Multiplying Community Management Effects In A Startup Accelerator

Excited 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.

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

@AnastasiaAshman Always learn something amazing from our chats. You're an inspiration, a friend, and a mentor. — billie mason (@DoxyGal) April 5, 2014

 Thanks Billie, you made my day!

Building Meaningful Community With Social Media

Watch 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.

Ready to go with the Building Community Using Social Media! #ewip2014 @AnastasiaAshman @pubslush @AmandaBabs1 pic.twitter.com/vV2wj42M03

— Karen Jaw-Madson (@KarenJaw) March 6, 2014

Someone's attention is the most precious thing you can have says Pamela Day @ZibbyZ #ewip2014

— Kristin Brownstone (@kbrownstone) March 6, 2014

Awesome talk w/@ZibbyZ @AnastasiaAshman @AmandaBabs1 on sharing the public & private you via social media to foster community. #ewip2014 1/2

— Frances Lee Hall (@fleehall) March 7, 2014

Who are you following? @AnastasiaAshman says that's most important. Follow the people YOU want to talk to for better engagement. #ewip2014

— Lila LaHood (@lilalahood) March 6, 2014

@AnastasiaAshman great job providing useful, actionable info about building social media community #ewip14

— Lisen Stromberg (@LisenStromberg) March 6, 2014

So true RT @thebubblygirl: One of the best ways to make community online is a @TweetChat @twitter #ewip2014

— Kay (@nappyheadblkgrl) March 6, 2014

Great point by @AnastasiaAshman: the old media view was that you "save your best stuff" for offline media. No longer true. #ewip2014

— Sarah Granger (@sarahgranger) March 6, 2014

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.

It’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. 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.

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

Blogger 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!

Curating My Influences On Entrepreneurship, Global Women Entrepreneurs, & Future Of Work

Just started this curation topic at Scoop.it and I've already got more 100 links of evergreen value and cutting-edge thinking.

I've been harvesting all the links I've been discovering, sharing, posting and discussing for the last couple of years in the dark social of email and private (and some now defunct) discussion settings.

That includes material I discovered and shared over the past four years at my LinkedIn GlobalNiche group, my Facebook Creative Entrepreneurs group, my Facebook GlobalNiche graduates group. I'm also posting my original comments on each of those shares.

Expect more as I pull links from more than a year's worth of postings at Basecamp, a collaborative service I've been using to discuss entrepreneurial issues with my GlobalNiche team members.

If you're interested in these topics and the thinking from around the web that has most influenced me, it's easy to subscribe to the collection in one click over at Scoop.it.

SEO Yourself By Filling Out Your GooglePlus Profile

Your G+ profile page is a web-wide cheat sheet for you & everyone else.

And when it’s time to update your avatar, your bio, your tagline, or whenever you’ve got fresh content to share, it'll help you remember where you are online too.

By hot linking all the places you need to update you’ll make your task so much easier. Since your G+ profile is prioritized by the Google search engine, when someone searches for you, they’ll also find all the other places you exist online too.

That's from my latest guest post for Jan Gordon's Curatti: Editors of Chaos.

I've been writing a weekly series about online community building at this social business and marketing site. My posts so far have incorporated aspects of curation, storytelling, branding, content strategy, conversation, cocreation, collaboration, discoverability, persuasion, fascination and engagement -- as well as highlighting best practices and work of industry figures I see leading the way.

Some of my Curatti guest posts:

• Who You Follow is Important and Here’s Why
• How to Use Twitter Chats to Build Dynamic Online Communities
• Who Should You Follow Back and Why?
• Here’s How to Use Social Media To Build Powerful Networks
• The Great Big Social Networking Experiment
• How To Find And Share Content That Makes You Distinct
• Go Public With Your Process To Attract Like-Minded People

1,000 People Just Joined The GlobalNiche Program. Did You?

That's right, 1,000 people around the world said yes to free access to my self-paced training to achieve your potential online.

