leaders, listeners, thinkers, and caretakers deriving their just powers from the consent of the community.

–That whenever any business, any site or any platform of interaction, any relationship becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to abandon or to abolish it. They may lay a new foundation on like values and organizing its powers that protect their Safety and Happiness.

Prudence dictates that long established platforms should not be changed for light and transient causes — with the result of exporting information and friendships into chaotic ubiquity; and accordingly experience hath shewn, that people are more likely suffer bad code and crashing sites, than to change their social networking habits and passwords.

But when the possibility of abuses, misuses and usurpations — particularly of personal information, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off what might harm their reputation and their future security.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the social web, solemnly publish and declare,

  • That these social networks are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent (excepting those offering extraordinary paid content).
  • That we will navigate the social web with appropriate caution tempering our transparency, rising to the belief that TMI can be not only dangerous to personal identity, but a passive invasion of others’ privacy.
  • We throw down, block, and abolish all content thieves, spammers, scrapers and people who hijack our Twitter streams to try to sell things as soon as they meet us.
  • We shun people who get to know us for the purpose of exploiting our networks.
  • We ignore Twitter breakdowns and glitches at our pleasure and make no promise to continue to do so.
  • We distrust people who say they know social media, but have no online presence and no social networking profiles.
  • We curse bad links and outages that interfere with getting our work done so that we might spend time with our families.
  • We will never forget that no amount of talking or attention getting will help a product or service that is woefully lacking. Social media cannot fix bad hires, faulty product, or other failings..
  • We commit to being social offline and online in equal and equivalent measures to build trust through predictability.
  • We protect each other when we see something happening that could cause a fail. We will not take pleasure or participate in huge social media bashing sparked by bad advertising, bad employee behavior, or human error. Discussion will not require beating a horse that is dead already or fueling a fire unnecessarily.
  • We refer business to the people most qualified in our networks by value of their intelligence, competence, integrity, and interpersonal skills, not by value of their number of followers or their friendship.
  • We strive to grow our businesses, our relationships, and our personal awareness so that we might have more to offer. That growing and knowing will allow us to align our goals with strategic partners to build stronger business, relationships and communities.
  • We do not click links or open attachments from people we do not know … ever.
  • We recognize the value of our cooperative, respectful, authentic interactions with like-minded people and value every tweet, comment, blog post, and that we share as we build our businesses and rebuild the economy of the world interdependently. .

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other time of our Lives, participation in our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

We declare our interdepedence as people who work on the web.

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We’re not starting a revolution. It’s already started.

What will you declare?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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The Declaration of Independence

What if FDR’s Ideas Ran the C-Suite and Your Social Media?

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These Times Ain’t So Different

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As part of a my quest to move outside my dad’s story, to learn from it as a business case of a growing business in a bad in economy, I’ve been studying the climate, conditions, and character of the people who lived through the terrible economy after World War 1 through the 1929 Stock Market Crash and the Great American Depression.

One hero, a pivotal leader in changing the world, was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd President of the United States, the only president to serve more than two terms, the man married to the famous Eleanor Roosevelt, also called FDR.

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He’s of particularly interest because he was elected in 1932, at the height of the depression and took office in 1933, the year prohibition was repealed and the year that my father opened his saloon.

What if FDR Ran the C-Suite and Your Social Media?

FDR was faced with a jobless population and a world that was preparing for a second war. I don’t wish to devalue the power or gravity of what he said then, but as I read his speeches and his conversations, I can’t help to think his words and wisdom might serve us all now as we look for leaders — not dreamers — to change the world and get growing again.

1: Try Something.

To the students of Oglethorp College, he set this challenge in 1932, but every commencement speaker knows the audience is more than the graduates and as a presidential candidate he was speaking to the country as well as to those before him.

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

2: Don’t Wait.

The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach.

3: Connect with Young Hearts — your own and others

We need enthusiasm, imagination and the ability to face facts, even unpleasant ones, bravely. We need to correct, by drastic means if necessary, the faults in our economic system from which we now suffer. We need the courage of the young.

