Curated By Others

When lots of other people curate the stream of content you create, what image of you emerges?

When other people curate your content for their own specialized communities, what emerges might be a multidimensional snapshot...a picture of your background, your interests, your training, your current activities, and, maybe, where you're headed.

Here's what I saw recently with a variety of online newspapers curations based on what I share on Twitter:

  • My archaeology past
  • my life in women's travel, cultural communications and expat coaching
  • my experience with publishing options
  • my role as a continuing education instructor at Udemy
  • my media past-present-and-future
  • my present in a coworking situation (and I'd add, my interest in the future of work.)

The snapshot is a gift, and I'm pleased and proud to be included in the below and other curations by people like Jeremy Silver,  a digital media investor, entrepreneur, adviser I met at TEDGlobal.

Click on any of the paper.li links to visit the daily version of the paper each owner auto-curates from chosen sources for his or her unique and focused community.

Thanks to these newspaper creators and content curators for including me as a source in their custom paper.li.

Read More

My Complete Handbook On Slideshare

Read More
Community, Entrepreneurship, Social & Mobile Anastasia Ashman Community, Entrepreneurship, Social & Mobile Anastasia Ashman

Pitched visual storytelling app to MBAs from South Korea

Had a great time today presenting SELFish, a social & visual storytelling mobile app in open beta for the next few months, to 30 MBA student-professionals from LG CNS visiting from South Korea, at RocketSpace. Thanks RocketStudios and LG!

I created and delivered the company's first live, public presentation of the product, the team, and our roadmap to market.

The event organizers asked each of the three RocketSpace startups which presented (social smartphone camera app Shoto.com and social betting app Youbetme.com) to include a particular challenge we are facing so the MBA students can address it in their afternoon session. I chose the challenge of selecting only one UVP as we go to market. At SELFish, we have several. Which should we emphasize to consumers? Is it our controls that allow us to pick who sees or contributes to our stories? Or is it our connection of moments into ongoing stories?

Thanks too, to Ronan Roche, a business analyst at RocketSpace, for making this homestyle video for me on short notice.

Read More

Shirley Rivera Takes On GlobalNiche Community Outreach, Compiling Case Studies

 

So excited, and grateful, Shirley, for you to apply your special skills to this massive task.

 

Shirley will be collecting good news and specifics from everyone. Hope to hear more, like the below...

 

 

Read More

Biggest Startup Lessons, Fun Tech Coworking Spaces, A New Product's Superpower

Screen Shot 2014-06-10 at 1.16.25 PM Thanks to RocketSpace for interviewing me for their Startup Spotlight series this month about SELFish, the new social network I joined earlier this year. We're based at RocketSpace, a really fun coworking and office space for high growth tech companies.

An excerpt from the interview (you can catch the whole thing here:

What’s your favorite thing about RocketSpace?

I’ve been working remotely as a cultural entrepreneur for many years so my favorite thing about RocketSpace is the energy and the serendipity of meeting others who are on a similar journey. After living globally for 14 years, I especially appreciate the borderless, international nature of RS. And I have to give props to RS’s sense of humor. The “wtf@” and “omg@” email aliases for reporting issues or happy occasions are your brand voice. You manage to be substantial and lighthearted at the same time.

What is your product’s superpower?

I’d say it’s that there are no social conventions to worry about at SELFish. We give you control, so you can indulge your self expression. Share what you want, how much you want, with whom you want. Since I’m a high volume publisher with very disparate interests and communities I want to interact with, I especially like that aspect of the product.

Screen Shot 2014-06-16 at 1.47.00 PM

Read More

Your Entrepreneurship Goals Are Your Online Presence Goals

Your entrepreneurship goals are your online presence goals and community is how you get things done.

These are the slides from last month's workshop for startup founders that Tanya Monsef Bunger and I conducted at the Women's Startup Lab in Menlo Park.

Read More

Founders Have Vision & Goals, Need Community To Get Things Done

Screen Shot 2014-06-03 at 2.21.34 PM Screen Shot 2014-06-01 at 2.30.20 PMClick here for the slideshow. Last month we had a great day at the Women's Startup Lab in Menlo Park, workshopping online community building for founders. (See details here.) The questions these entrepreneurs asked got us off to a good start:

  • "How do I reach people I don't know?"
  • "Which tool can I use to bring together two communities and get them communicating?"
  • "My community lives on Twitter but what if my end users are on Facebook?"
  • "How do I combine my posts in two different languages?"
  • "How do I maximize social networks to grow community, and where I do find the time for content creation?"

