Oct 10
30
Alliance, Tribe, and Syndication
Alliances, tribes, and virtual teams are popular among internet marketers today. SEO has incentivized reciprocal tribe syndication beyond the normal reasons to cooperate. Personally I have been wrestling with my entrepreneurial tendency to focus on my own creative projects, rather than to contributing a lot of time as a team player. I’m just being honest and authentic here.
Please don’t get me wrong; I love helping people as much as the Lone Ranger did. And I have always understood the values of synergy and leverage (the essence of networking), but I was usually the team leader or the “Chief of the Tribe,” if you will. I have never been inclined to be a groupie, and yet I respect the power of tribal alliances. I joined The Unified Tribe, and I fully intend to participate actively. For me, joining someone else’s tribe “takes some getting used to.”
The whole internet itself is a giant showcase of synergy. It began as a “free-world” defense network, evolved into a free global information resource, and then in the nineties was colonized (no pun intended) by individual enterprise. By 1998 eCommerce was the next big thing. In the gold rush of the dot-com bubble, competition was king.
Balancing synergy with independence is a subject that has been on my mind a lot lately. I’ve decided that the issue of interdependence warrants a series of posts in order to cover its many facets in bite-sized articles. Katie Freiling, the “Queen of Tribes,” recently posted a delightful video about “masks” on her blog, in which she asked what we would be wearing for Halloween. It made me think about being “The Lone Ranger.” But not wanting to wear a mask, I will be Indiana Jones (I also taught in Indiana at Purdue
).
