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Social Media: My Conversion!

// March 14th, 2010 // 4 Comments » // Uncategorized

Part 1 – I’m sorry, I don’t have time for that stuff….

I must admit to being one of those people who had to be dragged, kicking and screaming to the door of the Social Media revolution – and even then I was reluctant to knock!

In relation to building a home based business was concerned, I was convinced that this was a strategy custom built for those that wanted to avoid the task of developing their people skills (which I consider to be the no. 1 skill thereof) and as a result was very offhand and somewhat negative about it to boot!  Yes, I had joined Facebook and Twitter and Plaxo and Linkedin (+12 more) as the invitations came in from friends and collegues, but there they sat, as largely unvistited sites in a bookmarked list.  After a year of being on Facebook I had 6 friends, My twitter profile had one tweet and no followers, and everytime I got any SM related emails, I grumbled under my breath about how annoying (and a complete waste of bandwidth) this was.

Geting the picture?

My first awakening came as a result of this annoyance. I received a Facebook-related email one evening, and decided “That’s It! It’s time I learned what all the fuss is about!”  I sat down and determined that I wasn’t getting up until I really understood how this thing worked and why everyone seemed to love it so much.  Surely I couldn’t be missing anything really important?

Within an hour later I had my epiphany, on two fronts.  The first was realising that my almost constant background anxiety – that I never have time to keep in touch with all my friends – was now over.  With a couple of sentences and a click of the “Share” button, I could update them all at once.  Aha….leverage!!

The second “biggie” for me came when I wondered who I might possibly be able to catch up with from the past.  I had a  close friend who I had met in Macau in 1989 while I was in a Theatre Group touring Asia for close to a year.  At that time he was only 10 or so years old and had become a buddy of our whole troupe.  He had an unusual name so thought I might have a reasonable chance of finding him.  So I typed his name into the “find friends” field and hit the send button…..

….and there he was!  No 1 on the page, obviously him, living in Wales, married with two kids.  I sent him a friend request, and the next day we connected.  Now I was hooked!  I started looking at my friend’s friends to see if I knew any of them.  If I did, I sent them a friend request.  Within a week I had over 200 friends.  I was starting to engage.

Part 2 – Glimpsing The Business Vision

So, now Social Media was beginning to look like fun.  As the number of my facebook friends grew into the many hundreds, spanning folks from 20 countries, the spread of this revolution was becoming clearer, even if the power of it was not.  I still was shying away from Twitter, seeing a 140 character limit as totally ridiculous (I tend to be quite long-winded by nature!!LOL).

In the background however, something else was happening.  My good friend Michaelé Harrington had  seen the entrepreneurial potential of Social media many months before this, and had been doing course after course on various aspects needed to master the field.  In actual fact this was one of my objections!  Having been engaged as a full-time network marketer for many years, I was completely firm in my attachment to duplicatability.  In a nutshell, “If you want to be wealthy with a fast-growing business, then keep your actions simple – actions that anyone in your team can duplicate.”  What part of spending months and thousands of dollars was duplicable?  None of it!  I haughtily responded (to my own rhetorical question).

But I was missing something.  I was missing that what was happening was maybe more profitable and more leveraged, as a strategy, than anything I had ever been expose to.  I couldn’t yet see that social media was quickly emerging as a development as significant to the nature of business as the invention of the silicon chip was to the computer industry.

But I was about to get it.  Late last year (’09), after already learning an enormous amount, all of a sudden Michaelé started to emerge….no, blossom would be a better word, in this new environment.  It was like there was so much intellectual “water” building up that the dam had to burst at some point!  And the trigger for that bursting, for Michaelé, was connecting with the concept of TRIBE, and in particular the Tribe Mastery Course run by 6 extraordinary gentleman, each an accomplished practitioner in this new emerging field.  I watched as Michaelé’s presence started to increase on the web, and she started creating youtube videos, and she was getting re-tweeted out the yin yang, and she was connecting with some pretty influential people, and and and….I was impressed.

We had a couple of very pivotal conversations around this time, and the key thing that Michaelé helped me understand was, apart from this being a business networking tool of extraordinary reach, that it was a phenomenon totally in line with our movement as a human race from the computer age (or whatever age we’re supposed to be in at the moment – quite frankly I lose track) into the Age of Integrity.  With its keywords of Authenticity and Transparency, it may represent the biggest revolution in the way business relationships are created and developed since the invention of the telephone.  In fact I’m pretty sure it already is.

So now I have joined in on the tribe Mastery concept too… and loving it!  I want to publicly thank my dear friend Michaelé for having the tenacity to “go for it” in a new pioneering field, and for having the patience to stick with me till I got it.  I will be eternally grateful.  It has started my on a very big journey, which I am sure you will get to hear more about in the coming months.  I’m E-X-C-I-T-E-D!!!

Do yourself a favour and go check out Michaelé’s blog.  You will find it by clicking here.

Hi Cyber World – I’ve arrived!

// February 19th, 2010 // 3 Comments » // Uncategorized

Well, my blog is up!  I won’t flatter myself and call this a post….no, let’s just call it a….teaser, or perhaps a placeholder.  If you’re coming to have a look at my page, thanks for stopping by – I appreciate it.  Stand by for much more activity from me starting in the next few days as I build this puppy into a cool hub.  I look forward to sharing my life and my passions with you!!!