If we never started #TChat, you wouldn’t be here. (And don’t tell me that there are 600 other chats you can join today.)
Maybe you would’ve started your own Twitter chat, or LinkedIn group, or Facebook group, or other online professional or personal group. Or maybe you’d prefer more face time and start a career club down at your favorite coffee shop to mentor one another about the world of work.
Whatever the case, someone’s got to take the lead and launch something somewhere in order to attract like-minded others for like-minded activities to then nurture this new network, entity, or as more call it these days, community. But it’s manufactured organics, right? You’ve got to seed it to breed it. “Communities” have formed since the beginning of time and there’s always someone forming and leading them.
Ah, but what’s in a name? Naming and labeling have always changed the perception of what something is and the why of it. If we called it a “career club,” then that could imply a non-threatening collective of people helping people find, land and retain employment, as well as adapting and advancing. If we called it the “working for the man club,” that would change the perception even further — but it would still a self-contained and self-promoted ecosystem of people seeking and giving career advice (or venting about their crappy jobs and bosses).
If we called it a “talent community,” however, then the “talent” in talent community would actually dilute community, because it would be labeling its participants in a way that most wouldn’t label themselves as. Talent is for Hollywood, right? Not for us working stiffs. That’s why for those of us who created this career club, I bet we would never call it a talent community. I’m not even sure we’d call it a network.
In fact, I bet most who join an in-person or online “community” (our career club) primarily want to socialize, but only a few would join talent communities to do the same. Those people only want a job, pure and simple. But, there would be a minority who would want to collaborate and commiserate with the like-minded about life, love and industry.
Many companies, such as Citi, Walmart and countless others, use Facebook to set up career “coffee shops” for sitting, sipping and chatting. But is that really community, talent or not?
I say seed the career clubs inside talent community network coffee shops. Then and only then might you get true networks communities.
Thank you, by the way, for joining #TChat yesterday. Here’s this week’s preview, in case you missed it. Your tweets were many and, as usual, brilliant. Press play on the slide show, which features a mere sampling of the community wisdom that was on display. We’ll see you next week.
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