You guessed it—my first post since I was nearly killed by a little sinus bug from New York. It was huge! They live in the sewers there, you know. Like. Giant… Alligators.

A lot of things have happened in December. I was wrapped up in one of them—the race for Seth’s Alternate MBA—nearly all month (whew!). But several other notable projects have been going on at the same time, and one of them is the awesome Triiibes Blog Project. A particularly dedicated portion of the Triiibe hijacked Ed Welch’s Tribe Building blog (with his generous permission) and the posts that have been going up for the last few weeks are short, to the point, and super insightful. If you are on the tribe-buildin’ bus—especially if you enjoyed the Tribes Casebook and the Tribes Q&A—I suggest taking a look at these.

Here’s the fantastic, still partial index. (Hint: My post with Marty just went up today.)

The Triiibes Blog Project (Pace Smith)
What You Don’t Know… (Becky Blanton)
Tribes: We Have Better Food ™ (Tom Bentley)
What’s Your Tribe’s WHY? (Dr. Mani Sivasubramanian)
Brown lawn lands man in jail (Jodi Kaplan)
Raising Hell (Bette Miles-Holleman)
Help your tribe flaunt their tribeness: Create the t-shirt (Michael Donk)
Tight Tribes Are Made of This (Tom Bentley)
What is a comfortable size for a tribe? (CoCreatr Bernd Nurnberger)
A Crash Course In Tribe Building (Marcos Gaser)
Tribal Connections: Making them Stronger (Ed Welch)
Egg your Tribe (Michael Donk)
Thinking Outside the Tribe (Betsy Wuebker)
The Down Side of Tribes (Stephen Martell)
How long does it take to form a tribe? (Judy Vorfeld)
How long does it take to destroy a tribe? (Jodi Kaplan)
Ants: The Oldest Tribe on Earth (Bonnie Larner)
Doing the New Archimedes (Megan Elizabeth Morris & Martin Whitmore)
Sine Tribu (Jean-Philippe)
How To Be A Leader (Pace Smith)

There will probably be a few more before December is over, so keep an eye out! [Edit: That’s a wrap! Thank you Triiibes Blog Projecteers!] You can get more of Ed Welch’s Tribe Building blog by subscribing to the Tribe Building feed. (It’s a great blog—even without the rest of us!)

In case you needed a reminder: Paul Durban is a design god. Would somebody syndicate Bolofeesh already? ;}

Previous posts about the Tribes Q&A ebook:
The Tribes Q&A (by the Triiibe)
The Tribes Q&A (teeny addendum)
Tribes Q&A on SWIMBERT
The Tribes Casebook (courtesy of Triiibes)

Thursday morning I had a lovely second podcast chat with Trish Lambert and Karen Swim (because the first recording didn’t take—oops!). I’ve done radio shows for music-related exploits in Cleveland and I did my guppie news girl / announcer stint on WYSU when I was in college, but I’ve never been on a podcast before. It was great!

We mostly talked about the Q&A eBook process and how it might be applied to other organizations. We kept it to about a half hour to avoid overwhelming listeners with information, and we covered a lot of neat things, but oh the things we didn’t get to cover! This subject just fills me up, makes me want to burst and splatter information all over everyone.

I know. Gross. But how else can I get my point across? ;}

Trish and Karen had a lot of fantastic questions in both sessions, and it gave me a lot of glee to have proper answers (well, most of the time). It makes me so happy to see people using and enjoying the Q&A and I can’t help but look forward to the next project… as long as it gives me a little downtime first. Ha!

In any case, you can go listen to the Megan-flavored episode of the SWIMBERT podcast on their site. Thank you, ladies!

PS. There are rumors that there may eventually be unofficial translations of the Tribes Q&A in German and Czech. Though I don’t speak or read either, I’m rather insanely curious about getting to take a look at them if they happen. Pretty neat, huh?

This is the first project I can remember for which I didn’t particularly care about receiving credit. It resonated with me, needed to be done, and I stepped up to do whatever I could be useful doing. It felt really good to work this way. As a consequence of that, I didn’t add a lot of actual writing to the book—organizing, proofing, little pieces of much longer answers, that’s all. I don’t mind that a bit, because it’s really fulfilling to work on a project like this one that speaks powerfully to me.