Were you one of them? No? Got a few minutes and care to get connected and effective in 2014? Do these 2 things NOW.

1) Claim your complimentary seat. That'll give you 24/7 access to our on-demand multimedia curriculum. The training will help you navigate the social web to get closer to who and what matters to you.

Invite anyone you want to bring along with you. Our treat. Just share this link.

2) Then give me a shout on Twitter so I can be sure to add you to our list of your peers. That makes it easy for you to connect and work together! Plus, we're already talking there using the #globalniche hashtag.

...and welcome to all the lovely people I glimpsed in the new roster, including Leslie, Linda, Nicolas, Lindsey, Bonnie, Rachel, Katja, Eleanor, Julia, Chris, Simone, Shirley, Wendy, Christine, Harma, Stephanie, Oshikan, Myrthe, Jonelle, Aisha, Nicole, Kathy, Nilgun, Teike, Milo, Michaela, Monique, Sher, Craig, Jennifer, Karlijn, Roberta, Lynn, Michelle, Suraya, Andrea, Jeane, Bia, Neil, Zlatana, Linda, Laurie, Ebru...

I'm looking forward to getting connected and effective with you this year.

January 26 update: make that 2,600 new people. Welcome!

Prediction: You'll Be Your Own North Star On The Web in 2014

Pleased to be quoted in last night's #GetRealChat 2014 Social Trends with IBMConnect Speakers. Take a peek at the Storify slides from this on-fire tweet chat.

The first question of the night came from social business consultant and #GetRealChat leader Pam Moore. Moore asked Forbes columnist and author of SOCIALIZED Mark Fidelman about the convergence of social, mobile, analytics & the cloud in 2014. "What does this mean for consumers?"

Fidelman replied, "It means intelligent information will be delivered in context, wherever and whenever you want it. People will become even more sophisticated consumers and co-creators of technology and content."

That's my mantra of digital/media/info literacy, purposeful & intentional online presence, and community building through content and culture!

My answer to what's waiting for us in 2014 as our connection to each other strengthens and expands, as we gain insight into and direction from our data, and are relieved of its storage:

Convergence means we'll be our own North Star on the web.

Worry About Who You Follow: Unpacking The Mysteries Of Online Community At Curatti

Your social networks are your window onto the world, and a lens on your market, I write in "Who You Follow Is Important And Here's Why" my first post in a new series at Curatti: Editors Of Chaos. On a regular basis at Curatti I’m going to be unpacking the mysteries of online community, and exploring how to organically grow a network filled with people who are all deriving value from their connection.

In this post I go on to explain that you determine how wide your window is, and how focused the lens. Ultimately, your online connections will color your day, slant your view, and propel your actions.

Take a look at your timelines. They are the fruit of your curation efforts. You selected whom you follow.

Do the people and accounts you follow challenge you (in a good way)?

Read the whole piece here.

Most-Anticipated Launch Of The Season: Jan Gordon's Curatti Editors Of Chaos

New York-based Jan Gordon (a consummate curator on the social business scene) has created a one-stop shop for B2B business people looking for clarity and direction through the digital overwhelm. A longtime Twitter acquaintance of mine, my fellow attendee of GetStoried's Michael Margolis' inaugural 2010 Reinvention Summit and my fellow expert generalist, Jan just launched the Curatti salon.

The site is for entrepreneurial business people looking for meaning in the chaos of all this information, looking to reinvent the way they do things to get better results.

She told me she feels like Gertrude Stein, a catalyst and a conduit to draw together social, curation, content and community thought leaders (like my beloved #Ideachat's founder Angela Dunn) to help entrepreneurs find their own way.

"I live in the digital world, and help people navigate that and reblend it into the actual world," she says. The woman is my doppelgänger.

"We're going to be focusing on how to turn conversation into conversion," Jan says, about today's business quest to reach a moving target online through content and engagement. "Knowing who you're speaking to, setting up great content, and helping them gain knowledge and insights is how you're going to build a following."

