A Bigger Voice

Hey, Where Do You Think You’re Going With That Bigger Voice?

Our newest blogger is Bill Silverman, who has a gift for injecting humor at just the right moment, seeing the big picture, and working with the end in mind. When I told Bill that I would be writing this introduction for his first post, he asked me to make him taller (he's 5'4"). Bill not only serves as our marketing lead for A Bigger Voice, he's the ying to my yang when it comes to top-down strategic thinking (Bill) and bottom-up nuts and bolts (me). I first met Bill last year, working on another project together. I saw not only his talents in developing businesses and ideas, honed from his many years with large companies like Marriott and Cigna, but his heart in making a difference in the world, person to person. I hope you see Bill's talents and heart in his first post below.

--Carol Ross

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There’s a saying I like by Yogi Berra of New York Yankees fame: “If you don't know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.” This saying applies to driving, living your life, building a business strategy or having a bigger voice. I've noticed that folks generally find it difficult to imagine where they are going. Consequently, they risk ending up someplace they don’t want to be.

So, I’m wondering, where are you going with your bigger voice? Have you thought--really thought--about this?

Dreaming Big

Close your eyes for a second (I mean after you read this!) and imagine where want your bigger voice project to go. Imagine your community 5 years from now: What types of people are there? What are they doing? What kind of impact is your community making? What will be the stunning result? Will you make money? How? How much? How big will your work and your impact be? Dream! Dream Big! Dream so big that it scares you and thrills you all at once. Dream so big that you giggle a little and say “Oh I could never do that!”... but you secretly really want to. Got that big dream in mind? Great!

Now fill in the picture.  Add details. Maybe even write a story about a typical day in your Bigger Voice venture, or draft a Wall Street Journal article about your work circa 2015. These "writing journeys to the future" are amazingly helpful to me in gaining clarity about what I want to accomplish.  Pick up a pencil or hop on your computer and give it a try. When completed, you will have a compelling sketch of your destination.

Preparing for the Journey

Do I expect your bigger voice dream vision to come true exactly as you wrote it? No. Let’s be honest here. We are not fortune tellers. But what you have created is a destination and direction to head that is “roughly right.” You can make course corrections as you go.

Take a look at where you are today compared to where you want to go. With a beginning and a rough ending point, you can start mapping out your journey to your Bigger Voice dream. As you plan your trip, ponder:

• What skills and resources do you have that will help you along the way?
• What obstacles do you see along the way? What will you need to do to overcome them?
• What help will you need to move forward? Where will you get it?

Is a clearer picture beginning to emerge of your journey to a bigger voice? Great! You've created a rough sketch map of your journey.

With your rough sketch map in hand, start moving in the direction of your vision. With each step you take, your map and destination will get a little clearer. I suggest that twice, if not four times a year, you take a half-day timeout and repeat this exercise--to take your bearings, adjust your bigger voice vision and make course corrections. Schedule these sessions now. (Really!) You’ll be surprised at the power this simple visioning activity has in ensuring that your bigger voice journey takes you where you want to go.

How An Ex-Rock Star Can Help You Create Community

A Fast Company article describes a new site for uploading videos, The Hub, as a way for human rights atrocities to be made visible.  Why is this innovative? Because according to the article, places like YouTube have "strict guidelines against graphic sexual or violent material." The Hub was launched by ex-rock star, Peter Gabriel, who describes the purpose here:

"Once everyone has a camera inside a mobile phone, the issue is about creating a place where people can upload footage safely and make connections with people who might further their cause and their campaigns. That's the dream for The Hub."

This brings to mind a posting about forces that are changing the landscape of society and leading to The Long Tail--democratizing the tools of production, democratizing the tools of distribution, and connecting supply with demand.

The article goes on to make the point that "there's no other site that's cultivating a community around the videos that can translate awareness into action."  And that, is really the bottom line--transforming an idea into a movement. Love it.

Are we speaking the same language?

