If you grew up in North America, you were probably taught in school that if you wanted to speak, you needed to raise your hand.
In today’s connected economy, you need to learn to speak without raising your hand. No one needs to give you permission.
Today you could:
- begin the journey of becoming a trusted source of information about your cause by writing 250 words
- invite 100s of people to give money towards something bigger than themselves in 140 characters
- share five best practices from your last six months of work changing the world by uploading your slides
- engage your leadership with practical solutions to organization problems just by hitting the “publish” button
- get in front of a camera, introduce yourself and convince me why I should give the 10 bucks in my pocket to your initiative
If might be uncomfortable, but you’re going to have to unlearn what they taught you in school.
Why are you keeping silent?
doublederivativeca 
I have learning to do this more with blogging and being on Twitter, but I find trying to help others learn this is hard due to them not knowing how social media works. A solution would be to educate them, but for some it really is a hard concept to grasp, especially if they did not grow up with it or have used it before.
I think helping colleagues speak out loud is to show them successful examples (blog posts, tweets, Facebook updates) of how people leveraged these tools to get ideas out there, especially ones that result in change and have hands on training to use these tools. I am pondering a webinar to do this.
LikeLike
Great points Josh. I agree, often people need a nice person to come alongside them and show them how to push which buttons when.
They also need education in helping to think about how to think about social media. It’s uncomfortable for lots of people. Almost like beginning to live a in foreign country.
I wonder if there is a “Twitter in plain english” video. It would be great to build a webinar around that type of concept. Let me know if you set one up.
LikeLike