And that word is community. As I look back on December 2006, several events moved me to ponder
my 60 years on the planet. What do they mean? What difference does my presence make, if any?
Don't fear: I promise not to go all maudlin and weirdly philosophical. Nope: Instead, I want to do what the MarketingProfs/blogging community does best--share. Although all of us experience life-changing events, and we either use those events to change or not, December seemed an especially heavy month for us. Here are just a few of the events that led me to this missive.
1. My mother died and the community touched me with an outpouring of love, helping me through the strangeness death brings.
2. Gavin Heaton's father-in-law suffered serious injuries in an accident, and the community created a sub-community called "Friends of Gavin," and reached out to lend him many hands.
3. David Armano, Logic + Emotion, posted a response to another post he entitled, Social Media is Dead. Long Live Social Media.
4. Mack Collier, The Viral Garden, created a meme featuring what he called the zList of blogs, bringing attention and awareness to blogs that he felt others should discover.
What do these events have in common? A reaching out to claim and define a community built on a foundation of sharing. The American Heritage Dictionary of The English Language, third edition, defines community in these primary ways: 1) A group of people living in the same locality and under the same government, and 2) A group of people having common interests.
I find both definitions totally lacking in the most important elements necessary for community: humanism and humanitarianism. For me, community must first be defined by the characteristics of the people forming that community.
I am not an expert in defining the elements of language, but here is my take on community: A community is made up of people who share a common existence and exhibit the following traits: humanity, love, kindness, caring, knowledge, life, needs, emotions and heart. If that definition seems overly broad and inclusive, it is because I purposefully made it so.
I believe that communities ignore boundaries of geography, professional interests and cultural tribalism. To me, those boundaries create sub-communities but there is but one great community that we can call, for lack of better words, the community of WoMan. Within the world community, we create sub-communities, which represent the ways we organize ourselves into groups that can effectively make change, if moved to do so.
One of those sub-communities exists at MarketingProfs Daily Fix. Because of its size, it is a powerful one. Its common thread weaves together the subjects of marketing and business. But the human thread ties together people of many professions, skills, interests, locations, shapes and sizes. What we all have in common are the human traits within my proposed definition, more or less of some mentioned and those not mentioned.
Inspired by my upbringing that calls me to speak truth to power and to organize power around a common cause to make the world a better place, and inspired by the events above as well as the idea of sharing, so often spoken about by CK. One way is to grow our sub-community of inspiration and sharing beyond the boundaries of contributors, commenters and readers.
Whether within or without, our sub-community does make a difference in the world of business; does shine a light on the positive aspects of business; and does spread the gospel (the good news) that business can be a change for good beyond the material things it brings us through consumerism.
Through the life-changing experiences mentioned at the top of this post, some of us have personally been affected by community, both personally and professionally, resulting in various forms of greater happiness and/or success. I suspect many of us want to ensure that social media continues to form sub-communities, parts that positively change the whole.
David's post is the event that inspired and prompted this post (read the article for a better understanding; David's insights are worth noting and thinking about). Social Media is growing, hence changing--a natural state of events. How do we as community affect both the growth and the changes positively?
For an example of people who completely fail to understand the power of community, check out How to get re-elected.