The idea for the site came out of her own overwhelm as an early adopter. Now she's facilitating a platform for content, people to watch, news and trends, case studies, tools and training.

"People are desperate for context. That's what data can't give you, context. People want it straight. What do I need to know, what do I not know that you can teach me?"

I'm pleased to say that I will be a content partner to Curatti, charged with supplying a series of provocative thinking about community building on social networks, especially for businesses going through their own second acts (that's my thing, isn't it!?) and offering tips to navigate the disruption.

A Simple Strategy For Building A Global Network Isn't About You. Your Plan Has To Make The Network A No-Brainer For Its Users -- Not Its Builder

Which one of these is a 'simple' strategy for building a global network of people who have a range of digital abilities: a pervasive, cohesive presence with many online doors -- or one room in graveyard of the web?

Which one of these is a ‘simple’ digital strategy (true story!) of an organization that aims to build a global network from a millions-strong list of women it’s loosely associated with:

• a pervasive, cohesive presence across multiple social networking services, a community with free flow of information -- with windows into other related rooms of your peers and corridors you can go down if and when you are ready, willing, able, that is, when are you motivated and enabled to connect and pursue what appeals to you about this gathered community,
• OR, one room on a service known for not-loving its group functionality, a service littered with the skeletons of well-intentioned groups, a room that is 'easy' to open?

When you find yourself looking for a simple strategy to connect all your important people so they can finally get off an inert list of names and start to build closer ties, so you can ambiently be aware of your peers on a consistent basis, so you all can see each other and learn what everyone is up to, so you recognize your commonalities and your opportunities to collaborate, and so you can TAKE ACTION on your shared goals using the cost-effective, labor-saving, reach-amplifying online communication tools available in 2013, ask yourself this.

Simple for whom?

Is your plan simple for you, the community builder? Or is it simple for the community waiting to happen?

We're All Digital Strategists Now

With the web's power, reach, and endurance, we're all digital strategists now. And if we go online (or don't go online!) disregarding this fact, we miss the boat, and the point.

Here's A Way To Ask For And Get Support For Personal & Pro Challenges, On An On-Going Basis

Graduates of my program are prepping to bring GlobalNiche's online presence & online community building methodology to their own worlds as servant leaders in peer-based workshops (like this group led by Silvana Vukadin-Hoitt starting in November). With this framework, in six weeks the network is connected and has a model to continue working together and a place to do so.

I've also been brainstorming the groups of people in my life I want to connect with more effectively. (You try it. Bet you can name three groups of people close to you that you want to see succeed.)

My groups share a common thread.

We are peers and colleagues and friends and acquaintances -- and we are siloed in what we know, what we are trying to do,  how we do it, and with whom. We don't fully consider or know how to tap the resource we represent to each other.

That's what I'm proposing. A methodology to work in community on our own goals, with a stronger network as a result. A way we can all be cocreators of an effective network using the backbone of the social web. A way to ask for and get help and support for personal and professional challenges, on an on-going basis.

I see you.

You are people whose dreams I've been privy to, whose skills and talents I'm aware of, whose personal and professional pressures I know, whose untapped potential I recognize, and who I feel a commitment to helping put it all together to get where you want to go.

You're also people I would love to be better connected to, and who I'd like to connect better to fellow kindred spirits in my network. People you'd like to know. People who can help you and improve your life.

Groups I'd like to be a servant leader to are:

1) people I've collaborated with professionally or been in peer work groups with, including writers and media pros and publishing world types.

Often coming out of traditional models and feeling the brunt of disruption, I understand your skepticism and why you are slow to adopt today's social web tools and ways of operating;

2) friends whose work and dreams I'm aware of but we've never really brought our full professional selves together to make things happen.