While Simon Young is a new blogger for A Bigger Voice, he's not new to blogging or social media. Simon is our resident Kiwi and lead on technology for A Bigger Voice. I first met Simon after he posted a YouTube video, reporting on a geek camp in New Zealand. Within minutes, I could tell that Simon understood technology and used it to communicate at a human level.  Simon also has a gift for choosing words that meet you half-way (in addition to his social media consultancy, he runs Simon Young Writers) and creating the simple metaphor that will explain the complex. A rare bird, indeed. Enjoy.

--Carol Ross

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I've been reading a lot recently about the process of change and innovation, particularly in large organisations.

It's relatively easy for a Thomas Edison to innovate, all by himself in a workshop, or in control of a group of factory workers. But in the complex 21st century, how does change take root?

I believe it has a lot to do with speaking the same language.

In The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman tells the story of the Apache server, a piece of software that powers many websites today. It came about through people power, hundreds of developers contributing code voluntarily, with no recompense but the knowledge they were building something good.

It's an example of an organic community forming around a project, but it never would have gotten anywhere if the programmers involved didn't already have a common language. By that I mean their programming languages, but also the standard operating procedures they put in place.

When it came to A Bigger Voice, both consultants and clients came from across the board. Most of us were what Carol calls Boundary Crossers - people who bridge two or more areas of expertise without comfortably fitting in any one of them (at least, that's my definition!).

We began with no particular common language (except English!). We came from different states (or countries!), different industries and different frames of reference. And that was how it should be, because how can you get anything new from sameness?

But that diversity made it important to develop our common language before doing the doing. In retrospect, here's how it started:

1. Know the people. We learnt who our teammates were personally as well as professionally. We told our stories. We completed Strengths Finder profiles. And we felt accepted - we felt like we were already good enough for the role, and we had high standards to live up to.
2. Establish the framework. With Carol at the helm, we had a solid project management framework within which to be "organic". Of course, that framework shifted a few times as we saw the need, but without that framework in place - which included rituals like weekly meetings, "check-ins" at each meeting, and tools like Basecamp - nothing would happen.
3. Co-create the language. A lot of time was spent - and well spent - on reestablishing what we were about. It's like the story of the Blind Men and the Elephant - we all knew that A Bigger Voice was something special, but we didn't quite know what.  Over time, we came up with concepts that Bill boiled down to Crystallize, Create Community, and Monetize.

With all three of our clients, we faced the same issue of how to communicate one person's story to another - heart to heart, not just words to ears.

It's a neverending journey, but when your story gathers just a few people around it, they begin to create the language with you. That, I hope, is what our clients are experiencing - and what I'm sure A Bigger Voice will continue to experience as you contribute your thoughts.

How does the elephant feel from where you are?

Who's Reading Blogs? Maybe Your Grandmother...

Josh Bernoff, co-author of the book, Groundswell, and an analyst at Forrester, provides some fascinating data about the adoption of social media, hot off the Wordpress (or whatever his blog is built on.)

What makes the data so valuable is not only that it's current and compares the same data to last year, but also that it divides up social media users based on distinct categories:

• Creators--e.g., blogger, uploader of YouTube video
• Critics--e.g., reviewer of books on Amazon, commenter on a blog
• Collectors--e.g., user of RSS feed
• Joiners--e.g., user with profile on LinkedIn
• Spectators--e.g., listener of a podcast, reader of a blog
• Inactives--none of the above

Bottom line: The number of online US users in the first five categories is increasing at a good pace.

Even more fascinating is that Bernoff points to the growth in social media adoption by digital immigrants:

"Where is the growth in consumption of online content coming from? From older people – the group my young colleagues who manage all this data call “middle-aged.” (Ouch!) Social activity is way up among 35-to-44 year-olds, especially when it comes to joining social networks and reading and reacting to content. Even among 45-to-54 year-olds, 68% are now Spectators, 24% are Joiners, and only 28% are Inactives."

Bernoff's interpretation of what this all means:

"It will soon be no more remarkable that your grandmother reads a blog than that she reads email. Social content is going mainstream. Social content ranks high on search engines because it changes so frequently and gets linked to more often, so more and more online adults are becoming exposed to it, accepting it, and embracing it. If you’re a marketer, no matter what group of consumers you’re targeting, this means you must pay attention to the social world online."

