Socially ILL

My Confession
In the fall of last year, I tried to combine advocating awareness to a social epidemic that I am passionate about with my actual consulting work. At the heart of both is a promotion of relationship building and social awareness. So in a tongue in cheek way meant to inspire conversation, I named the joint project/business SocialBling. Considering how our culture only seems to want to talk about material things (bling) I thought I would promote relationships as an over-indulgent luxury. Everyone told me it was ridiculous ambitious. They were right, but I don’t have a fear of being wrong so it did not matter. The only thing I truly fear is being alone and I did not feel like I was doing anything that was promoting that fear so I pressed on. After all, how could someone that promotes the value of relationships as an essential element of well-being and success; who loves meeting people, helping people meet others and who loves to entertain ever end up feeling isolated? Now reading through that list I know exactly how. It is a simple equation of inclusion vs. exclusion. read more »

Half-Baked Social Media Cake

Do we understand enough about the present to predict the future? I get asked almost daily to reveal what I believe the future has in store for social media development. I find this topic strange because we barely understand what is happening now in social media. Undoubtedly those of us claiming any kind of expertise in social media are often seduced on keeping up appearances by giving our opinions and predictions at a frequency equal to a self-loading paintball gun. But it’s that very frequency where lack of understanding is proven; an overload of misleading information meant to serve singular purposes, companies and/or people is the problem not the solution. read more »

What is EMBR?

Life is full of possibilities and opportunities. With social media, we now live in global communities. We are not limited by size of local community or lack of information.  The greatest challenge comes from determining who you are and what is important to you –finding the “thing” that inspires you to get up every day and do what you.  The good news is once you do that, it makes it so much easier to process new information. Part of this process is to understand your strengths and weaknesses. You also need to know; who will you need to connect to in order to fulfill your goals. What experts will you need to enlist? What kind of mentor would be inspiring to you? How will you articulate your dreams and connect that to what other people understand? read more »