We can go beyond commiserating over coffee and silo-ing the personal and professional in our relationship;

3) people I have a history of interacting with intellectually in the long term, like fellow alumnae of my college;

4) acquaintances who ask me about what I do or how I do it, but don't imagine yourself doing it.

This would include my hairdresser who as an independent professional who moves from salon to salon could use the continuity and discoverability of an online portfolio. The young pilates instructor I met at the Wisdom 2.0 conference who could be establishing her practice with instruction videos online. The woman I met at a cocktail party recently who hadn't heard of local and online gatherings of people who share her cross-cultural experience;

5) people who have followed and appreciated my cultural work like Expat Harem the book and also the blog but don't see how it translates into GlobalNiche's social web training and online community building and personal brand building -- or why any of that is a way to help you live in the world the way you saw glimpses of in my cultural work.

People who haven't yet grasped that your cultural understandings, sensitivities, interests, experiences are assets and guidance you can use to live more fully with the help of social, mobile, and online tools and life. People who don’t yet see how your cultural understanding can help you on the internet, and in fact, give you an advantage online.

I see you, and I can envision what will emerge from our better connection. Don't wait for me to contact you. Reach out right now and let's get started.

Being Hip Offline Doesn't Make You Hip Online

I have bad news for you.

Being a hip person offline doesn't mean you're suddenly hip online.

Same goes for being funny, deep, interesting or another quality you're known for and proudly own offline.

To be so in online spaces actually takes effort and awareness to build up your faculties on the web and with online tools for expression.

To be hip (etc, whatever!) online you'll have to interact in places appropriate for your qualities with a freshness and understanding that telegraphs your au courant nature, for instance. You'll have to display how on-trend you are from concept to execution. You have to prove it.

You can't just declare your qualities in your digital bio and assume because you've logged on you've automatically brought online everything you are offline. No, your work has just begun.

Our Grads Are Brand Advocates & Servant Leaders In Their Communities

Excited about a new chapter at GlobalNiche. One year after launching our program, we're equipping our graduates to build out their own communities.

In doing so, we're hitting a major, longterm milestone: GlobalNiche is an online platform to build community. We're equipping our graduates with the infrastructure and support you need to bring our continuity practice to your wider communities....to the very people in your lives you want to build something with.

Once you have a handle on your own goals for an online presence and you've got some pieces in place, you can help the-people-you-want-to-be-connected-to get connected.

So proud to see the study group Silvana Vukadin-Hoitt is hosting in November for the creative, entrepreneurial and global nomad women in her world. (If this sounds like a work community for someone you know, pass it on!)

As Silvana writes,

"Increasing your online visibility at your own pace, creating a digital presence that looks, sounds and feels like you and that helps you meet your aims is key to the age we’re now living in. In theory, yes, we all want to belong to a productive group of people who understand us and our aims. In practice, it’s difficult to be accountable to your plans and to keep showing up for yourself and for others. What would it be like to have a practical foundation to further your current artistic endeavors?"

When it comes to the business of building an online presence to meet one's goals, you can imagine how the target moves and goals evolve.

That's why, just like me and my cofounder Tara, our graduates see themselves as 'leading learners'.

That's something I heard Natalie Sisson of The Suitcase Entrepreneur describe this summer about her role in the Freedom Business movement. It's being the person who's just a couple steps ahead of the people you're making a path for.

You can show others in your life what you DO know, and you can work alongside them learning what you don't yet know.

What a GlobalNiche study group leader does is foster our culture of sharing, and collaboration, and experimentation on the social web, and doing big things in small steps.

Part of the GlobalNiche experience is practicing finding what you need by tapping into a network of people ahead of you on the path. Googling stuff to find out how people got answers to the same question you have today.

Our group leaders are also servant leaders. (Thanks to grad Shirley Rivera for bringing this concept to my attention!) Helping the people in your life develop and improve, using a non dogmatic system that you just so happened to find out about before others did.

