Thursday 9 September 2010

Twitter Tribes

Events over the last few weeks - and I will blog about them when I can put some perspective, and therefore some humour on them - have started me thinking about the life I want for my family and myself, and how I might end up just a little less "Demented".
In the course of seeking some inspiration and in my journey in discovering the great interconnectedness of everything, I have started exploring the world of Social Media.
Triggered by a single evening - at an end of term night out I was sitting among a group of Mums who took an alternate approach, and had a different set of priorities and incentives, who opted out of mainstream corporate life and took their future into their own hands. I was fascinated to hear of their various enterprises, their Networking events and their use of social media. Connecting with them through Linkedin I began to receive their Twitter feeds, was knocked out by the mix of the social, informational, business, marketing and humorous things they had to say, and how connected and interconnected they all are....,
As these horizons began to expand, I pondered some dichotomies - the use of New technology by a traditionally untech group (and I reckon I could get a post or even a blog together on what I think of as the 'Feminisation of Tech'), my own subversive use of the technology in a company where all forms of social media are governed out, yet where there is a groundswell of employees using their own Smartphones, iPads and even some sneaky tricks on the Intranet (ref LinkedIn) to bring some colour into the Corporate and external world, and the existence of the domestic and geek worlds in a single 'space' - Twitter, I started to explore further.... .
Spotting a tweet around some of my thoughts, I started following several people in the Social Media and Tech worlds, as well as the Mumpreneurs, and their replies and began to uncover many of the themes that are troubling me - how to get social media into my corporate world, how to leverage the fact that so many employees are currently doing it anyway, how to better utilise the models that the technically savvy small businesses are putting in place.
What a revelation!
Then today was a real eyeopener - I began to pick up a Tweets stream from my favourite Tweeter - @Rotkapchen - about HEROs - from Empowered by Josh Bernoff @jbernoff - and you know, I suddenly felt like I could be one - well maybe a little like one of @rotkapchen's 'walking wounded', but so delighted there are others out there who feel this movement, and are trying to verbalise it, utilise it and share it!

So @BLD, @Clutterfairy, @Euan, and in particular @Rotkapchen - thanks for your streams, for brightening my Grey Corporate days, and for showing me there is another existence that I can aspire to where I can be a little more myself :-D

3 comments:

  1. Enjoyed your Hero awakening. Looking forward to hearing more. @Rotkapchen is a wonder.

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  2. Don't get too enamored. It comes with a price...sitting at home, minimal income. Inverse relationship...if I'm working, I get 'dull' (HERO-friendly environments are hard to find and are often department-specific -- all experiences in the same company are not equally comparable).

    I'm starting to wonder if I just 'see' things that others don't. Clearly I have been in environments where people are literally oblivious to the self-limiting chains all around them. They're unphased and have no idea what my complaints are about. Great for them that they can survive, content. They make the most of their fishbowl (although I've been known to come up with some great 'toys' in the fishbowl to make the experience more interesting).

    In my personal life, people often say I'm the first to find the positive in a bad situation. I hate when asked the question, are you a half-full or half-empty glass person. It entirely depends on the context. At work, I'm most likely to reply: What glass, where?

    Why? Because there is so much posturing around how 'well' things are going, while employees are struggling to 'do' their work. I don't buy into the myth. Emperors don't like to be shown naked.

    Luv @Rotkapchen

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  3. I understand, and it is a price I have never been able to pay - mainly because there were bills to pay too ;-) with you on the feet of clay though - unable to be Pollyanna about clearly faulty thinking and often feeling like the small boy - being castigated or 'punished' for speaking out. Not sure it's a fishbowl - more a bell-jar - the oxygen of creativity being sucked out, with the inevitable result - I'm in a particularly big bell-jar so it will not happen for some time, and maybe within that there's hope - both in terms of the opportunities for HEROes, and the time to change...

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