Not only should marketers take note.  Anyone on the path to a bigger voice, intent on attracting a community of like-minded individuals, should see this as good news. More participants of social media means that you'll have a better chance of connecting with those individuals who resonate with your unique voice and the change you want to create in the world.

And with any tool, the context in which you are using it is important. (Please don't use that hammer for everything that remotely resembles a nail.) Bernoff provides a word of warning on what not to expect:

 

"[T]he future of social applications online will not include contributions from everyone, because not everyone has the temperament to create content. Don’t count on all your customers to contribute, and don’t believe that what you see online is representative of your whole audience. The shy among your customers are reading this stuff, but most of them aren’t ready to contribute, and won’t be for a while."

This is really good food for thought. I forget that not everyone wants to be a blogger. Not everyone is inclined to comment on a blog. (I think I read someplace that only 1% of blog readers actually leave a comment.) And that's okay. Communities, whether online or offline, need to allow for all levels of participation, from the lurker/first-time attendee in the back of the room to the frequent commenter to the occasional participant who weighs in on a provocative topic.

Building Communities: A Pattern Language

It's with great pleasure that I introduce Beth Wallace, a new blogger for A Bigger Voice. Beth is the community-building lead and someone who sees and inspires community wherever she goes. When I first asked Beth to join our team at A Bigger Voice, I didn't know about her background as a community-builder in businesses and non-profits, but I could feel it. Beth was my writing coach and editor and someone who always provided a depth of listening that made me feel seen and heard.  She has since shown that the core tenets of community-building are part of how she lives her life. I hope you enjoy hearing Beth's voice. --Carol Ross

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I first encountered the ideas of Christopher Alexander and his colleagues  in a series of summer classes on designing environments for children. These classes were taught by the late Anita Rui Olds and Ed Howe at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, in the early 90s. Alexander is an architect and now professor emeritus at Berkeley whose ground-breaking series of books from the 70s—The Timeless Way of Building (1979); A Pattern Language (1977); and The Oregon Experiment (1975)—changed the way that architects and planners thought about communities and buildings. The ideas in A Pattern Language have since also been applied to software design.

In a conversation with Carol and Bill, I remembered A Pattern Language  and started thinking about how Alexander’s ideas about buildings and communities might apply to community-building in A Bigger Voice. This post begins a series on Alexander's ideas as they apply to online community-building, starting with the two big concepts that seem central to me.

The first is that aliveness is key to the health and effectiveness of buildings and communities. Here’s how Alexander talks about it in The Timeless Way of Building:

There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit of [a person], a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.

The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of a person, and the crux of any individual person's story. It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.

In order to define this quality in buildings and in towns, we must begin by understanding that every place is given its character by certain patterns of events that keep on happening there.

These patterns of events are always interlocked with certain geometric patterns in the space. Indeed, as we shall see, each building and each town is ultimately made out of these patterns in the space, and out of nothing else: They are atoms and molecules from which a building or town is made.

The specific patterns out of which a building or a town is made may be alive or dead. To the extent they are alive, they let our inner forces loose, and set us free; but when they are dead, they keep us locked in conflict.

The more living patterns there are in a place—a room, a building, or a town—the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has that self maintaining fire which is the quality without a name.

The second, upon which Alexander’s design solutions in A Pattern Language are based, is that the same problems arise over and over again to be solved in the design of communities and buildings, and that it's possible to describe the core of a solution to that problem "in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over without ever doing it the same way twice." Alexander calls these solutions “patterns” and sees them as contained within and connected to one another; as interdependent. Together, the patterns form a language with which it is possible to design communities and buildings that foster life. In A Pattern Language, Alexander says:

…no pattern is an isolated entry. Each pattern can exist in the world only to the extent that it is supported by other patterns: the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns which are embedded in it.

This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.

What does this have to do with A Bigger Voice?

