There’s this guy who is looking for work. Actually, he’s being pushed out of his current organization. He’s basically been isolated from the rest of his team but they won’t fire him. The whole thing is really odd.
He made some comment or did something benign, but his boss thought her authority was being challenged. So now he’s kind of stuck. Looking for work.
Over the past few months, I’ve had some stirring to create some sort of community. What I realized, in looking deeper at the word ‘community’, is that I wanted to bring some like-minded folks together from my neighborhood.
The problem? I wasn’t all that involved in my neighborhood. I played soccer during the week and weekend but that wasn’t always in my neighborhood (depending on how you define ‘Upper West Side’).
So, I thought about what it was that I did and the experience I could bring to a community meeting. From that, I started the Upper West Side Work from Home meeting. In a city as big as New York, I thought there might be a handful of folks that shared the same experience / challenges / opportunities I do – working from home and slightly missing some of the commradarie found when working in an office.
Follow up on yesterday’s post, where do you start if you’re looking to get online?
Firstly, congratulations on making the big step – These are exciting times!
Next, listen to the Wall Street Journal. They have a good, albeit a bit confusing, article “A Web Presence Without A Website“. If you take out the confusing part (no website, but a blog site, etc.), the underlying goal is to get started somewhere.
Regardless of what you call it, you’ll have to start somewhere. My preference is to first walk through a single non-website/blog site activity:
Ok, you’ve taken the big leap. You have a presence on the Internet! Woo! Now what?
You’ll want to tell everyone that you have arrived. You have this great, terrific story and you want people to hear about it. They need to hear about it. Easy enough. You go out and sign up on:
Great! Now you start posting great content. About your products, your services, your ideas, your expertise. You might use some integration pieces to ensure this information flows out from your site to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Meetup, FourSquare, Others. Bang. The word is out. You are here. Come get some.
Ever have a conversation with someone that starts out with a self-asking question? It goes something like this:
“How are you?”
“Good. How are you?”
“Well, since you asked…”
It’s almost as if the initially-posed question was asked to get you to ask the same question to them. Like they are looking for a way to share some story that is super important, and you need to know about it.
The only reason to initiate the conversation was so they can launch into their own diatribe. Sound familiar?
I think of this as I’m doing two things this morning: