Last year at #140conf Small Town I was blown away by the people from across America who came to Hutchinson, Kansas and shared their stories as well as the people who came to Hutchinson to hear them. This year speakers from 17 states are converging on Kansas on September 20th for a conversation about how high tech thrives outside Silicon Valley and all the usual big cities.

Look for our speakers to share their stories about the real-time web and how it is changing their lives and their businesses in the Small Towns they live in.

This is not just a Kansas event. It’s not a local #140conf. This is an international event that happens to be held in Kansas.

And we are the only international “high tech” event to talk small towns and go to a small town to do it.

As one of the “big city” people who attended last year’s event, I believe other big city people should take note and make an effort to attend this conference. You will enjoy the experience. The perspectives shared opened my eyes to a part of America which I knew of but never felt connected with. I now do. It is never too late to reach out and discover something about yourself or your country.

Whether you are from a Big City or a Small Town, you are in for an amazing day shared only the way #140conf can deliver it to you.

For more information and to register, please visit: http://smalltown.140conf.com/

I’m so excited to be attending & speaking at my 2^nd #140 Conference this week in New York City. I attended the one this past October in my hometown of Detroit, and while the experience of speaking there was great, I found that the most exciting part about the conference to me was the great diversity of topics and speakers all unified together to talk about how they participate in the wild, crazy, awesome online world known as Twitter.

This year, I’m presenting my talk entitled “The Adventures of @DMC_Julian at the Detroit Medical Center (DMC)”, where I’ll speak about my experience using Twitter for my hospital system in Michigan, and as I was initially looking at the schedule for #140conf NYC to see what time my talk was, I noticed all of these super interesting talk titles come across my screen. From “Sesame Street” to “Hugs” and “Sneakers” to “Chuck Norris”, I couldn’t believe how many great diverse talks that I was going to have the honor of being a part of in the lineup.

The overall theme that I’ve seen from all of the talks is…“Learning From Outside of Your Own Circle”…that is what I believe is the best part and overall lesson behind #140conf. While I believe that it’s great for one to attend conferences that focus solely on one’s own field (like with myself and the hospital/healthcare industry & social media), I also believe that it’s sometimes underrated and ultimately invaluable for one to truly venture out and learn outside of their current field.

So not only am I seriously very excited to be part of a great speaking lineup at #140conf NYC, I am also equally excited to learn from all of the cool-looking sessions planned and hopefully I’ll have enough room in my noggin to store all of the great info gained to share with my awesome Twitter peeps back home in good ol’ Detroit.

In a social setting, we decide how we engage. If someone tries to call us and we prefer not to talk, we send them a text. If we want to have a conversation, but don’t want any unexpected listeners, we jump on social chat. What is more, each of us knows the rules of when and how to talk to one another, and we respect each other’s chosen channel of engagement.

These unspoken rules are obvious to us; they’re “written” into our culture.  So much so, that we expect those rules to be respected from whomever engages us, businesses included. We want a business to know who we are, what we want, and most importantly, how to talk to us.

We at LivePerson have created a few rules of thumb that help businesses respect some of these unspoken rules:

1 – Don’t engage if you don’t have to:

This month I am honored to be speaking at the 140conference in NYC about what I believe to be the future of building brands…Open Book Branding.

Over the past few years I’ve been fortunate to speak at a number of events… everything from digital marketing summits, social media conferences, event planning think tanks, American Heart Association global conferences, Asset-Based Thinking workshops to local town hall meetings with moms and kids. And now, I am fortunate to be teaching at USC’s Marshall School of Business creating lectures and engaging students in the digital classroom.  For me, these experiences have been an invigorating, ever expanding exposure to a new world of communications, knowledge sharing and re-discovering the art of building brands in a digital age at The Concept Farm.

Open Brands Will Thrive. Closed Brands Will Struggle To Survive.

Open Brands are built by companies that operate on strong values based business models supported and enhanced by transparent and empowering company cultures. The drivers of this open mindset are enlightened CEOs who recognize that long term profitable brands and businesses require building and leveraging both hard and soft assets.

More and more of today’s CEO’s now see a three tiered metric of profit as essential to building a strong and sustainable business. Dollar profit for fiscal sustainability. Emotional Profit of company stakeholders to engender a sustainable corporate culture and ethos. Greater Good Profit that extends benefits beyond the company to long term connected communities.

A recent study seems to confirm that this enlightened profit perspective may do a lot more than just make a company CEO feel good. Valuing and building soft assets can actually be the key to delivering even better financial results and  healthier, stronger companies and brands. Recent research shows that CEOs who make it their business to place a higher priority on stakeholders’ interests and well-being rather than a relentless pursuit of delivering dollar profit come out on top.