In his first inaugural address , FDR laid out the challenges we face and pledged himself to leadership for change in ways that resonate to this day.

4: Speak the Truth

This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.

5: Fear paralyzes.

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

6: Confidence requires deep commitment.

Confidence… thrives on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection and on unselfish performance. Without them it cannot live.

7: Achievement and creativity are joyful and thrilling.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.

And from his speech at the Citadel in 1935 …proof in his relentless, fearless, strategic leadership.

8: Our strategy will save us.

Yes, we are on our way back— not just by pure chance, my friends, not just by a turn of the wheel, of the cycle. We are coming back more soundly than ever before because we are planning it that way. Don’t let anybody tell you differently.


9: Leaders embrace change and value social justice.

Throughout the world, change is the order of the day. In every Nation economic problems, long in the making, have brought crises of many kinds for which the masters of old practice and theory were unprepared. In most Nations social justice, no longer a distant ideal, has become a definite goal, and ancient Governments are beginning to heed the call.

In his speech before the Democratic National Convention in 1936, he summed up our mission.

10: Leaders rise to the call.

There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

It’s good to have heroes. It’s good to learn from them and carry their wisdom forward with us.

The tools may change. The speed of connections may get faster.
But the values that move and motivate people to great things are unchanging, authentic, and core to our species.

These new social tools are only as good as the leaders who pick them up and the strategies and cultures they choose to bring to them. This new reach, this new speed the tools offer can help us, our friends, our clients, and the people we meet grow our businesses to get our economy rolling again … we are the difference in whether that happens.

What if FDR’s Ideas Ran the C-Suite and Your Social Media?

How will FDR’s words guide you to grow your business? How will you his wisdom to enlist those around you to join you to bring the economy back?

Start small. Raise a barn. Don’t build a coliseum.

We can change the world … just like that.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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Social Media List: Tweets, Business and Getting Started in a Career

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A Weekly Series by Teresa Morrow

I’m Teresa Morrow, Founder of Key Business Partners, LLC and I work with authors and writers by managing their online promotion. As part of my job I read a lot of books (and I love to read anyway!).  I am here to offer a weekly post about one book I am working with and one book I have put on my reading list. The books will cover topics such as social media (Facebook and Twitter), organization, career building, networking, writing and self development and inspiration.

#EntryLevel Tweet: Taking Your Career from Classroom to Cubicle

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This week I would like to start off with a book I have read and working with entitled #EntryLevel Tweet by Heather Huhman.

When asked why she wrote #EntryLevel Tweet, Heather replies, “Hiring managers expect young professionals to be job hunting experts. And there’s a strong need for quick, easy-to-digest
information about entry-level job searching.”

When I was reading #EntryLevel Tweet I found myself shaking my head in affirmation because many  of the things stated in the book are right on. Such as:

~You need to choose a career that makes you happy and excited about going to work, but remember that not every day on the job will be fun. —>there is some part, it may only be 1% of your job, that you will not like doing as part of your job.

Also, she adds, Don’t beat yourself up for not making the right choice at first–most of us don’t! —>How true this is! I was going to be a marine biologist, until I went to college and found out I was not as good as math and science as I thought I once was in this subjects.

Huhman then goes on to discuss how the world for those seeking their first job out of college has changed. “Even in a candidate saturated market, there are many more (and better) ways to get in front of hiring managers than there used to be. —>Oh, yes, this is certainly true. There are people who can do a video resume for you. *Actually that is how my niece landed her first job as a reporter.

She continues to help recent grads by providing them stepping stones to secure the proper tools to obtain in order to be more successful at landing the job.

About the Author:

Heather R. Huhman is a career expert and Founder of Come Recommended, an exclusive online community connecting the best internship and entry-level job candidates with the best employers. As an experienced hiring manager and someone who has been in nearly every employment-related situation imaginable, Heather knows and understands the needs of today’s employers and internship and entry-level job seekers.