...being a cocreator of your community by bringing practical, useful, transformative tools to help the group be effective.

Besides the infrastructure we set up for our grads (including access to the multimedia curriculum and material for several-times-a-week prompts, a branded G+ community for their study group, and all the back-end invoicing and payment structure ) we have also created a support community at G+ for study group leaders.

During September's two week training for grads considering leading a study group I believe I was the one who learned the most! Leading learners learn more.

My Advice To 40,000 Professional Services Pros On How to Make Your Digital Strategy Sustainable

Thrilled to contribute my perspective to this month's "Ask The Expert" column on how to combat digital overwhelm in the business-to-business (B2B) space.

I answer this question from the community of executives and services professionals:

"I’m mentally exhausted from my social media responsibilities. What can I do differently with my digital strategy to make it more sustainable? Automation? Passing it to the intern?"

As you can imagine my approach and method for sustainability hinges on making your engagement with your online social networks one that nourishes you rather than depletes you.

Your network should delight and challenge you; bring you fresh insights and curated news you can use; it should activate you and engage you.

Once you start receiving true value from your network by curating your connections, you’ll have a better sense of how to provide value in return.

As your online communities begin to sustain you, participating in them will become sustainable.

Thanks to my fellow editorial pro Meryl Evans (who I met on Twitter many years ago!) for the invitation to share my perspective with the 40,000 subscribers of this 11-year-old newsletter for consultants, lawyers, accountants, architects, and other professional services professionals.

Mashable Lifestyle Features My Social Media Advice To College Students Applying To Grad School

Thanks Mashable Lifestyle -- part of the Mashable news site for the connected generation, one of the largest blogs on the Internet-- for featuring my social media advice to college students in your new weekly Twitter chat on the digital life!

Other guidance for college students applying I shared during the live tweeted #mashadvice column this week:

• demo via social media (activities, blogs, commentary) strengths you'd include in your application
• besides showing interest in a topic via social, also show *engagement* (what you DO about it)
• Twitter, LI, any service: what's findable should reflect you/path you're on, match up w/what you present in applications
• think about using Pinterest to create portfolios of your work (actual, or imagined-future), curate your vision
• photos can be used as complement: to create atmosphere, demo aesthetic, show history

Fast Company On Creative Career Reinvention For GenY & Boomers Through Social Media Savvy & Storytelling, Sounds Like The GlobalNiche Recipe

Loved to see this "Second-Act-Career Success Stories" article in Fast Company today by Lydia Dishman, focusing on non-digital-natives who have been using digital tools and social techniques to dynamically reinvent themselves.

They're not at a disadvantage because they're non-native digital beings. In fact, as these examples show -- we digital immigrants have more to work with for our online transformation.

The second-act career successes Dishman writes about sound very much like GlobalNiche recipes. It's what we've been pioneering in our own lives, creating training and showing others how to enact.  For instance:

Reframing your experiences for value

• using your previously produced content/material to reach goals you set today

Embracing the power of the social web to grow

• to find communities of mentors, peers, employers, clients, and customers, as well as to rapidly educate yourself in leading edge business techniques

Dishman also notes that 94% of recruiters are using or plan to use social media to find candidates and 78% of them already have placed people they found online. That only underscores my point here about the need for career counseling and training personnel to meet rising expectations....wonder what the percentage of trainers for mid career counseling are embracing these new realities.

Mapping My LinkedIn Network

My network has a new branch since I last did this network map in March 2013. That maroon group on the lower lefthand side is from PJ Van Hulle's 90-day list-building challenge, Listapalooza.

The blue are Turkey and Expat Harem-related. The green are Turkish diaspora. The pink is Bryn Mawr College, the orange is social media and online marketing pros, and professional coaches. The bronze is NYC, SF, writing and travel peers. The yellow at center is Silicon Valley, startups and the VC world, while the light blue is the TED community.

Click on the image to see a larger version. Here's where to get your own.