It was wonderful to meet and get a peek into the businesses of founders Dedra Chamberlin (Cirrus Identity, for social identity management in the higher education space), Cynthia Litchi (she's launching Tejul, a social learning site for Latin American female artisans to teach each other), and Vicky Zhang of Fledgg (a company to connect young entrepreneurs and mentors globally).

Screen Shot 2014-06-01 at 3.20.34 PM Cultural and personal sensitivity issues we covered in this workshop included how to strike a balance between one's CEO presence and personal presence online since "it's risky!" We also talked about optimizing your profiles at all the social media services and sites you're a member of. Cynthia Litchi mentioned that in Mexico, where she's from, professionals don't use LinkedIn because of security issues -- so if you want to connect with Mexican pro counterparts online, more closed settings are where you're going to find them. Thanks to Tanya Monsef Bunger, a coach at the Women's Startup Lab, for coleading this workshop and Ari Horie and everyone at the Innovation Lab for hosting.

I want to do more workshops with entrepreneurs about how they can use social media, online presence building, content creation, curation and content marketing and personal branding to grow community...

because entrepreneurs come to the table uniquely prepared to use their online presence to meet their goals.

They have a huge vision, they have distinct goals, they have content, they have a platform of some kind. And they are driven to make the most of their resources. And that's exactly what they need to combine in order to connect with their peers, their customers, mentors, advisors, investors.

Read More
Community, Content, Entrepreneurship, Social & Mobile Anastasia Ashman Community, Content, Entrepreneurship, Social & Mobile Anastasia Ashman

Sneak Peek At New Social Networking App To Collaborate On Your Life Stories

Sneak peek what I've been working on as a community and content person at the Selfish startup since February... we go live in the Canada and Russian app stores this summer and the USA app store soon after!Screen Shot 2014-05-23 at 5.02.05 PM

If you want to beta test this new social networking app for collaborating on your life stories with your favorite people, let me know and I'll send you a super special link.

Happy Memorial Day!

Read More

GlobalNiche San Francisco Area Meetup

"I'd like to see GlobalNiche become a life philosophy," says Shirley Rivera.

 

The latest of many F2F gatherings of GlobalNiche people and their friends, around the world! Reading this and want to do your own? Do it!! We'll help you get the word out. Special thanks to Amit Raikar, Shirley Rivera and Tanya Monsef Bunger for event production, transportation, and inspiration and a lot of other wonderful things that made this evening happen. It was a blur of wine, and excitement and twinkling lights, and silver and raspberry and houndstooth, and happy  faces and surprise meetings and balloons and cherry pie. There was a lot of hugging and huddling, and we really didn't need the crackling fireplace because we were all on FIRE!

Looking forward to the video interviews that Amit Raikar directed and shot along with his full production crew of Jeri Neves, James Pendziszewski, Mike Montoya and Ryan Munevar. Amit asked each of the attendees to share what GlobalNiche is to them, and where it's taking them (and where they're taking GlobalNiche!).

Everyone came out their five minute video interview proclaiming, "I have no idea what I said!" so it'll be fascinating to see how it all adds up.

...what this expat, Third Culture, creative entrepreneur, content creator, location independence community and curriculum and study group setting and online presence building and global network tapping and personal culture creating, hybrid life design movement means to each of us.

Great to see Silvana Vukadin-Hoitt, in from Denver, just for this occasion! From the South Bay and beyond, we were excited to welcome Loreen Huddleston, Bertita Graebner, Bonita Banducci, Karen Jaw-Madson, Trish Sewe, Evelyne Michaut and Siddartha and new friends including Heather Franzese.

"Our local GN community is, I am quite convinced, mirrored and replicated everywhere in our global presence," says Bertita.

 

"I felt truly blessed to be among a group of such strong, smart, interesting women (and men)," says Loreen.

 

Read More

Expat Harem Writer Wendy Jean Fox Wins Literary Award And Publishes Her First Book

Screen Shot 2014-05-03 at 6.55.11 PMCongrats to Wendy Jean Fox (you may know her as one of the original Expat Harem writers, her piece is Coming Clean In Kayseri  [read it at that link] about a visit to an ancient hamam bathhouse in central Anatolia where Wendy was teaching). Wendy won the Press 53 award for short fiction for her collection, "The Seven Stages of Anger & Other Stories". It will be published by Press 53, a literary press in Winston-Salem, North Carolina this October. I'm pleased to receive an advance reading copy and honored to blurb it!

