Viral loops, not manifestos, provide the opportunity for unparalleled influence. This is a world in which documents handed down by well-meaning alpha males result in a stifled yawn. However, this same world moves to the edge of their seat upon realizing that the responsibility to change the world need not be their legacy or burden. On the contrary, the creation of culture is the calling from which history speaks.

For example, Compassion International recently asked me to help form a group of influential bloggers for a historic trip to Uganda. A trip in which we visited slums, HIV/Aids hospitals and projects each morning. We then blogged, created video, and recounted stories raw with reality and emotion each afternoon. Thousands of people around the world followed our eight day journey real-time and over 400 children were sponsored and rescued from poverty. The viral loop that was created spawned hundreds of additional posts and offered the opportunity for thousands of additional people to experience the trip in an automagical way.

This “automagic” tested the corporate structure of Compassion. The trip was completely out of their control. The blog posts were not softened or censored and the videos and art spawned were not pre-approved by the marketing department. The servant leaders of this large organization flexed and collaborated to create culture.

Servant leaders have the ability to provide a new type of leadership. A collaborative mentoring and releasing of people with varied and mystical gifts in order to create culture. Alpha leaders value control, servant leaders value collaboration. Alpha leaders value individualism, servant leaders value community. Alpha leaders value affluence, servant leaders value influence.

Today, it is through viral loops that movements really snowball. In their latest issue, Fast Company says, “A destination such as Facebook grows via invitations, with each “friend” reaching out to her own set of contacts, which in turn do the same. More than half of the undergraduate population at Harvard joined within a month of Facebook’s 2004 launch; four years later, it has 67 million active users. And at its current 3% weekly expansion rate, it will have 200 million users by the end of the year, equal to the population of the fifth-largest nation on earth.”

This is not yesterday. It is today. Millions of cultural creatives offer a more hopeful future(s) and are converging for profound change. This convergence is a quiet revolution without manifestos or alpha leaders. This story is one that begs ten thousand tellers and then ten times more to be inspired by it.

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This is a repost of an essay I wrote May 9, 2008 as a guest blogger for Hugh Hewitt

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“A linked group of users can also create a positive feedback loop. Passionate online fans famously helped revive TV’s Family Guy after it was initially canceled by Fox, while Arrested Development may get a second life as a movie because of Internet fan support. Earlier this year, one ardent fan of Betty White, David Mathews of San Antonio, launched a campaign on Facebook to get the octogenarian actress invited to host Saturday Night Live. Hundreds of thousands of people joined in with their support. ‘I didn’t know what Facebook was,’ White said during her monologue on May 8. ‘Now that I do know what it is, I have to say, it seems like a huge waste of time,’” so says Fast Company’s fascinating article “The New Faces of Social Media” in the November 2011 issue.

Just as businesses have historically paid heed to industry trade publications and newsletters, so too must they now familiarize themselves with the bloggers that intersect their industry. Michael Hyatt, Seth Godin, Jason Fried, Tim Ferriss, Freakonomics, and Techdirt are but a tiny sample of the new social voices, when linked together, create a roar.

Mark Borden says, “Perhaps the most influential specialists are the sites and bloggers that cover social media itself. Often described as the Brad Pitt of social media, 25-year-old Pete Cashmore is the founder and CEO of the website Mashable. That position led to the Scotsman’s being declared the world’s most influential person on Twitter in a 2009 poll.

As a blogger and editor, Cashmore has an intuitive understanding for online storytelling that not only attracts more than 30 million monthly page views for Mashable but has also made the site profitable. What he believes sets Mashable apart from traditional news outlets: ‘Social media is about engagement and interaction,’ he says. ‘It’s more about community and posing the question, rather than having all the answers.’”

So, in the spirit of not having all the answers, and sincerely wanting to engage you (my social community), I  posit these initial 5 steps to creating a “roar” by utilizing social networks. Please add clarification, correction, conversation and most importantly community to make these 5 steps better and also feel free to add more steps as needed.

5 Steps To Creating a “Roar” By Utilizing Social Networks

1. Make the message clear. A message that focuses on the diversity of the objective rather than the value it can bring to your network is not the way to be heard. Make sure your message clearly states the purpose and what makes you unique.

2. Analyze your network response. Which of your blog posts are most popular? Why? Which of your Tweets are retweeted most? Why? Which of your Facebook updates are most commented upon? Why? Before long, a composite picture begins to emerge. What does your raving fans and supporters look like? Who are they? What do they like? What do they hate? What are they passionate to talk about?

3. Understand the rhythm of your social networks. It is imperative to understand the natural ebb and flow and attention span of your social networks. For example, I have learned that weekends are not the time to unveil a new objective. Monday mornings seem dead as everyone is frantically trying to catch up. Friday is a slow day in my network. What is the rhythm of your social network? Analyze and use this data to sense when networks are ready to make something spread. Look at how people are engaging with your content and then send them to the stuff that inspires more action and more sharing.

4. Become a curator. The web is a world of radical discontinuity. In other words, it is changing so fast, most of us can’t keep up. There is so much information—and conflicting points of view—that curators who spotlight what’s important have a particularly strong impact. Rose, the Digg founder, created a system where the most-read content is pushed to the top of the Internet news cycle. Kawasaki’s Alltop is what he calls an “online magazine rack” of selected topics on the web. Jack Dorsey’s Twitter platform allows users to communicate in both a one-to-one fashion and one-to-many. In the process, Twitter creates a world of everyday curators.

