Social Media and Running

When you hear the word “Movement” what do you think? This is a pretty big word and you might flash on civil rights or anti-war movements. You might even think about physical movements as in running. Some of you might – and I say might – have bowel movement come to mind

As I get ready to head to airport shortly and Northern California for the Bizz Johnson Marathon tomorrow, I was reflecting on a business update review I had with my boss yesterday where we (he) talked about forming a movement.  To put it into context, Austen pretty much single-handedly formed an Art of Selling (AoS) movement within a massive company (Microsoft) and then drove to a World Class Selling (WCS) community site with over 1,000 members today.

Why is this big?  To drive a movement in a large company with members from outside your own organization takes a huge amount of both social media expertise, personal charisma (think Obama and him winning the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday or JFK or Clinton), and networking support.

Our company is heavily behind a “three screens and a cloud” vision and is our mantra.  What that means exactly is somewhat debatable, but if you are in the industry, you will understand.  Recently, Steve Ballmer did a great interview with Techcrunch where he outlines the vision.

In our call yesterday, Austen outlined brilliantly a chance of our own organization to take the lead – and through Marketing – to drive a movement within the company around this using community, and viral marketing, building excitement and taking advantage of his own personal political capital and our own expertise.  I was massively excited when the call ended.

When I first joined the company, I wanted to do some big social media things here, so we started behindthreescreens.com – you can see a video from Austen in front Silverlight carousel.  Thanks to the inspiration and hard work from of a bunch of people (Jennifer and Rob), we got the site up and have worked hard to evolve and solving technical and user challenges and keeping the content fresh.  We still have a long way to go, but we have got fantastic feedback so far.

What does this have to do with running you might say?  As I evolve my own Climbing and Running site (which is already integrated with analytics, Facebook, Flickr, training log etc) to enable me to climb Everest and Vinson in the next 20 months, I need to also form a movement around my 7+7+7 goals, vision and strategy.  We’ve had some early talks and hopefully, just maybe, in the next couple of months – in between existing work and commitments, we might get something up that is just kick-ass!

When people think of running, they might imagine a singular activity.  But marathons are all about the people and the stories and the adventures along the way.  Austen is a story teller and and I think I am also.  When I write about the run and share with friends who will be there and those that just follow from a distance, it’s about building this community also.

For now – time to head to the airport and Susanville – get to the starting line – and as usual – have great fun, perservere through challenges, embrace the time and successes along the way!