But I have to admit, it gives me a lot of glee to see someone I don’t know quoting one teeny tiny piece of text that I know I wrote.

Care. Your tribe knows if you care about them—if you care about what happens to them, what inspires them, what affects them, what improves their lives, and what brings them joy. Likewise, your tribe knows if you do not care—they can smell a fake a mile away and if it is not apparent now, it will be soon. It makes all the difference in the world between a tribe stuck together with paper and string and a tribe whose members are strongly, organically connected to their leader and to one another.

So I’m just going to take a second and be proud of me.

Yeah. Dude. That feels awesome.

Okay.

Second over. Back to work! ;}

[Edit: It happened AGAIN! Same kooky thing, different clip.

Selling goods (such as concert tickets, albums, or T-shirts) is NOT what makes you a living. Connecting people and giving them a place in the world IS. There is a huge difference between focusing on one and focusing on the other. Making a living—making money—is only a pleasant side effect of doing this right. But it is a side effect that happens all the time.

Okay, so I took TWO seconds. I’m sure this is happening to everyone else, I just recognize my own clips. It’s still freaky and awesome!]

I’ve been meaning to make a post all week about how I’ve been loathe to join new social networks because I feel repelled by the constant self-promotion that goes on in them. I’m thinking of getting rid of my MySpace account (and don’t act surprised, either), and maybe a few others. I didn’t have a solution for it before, but I do now. I know exactly what the problem is. And I know because I’m a member of Triiibes now, and Seth said no promote, yes help people. And so that’s what we do. We browse around being useful, supportive, getting to know one another better. And that accomplishes so much more than using our profiles like billboards.

We’re proud of who we are and what we do, but broadcasting that isn’t what our participation in Triiibes is about. It’s about making a difference in the lives of other people, more often and not, and wow do I connect with that.

I’m still a little bleary from the projects I’ve been hauling forward in the last month, so my prose isn’t so perfect. If you want to read a clear, well-written post about exactly this same subject—alarming how exactly on the same page we were all week, and I hadn’t even looked at it until this morning—take a look at Trish’s post at SWIMBERT: Tribal attraction…what makes it or breaks it?

I think more social networks need to gently enforce this kind of atmosphere—where it’s about the tribe, not the individual (and not the individual’s marketing copy). I would join those networks. I would love to make new friends… this way.

Self-promotion is great. Be proud of yourself, be proud of what you do. But don’t engage in it to the exclusion of people. There are amazing people out there, people you can connect with, people whose effect on your life might be amazing. People you could really help. If you swan around wondering what everyone else can do for you, you might never find them.

“The networking that matters is helping people achieve their goals, doing it reliably and repeatedly so that over time people have an interest in helping you acheive YOUR goals, because they have a stake in it. [...] You’re not doing it for the punchline, you’re doing it because the ACT of doing it is beneficial.”

~ Seth Godin, chatting with Debbie Weil (link to video)

...said the Unicorn in the Balloon Factory!

Your mission, gentle readers, should you choose to accept it…

Over the weekend, Marty and I watched Seth Godin’s Tribes presentation, given this month in New York. An enthusiastic pack of Triiibes members traveled to attend, and many of them took audio and video of the event. It was no surprise that after the fact I had my hands on Seth’s slides and the audio of his talk, and so you, in turn, should not be surprised that I am about to foist it on you.

It is going to blow your mind. As surely as you are staring at this screen, you need to see this thing.

I ran the slides and audio for Pace and Kyeli Monday evening. It blew their minds. I sent links to Rudi, and had her watch and report back. It blew her mind, too. Cricket and Nathan are next; they cannot escape my clutches. (Neither, my pretties, can you.)

I’d say I had a good three trillion separate revelations while parsing this perfect, perfect presentation, and it’s immensely important to me that you have the same opportunity.

So here’s what you need to do.

Go download the audio. You can get it from John Wall’s Marketing Over Coffee blog, right here.

Now—you can do this—set the audio playing. And click through these slides while you listen. Even better, you can download the Powerpoint presentation to your computer and go through them that way. (It’s a 75mb file, but there are notes to help keep you on track!) You can even watch the gorgeous full video with Q&A that Anne McCrossan at Visceral Business uploaded to blip.tv (it’s fantastic).