Part of what we’re after in the community-building segment of ABV is a pattern language for communities, a set of solutions to common problems that can help us design life-giving communities both online and in person. What makes an online community built around a person, an idea, or a central question or problem take off? Like towns and buildings, the character of an online community is shaped by “certain patterns of events that keep on happening there.” To shape a “vibrant community of kindred spirits” we must be able to construct communities in ways that let people’s inner forces loose. It’s not the geometric patterns of buildings that control what happens in a virtual community, but there are analogous structures. Just think of a clumsy user interface, or moderation that is either heavy-handed or nonexistent, and you're looking at patterns that control the community's experience, and in the end, its existence.

Having a bigger voice means accepting the responsibility Alexander names, not to build things in isolation, but to repair the world around them and within them, and make the world in that one place more coherent.What does that really mean? How else will Alexander’s work apply? I’m still thinking about this, and I’d love to hear your ideas. What does the idea of a pattern language spark in you? What structures make you more or less likely to engage, on- and off-line?

Welcome!

Hi, I'm Carol Ross. The concept of A Bigger Voice came to me while driving home after dropping off the kids at school. In a matter of seconds, I knew that this was my work to do for a lifetime. I knew it not just intellectually, but emotionally and physically. A visceral feeling, that brought me to tears.

In the time that it took me to go from school to home, I made sense of my life’s experiences with three small words, day-dreamed into consciousness. “A bigger voice.”

I’ve worked hard to have a bigger voice. And I want it for others.

Kindred Spirits

I've often talked about kindred spirits in the context of community. These are like-minded people who will further your thinking. They take you on an unexpected and better path than you could take by yourself.

In the spring of 2008, I put together a team of consultants with expertise and talent in four areas--marketing, networking, technology, and community-building.  Over the past five years, these areas have played a part in running a successful business as a coach and consultant. More importantly, focusing on these areas has given me a bigger voice in the crowded marketplace of ideas and solopreneurs.  I've been able to attract my tribe.

I not only hired consultants. I found kindred spirits. While we each had different areas of expertise, the common ground for this team was a shared passion for giving full expression to one's wisdom, stories, and dreams. It was the start of the community for A Bigger Voice: 

I found Beth Wallace, our community-building lead, right under my nose. Beth was my deep-thinking editor for a book that never came to fruition. In addition to being a writing coach, she is a life coach with a voice that envelops you like a warm blanket on a cold winter morning.  Beth understands how communities grow and thrive because she's been part of communities all her life, both online and offline, as instigator, as participant, and as observer.

I met Bill Silverman, our marketing lead, when he enthusiastically raised his hand (through email) to work on another initiative oozing with meaning--the Conscious Living, Conscious Leaving podcast. (I started this podcast as a way to spread the wisdom from interviews I had done with a friend dying of ALS.) Bill is an experienced branding and marketing professional, as well as a life coach, with a penchant for understanding the big picture and a gift for dreaming into the future.

Connected through a friend of a friend of a friend, I knew within ten minutes of talking with Ellen Ingraham that she not only understood networking, she lived it. Ellen networks, not because it benefits her (which it eventually does,) but because it's joyful. Yes, joyful.

I found Simon Young half way around the world in New Zealand, in the middle of the night, surfing a Squidoo lens about digital coaches. Simon is a social media consultant and freelance journalist, with a friendly face and manner that makes technology approachable, even understandable.

Our community is growing.  Tomorrow, you'll see a new look and feel for this blog, along with the addition of Beth, Bill, Ellen, and Simon as bloggers. I hope that we also see more kindred spirits show up. Tell us a bit about yourself, either with an email, community [at] abiggervoice.com or by clicking on the comment link below.

Group Blog: From More of Me to Reality TV

In a discussion with the team working on A Bigger Voice on what kind of group blog we want to be, I had a wonderful insight: I had wanted more of me--my style, my blogging experience, my sensibility of what makes a good blog post. And the team pushed back to create something so much better.

