It was way back in 2008 when I first entered a Seats2meet location. It was by coincidence, because my publisher considered it a wise idea to book a meeting room at S2M Utrecht, for the presentation of my book ‘Kracht zonder Macht’ (‘Power without Force?’). Seats2meet was a Wow experience. We didn’t get just a beautiful meeting room and additional services; the package included also a website, enabling all my attendants to become a digital community around the book. This site still exists (www.krachtzondermacht.nl). Nowadays, you’ll find state of art Seats2meet booking and event sites.
Since then, I’ve had a lot of Wow-moments in co-creating with the Seats2meet organization. Being a Society 3.0 ‘know mad’, building several ‘social enterprises’, you can find me often in one of the Dutch S2M locations. And being there brings me always a step further…
Why is that? I’m self employed, married, raising six children and bringing down a serious mortgage on our house. I should be somewhere at work, shouldn’t I? At the same time, I fully adopted ‘asynchronous reciprocity’ as my personal ‘marketing strategy’: sharing new ideas, helping people and companies upfront, giving speeches for free, networking around my personal mission ‘humanization of organization’, publishing books on my own account and blogging about the ones I read, and meeting as many new people as I can… This may all seem a bit naïve or even weird. But you can also consider this ‘work’. And at the end of the day – or let me say at the end of the year – somehow, based on this ‘non-marketing approach of mine, nice projects and new clients found their way to me and to my social-co-entrepreneurs. Together we live a constructive professional life, adding value to the society, to ourselves and to our beloved ones, and it goes with a lot of sense. It is quite pleasurable to ‘work’ like this, in Society 3.0.
And now for you, careful reader of this blog. Still reading? Where are you at the moment? At a Seats2meet location, or maybe at home, considering booking a S2M work seat for free? (Sorry, replace ‘free’ for ‘social capital’.) Imagine yourself in a Seats2meet, actually in a chair, probably behind your notebook or smart phone. Are you working on the personal proposition the world is waiting for? Did you spend a lot of hours behind your screen? Are you succeeding? Great! Or maybe you are a student, who escaped the academic library, because you are forbidden to make noise. Did you find new knowledge in cyberspace? Getting your paper done? Good for you.
Time to look around. What’s happening on all the other ‘seats’? Who are those people? Also social entrepreneurs trying to expose their proposition? Also students wanting to exchange knowledge? You have ‘met your seat’ all right. It’s time to meet other people. Why would you do that? How are you going to meet successfully an constructively? May I leave you with these questions? The answer will find you, if you consider the asynchronous approach… What would be the ideal meeting for the other?
