Entrepreneur, educator and speaker, Gwen Bell is your go-to girl for social media know-how. Recently named one of the 25 Most Powerful and Influential Women in Social Media, she co-created the fabulously useful Unconventional Guide to the Social Web with Chris Guillebeau and is a partner at Kirtsy; she's also a yoga teacher, salsa dancer and karaoke freak (so i know we'd have a great night out together!)
Ladies and gentlemen: Ms Gwen Bell...
You’ve been called a social media rock star, which I love! Could you tell us about your path into this career, and what your job involves?
It started when I lived in Japan. I fired up my first blog (on LiveJournal) right before I flew to Tokyo for the first time. I moved to Japan to teach but stayed on after opening a yoga studio (now in its fourth year) in Yokohama. A few years into my time in the country I began missing some of the intimacy of sharing with my peers and I heard about a social networking site through Yoga Journal. The name of the site at the time was Zaadz (later acquired by Gaiam - it's now called Gaia). I started out as a passionate user, then became an ambassador and later went to work for the company on a freelance basis.
That was my introduction to social media. I used it to do what I am most passionate about - connect, inspire and ask a whole lot of questions. My job involves showing up and listening to where people are at. And innovating from there.
What element of social media do you enjoy the most?
I love that you never know who you're going to meet next. I love when what I can share is able to help you in some way.
Please describe a typical day – do you have many routines?
When I wake up (usually around eight) I do some meditation, yoga and writing. The writing is a page, free-form, but usually based on what's happening in my mind. What came up in meditation often shows up on the page. I then write down the three goals I'd like to accomplish during the day (and check to make sure they have some correlation to my personal manifesto).
The rest of the morning is spent on networks - catching up with emails (I'm doing my best to migrate off email altogether by encouraging people to reach me on Twitter via direct message). I spend as little time as possible on the phone. As a visual learner, I need eye contact when conversing.
Afternoons are spent on projects. Blogging, tweeting, meeting, speaking engagements. I speak, on average, twice a month. Usually I do some traveling for the engagement, so I have travel routines for when I'm on the road. When I get to the airport for travel I 'become an employee of the airport.' I mimic the way the airport employees behave and do my best to be a model traveler. Even during difficult times. I see them as part of the travel experience.
In the evenings I will sometimes do dinner with friends, sometimes take a yoga class, sometimes have date night with Joel. Every Sunday is family night at Joel's parent's house. He is the eldest of seven kids (and his younger sister is expecting her first baby) so we've always got something to celebrate on the weekends. Joel and I watch Psych, read books (I'm currently reading Twyla Tharp's fantastic book, The Creative Habit. Can't recommend it highly enough.)
The computer is off by ten. I try not to stretch it past ten, even if a project deadline approaches. After ten, my emails are crap anyway. I aim for having my legs up the wall by 11:30 and lights out by midnight. This doesn't apply on nights I'm salsa dancing until two.
When starting a new project, how do you begin to gather your ideas/inspirations? How do you record them?
Every day is an opportunity to create and I am always ready (except for when I forget my pen and that's the opposite of awesome). I record images with my iPhone camera if I don't have my digital SLR on me (Canon T1i/50 mm). I have a notebook that I got from Muji (stocked up on them during my most recent trip to Japan). I use it as my bucket in David Allen terms. It has a transparent, zippered pouch for a cover. All the little bits and bobs I discover along the way? They go in the front pocket.
I used Moleskines for several years to capture my ideas for projects. They are great but I found I got a bit precious about what I wrote down. If I didn't think it would be Hemingway-approved, it didn't make it to the page. Ha!
I have started using a transparent box at the beginning of a project, in addition to my Muji notebooks. I create vision maps. I stop reading blogs and consuming content if I'm in a true incubation stage. I think there is a certain amount of self-imposed isolation that must accompany the creative process. We just have to know when it's time to come out of incubation and begin iterating. This is difficult to discover for ourselves. It's one reason I like to work on projects with a partner. They remind us to take it light - to go have a beer and seek inspiration at the pub level.
You met your husband on Twitter – you gotta tell us more about that!
I have a great post explaining how it all went down!
Why yoga?
I started taking yoga classes as a freshman undergraduate at UNC in Chapel Hill. I had struggled for a few years with bursitis in my hips and was seeking relief with yoga and acupuncture. I either outgrew or healed from the bursitis but stuck with the yoga.
