Cultural Resolution

In spite of all the buzz around social media in the last couple of years, many of us have been a little slow to jump in.  After all, who has time?  And a blog is a commitment to regular writing, which is a lot of work.  And who is really interested in what I have to say anyway?  And what exactly is the point of Twitter?  I’ve said all these things myself at some point, and I hear them every time I’m with a group of communicators — from students to old-timers.  And I dabbled, dipping a toe in the water a few times.  But only in the last several months did I really jump in all the way.  And it’s been such a good experience that I’ve been trying to lure others to join me, including IABC’s international executive board members and senior staff.  So if you sensed lots of ripples in the social media waters recently, it might be because so many of them have been jumping in:

Past-Chair Todd Hattori, ABC, who formerly blogged on the IABC Cafe, has launched his eXchange site, A Seat at the Bar, for informal conversations over virtual cocktails (since I’ve shared many real cocktails with Todd, I love this idea).

Irene Monley, ABC, who serves both on the IABC board and as Chair of the IABC Research Foundation, has named her site Seizing Opportunities – Quietly, which reflects her style perfectly, I think.

Silvia Cambie, board member and long-time blogger, didn’t want to create another blog, so she’s used eXchange to create a landing page to make it easy for IABC members to find her, and provide a link to her real blog, XCulture, where she writes about cross-cultural communication.

In spite of a hectic global travel and work schedule, board member Adrian Cropley managed to get started with Think Global – Act Local.

Board member Felicia Shiu, ABC, was one of the first to utilize eXchange, and has been blogging here since last March, pursuing three of her passions with a foodie blog called Food, Drink & Travel.

Chris Grossgart, Sr VP of Education & Information, jumped in with Lobal Warming (a wonderful play on words, not a typo).

Finance Director Marilyn Keyes, ABC, made the leap last week with Afterwords.

Lee Anne Snedeker, IABC’s Sr VP of Membership, has started Membership Musings.

Chief Techonology Officer Chris Hall launched Passing on the Right .

Marketing VP Joseph Ugalde started Twisted Vista (check out the very funny chart in his first post).

Natasha Nicholson, VP of Publishing & Research, has created a site called Communication World, to share “notes & reflections from the editors.”

Other board members and staff have promised they’ll make the leap soon, so I’ll keep you posted as they join us.  But please help me welcome the newbies, by visiting their sites, showing them the ropes, and helping them fully embrace this often confusing and sometimes lonely new world.  

And if you haven’t yet set up your own eXchange site, please join us.  Let’s all make a splash together! 

UPDATE:  Another one into the water!  Board member Erika Ruiz Ramos has just launched her site, Getting Really Global.  Welcome Erika!

I was in a sorority in college (Alpha Phi in case anyone is interested), and pretty much every time we got together, we sang.  Some of the songs were originals, but most were based on familiar tunes, with the words changed to be about sisterhood and stuff.   Today, as I was thinking about my role as IABC chair, getting ready for my first board meeting as chair (and panicking about how quickly the year is already going and there’s so much I want to accomplish in so little time) and generally wondering how I’m doing so far, one of those songs was going through my head, because it started off, “How’m I doin’, hey hey…”  And it occurred to me for the first time that there was probably a real song out there somewhere that ours was ripped off from.  So I Googled the phrase and found lyrics and then did a blip search and found this recording. 

Now, given that I only took office at the end of June, and that these first couple of months have been over the summer, when it can be hard to get a lot accomplished, I don’t feel ready to throw the question out to the world (though you’re always welcome to tell me what you think — just be gentle).  But I am asking myself, so I’ll share my answers here.  I should stress that this is not a report on everything IABC has done in the past two months, because that is certainly more substantial, but I’ll let Julie report those successes. 

Instead, I’m taking a look at my Four I’s and seeing if I’ve made any progress yet.  

Through this blog and expanding my activities in other social media, I’ve been trying to connect with more individual members, and trying to influence (or would it be inspire?) others to do the same.  The numbers, while still small, are substantial:  According to my Google Analytics report, since starting the blog, I’ve had 1868 visits, 3933 page views, and 1021 unique visitors.  There’s no other way I could have interacted with that many members in two months.  And that doesn’t include those that I’m regularly connecting with via Twitter or Blip.fm or Facebook or LinkedIn or Plaxo.  The small numbers add up.  And there’s at least a little inspiration going, because I know a number of members who have started their own eXchange pages because I helped draw their attention to this great new IABC offering, and the number of members on the other platforms is growing.  In one case, a new contact that started via Twitter turned into an email conversation that led to a joint effort to start an eXchange site that would serve as a forum for freelancers.  Since then, others have joined in, providing content and sharing admin duties, and even more people have volunteered to help make it grow.  That’s really exciting to me.  Individual members creating a new member benefit, without forming a committee or requiring staff or funding support or taking massive amounts of volunteer time.   I want us to find more ways to do this.

In the Influence category, where I’ve said a big part of my focus is Accreditation, we’ve established a working group that has jumped in with both feet to begin what I believe will be a massive change process that will help us take the program to a new level.  Certainly, such change is not an overnight thing, but I feel really good that we’ve already broken ground.  The group’s work so far will feed a strategic discussion at the upcoming International Executive Board meeting, so I expect more progress out of that.

There’s been other small stuff: 

• Had a great dinner meeting with board members of the San Francisco chapter, among other things talking about how they can make the most of being the hosts for the 2009 IABC World Conference.  They inspired me, and I hope I gave them some ideas they can use. 
• I’ve done two IABC Cafe2Go podcasts with Julie. Don’t know what our listener numbers are, but I’ve gotten emails and tweets from people with positive feedback, and I’ve made several new contacts from it.
• I attended the Europe/Middle East region’s Leadership Institute in Amsterdam.   Guess that hits on the International I, even though it’s my own region. 

So how’m I doin’?  I’d say that there’s not much to shout about yet, but it’s a decent base to build on.  So much ahead….

Oh yeah, almost forgot a footnote, of no import, but a cool coincidence:  If you look at the lyrics of the song, or listen to the recording, there’s a line that is very much like “tweet tweet…”  So it gave me a chuckle, since a huge part of my activity involves Twitter, and the “how’m I doin?” question is so similar to Twitter’s “what are you doing?”  Maybe Twitter should re-write the song too.

Social media is this month’s primary topic, and this podcast includes mentions of a few of my online IABC buddies, from eXchange, Twitter, Facebook and more, including:  Laura P Thomas, Ilze Raath, Susan Cellura, Justin Goldsborough, Sara Miller, Fabio Selgado. 

Big thanks to Neville Hobson, ABC, for producing the podcast.  He also played a part on the other side of the microphone, interviewing social media wiz Aaron Uhrmacher of Text100, about corporate blogging.  Aaron will be presenting a webinar on the topic in a couple of weeks.