Learning from a bad week

This week has been a tough one; and that’s a fact of life.

There are times in each of our lives when we have a hard week and we start shutting down, saying “life’s not fair”, and wishing away our troubles until we’re blue in the face. I’ve done that in my life too from time to time. That is merely opportunity lost though.

Opportunities come too few and far between to let them slip away like that.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to meet with some really great community leaders at Experience Columbus to discuss growing the number of “Columbus Advocates” and how we might affect this via social media. Before the meeting my head was a million miles away, full with all of my weeks negativity. Sitting in that room, talking with passion about the community and the technology that I love was all it took for me to remember opportunity.

Experience Columbus provided the perfect backdrop to this mind switch. One year ago this organization invited about 40 local bloggers and social media savvy folks to the premiere of the Experience Columbus social media strategy. While it had some good elements to it the total package did not go over well.

Experience Columbus had spent a great deal of time designing a failure.

Instead of engaging their online networks up front they brought them in on the backend. The message fell flat without the buy-in that develops organically from early engagement and continued collaboration. Experience Columbus, like many organizations, might have walked away from this and headed back into the vacuum. But the didn’t.

Experience Columbus found the opportunity in this failure.

The meeting held yesterday was only one of several being held. Beside the meetings, the employees of Experience Columbus have spent this last year getting personally involved in building their social media networks throughout the region. Along with that development they have been gathering massive amounts of user generated content from the local blogging and social media networks.

What did our group learn at its meeting then?

First of all is that Experience Columbus has an incredible amount of information to share – and do they ever want to share it! Unfortunately all of us at the meeting not directly employeed by Experience Columbus had no idea how much of this info was already available because it wasn’t convenient to find and the Experience Columbus site (and story) wasn’t compelling enough to get us to search it out.

Experience Columbus continues to learn.

The Experience Columbus team had amazing questions and insights to offer as the discussion moved on. Seeing how committed they have been to learning from the failure last year I expect this interaction will only spur them on to even greater work. I really appreciated being asked to participate in this important community effort.

Want to help by being a Columbus Ambassador? It’s easy, just keep spreading the good word about Columubus and look up the folks at Experience Columbus and offer to help!