The Socializers
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Posts Tagged ‘ social fabric of the internet ’

“…symbolical rites are the external expressions of man’s inward desire to unite with Divinity.” – Roberta H. Lamerson, F.R.C.

One of the most sacred spiritual rites throughout history is the walking of the labyrinth.

Kimberly Lowelle, the President of The Labyrinth Society – a network of labyrinth scholars and enthusiasts – writes, “The labyrinth is an archetype of transformation. Its transcendant nature knows no boundaries, crossing time and cultures with ease. The labyrinth serves as a bridge from the mundane to the divine…” I suggest to the reader that the Labyrinth is an image AND an experience worth looking deeper into as a model for yielding what one wants from the social fabric of the internet, which is really the fabric of our communal heart.

At their labyrinth website, Grace Cathedral in San Francisco writes about about the deeper meanings of the labyrinth, “The Labyrinth is an archetype, a divine imprint, found in all religious traditions in various forms around the world. By walking a replica of the Chartres labyrinth, laid in the floor of Chartres Cathedral in France around 1220, we are rediscovering a long-forgotten mystical tradition that is insisting to be reborn.”

The labyrinth is a shared esoteric tradition, “In Native American culture it is called the Medicine Wheel and Man in the Maze. The Celts described it as the Never Ending Circle. It is also called the Kabbala in mystical Judaism. One feature they all share is that they have one path which winds in a circuitous way to the center.”

Having spent nearly a year walking solely in the labyrinth of social networks AND around the world meeting real people from those networks, I must say that the spiritual opportunity for humanity in social networks is profound.

What do I mean by this? If the ultimate goal of any relationship is the union of two hearts, then I would submit to the reader that social networks reveal paths for multiple re-unions. I have lived such re-unions over and over during the last 12 months in particular, from the re-kindling of high school romance to finding new friends within tribes of a shared heart-sense. Such re-unions are a symbolic experience within human experience of a deeper truth, a deeper goal that all peoples, all tribes, all nations share: to reach the spiritual goals defined by their forefathers and wise-women in whatever spiritual/aesthetic/communal traditions they were raised in. AGAIN, whatever spiritual tradition or method of reaching the sacred you choose, I suggest to you that social networks offer a path of BRINGING YOUR HEART TO YOUR PEOPLE. They want it and need it!

ON A DEEPER LEVEL, SOCIAL NETWORKS ARE EVEN NOW BEING WOVEN TOGETHER FOR THE EXPRESS PURPOSE OF SAVING WHAT NEEDS TO BE SAVED IN THE ECO-SYSTEM, THE HUMAN COMMUNITY AND IN OUR INDIVIDUAL HEARTS — ON A GLOBAL LEVEL.

The labyrinth is a living, breathing metaphor for those who walk the social networks and the paths of this planet FOR THE EXPRESS GOAL OF WEAVING HUMANITY TOGETHER.

Grace Cathedral literature shows how the exercise of the labyrinth may be seen in three parts. I have quoted their EXCELLENT material here AND added thoughts on personal and corporate findings one may take from the exercise of the labyrinth.

1. PURGATION (RELEASING) ~ “A releasing, a letting go of the details of your life. This is the act of shedding thoughts and distractions. A time to open the heart and quiet the mind.” (source)

Releasing on a Personal Level: To really enter social networks takes a lot of faith and courage. What I thought was important transforms as I transcend those early details from my Info section and discover truly amazing versions of my own personal gifts and ideals. Moving deeper into TRANSPARENT social graphs is a kind of shedding, the flower opens up, and the center of vitality is revealed. YOUR VITALITY can come from the goals you assign yourself AND THAT your graph assigns you on a daily basis.

Releasing for Businesses: What this means is a releasing of the “expert-ness” in the mind of the Marketing Manager, the Brand Manager and the SVP of Product IN PREPARATION for the LISTENING to the voice of the consumer. Your genius NEEDS to be in taking what your customer wants and elevating that to a level of product or service that exceeds his/her need/desire.

2. ILLUMINATION (RECEIVING) ~ “When you reach the center, stay there as long as you like. It is a place of meditation and prayer. Receive what is there for you to receive.” (source)

Receiving on a Personal Level: It seems that everyday, a quote or an image or a movie clip, reveals an answer and truth that I needed. Listening to the social fabric of the internet and to oneself PRIOR to interaction with friends gives you the chance to make good decisions about where you want your heart to go that moment, that day, and for your lifetime!

Receiving for Businesses: The important concept here for business is LISTENING. When we listen AT THE CENTER(s) of our customer base (key demographic), answers arrive for future product offerings and brand direction. AND customer service issues are solved very quickly.

