An ebook about the value of tribes, by a triiibe who knows

Three months ago, marketing guru Seth Godin posted one item on his blog about a private, online group he was setting up on Ning.

The idea was to create a real-life experiment/lab to play with his ideas about community, or tribe, in the weeks leading up to the launch of his latest book, Tribes.

I was one of the people who made it into the triiibe, and was fairly active in the first month, meeting a number of interesting people it probably would have taken me a lot longer to meet in real life (most of us were only a degree or two or three apart--it's a small, small Internet world.)

My favorite of these new acquaintances, Mark Hayward, is an entrepreneur who chucked "regular" life to go open an island resort with his wife. He was in the throes of putting together a nifty nonprofit with Leo Babuta of Zen Habits and author-adventurer Dan Clements when triiibes came about, and was able to solicit a lot of help from the triiibe around his design, his marketing plan, his promotion--all kinds of many-minds stuff.

(Coincidentally--or maybe not--Mark just wrote an interesting post on the value of expanding your network during difficult times. He lists a number of people he's met via the Internet, myself included, whom he's started following to help him get over the social media learning curve. I found it extremely interesting that the links he shared were all from Twitter--another knife in the heart of the myth that it's nothing but a time suck.)

One of the projects Seth fostered in triiibes was an ebook about...tribes! It contains dozens of case studies, one by yours truly on the famed Group Theatre (see p. 220), and it's free!

Download the free Tribes Case Studies PDF ebook here.

Pretty interesting range of tribes in the book. Between that experiment and my month's working sabbatical in Seattle, meeting local members of Biznik, I'm getting full immersion in community.

What tribes are you a part of? How are they helping you day-to-day? And how are they helping you in these weird economic times?

Comments

[Dan McComb]

Speaking of small internet world... Lara just bought a copy of Tribes and when she opened the cover, it fell off revealing a montage of thousands of faces printed on the reverse of the cover. You wouldn't think that any ONE face would jump out at us, but one did! Biznik member Betsy Talbot. Let me guess - your face is in there somewhere too?

Dan

[Colleen Wainwright]

Ha! That's awesome. I loved Seth's idea for that but I'm not sure that I made the cut-off for it.

I'll have to check when I get back to L.A., where my copy is being held in the bowels of the USPS holding pen.

[mark_hayward]

Hi Colleen - thank you for your very kind words. :)

Without any marketing or advertising budget it has been a very interesting year trying to promote my business using only (FREE) social media and attempting to get people to visit an island they have never heard of. Yes, Culebra is part of the U.S. :)

When I saw the potential of social media, and with my international development background, it seemed natural to try an use it to create and launch what I hope will become a successful humanitarian organization that carries essentially NO overhead and funnels funds toward locally based initiatives.

Hope you have a fantastic Friday.
MH

[mark_hayward]

Apologies - above "to try an use" should read "to try and use"....more coffee please.