The research, entitled Unrequited Profit: How Stakeholder and Economic Values Relate To Subordinates’ Perceptions of Leadership and Firm Performance was conducted by top people in the their field: Mary Sully de Luque, of Thunderbird School of Global Management; David A. Waldman, of Arizona State University West; and Robert J. House, of the University of Pennsylvania. Their findings are based on survey data gathered from 520 business organizations in 17 countries. Here’s how the authors summed up their study.

We were testing the hypothesis that if a CEO’s primary focus is on profit maximization, employees develop negative feelings toward the organization. They tend to perceive the CEO as autocratic and focused on the short term, and they report being somewhat less willing to sacrifice for the company. Corporate performance is poorer as a result.

It turns out that this reordering of priorities and balanced perspective generate greater workforce engagement and extra effort that in turn yield significantly better operations and superior financial results. There also appears to be some risk to a CEO’s leadership effectiveness associated with a “profit above all else attitude”… the mantra of many a “hard driving” CEO. The exclusively profit driven CEO is seen as an autocratic leader and is less likely to garner employee commitment.

The S.O.S. Of The Values Based CEO

The values driven CEO is seen as a visionary, a motivator  and is more likely to positively influence loyalty and inspire  “extra effort”. He or she is viewed as a kinder, more empathetic breed of CEO superhero. This holistic view  being embraced by CEOs is Asset-Based Thinking at its best. It builds upon core asset-based leadership skills we call S.O.S. Leading with Substance. Sizzle. Soul. The hard assets of performance and skills are the substance. The costs of entry. Sizzle is the personal style and presentation that get attention. Soul is “why” it is personally important and meaningful…the secret ingredient that makes it all work.

A while ago I read a New York Times article about values based organizations and business cultures that included this sage Asset-Based Thinking advice from Brandon Busteed, co-founder of Outside the Classroom. “Run like a business, act like a nonprofit, care to be better.”

Simple, smart, savvy advice for any business, any brand, or anyone simply involved in the business of life.

Here comes Open Book Branding. It’s about time.

Hank Wasiak is a communications industry leader who has worked with the corporate elite of global businesses and the former Vice Chairman of McCann-Erickson. He is a-partner at The Concept Farm, best selling author, teacher, keynote speaker, three time Emmy award winning television host and a Reiki Master.

Hank teamed up with Dr. Kathryn D. Cramer, Ph.D. to create a best selling business – self help book series based on Asset-Based Thinking. Running Press has published three books in the series including the lead title ”Change The Way You See Everything”

A self-proclaimed “Mad Man Turned Twitterholic”, Hank has seen and done it all in a marketing communications career that spans five decades. Today he is a leading advocate for harnessing the positive, disruptive power of digital communications and social platforms to build a new generation of “Open Brands”. Hank is a frequent speaker at interactive conferences, guest writer for Mashable and authors columns on Technorati’s blogcritics.org. Hank is an Adjunct Professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business and a member of the national board of directors of the American Heart Association.

I am counting the days until the #140conf NYC the way most kids count the days until their birthday or Christmas.  Why am I so excited?  The 140 Conference is a special one — hugs are more common than handshakes, passions are freely shared and ideas are openly exchanged.  The New York City gathering is special for me because I will be meeting friends for the first time.  Many friends, I don’t know or follow yet but I will also be meeting friends who are my sisters in the Lupus community.  We have formed a bond of sisterhood over living with a chronic illness.

Together we will raise Lupus Awareness on the 140 Conference panel “Lupus Ladies of Twitter”.  The panel is not going to be a bunch of “sick” people telling you about how I survive with a disease that is best known as a punch line on “House”.  Christine Miserandino, @bydls on Twitter, started a website www.butyoudontlooksick.com as well as the #spoonie hashtag to spread and share “The Spoon Theory” she wrote it to convey what it is like to suffer from Lupus to her friends, that it has found a viral life of its own speaks to the powerful message of Christine’s story.  Brenda Blackmon, @brendablackmon on Twitter, is award-winning journalist but the story hit close to home when her daughter Kelly was in a coma due to complications of Lupus.  The book “A Mom’s Story” is Brenda’s perspective of finding hope in the clouds and much more.  http://www.brendablackmonbooks.com/ The fight never stops for Kelly who is now running The Kelly Fund for Lupus, @KellyFund4Lupus on Twitter, is a non-profit that supports the @Alliance4Lupus and other Lupus awareness efforts.  http://www.thekellyfundforlupus.org/

My excitement grows every day as I realize that being chosen by Jeff Pulver to be a part of the list of speakers is an honor in itself.  Our panel “Lupus Ladies of Twitter” is on June 16^th, the second day of the conference and you won’t want to miss it.  We are following @DeepakChopra and I can either be freaked out but what an impressive man to follow (literally and Twitter-ally) or I can embrace the scheduling and realize what a cool “opening act”!  Either way, I hope to share that to me the real joy will come when I get to meet and hug my Lupus sisters.