3. UNION (RETURNING) ~ “As you leave, following the same path out of the center as you came in, you enter the third stage, which is joining God, your Higher Power, or the healing forces at work in the world. Each time you walk the labyrinth you become more empowered to find and do the work you feel your soul reaching for.” (source)

Union on a Personal Level: Chatting with a friend or video-Skype expands the vision found when listening. Meeting physically takes this EVEN FURTHER. That transparent shedding we do as an action of entering the social fabric of the internet and revealing ourselves REQUIRES friendliness and generosity. Secure allies within your social graph to support you in this (HINT: the best way to do this is by being that same person to him/her/them).

Union for Businesses: Again, as said above, the genius that comes from the center of the social graph is knowing what your customer wants and elevating that to a level of product or service that exceeds his/her need/desire. That’s what the Lovemarks from Saatchi + Saatchi are all about! This also is the golden road to building lasting Customer Lifetime Value and Customer Equity.

I suggest to the reader that building and entering your social graph IS akin to the building AND walking of a labyrinth. This passage is a sacred act AND also has regular CENTERS (POINTS OF ILLUMINATION) that you reach. If our genes carry an imprint, it seems logical to state that the social graph you have started building is a VISUALIZATION OF YOUR GENETIC HERITIAGE AND YOUR SPIRITUAL TRIBE.

Entering your personalized social graph, if viewed as a sacred experience, could very well result in your finding the answers and solutions needed by YOU.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls. ~Joseph Campbell

The future of human interaction with the invisible has fully arrived. We are now firmly in an era where Predictive and Temporal Analytics (THINK: Analytics-Driven Policy) MATCHED WITH abundant Storytelling/Transmedia genius HAS yielded full-blown portals into the realm of RELATIONSHIP TO THE MYTHIC. One need only look at the largest portals to VIRTUALPHYSICAL and ROMANTIC relationship creation for evidence of these doorways.

WHAT IS “RELATIONSHIP TO THE MYTHIC”? (And why is this important?)

Joseph Campbell, the mythologist, writes, “The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.” Wolfgang Pauli writes of “an invisible, potential form of reality that is only indirectly inferable through its effects.”

I submit to the reader that through a combination of Listening to Oneself AND Investigation using Social Monitoring Tools, humans can now discover “worm-holes” that lead directly to their most cherished and inner-desired locations. I would also suggest that these most cherished INNER LOCATIONS are spiritual destinations characterized by terms like nostalgia and “the best times of my life”. Such INNER and REMEMBERED locations MAY be the most desirable locations known to mankind AND MAY also be THE wellspring of creativity for the individual, a society and the whole of humanity. We all seek the bright field, which IS the MYTHIC REALM.

The process for accessing these locations COULD trace the following path:

1. LISTEN TO YOUR OWN HEART by taking one single day out of your life and spending that 24 hour period alone. Simply listening. Karl Menninger writes, ”Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us , makes us unfold and expand.” Places like Spirit Rock, Esalen, Omega Institute, forests, deserts, islands and parks within cities can facilitate a window TO THE dreamed-of location.

2. WRITE! During your time of listening to yourself, write. And underline the words that mean the most to you. Those are your search terms, the keywords that you will use in the social fabric of the internet to find others like you, destinations of your tribe and eco-systems sympathetic to YOUR nature. Joseph Campbell writes, “One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.” What a fabulous reality we have in that the social fabric of the internet offers abundant paths to the flowering of our humanity!

3. IDENTIFY YOUR KEYS. Take your keywords, your KEYS, to the social monitoring tools, visual maps, AND keyword tools and follow your findings to the location of your tribe in the social networks!

4. BOARD YOUR PLANE, TRAIN OR AUTOMOBILE, whether this be a metaphor for mental passage, spiritual exploration, relationship deepening/adjustment/discovery AND/OR actual physical movement.

5. WRITE YOUR LOVE LETTERS TO THE WORLD as you travel to the land of your tribe (Hint: That’s what blogging, tweeting, FBing, Flickr-ing, YouTubing, SlideShare-ing, etc. really are…these are your forums to express your GIFT to the world). The joy and beauty of your journey will infiltrate and instruct the fabric of the communities around you and inspire others to do their own exploration and SHIFT!

What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else. ~Joseph Campbell

Popularity: 10% [?]

We, as members of Generations X, Y and the Millenials, wish to communicate the following message to the Babyboomers running this planet.

We begin with respectful gratitude to you, our parents and grandparents, for conceiving and birthing the bodies and world we thrive and live within. We respectfully honor all of the incredible advances in every discipline that have led to better lives for every one of us on this planet. We attribute our own creativity, knowledge and burgeoning wisdom to the truly incredible education system built and paid for by you, our predecessors. We honor the way you have defended us against violence and opened new possibilities for peace heretofore unrealized.