Her expertise in this area led to her selection as Examiner.com’s entry-level careers columnist in mid-2008. The daily, national column educates high school students through recent college graduates about how to find, land, and succeed at internships and entry-level jobs.

You can pick up your copy of #EntryLevel Tweet here.

@collegegrads read this #book if you want a quick, easy-to-read guide on how to go from a confused graduate to a confident entry-level worker.”
Dan Schawbel, @danschawbel, Author of ‘Me 2.0:Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success’

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant

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Now it is time for me to share with you a book I have not read but it is on my reading list. My choice for this week is Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne and published by Harvard Business School Press.

Blue Ocean Strategy provides a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant. In this frame-changing book, Kim and Mauborgne present a proven analytical framework and the tools for successfully creating and capturing blue oceans. Examining a wide range of strategic moves across a host of industries, Blue Ocean Strategy highlights the six principles that every company can use to successfully formulate and execute blue ocean strategies. The six principles show how to reconstruct market boundaries, focus on the big picture, reach beyond existing demand, get the strategic sequence right, overcome organizational hurdles, and build execution into strategy.

About the Authors:

W. Chan Kim is Co-Director of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute and The Boston Consulting Group Bruce D. Henderson Chair Professor of Strategy and International Management at INSEAD, France.

Renee Mauborgne is The INSEAD Distinguished Fellow and a professor of strategy at INSEAD. She is also Co-Director of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute.

“Blue Ocean Strategy will have you wondering why companies need so much persuasion to stay out of shark-infested waters.” — BusinessWeek, April 4th 2005

You can purchase your copy on Amazon.

Is Influencer Marketing Limiting You?

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We Limit Ourselves When We Limit Our Words

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UPDATE:
What is an influencer? Traditionally it has meant someone or something with psychological and social power to motivate change …

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These days the word, influencer, has become almost a proper noun. Use it in the social media world and we assume that it tags a person who has a close relationship to folks we want to reach and the word, influence, has become an active verb, something we do …

When we talk about influencers in the social media space what we’re really talking about is influencer marketing … looking for people who have an advantage, authority, the agency to cause others to act.

Influencer marketing is a form of marketing that has emerged from a variety of recent practices and studies, in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and orients marketing activities around these influencers. —Wikipedia

If we check with folks and references who live off the Internet, influence has a much larger definition than that. Think about “driving under the influence of alcohol” and you’ll get grounded again. People who get folks to buy are not the only influencers at work in our world. And for every influencer / person we would like to move, someone or something is influencing us to choose them too. Here are a few influencers we don’t talk about enough.

  • Overheard conversations and subliminal aggregations of things we hear
  • Conditions in our environment, such as energy, time, resources
  • Assumptions in our thinking, including bias, curiosity, and ignorance
  • Emotional attachments we don’t suspect or those we have strong commitments to
  • Genetic disposition, such as fear or self-preservation
  • Our unique experiences, memories, and skills which shape our entire world view
  • The individual wiring of our brains and our cognitive processing
  • Books, movies, ideas, music, art, conferences, seminars, educational events
  • Compelling stories, even advertisements

Influence is what we allow to move our actions and thoughts. It’s all around us and available to explore in ways that provoke new thoughts and experiences. We limit ourselves and our thinking when we limit our words.

We limit our marketing by limiting how we define influencer too. Great strategy looks farther and deeper than that.

What influences you?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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Why Stuck?

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Todays guest post is from Kneale Mann.

Kneale Mann is a writer, a coach and a strategist. With 26 years experience, he consultants on communications, marketing and social media strategy in the private, hi-tech and public sectors. He is also an associate with CEPSM and a member of the TEDxOttawa organization team.

We All Have Choices

Recently, a friend sent me a copy of Rick Butts’ book “7 Choices”. In it, Rick talks about the time we work on us verses the time we work on what we do or getting customers or what we can offer. In the age of social networking, we can all create profiles and exchange ideas and share. But how much time do we spent on better understanding ourselves?