The Denver, Colorado-based Wendy also joined the GlobalNiche program.

"The GlobalNiche program has been instrumental in helping me get focused on doing something with all random piles of pages laying around," she said.

 

"I was already sending out pretty frequently to lit mags, and getting quite a few stories picked up, but GN helped me get better - what do I really want, how do I get there, what do I already have, what do I need to make. I wanted, first, a book. Now I have to get my novel in shape.

Screen Shot 2014-05-03 at 9.56.30 AM

"I know this is not a coincidence that I began the program (I'm about halfway through) and that this is happening.

"So, thank you to you and Tara and the entire community. I appreciate your energy and what you are doing -- it's an inspiration."

Thanks a lot, Wendy, and thanks for the Expat Harem shoutout in your bio on the book cover!

Read More

Speaking At The Innovation Lab For Silicon Valley Startup Founders

Screen Shot 2014-04-27 at 6.49.59 PMLooking forward to speaking about social media for entrepreneurs along with Tanya Monsef Bunger at the Women's Startup Lab's Innovation Lab on May 13th. Innovation Lab is an intensive and interactive learning lab for startup founders "to develop the skills and competencies needed to be effective leaders/founders."

Screen Shot 2014-04-27 at 8.26.08 PMTanya and I will be leading a 3 hour workshop in the ‘Grow your Startup’ section of the lab.

 

To complement six other ’how to’ subjects offered in this series, such as essential sales techniques to close deals, lean marketing strategy, lean startup training, UI/UX design, IP Strategy and Valuation/Financial modeling, we will be instructing the group on using social media to build an online community.

Tanya is my GlobalNiche team member, and for the past year has been a business coach at the Women's Startup Lab founded by Allison Chapman and Ari Horie, who's pictured below.

 

Screen Shot 2014-04-27 at 6.53.25 PM

Read More
Community, Culture, Expatriatism, Platform Anastasia Ashman Community, Culture, Expatriatism, Platform Anastasia Ashman

Multiplying Community Management Effects In A Startup Accelerator

Screen Shot 2014-04-11 at 11.25.00 AMExcited to brainstorm next week with Olivia June Poole, the new community director of RocketSpace where I'm now based, a regular gathering of community managers here to bring together all the different community people from startups in this incubator/accelerator/coworking space.

Kinda meta. Also, a way to make coworking even more beneficial.

 

I see it being a way to get to know our fellow community-entrusted pros, discuss community management issues among ourselves, and begin to meld our discrete communities for increased impact and opportunity.

photo-10

Read More

Faye Brann Addresses The Gap In The Market For Narrative Expat Literature

 

Screen Shot 2014-04-08 at 2.37.18 PM Thanks to expat author in Dubai Faye Brann for interviewing me about #expat #literature and the #publishing world's opportunities to capture expat lit's readers.  She blogs about it here. Here's the interview as it was conducted on Twitter this week -- which is where Faye and I met!

 

Screen Shot 2014-04-08 at 1.45.22 PM

Faye is working on her first book, There’s No Place Like Home, to "look at the often misunderstood life of the ‘trailing spouse’ abroad". At her blog she explores the gap in the market for narrative expat literature.

Read More

Executing Global Rollout Of A New Social Networking Collaboration Tool

 

photo-9BetaList highlights to thousands of tech-savvy early adopters the upcoming mobile app of Selfish.me, the San Francisco startup I joined in February as director of community...

So fun strategizing and executing the global rollout of this new social networking collaboration tool! Sign up now to be notified as soon as it hits the app store.

Screen Shot 2014-04-06 at 1.03.05 PM

Read More

Inspirations & Friends & Mentors = The Kind Of Relationships I Want To Have

 

 Thanks Billie, you made my day!

Read More

Building Meaningful Community With Social Media

photoWatch a video here, thanks to videographer Stacy McKenzie. Thanks to the organizers, sponsors and participants of the Exceptional Women In Publishing conference. Here's just a tiny peek into an inspiring day. More to come, including resource links to the things we mentioned during the below panel.