At the same time, we announce to you our wholesale rejection of your conflicts, prejudices and entrenched interests. Our current experience of the negative results to our eco-system, communities and economics from these shadow aspects of your generation’s psyche require us for the sake of our children and your grandchildren to now step forward and alter certain paths elected by you and The Traditionalists since the major world wars in the early 20th century.

Now that a majority of you are reaching retirement age and what the Hindu system calls “the forest-dweller stage”, we as The Central Householders on this planet require a set of fresh perspectives in the major disciplines and verticals, such as politics, economics and environmental policy, so that our planet, communities, food sources and children are protected.

Due to the severity of events in several significant theaters of action, particularily finance, political-process and ecological preservation, we respectfully ask that you join us to hear some fabulous ideas from the forward thinking leaders of our generation. We want you there because you gave us the foundation for this thought and invention to come about. We want to show you, Mom and Pop, Grandpa and Grandma, Uncle and Aunt, Mentor and Teacher, what we have come up with as part of our assignment to make a better world. We hope you’ll come and we think you’ll like what we have in mind.

Our goal is a healthier, wiser and more effective human family, well-equipped to heal, guide and protect our children and your grandchildren into a fabulous and exciting future that will contain astounding technologies, well-woven/integrated communities and children motivated to live and thrive. As we see it, this is truly possible and we have seen a glimpse of it through the rapidly expanding communities of thought, invention and innovation in our online and offline worlds. These worlds are increasingly being woven together globally through the social fabric of the internet, through technologies in multiple verticals and through our innate drive to survive as humans.

We characterize this drive to survive in our generation primarily through meaning. The social fabric of the internet, our primary vehicle for communication, is driven by a search for meaning. In fact, studies show that The Millennials, the latest generation on this planet to hold credit cards and turn in resumes, are characterized as the generation in search of Meaning. These torch-bearers of humanity want work, communities and activities that amount to something more than accumulation of wealth and property. Their definition of wealth is spiritual, emotional and communal.

Understand that we have no choice at this time but to ask you to step down from those aspects of your leadership that involve the wholesale raping of this planet and one another FOR THE EXPRESS INTEREST OF OUR MUTUALLY SHARED CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN. Understand also, that for those of you who cannot or choose not to hear us due to greed, entrenched interests and general allegience to an out-dated paradigm of consumeristic accumulation, we may need to remove you by force. We honor your courage and vigor in building the worlds you have built…these edifices are truly monumental. But now, in this time, we require that you re-orient toward the survival of the planet, its species and the beautifully woven cultures of the world.

With Kind Regards and Good Intentions,

GenX, GenY and The Millenials

Popularity: 10% [?]

THE CYCLE OF AWARENESS IN THE SOCIAL FABRIC OF THE INTERNET (REDUCED):

Every tweet (Twitter) and Facebook (Facebook) status update is a blog post title (Wordpress, Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr), every blog post a chapter in a digital book (iBook) populated by media, including (but not limited to), photos (Flickr), video (YouTube), music (Last.fm), and footnotes (Slideshare), every digital book a community (Ning), every community contains the full range of archetypal characters (The Conversation Prism), and each of those characters introduces your material to their tribes through tweets, blog posts, etc.

And ALL of this is trackable, monitor-able and monetize-able!

Popularity: 4% [?]

Strategy for small businesses in crisis times:

1. Take one day to listen to yourself:
http://amzn.to/Proprioceptive
http://amzn.to/walking_meditation
“Silence is a source of great strength.” – Lao Tzu.

2. Take the next day to listen to your customer.

3. Take the 3rd day to map the intersection points of your dreams and your customer’s needs.
http://bit.ly/Behance_Action
http://bit.ly/37_signals
http://bit.ly/Timeboxing

4.Create 20 strategies for you business based on these intersection points. Prioritize these strategies. Remember, strategic thought is the art of shaping realities.
http://bit.ly/scenario_planning_method
http://bit.ly/social_footprint_map

5. Identify and clear blockages to effectively actuating these strategies.
– Go for a stroll (this is very powerful and simple. Be sure to breathe while walking).
– Give attention to the thoughts (focus on the blockage itself and go into it.
            ”If you can’t get out of it, Get into it!” ~ from Outward Bound)
– Let go of thinking (vigorous physical exercise helps with this one, including dancing all night!)
– Be in the present moment (What is happening right now? And now? And now?)
– Practice conscious breathing
– Shift to a new scene
– Shift to doing something different
– Free association
– Reverse the thoughts
– Practice mindful non-judgment

6. Execute the strategies 1 by 1, using increased income to facilitate all the extras that come along and to give you white space for zen and more strategizing.

Popularity: unranked [?]

