Social business requires an integration of all we know to advance our conversations and meaningfully connect to both traditional and non-traditional employment opportunities.
How To Create Your Social Media Knowledge Portrait by Betsey Merkel
Social business requires an integration of all we know to advance our conversations and meaningfully connect to both traditional and non-traditional employment opportunities.
The creation of a social media knowledge portrait begins by recognizing traditional work experiences, skills training, formal education, human passion, and emerging interests. Hobbies once unrelated, now become employable attributes.
The creation of a social media knowledge portrait begins by recognizing traditional work experiences, skills training, formal education, human passion, and emerging interests. Hobbies once unrelated, now become employable attributes.
A social media knowledge portrait is a method of organizing human knowledge and intelligence to:
- Generate a unique entrepreneurial knowledge base;
- Increase serendipity and connect to unforeseen opportunities;
- Diversify strategic pathways for sharing and collaboration;
- Inventory knowledge, expertise, skills and interest; and
- Connect knowledge investments to education, economic and workforce development.
Step One: Identify Your Categories of Commitment
The Categories of Commitment Map (shown above) offers a fuller, more appreciative range of human talents. This opens up an individual's capacity to attract like-minded entrepreneurs, broaden connectivity to resources, and increase potential starting points for conversations that may lead to new collaboration opportunities.
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Traditional workforce development actualized one career, one talent, or one skill.
But in today’s dynamic workplace, entrepreneurs must hone a diverse skill set, continuously cultivate complex connectivity, and adopt social behaviors focused on giving, attribution and reciprocity. |
Categories of Commitment are areas of high-level industry skills training, experience, and emerging interests. |
What are you passionate about? What skills are you trained in? What areas do you have work experience in? These are questions to help you begin to organize your value andrelevance in the relationship-based economies of social business.
Step Two: Build Your Meaning Matrix
Because of the vastness of the Web, it’s important to organize what we know to empower both entrepreneurs and audiences to go beyond random information sharing.
The Meaning Matrix is a first step to customize what you know by putting valuable experiences to work, and continuing to leverage educated knowledge and skills training in new ways. In other words, there are abundant possibilities and no wrong answers!
Each “intersection” provides a new knowledge area for conversation, article topics, presentations, and potential customer service innovation.
A Meaning Matrix identifies integral knowledge assets unique to every individual entrepreneur.
Every entrepreneur is essentially a unique knowledge database. Sharing knowledge in face-to-face and online conversations engages authentic audiences and over time, entrepreneurs begin to fully appreciate their value and relevance to social business.
By designing customized content, an entrepreneur can expand their social relevance, target strategic resources and capabilities, and generate a breadth of connectivity to catalyze new business opportunities.
Using this approach, every entrepreneur can articulate the value they bring to solve challenges in social, economic and environmental disruption and appreciate perspectives that have the capacity to recognize new, unfamiliar opportunities.
How Do You Design Your Content For Value?
Experiment! Create your Social Media Knowledge Portrait. I hope you'll share your ideas, successes and failures in the comment box below. I'd like to hear from you!
I'd like to send a special shout out and thanks to entrepreneur Harvey Justmann, Supply Chain Professional, based in Cleveland, Ohio, who contributed the knowledge categories and topic examples used throughout this article. Connect with Harvey on LinkedIn.
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Betsey Merkel is Co-Founder, Director and Social Intelligence Lead at I-Open. Betsey specializes in communications for community and economic development. Follow Betsey on Twitter at @BetseyMerkel
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