 

 

 

 

 

photo-1

Read More

Speaking About Community Building With Social Media at Exceptional Women In Publishing Conference

Screen Shot 2014-01-20 at 5.03.33 PMScreen Shot 2014-02-23 at 9.40.19 AMAlong with behavior design entrepreneur Pamela Day -- who's a researcher at Stanford's Persuasive Technology Lab -- and Amanda Barbara from the global crowd-funding publishing platform PubSlush, the "Kickstarter for books" and another pro from a major social media platform you all know about, in March I'll be speaking on a "How to build meaningful community with social media" panel.

This event at the Julia Morgan Ballroom will be the 6th Annual Women’s Leadership Conference with a theme of How to Move Forward: Women Leaders in Media, a day-long event of discussions about successful business and content models of today and tomorrow.

So pleased to be joining speakers including

  • Deanna Brown (CEO of Byliner with whom I've recently had a chance to discuss the future of digital reading as an entertainment channel to rival Netflix and HBO)
  • my fellow author Sarah Granger (founder of Center for Technology, Media & Society, who has the distinction of being the person I've been following on Twitter the longest and finally we met in person at TEDxBay Area in 2012! Her book "The Digital Mystique" comes out from my own publisher Seal Press later this year.)
  • Yumi Wilson (LinkedIn for journalists)
  • Rose Aguilar of KALW radio (who came into my world back when I was planning the Expat Harem book tour through the Bay Area!)
  • and others from AOL, Flipboard, The Bold Italic, Upworthy, Disney, San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones, The New York Times, Sunset, Pacific Standard, Quartz

Screen Shot 2014-02-23 at 9.51.05 AM

Screen Shot 2014-02-26 at 11.29.30 AMThe day's honoree is Kara Swisher, formerly of the Wall Street Journal's AllThingsD and now founder of Re/Code, while the host Michelle Fitzhugh-Craig is an award winning journalist with more than 15 years in print and online reporting, editing, social media and design.

It promises to be a great day. Here's where to register. If you can't attend, follow along on Twitter (starting now!) with the hashtag #ewip2014. Open a window on the day's speakers by following EWIP2014 Speakers Twitter list by Erin Browner.

 

Watch a video of my panel here, thanks to videographer Stacy McKenzie.

Read More

2014 Marks 2 Years Of Offering The GlobalNiche Program: An Update & Shifting Of Gears

An update from me, my GlobalNiche cofounder Tara Agacayak, and our team member Tanya Monsef Bunger. 

Today over 3000 are taking the course, with 13 study group leaders working to bring the program to their own communities of artisans, expats, servant leaders, writers and academics, and women entrepreneurs.

Screen Shot 2014-02-10 at 10.36.28 AMIt’s been a privilege and a pleasure to have worked full time on this endeavor for the past 24 months.Today we’re excited to share what we’ve achieved -- as well as how we’re shifting gears.

Back in 2009, we envisioned a professional alliance of people connected online sharing ideas and supporting each other’s work.

 

We began speaking to groups about how to use social media to develop professionally by building an online web platform. We conducted on and offline seminars and workshops, masterminds and community-building programs.

By committing to work in community, we evolved the GlobalNiche program as an easy, systematic, iterative way to build a platform for opportunity to happen. We realize that our individual platforms open us up to opportunity -- not by magic, but by connecting us with our global community via the social web.

In the past two years, we’ve won an award for our global community-building methodology, hosted 20+ live web conversations with emerging thought leaders on cutting edge GlobalNiche issues, designed, created and delivered email tutorials, program pilots, a self-study workbook, a high-touch 6-week coaching program, on-demand multimedia programs, 2 online study groups, a peer study group training, supported 3 peer study groups with more on the calendar and published a Kindle handbook. We’ve also provided our platform building tutorial to the Global Tech Women conference, become a LeanIn platform partner, spoken at numerous events and broadened the GlobalNiche network to include women leaders, content creators, social business people and entrepreneurs everywhere. We’re proud to have contributed to, participated in, and added GlobalNiche’s definition and practice to these global life/work movements:

  • every-day entrepreneurial thinking and acting, creative entrepreneurship as a solution for everyone
  • location independence and lifestyle design in populations beyond expats, travelers and life hackers
  • recognition of the importance of digital identity, personal branding, digital footprints and online social networking for personal and professional development
  • re-envisioning the future of work with online collaboration and co-creation
  • the adoption of global communication best practices
  • the tidal wave of online content marketing
  • the rise of the transformational consumer and transformational online communities

Working on GlobalNiche educated us in what it takes to build a business. We’ve gained a new appreciation for what we know, as well as identified gaps in our own knowledge, skills, abilities and experience.