The Heart is a Critically Important Muscle in Social Marketing
by Nathaniel Hansen

The socializing of media and tech is a bid by the human heart to transform the cold, hard, and un-feeling processes of “bottom-line, quantitative” thought INTO a tool for saving all that is beautiful about this planet, the human spirit and our beautiful flora/fauna. The season of the heart has arrived AND, because our tech was born from the imagination, it MUST serve that same SOURCE. Here are some steps you can take to HUMANIZE your entrance into the social fabric of the internet:

1. Discover communities closest to your heart through the use of free monitoring tools. To do this make a list of 40 keywords/keyphrases that match your heart/passion/goals. Then go to this page and find the FASTEST climbing Facebook pages associated with those keyphrases: http://bit.ly/facebook_leaderboard. “Like” these.

2. Observe the choices, challenges, impressions, and wants of the people within these Facebook pages AND other networks Most of the monitoring tools available to do this observing are listed at this wiki: http://bit.ly/social_monitoring_master_list.

3. The monitoring tools in the wiki above will acquaint you with where THE conversation about your passion is taking place in forums, blogs, amongst key influencers (tweeters and bloggers), major communities (blogs, forums, web properties) and discussion eco-systems (comments at blogs, news sites, forums). Prioritize your participation based not only on volume of those in the conversation BUT also the quality of those discussing. You may participate in a conversation with 10 world leaders in a vertical/niche and go further than you would have in the mosh-pit of a forum. Then again, that same mosh-pit may be just the place for vitalizing your type of content. This takes wisdom, 24 hours of reflection and then ACTION.

4. Closely tied to this, determine which communities and influencers most closely mirror your passion. Locate your initial foray THERE.

5. Raise up brand ambassadors, community managers and, if you are an enterprise-level business, study the exploding phenomenon of Chief Customer Officers: http://bit.ly/CCO_Harvard_report

6. Your Community Manager, Brand Ambassadors and Chief Customer Officer ought to be a blended individual, having social savvy AND passion/real experience within your vertical/niche/brand.

7. Create a BRAND BOOKLET and BEST PRACTICE MANUAL with and for your social brand leader. They ought to be the kind of person who is excited about creating this with you and have leadership traits related to the creation of this booklet.

8. Perform an analysis of the sub-culture(s) surrounding your brand and be sure to not only speak the language of these cultures but also be an innovator of that language. Your brand is more than an avatar. It is a living, breathing personality and your ambassador(s) should give his/her all for the tribe that feeds the brand.

9. Lex Sisney, the co-founder of Commission Junction, the world’s foundational affiliate software, once said to me, “Find the pain and you’ll find the money!” Knowing where lack exists IS VERY IMPORTANT in defining your offering. And knowing what makes the delivery and receiving of this offering fun is the other piece in this puzzle.

10. The humanization of brands is a massive revolution currently taking place. The CEO OF THE FUTURE is at the forefront with the customer, tweeting, blogging and on the front lines vs. the old model of being invisible and un-touchable. The CEO of the future may be reached by anyone and is listening to his/her customer. Anyone can reach the CEO of the future. The hidden CEO is a relic of the past.

11. Conversations with your audience and customer are just that. A dialogue implies that you’ve listened to what the customer is saying. And they will find that cool.

12. Your ambassadors ought to be given rewards that make sense to the niche and the need of your community and your customer. Sometimes a year’s worth of groceries is more important than a new 120″ HDTV.

13. Be a problem solver vs. just a listener. That’s the essence and one of the good things about America: we are known the world over for doing something about it once we are enrolled.

Love what you do, love your tribe, and orient around heart-centered communication.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Your imagination is your preview of life’s coming attractions. ~ Albert Einstenin

The socializing of media and tech is a bid by the human heart to transform the cold, hard, and un-feeling processes of “bottom-line, quantitative” thought INTO a tool for saving all that is beautiful about this planet, the human spirit and our beautiful flora/fauna. The season of the heart has arrived AND, because our tech was born from the imagination, it MUST serve that same SOURCE.

Understanding the mythic fabric of your business, the etymology of your brand name and the spiritual sub-culture of your company offers vision, perspective and a different kind of locomotion than just dollars and cents. BOTH are important, both are vital. Begin by asking yourself about the stories that birthed your enterprise. There are metaphors within these tales, and these metaphors offer instruction.

Conscious Residents of Planet Earth are turning off Top-down News channels and opting for personally chosen channels. The entire population is trending toward a spiritual/interior exodus for personally-crafted planets. The social fabric of the internet is a template for a spiritual, interior phenomenon.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Can transparency be shaped?

April 29, 20102010-04-30T02:44:00ZF j, Y | No Comments | social media observations

Can transparency be shaped? If the concept “transparency” were a medium, what qualities would we give it in its current state globally? Meet a Transparency Expert, http://bit.ly/transparency_expert, who has written books on fascinating subjects like Doublespeak (http://bit.ly/doublespeak_article) and THE SEC Plain Language Handbook: (http://bit.ly/plain_language_handbook).
~ Nathaniel Hansen

Popularity: unranked [?]

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