Google_ for Business_ How Google's Social Network Changes Everything - Chris Brogan [59]
You might not (yet) be as big as Michael Dell or Sergey Brin. That’s not the big point. The big opportunity for a power move here is that you can be accessible as a business leader and that matters. Is there a huge return on investment to putting yourself in front of the community? It might be hard to trace it to a number on a spreadsheet, but you’d be hard pressed to find a PR agency that wouldn’t advocate for this.
Muhammad Yunus: Changing the World
Reading Professor Muhammad Yunus’s job occupation as it’s listed on Google+ might give you pause: “Creating a world without poverty.” That’s what occupies him. As the founder of the Grameen Bank, Professor Yunus spends a good deal of time showing through example how his work in teaching people how to lend money to the poor rural citizens of Bangladesh (as of May 2011, Grameen Bank has 8.4 million borrowers, 97% of which are women, with a nearly 100% payback rate) might help others change the world.
None of this has anything to do with Google+. Professor Yunus did this work the old-fashioned way: in person, on huge stages, and with handshakes from world leaders all over the world. But what has come back to Google+ is a new and powerful stage from which Professor Yunus can share his travels, his efforts, and the ongoing story of the work of empowering the poor to build better lives. If you read his posts, each one is a blend of education and an opportunity for others to participate in some way (not even necessarily his own projects, but ideas that seed other projects).
By sharing his day-to-day life in pictures, text, and videos, Professor Yunus shows that these victories are made up of several components. That’s the power move. If you’re working on slow-moving projects, on projects that maybe don’t always draw the sustained attention of the mainstream, Google+ becomes a media center where you can build information that others will opt into and find inspiring. Instead of simply sharing this information on his website, Professor Yunus brings this out to the outpost where everyone can read a stream of interesting posts from others so that people can remember to think of the larger story in the frenzy of their days.
Mark Horvath: Handing Out Pizza, Socks, and Hope
I’ve known Mark Horvath, founder of InvisiblePeople.tv and WeAreVisible.com, since 2008. We met in the hallways of Gnomedex, after I saw his presentation about how he films the stories of everyday homeless people to give them a voice and a face, and how he gives socks, pizza slices, and whatever else he can get his hands on to the homeless wherever he goes. Mark happens to be the only person working full time on Invisible People, so he’s part president, part secretary, part worker bee, and part cameraman. Here’s his take.
Mark has brought a lot of attention to the homeless through his videos, and he has brought attention to the project by being active on Twitter as @hardlynormal. (If you’re a Twitter user, go follow him now.) He’s brought this to Google+, where he can clearly and simply show the videos. The beauty of Mark’s platform on Google+ is that he can now open up to conversations. You can leave comments on YouTube, but the general quality of comments on that platform isn’t necessarily all that useful. Again, like Professor Muhammad Yunus, Mark can now slot his stories about the homeless into the stream we’re participating in already.
What you can learn from Mark is that telling a story is always more impactful than simply asking for something. Secondly, you can learn that simple small bites are just as important as the big bites. Professor Yunus works on larger scale changing the world, and Mark puts socks in the hands