What we've come up with is a grand experiment, where our individual voices are representative of what  readers are thinking and feeling, from the expert to the novice, from the academic to the conversational, from the curious to the self-assured. Some of us are firmly rooted in the digital immigrant experience and others are digital natives through and through.

Think of this as an interactive web version of a reality TV show, with a cast of unique characters. The audience not only tunes in to see what happens next. They shape what happens with their questions and comments. Like reality TV, expect things to get messy from time to time.  We hope to embrace the chaos, in service to learning together. 

As bloggers, we will be participants in learning how to have A Bigger Voice by blogging together.  And we are commentators in what we know works using our areas of expertise.

A lesson that I keep coming back to is this: When voices in a community are fully heard, magic happens.

Get ready to be part of that magic.  The official launch date is this Thursday, Oct 16. We'll try to stick to a Tues/Thurs posting schedule, with one new voice added each Thursday. You'll continue to hear my voice on Tuesdays. Unless you don't.

Creating Community Through Blogs, Part 2

I promised to report on what the team for A Bigger Voice is learning on blogging to create community.

Here's what we believe so far:

• If you start with too many places to interact with like-minded individuals, it's easy to be spread too thin, and create a perception of "nothing is happening here."  Perception soon turns to reality. Better to focus on one vehicle, such as a blog, and develop momentum.
• Eventually, you want an "eco-system" that allows for many ways, not just one way, to connect and interact with your kindred spirits.   New parts of the eco-system are best added only after the starting point shows good engagement levels (e.g., comments on a blog.) An eco-system includes both online and off-line vehicles (e.g., conference calls, in-person meetings.)
• Blogging is a great place to start creating the online component of a community. The most successful bloggers have an authentic voice, with a niche that attracts a self-selecting crowd--qualities that feed into vibrant communities. Through comments, blogs provide a means for a many-to-many conversation to occur. And blogs enable those seeking a bigger voice to start small, quickly and easily, and grow over time.

Quite honestly, all good blogging is about creating a community. Even the ones that are clearly making money from their blog. So as not to reinvent the wheel, here are some posts by successful bloggers on this topic:

• Thirteen Tips on How to Have Great Conversations on Your Blog by Darren Rowse at Pro-Blogger. This one article provides a slew of other links to other topics, from the protocol on comments to why good titles matter and how to craft them.
• 25 Ways to Build Community by Chris Brogan. It's a post that has something for everyone, from experienced bloggers to newbies, with concise tips that move you into action.
• What Makes Great Blogwriting? by Leo Babauta of Write to Done. This is particularly useful for understanding the difference between writing for a blog and other forms of writing (e.g., magazine articles, ezines.)

My thanks to Marissa, for pointing me to all of the above resources. An attorney and an avid blogger/blog reader, Marissa uses her research skills for much more than the law. 

Stay tuned for Part 3 of this series. In the meantime, please provide additional questions for us to explore by clicking on the comments link below.

Thin Air Summit

Simon just told about an event in Denver, Nov 7-9 to learn about social media, the Thin Air Summit, billed as "A New Media Conference in the Mile High City."  The keynote speakers are Dave Taylor and Jeremiah Owyang, who I've mentioned several times on this blog. (Faithful readership of Jeremiah's blog is akin to getting a master's degree in social media. His day job is as a social media analyst for Forrester Research.) They only take 100 attendees, with twenty speakers over two days. It should be a great learning event.

If you think you can't afford the time or fees, think again. It's $97 for two days, on a weekend in November. Too early for skiing, too late for enjoying the fall colors, and the holidays are still a few weeks away.

The conference organizers have even thought about the intimidation factor. There's a pre-conference evening workshop for $47, “Everything You Wanted to Know About New Media But Were Afraid to Ask,” which should help ease you into the world of social media.

There's no excuse not to attend. (Okay, maybe Simon won't be attending. Only because he lives in New Zealand. Just noticed that it took someone half-way around the world to tell me about an event in my own backyard. And he found out about it from two podcasters in the Denver area. That's what you call boomerang marketing.)

Let me know if you will be there so that we can connect....