In 1943, Abraham Maslow outlined our need to belong in his paper Hierarchy of Needs. No matter your age or situation, you want your life to have purpose and passion. That is the core of why we may get stuck – we aren’t following either. We haven’t deciphered who we are and what drives our passion. All too often we seek external confirmation.

Internet Friends

If you are immersed in social media and haven’t taken a moment to think of all the wonderful people you would not have met otherwise you are missing the essential part of the process. In my case, I met Liz Strauss and Kathryn Jennex and over the course of two years we all got to know each other. A few tweets turned in to some emails and phone calls then in to actual work. I look forward to new projects with them in 2010. My friend Lisa Hickey calls it accelerated serendipity.

I was at an event last week and realized that the twenty or so people I was sitting with had all met online. We shared similar sensibilities, we found trust with each other and we want each other to be happy and do well.

So why do we get stuck? Is it because no one will help us realize our passion and purpose? Or is it that we haven’t discovered it inside us in order to tell people what we want?

Three years ago, a friend gave me a copy of The Secret and I have told this story numerous times but I watched the first half of the film with my closed mind and arms folded and the second half taking notes. But notes aren’t enough. We need action and focus. We are human. We get stuck. We fall into the same traps of listening to the opinions of naysayers. We fail to listen to that pang in deep in our gut.

I was speaking with a client the other day about Ellen DeGeneres. She endured three years of unanswered phone calls. No one wanted to hire her and she was running out of money. She was stuck. She then got the idea of doing her own talk show. The studios weren’t falling over themselves to help her realize her dream. But she made it happen and built it into one of the most popular shows on television. It took work and persistence. She did it because she found out who she was and got unstuck.

Why do you get stuck? Why are you not following your dreams and passions and purpose? Or maybe you are?

Does this mean we shouldn’t discover people we trust to help us navigate this journey? Ask the most successful people on the planet if they get stuck and you will get a resounding – YES! None of us is immune. But if someone asks you to help them get unstuck, forget their resume or the past and listen to what they need. If you do, magic will happen for both of you.

Rules, Negative Data, and Incurable Idealists

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What If Everything We Believed In Isn’t True?

Change the World!

I’m no computer. My operating system was developed at home, versioned at school, and beat up some through the decades and detours I’ve experienced.

Don’t run in the house. Use your indoor voice. Do your work before you play. Color inside the lines. Sit up straight. Be polite. Each basic command was entered in my head. If I do these things, I will operate properly — so they told me.

I also captured information about family and fairy tales, heroes and angels, creativity and planets, inventors and imagination, and artists, and poetry, fairness and ideals. In my life I’ve talked about and witnessed awe-inspiring and wonder-full things. These concepts are in my hidden system files — read-only, undeletable files.

I’m bombarded daily with data. But she is supposed to be your friend. Data. He lost his job. Data. There have been more bombings. Data. Want to make $4000/day online? Data miner. Still data. That’s all it is — data. I don’t have unlimited memory, so unnecessary negative data doesn’t get saved —period.

Some days the data causes my mind to fragment in unfamiliar and unproductive ways.

Bits and bytes of negative data chip away at my world view and therefore at me. The Tigger in me finds myself quoting Eeyore. “Pathetic, that’s what it is. Pathetic.”

What if the world is the awful place that keeps presenting itself to me?

But try as I might, I can’t—still won’t—give up on the world. I still believe in family, and fairy tales, and heroes, and angels, and creativity, and planets, and fairness, and inventors, and imagination, and artists, and poetry, and ideals, and so many awe-inspiring and wonder-full things. They were written on my soul as a child. I can’t delete them, lucky for me. I might have wanted to once, but not now, not again, not ever.

The world needs incurable idealists. We balance out the hardcore cynics. It has to do with joy, and hope, and possibility.

The world needs people who believe in it as much as we need people who believe in us.

As we believe so we become.

Are you willing to believe in a world that works?

We can change the world just like that.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your web presence.