It's difficult for me to talk about yoga in an abstract way without getting woo woo about it. You know, it's a practice. All it asks of you is to keep showing up to the mat. Yoga doesn't ask, "why didn't you show up yesterday?" It has allowed me to grow in my forgiveness of myself and of others. I bump up against the limitations of my own body and see those limitations in others. And I take life a bit less seriously when I'm meditating or practicing yoga.
So what we do know is this. We know life is difficult. I believe self-knowledge is the way through. I believe yoga is one of the most forgiving ways on the path to that place of self-knowledge.
What books/music/blogs etc do you love? Could you share some recommendations?
The best way to answer that is to share my Twitter lists with you.
What achievement are you most proud of?
Getting back on the mat
How do you balance your online life with your off-line life?
To start, I don't see balance as a final destination. We'll never 'be balanced.' I see us all as practicing balance-in-process. Some moments we touch balance. Sometimes we discover balance on the mat, sometimes we discover balance on the web.
I think we freak when we're overwhelmed (our feed readers hit 1,000 unread items, our in-boxes burst at the seams on Monday mornings) because we think the point is to bring our lives to a place of 'balance.' I'm not sure that state exists for more than a few moments at a time.
In Japan there's a doll. The daruma doll. It has a phrase associated with it: '7 times down, 8 times up.' An image to bear in mind. The point is we keep coming back to our (digital) center. When I was doing my yoga teacher training our teacher had us relax our toes when we were standing on one leg. Relax the toes of the standing foot, the foot that's grounding you. It's hard. Your body grips and over-engages when you're out of balance. If we can relax our toes when we're experiencing difficulty, that's balance.
What are you working on at the moment?
- Mind body tech workshops. These are one part web-based work (tech), one part yoga (body openers to counteract hacker back/balance asanas to relieve imbalance that accompanies online life), one part vision mapping. (For now, dates are in Vancouver and Seattle in 2009)
- Rock star jump start sessions for the social web (Unconventional Guide to the Social Web with Chris Guillebeau)
- speaking engagements around the nation on how to get started with the social web (I'm represented by The Speakers Group)
- consulting with businesses and academic institutions on strategy on the social web
- combing the web for bits to share, expand on in a blog post, add to a speaking deck or teaching plan
- sometimes I go to my studio in Japan to teach yoga. I miss it when I'm away too long
- the last one's a secret
How do imagine social media will evolve over the next five years?
That question explodes my mind. Five years ago we couldn't have imagined Twitter would become what it has, could we? I'm a consultant in this space and I see two kinds of people: one is desperately trying to catch up to the technology. The other is creating it. If you're not creating the technology, I'm sorry to say, you're always going to be behind. No, I'm not suggesting all creatives run out and start learning how to program in Java. We don't need more programmers, necessarily, but we do need our creatives (and yoginis and healers) to be on the social web, interacting with and helping to create the technology.
There are a few trends that I think we'll see evolve over the next few years. One is more emphasis on real-time experience. The other is the semantic web. As technology becomes more sophisticated the question will no longer be should we incorporate this or that into our lives. The question will be how best can we incorporate it? How can we live seamlessly with technology? One answer, I believe, will be to evolve our technology to be more humane. We'll learn that simplifying and relaxing our toes is part of the answer.
You're having a dinner party and can invite six famous people from the past or present - who would you choose and why? (and will there be karaoke?)
Coco Chanel. She'll wear something outlandishly well-tailored. She'll bring a bottle of expensive champagne with her. She'll sing Ne Me Quitte Pas.
Eleanor Roosevelt. She'll be the one who says just a few things but all of them will have the weight of the world in them. She'll sing something by Natalie Imbruglia.
Madonna. She'll wear a bodysuit made of diamonds and sapphires. She'll sing We Belong by Pat Benatar (because I'm going to request it).
Steve Jobs. He'll entertain us with his maniacal genius. He will sing Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto.
Albert Einstein. He'll give us his take on where we're headed as a society. He'll sing something by Chicago. Probably, Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?
Leonardo da Vinci. He won't sing. He'll sketch quietly in the corner, sipping a glass of wine.
The party will last until the wee hours. Naturally.
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Thank you so much for sharing with us today, Gwen - I now want an invite to your dinner party (and i'll be bringing lots of cameras!)
[All photographs by Gwen Bell]
