Sunday, May 17, 2009

Creating Movements and Tribes....that Matter too


A couple months ago, I blogged some thoughts about the value of connecting...company and customers, customers and customers and purpose ideas of Mark Earls. That post was about several books and thoughts and related to Seth Godin's Tribes. He has talked before about how tribes sort of change the world, marketing perspectives, and a whole lot more. He relates it to changes as we flip advertising and marketing upside down and think about "the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them....adding up to the fact that what people really want is the ability to connect to each other, not to companies....or perhaps connection to humans who are part of companies?

You can check out the latest from Godin on Tribes over at TED site where he argues that at the same time as the Web changes mass communications, every day people like you and me go off to work to change things and have an impact....and today, we can have that impact.

His argument about living at a time of significant change certainly holds. No doubts about the Web changing how we connect, live and work; mobil devices change how we stay in touch...in fact it is not just about mobility, it is increasingly about technology's ubiquity; when and how we work is no longer governed by place and time, necessarily; and, geography knows few boundaries.

Information is so readily available, who knows what theory will explode tomorrow and if we were somehow organized enough we could probably earn our own advanced degrees, maybe without professors. As the media fragments and, in some cases, struggles to adopt, what are we to do with more information than we can digest, or ever work through or consider?
Of course, we are to rely more and more on friends and those we respect or trust.

Sure we have moved from factory to television (mass media) to the current situation of today...a period when Godin argues we demand leadership, ideas that challenge the status quo, connections with others and are ready to make commitments.

But in that pursuit of demanding leadership and all that information...and our reliance on a Tribe or others we trust, lets also not fall into the trap of sleep walking through it all. Seems we shouldn't forget to be demanding of ourselves -- not just for the right connections and exciting ideas so that we can jump into tribes. But also to require of ourselves and the Tribes we join the kind of critical thinking and thoughtfulness that keeps us progressing, challenging and thinking. In that respect, rather than just following Tribe leaders or the Tribe, we need to make and find the time to reflect and digest, coming to our own conclusions too about why, what, and wherefore. Godin talks about TV messages hypmotizing. The Web might yet prove to be very capable of that too...

At the end of the TED video Seth Godin issues a challenge: in the next 24 hours create a movement that matters. Its not just the movement part, in these chaging times. I think equally important is the "that matters" aspect of that challenge. Two thoughts worth thinking about

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