Our early stage founder experience took us into the startup world. We opened and maintained profiles at accelerator and incubator application platforms like Gust.com, Angel.co, and F6s.  We attended founder events, applied to accelerators, got VC training for elevator pitches, learned the investment landscape. We learned about the role of mentors, advisors, and equity positions.

We tried our hand at investor presentations, worked toward that elusive thing called “product-market fit”, learned about choosing vendors, designed logos and website look & feel, investigated shopping cart and affiliate network solutions until we ran screaming in the other direction.

We worked on what seems like a lifetime about brand messaging - writing taglines and elevator pitches on a weekly basis (and still not there yet).

We discovered what it means to be a globally distributed team managing a variety of time zones, test driving collaboration software.

Looking back on all that we’ve achieved and learned, we realize that we’ve reached our 2009 goal of building an online global support alliance. More than that, we developed a curriculum that teaches people the skills they need to do this for themselves.

Now we’re turning the method over -- to you, and to your communities, and to people far beyond those in our current networks -- to let it grow.

2014’s shift toward a community-based movement not only makes the method available to more people but it also allows the founding team to focus on applying what we’ve learned, what we built, and the skills we developed on new projects and in ever wider communities. This is the next chapter for GlobalNiche thinking and methodology. Screen Shot 2014-01-20 at 5.03.33 PM Tara is leaving her position with GlobalNiche. She is putting her strategy and analytical skills to work doing market research for a London-based company and she has been contracted as project manager on an upcoming socio-cultural book about Turkey.

Anastasia continues to lead the GlobalNiche movement by holding the vision and on-going operations. She has taken a community-building position in a new social storytelling startup being incubated at RocketSpace in San Francisco. As a speaker and consultant, this spring she’ll be talking about platform at the Exceptional Women In Publishing conference, and leading a workshop with Tanya about the GlobalNiche Method at Women’s Startup Lab.

Tanya is continuing business development related to the GlobalNiche movement. She is working with female founders/entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley to accelerate their businesses and has also accepted a professorship at Santa Clara University where she’s exploring opportunities to use the GlobalNiche curriculum. She will act as director of the Global Fellows program.

As we shift gears, we’re grateful and proud of what we’ve created together, how the GlobalNiche movement continues to support our growth through the principles we’ve established in the program and using social technology.

And as ever, we appreciate being on this journey with you.

Read More

Another Storytelling Venture Sheds Old Media Constraints For 21st Century Creativity & Context

Screen Shot 2014-01-26 at 4.09.26 PMBlogger and columnist Ezra Klein (formerly of the Washington Post) just announced in The Verge his new news venture "Project X" at Vox Media. It aims to address the question: "why hasn't the Internet made the news better at delivering crucial context alongside new information?" "New information is not always — and perhaps not even usually — the most important information for understanding a topic," Klein writes in The Verge. That's the way news has functioned in the past, often due to space restrictions. "The web has no such limits. There's space to tell people both what happened today and what happened that led to today."

As a 21st century content creator with an old media background, I'm familiar both with the restrictions Project X's founders (including Melissa Bell and Matthew Yglesias ) have been bristling under and the avenues they want to pursue.

News is a natural field for building a rich new ecosystem of information around content.

 

For the past decade I've been committed to doing on a personal scale what Project X aims to do for news: Plumbing the content of deep interests and creating transmedia stories that can live and grow online.

Our time is coming!

Read More
Community, Culture, Entrepreneurship, Turkey Anastasia Ashman Community, Culture, Entrepreneurship, Turkey Anastasia Ashman

Turkey-Related Entrepreneurs, Founders & Funders

Screen Shot 2014-01-23 at 5.29.29 PMOut having antique cocktails (that's the San Francisco way) at Comstock Saloon with family and friends. The international (and Turkish-related) set of startup entrepreneurs, founders and funders included Bora Sahinoglu, Burc Sahinoglu (of CratePlayer & HIVEBEATS), Rostem Hairedin (of Selfish.me) and Ersin Pamuksuzer of StartupBootcamp in Istanbul.

Ersin's latest venture was in the news this week, with TechCrunch announcing "As Investor Interest Heats Up In Turkey, Pan-European Accelerator Startupbootcamp Launches In Istanbul."

TechCrunch also reported that heat up this week. Congrats to my friend global VC Cem Sertoglu who's managing the $130 million Earlybird Digital East Fund (EDEF) "to invest in early and early growth startups in Turkey and Central and Eastern Europe."

Read More