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“Transparency is the New Black”

May 29, 2013 by Dennis Fischman Leave a Comment

 

 
Review of Share This!
Deanna Zandt has written a wonderful guide to social networks for people who don’t feel at home there.  She explains what’s new about building relationships through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and the like, and she encourages us all to participate. 

“Sharing is daring,” she says.  By putting more of yourself out there, within limits that you consciously set, you increase your credibility with people who are just getting to know you.  As you become more well known, you win people’s trust.  At the same time, she argues, sharing personal and professional information helps build a better world.  If someone reads and enjoys a tweet I send out about good communications AND they go to my blog and find my Jewish musings, then it registers that a person they respect can be serious about being Jewish (or gay, or a feminist, or…whatever you are.  Fill in the blank.)  It may be overstating things to say that this will change the world, as she does in her subtitle, but at least it will show what the world is already.

In any case, sharing more about ourselves is the direction we are all heading.  “Transparency is the new black.”  So, better try it on and find a style of social networking that compliments you.  In the Resources section of the book, you’ll find tips for individuals and tactics for organizations that she recommends.  Try a couple and see how they work for you.

Reading this book, I felt as if I were a traveler in a new and foreign country, with a helpful guide pointing out the landmarks and explaining local customs.  At the same time, paradoxically, I felt as if I’d come home.  Really being interested in other people, helping them with what they’re doing, and offering them ways to help me too (or promote a cause we both care about): this is what I’ve always done.

Back in 1986, when Rona answered a personal ad I’d placed in a newspaper, I realized that we already had met through the local chapter of a progressive Jewish organization.  It would have been very awkward if I had kept that to myself and didn’t tell her that right away when I wrote her back.  By letting her know, not only did I show that I cared about honesty in relationships right from the start.  I also (not realizing it at the time) let her see that she knew people who knew me and shared some of the same values that moved me.  That was the basis for beginning to trust me.  Reader, she married me. 

Organizations are also looking to woo people, and they will have to open up more to build lasting relationships with volunteers, supporters, donors, customers, or investors.  I would like to focus on helping them do it, online and off.

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The First Step into Social Media

May 28, 2013 by Dennis Fischman Leave a Comment

I’m 55 pages into Deanna Zandt’s Share This!  I’ve had two big surprises so far.  One is that the book has said very little about techniques or tactics for using social media: it’s mainly about the attitude you bring to it.  I tried to summarize that attitude in my very first tweet:

Recipe for good conversation: Listen. Ask questions. Pay attention to answers. Contribute when you can keep the conversation going.

(And, I might add, be yourself.  Not necessarily your whole self, everywhere, all the time…but nothing but yourself.  People will trust you partly because you show Imageyou consider them trustworthy.)

Surprise #2: most of this is what I do already, face to face.  I would never dream of walking into a room and telling everybody, “Listen to me because what I have to say is the most important thing”–so why would I walk online and do that?  And on the positive side: I try to share information and ideas and make introductions that I thing people would benefit from.  Does it really matter whether I do that face to face, on the phone, by email, or on Facebook or LinkedIn?
Note: this entry originally appeared in May 2012 on my personal blog.

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What We Have Here is Tailored to Communicate

May 24, 2013 by Dennis Fischman 2 Comments

“Tell me a story.”

Beginning in childhood, we all ask to hear stories.  They entertain us.  They delight us.  They help us make sense of a world that’s been there before us and that’s going on all around us, which we spend our lives trying to understand.  As adults, we discover new techniques for making sense of the world: measurements, statistics, correlations, theory.  Graphs and charts help us make discoveries.  Photos and artwork call our attention in ways words can’t, and music touches us in places that words don’t.  Still and all, when people mobilize to get things done, it’s usually because we have seen ourselves as characters in a story.  The pictures, the numbers, and the words all come together and we see the present moment as part of an ongoing drama.  When the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” that was one of the shortest stories ever told…and one of the most compelling.

I’ve come to realize that in my work life, what I do best and what I like to do the most is to tell the story of an organization, to make its case, so that people want to devote their time, their money, their energy, their ideas to helping it succeed.  In my years at CAAS and in the nonprofit world, I’ve enjoyed many ways of communicating, from in-person and on-air interviews to written proposals, from helping Reflection Films produce a video about CAAS to helping Andy Metzger write articles about poverty for the Somerville Journal–and of course,writing this blog.

I’m starting a journey toward making Communications a bigger part of what I do every day.  Come along with me.  I’ll share some of the sights and sounds and reflect on what I meet along the way.  Some of you may be experienced travelers who can give me tips for the journey and point out milestones as they pass.  All of you are welcome.   

Note: this entry originally appeared in May 2012 on my personal blog.

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