See? Just like being in New York!

This presentation is a lot like Seth’s book, but it’s also a whole different animal. You have to experience it to believe it. It runs about an hour, and I promise you on my life it’s worth the time.

You’d better just go watch it now. You know I’ll only kidnap you and make you watch it here if you don’t. And then there’s the cost of rope and transportation, and I’ll probably make you eat raw produce, and you’re a grown up. You can make your own decisions.

(Just, you know. Make the right ones.)

You know, I meant to write up one post about the new links in my sidebar, and look what happened! You see, the problem here is just that they’re all too awesome. I can’t fit any of them into the paragraphs I wrote, much less a few sentences that would have allowed me to make one freaking list. Man. The perils of knowing amazing people…

This is the last post, anyway.

It’s about Triiibes, as you may already have surmised. And I can’t link you to the Triiibe—but I can tell you about it.

The reason I can’t link you is because unless you’re already a member, you can’t get in. It hasn’t (to my knowledge) been decided yet whether it will become visible to the public eventually, and I’m leaving that up to the folks in the know. Membership sounds like it will continue to be closed except for limited invites, so that’s right out. But man, the things that happen in there are so awesome. I can’t keep them quiet.

Well. Most of them. Well. Some of them. ;}

Seth Godin started the whole shebang with a barrier to entry: Pre-order Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, sight unseen. Thousands of us did so, leaping in with both feet and shrieking new marketing battle cries. (At least, that’s what I did…) The result is one of the most amazing communities I’ve ever belonged to.

Pace and Kyeli are both members. Cricket is a member now, too, and Marty shouldn’t be far behind (if we’re lucky!). Havi’s a member—and I wouldn’t know about her at all if it wasn’t for Triiibes. For some vast cosmic reason, everything is falling into place for me… and a large part of it is this group of people.

What does Triiibes do? Well, we wrote an ebook. (It’s great.)

We talk a lot—about business, people, the concept of tribes, Seth’s book, marketing, changing the world, making a difference, making something amazing. Triiibes is what Zaadz / Gaia should have been, but couldn’t possibly have managed. It took a closed social network and a readership the quality of Seth’s to accomplish that! Not to mention the quality of leadership Seth exhibits himself, and his ability to bring out the leader in everyone else… that’s something amazing. (Read this book if you have any doubt.)

We’re working on something new, but my lips are zipped—for now. ;}

There’s still more. Being a member of the Triiibe has taught me a ton about tribes in general (and often, in specific). It’s teaching me about community projects and the organic nature of what can be mundanely called “teamwork” but takes on a huger, more significant stature when considered in all of its complexity and variety and spontaneity. It’s teaching me about people, and how many of us are insanely brilliant, full of incredible possibility and potential. I’m talking about the members of Triiibes, but I’m talking about you, too. Triiibes is showing me what the world is capable of, and it is really something.

Triiibes isn’t just a social network. Maybe it started out that way, but it mutated fast. It’s a real tribe now, with people who are truly connected to one another. Joe and I and at least a dozen other people were discussing the question of whether there is a spiritual aspect to the Triiibes community, and I found myself saying this:

I think that the Triiibe IS spiritual, in many ways. It’s the spirit of connection and working together. It’s the spirit of being many parts of a whole, organic and astonishing in millions of different ways. It’s the passion that we feel about the ideas we share, and the willingness (the yearning, even) to help others before thinking of ourselves. Take a look at how we interact, all together, without ever having met, how we already know one another and love one another and care about every person in here. The intensity of this varies across the Triiibe, but it’s there in spades. And it’s amazing. And it’s much more powerful than any church I ever belonged to. This vibration is its own animal, and I would hesitate to say that it lacks spirituality.

It grows and learns and becomes bigger. Not the number of members—the energy and the soul of the connected community. It’s… really spiritual!

It’s all in how you look at the thing. In this case, the thing is great. Not like “this cereal is great!” but instead, This vibration we’ve created, this awe-inspiring bit of a vast connected universe, we are tapping into something truly great. We’re learning more about it all the time.

You know what it is?

It’s just people.

It’s people doing what people can do, which is connect with and raise up and help each other. We are doing it with plans and projects and ideas, but it’s the same. It’s such a joy to be a part of. You should do it too.

You can start any time you want!