The Virtual Meeting Coach

It’s not for the faint of heart.

Building, monitoring and managing your online reputation can be a bit complex – at the start. And even in the middle. It does get easier, but having someone point us in the right direction can really save us a bucket of frustration and wasted time. For sure, the deliberate use of social media to build business isn’t for slackers.

In our fourth and final conversation of this series on The Virtual Meeting Coach Show, Matt Sweet, Rene Fabre and I talk about dandelions and Malcolm Cecil – and what we’re really accomplishing with all our social media participation. Besides wasting time and scrambling our brains.

Dandelions? Who in the #$@% is Malcolm Cecil? And what  do things like that have to do with helping people find you and your professional services on the internet or put money in your pockets?

Masters of the Obvious

Matt and Rene, two wild and crazy internet marketers for the Pacific NW region of Ticor Title, call themselves “Masters of the Obvious.” But it’s not true. They’re musicians who see patterns where some of us can’t. And God knows, most of us could use some help making sense of how we might ever make a living out of our Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn interactions. Not to speak of all the rest…

Our conversation in this fourth and final segment is rich with metaphor – and some powerful visual analogues. We talk about StepRep and how you can use it to help Google track all your dandelion seeds back to their source – you.

We hope our dialogue inspires you to participate both more creatively and more sensibly in online communities where, as Matt is fond of saying, “Conversations are markets.”

“Like, love or hate this show? Can we improve? Tell us!”

This week I read a stunning piece by Jeff Jarvis in Business Week.

Jeff teaches at the CUNY School of Journalism and blogs at buzzmachine.com. His piece is short but packed a big punch.

He probed around a number of key issues in the conversation about openness – or transparency – and the Internet. The whole conversation of “publicness.”  His opening line was provocative, “In the company of nudists, no one is naked.”

The longer I live here, in southern Oregon, the more I see that what’s most important to people here is having a place to live their lives in “peace and privacy.” Migrants and natives alike.

I moved here not quite three years ago from Austin, Texas, and it’s taken me awhile to appreciate just how deliberately my fellow residents of the “State of Jefferson” cultivate their disconnection from the rest of the nation – and the world. I consider myself a very “private person,” but compared to most of my neighbors, I’m a virtual slut. So, I spend a lot of time trying to calibrate my enthusiasm for online learning and virtual business relationships with the thinking of most folks I’m shopping for groceries and gardening supplies with.

All week I’ve been pondering Jeff’s point about  the obstacle to more transparency in our online relating being “control,” not  “privacy.”

Privacy and Control Are Not the Same Issue

A new friend (who’s a 30-40-something) told me this week she just signed up for Facebook and that she wanted to talk to me about some “virtual meeting coaching.”  She was in a panic about how she was going to keep her real-life friends out of her Facebook. She said she didn’t want them “in there acting like they do.”

When I asked her why not, she said she wanted to be able to keep taking crazy, fun road-trips to the beach with them – without having to acknowledge “in public” that she enjoys their carousing. She was worried that if she let them into her Facebook, they would make her look bad to the other people she wanted in her Facebook and she wondered what she could do about that.

As I listened to her, I heard a perfect testimony for Jarvis’ suggestion that our hesitation about increasing the transparency of our online communication isn’t about “privacy.” It’s about “control” of how we reveal (or conceal) our different faces.

Privacy and control really aren’t the same issue, are they?  What we want from relating “virtually” are new ways to strengthen relationships – without being misunderstood or taken advantage of.

I gave my new friend some personal advice about how I’m handling this challenge, but I’m really interested in how the rest of you are handling it. How are you handling the opportunity to become more and more transparent with your online communication?

Will you help me out by leaving some comments below?