Amanda Greene is @LAlupusLady on Twitter. Follow her and check out http://lalupuslady.com/ to see how she shares how she finds the flair of sharing that Lupus Awareness is Fun!

I’d like to say that I found Ann Marie in Chicago, but the truth is that she found me. Ann Marie uses social media to escape from her world and connect with others. When I arrived in the Windy City I received a tweet from @padschicago and the next day we arranged to meet in a train station.

Chicago blogger and now friend Megan Cottrell happened to be with me the day I met Ann Marie and wrote what still may be my favorite Invisible People post. PLEASE read this powerful post here. You can watch Ann’s original Invisible People video here.

Ann Marie has been sharing on social media that she found permanent supportive housing which is amazing. She has been tweeting pics and videos of her new place so I had a feeling she’d be OK if we stopped by for a visit.  Marla Schulman and I jumped into a cab and went to Lakeview area of Chicago to visit her. Ann was waiting on the sidewalk for us. She looked great – like a normal person not a street person.  I know first hand how hard it is to pull yourself out of homelessness. Ann had been on the streets for many years making it even harder. But she should be very proud of her accomplishment because she did this. She fought all all kinds of battles to get off the streets. I am so happy for her.

I am honored to be speaking next month at 140 Conference NYC. Great things happen at 140 Conference and you don’t want to miss it.

Pure consciousness isn’t a way of thinking or a point of view. It’s the pure potential from which everything springs. The qualities of pure consciousness seem subtle at first, but they grow more powerful as you proceed farther on your path. Here are the chief qualities described in the great wisdom traditions.

Ten Qualities of Pure Consciousness

1. Pure consciousness is silent and peaceful.  When you experience this quality, you are free of inner conflict, anger, and fear.

2. Pure consciousness is self-sufficient, or centered within itself. When you experience this quality, the need for distraction vanishes. You are comfortable simply being here. The mind is not restless in its quest for stimulation

3. Pure consciousness is fully awake.  This quality is experienced as mental alertness and freshness. The mind is no longer dull or fatigued.

4. Pure consciousness contains infinite potential; it is open to any outcome. When you experience this quality, you are no longer bound by fixed habits and beliefs. The horizon seems open, the future full of possibilities.  The greater your experience of pure potential, the more creative you become.

5. Pure consciousness is self-organizing.  It effortlessly coordinates all aspects of existence. You are experiencing this quality when things fall into place of their own accord. There is less struggle to force different parts of life to harmonize, because you are more in tune with the natural harmony that runs through everything.

6. Pure consciousness is spontaneous.  Timetables, boundaries, and rules don’t apply; nor are they needed.  Breaking free of old constraints, whatever they may be, makes you feel safer about expressing who you are and what you want in a spontaneous manner. This is the state of absolute freedom, which you experience whenever you feel liberated.

7. Pure consciousness is dynamic.  Although not in motion, it provides energy for all the activity in the universe. You experience this quality when you feel that you can fully embrace life. You have the energy and the will to do great things.

8. Pure consciousness is blissful.  This is the root of happiness and its highest expression. Any surge of happiness, whatever the cause, is a taste of bliss. An orgasm is blissful, but so is compassion. Every experience of love can also be traced back to its origins in bliss.

9. Pure consciousness is knowing.  It contains the answers to all questions and, more crucially, the practical knowledge needed for unfolding the universe, the human body, and the mind. Any experience of intuition, insight, or truth taps into this quality.

10. Pure consciousness is whole.  It is all-encompassing. Therefore, despite the infinite diversity of the physical world, at adeeper level only one process is occurring: wholeness is moving like a single ocean that holds every wave. You experience this quality when your life makes sense and you feel part of Nature; you are at home simply by being alive.

As you can see, I haven’t used any religious terms, yet this is divinity, stripped of the demands of faith and obedience.  At this point, you cannot be expected simply to accept that these ten qualities are, in essence, divine. However, you can use this idea as a working hypothesis. In that sense, you are the experimenter and the experiment. If you are actually transcending everyday reality, these qualities will grow in your life.  You will notice more fulfillment and creativity.  Your sense of being secure will grow as you come to know who you really are.