5. React quickly. When you feel that “second-sense,” that “intuition,” that “hunch,” that something is a big deal. It probably is. Act on it. Decisively and promptly. You don’t necessarily have to be the first person in the world to react—but you should be the first person in your social network. As the old adage goes, “Timing is everything.”

Thoughts?

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The modern pens of Mark Twain, Jack London, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte transported me from poverty, as if on a magic carpet ride, to riches. After a boring black and white day at school I would rush home and plunge myself into the sensual worlds of Huckleberry Finn, Lemuel Gulliver, the Black Knight, Uriah Heep, and Heathcliff.

I fell passionately in love with reading. It is a torrid affair I indulge to this day.

Growing older, and if anything, intensifying  my voracious reading addiction, I came to understand (no thanks to my public schools and universities) how surface my reading was. I realized in order to understand the scope of the world and to be a credible influencer, I  must read “deep and wide.” In support of this idea, I recommend reading a wonderful blog post In Defense of Old Books my dear friend Michael Hyatt recently wrote based on the C.S. Lewis introduction to On Incarnation by St. Athanasius.

Five authors that have wrought profound influence upon my reading have taken time to compile lists of what they call “Super Texts“, “Genius”, “World’s Best”, “Reality”, and “Must Reads”.

— The Joy of Reading: A Passionate Guide to 189 of the World’s Best Authors and Their Works Charles Van Doren

— Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds Harold Bloom

— The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership Dr. Steve Sample

— Reality and the Vision: Eighteen Christian Authors Reveal What They Read and Why : Essays by Members of the Chrysostom Society Ed. Philip Yancey

— In, But Not Of: A Guide to Christian Ambition Hugh Hewitt

True, the above five books are written by modern writers, but they provide a diverse and fairly comprehensive guide to old books that Sample says, “permeate the wallpaper of our society.” And because of the invaluable information they contain, I consider them must-reads for every leader and influencer.

I thought it valuable to cross-reference these five books and choose only the “super texts” that occur across the board in all their recommendations (there are a few exceptions). I must admit it was a very difficult task that required leaving out a few books I felt strongly should have made this list of must-reads. But, nonetheless, here it is. A very short list of what I boldly (some might say naively) call the greatest of the world’s greatest books.

The first five are easy.

— Judeo-Christian Bible

— Qur’an

— Bhagavad Gita

— Pali Canon of Buddhism

— Analects of Confucius

Then it becomes a little more difficult.

— Republic Plato

— Politics Aristotle

— Hamlet, As You Like It, Henry IV, Sonnet 129 Shakespeare

— Iliad, Odyssey Homer

— The History (selections—read as much as you can or want to)  Herodotus

—Oedipus Rex, Antigone, Philoctetes (for artists) Sophocles

— Divine Comedy (John Ciardi translation) Dante

— Essays (Donald Frame Translation) Montaigne

— Don Quixote Cervantes

—The Prince Machiavelli

Then even more difficult for consensus.

— Aeneid Virgil

— The Oresteia Aeschylus

— Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans (selections) Plutarch

— Beowulf

— Canterbury Tales Chaucer

— War and Peace Tolstoy

— Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky

— Pensees Pascal

— Poems Donne

— Selected Poems Byron & Keats

As we progress to modernity, the choices become immeasurably more difficult. Perhaps I’ll have a go at that later.

Sample says, “One of the greatest fallacies of our age is the belief that we are fundamentally different from our ancient forebears. What nonsense! …We are every bit as human, and no more human, than the characters of the Old Testament or the people of sixteenth-century Florence…Our basic natures are identical to theirs. And the supertexts, more than contemporary literature, do an excellent job of helping us understand this timelessness of human nature.”

Hewitt says, “If the prospect of reading—a lot—daunts you, then you’re not serious about genuine influence.”

Yancey says, “Across time and generations, books carry the thoughts and feelings, the essence, of the human spirit.”

Van Doren says, “It is important to gain the confidence to attempt nearly any book.”

Bloom says, “Our desire for the transcendental and extraordinary seems part of our common heritage, and abandons us slowly, and never completely.”

As C.S. Lewis states, “Don’t read what others say about the great books, have the courage to read them yourselves.”

Which of these books have you completed?

How have they influenced you?

Which ONE of these books will you vow to attempt next?

Do you take issue with my list?

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The trip was my Dad’s idea. He had purchased two Spring Training tickets for the Atlanta Braves in Orlando. My Mom doesn’t travel well due to an issue with her leg, so they asked me if I would like to go. The past three and a half decades have been filled with college and work. Lots of work.

Now that I am a free man and control my own schedule, when the subject came up, I said “Yes” before I realized the word had popped out of my mouth.

You see, as the oldest child, if my Dad called something black, I felt it my job to let the world know it was actually white – even if it was black. The truth didn’t matter – I just knew I had a calling.

34 years has not changed that.

Dad is a man of routine. Every morning a Hardee’s biscuit, lunch at Wendy’s and then dinner at Golden Corral. Every day the same thing. On rare occasions, he will venture out to a special evening on the town at the local Cracker Barrel. But that takes some doing.

Dad is a man of few words and very shy. His yes is yes and his no is no. Due to many years working in a yarn spinning factory, his hearing has also diminished. So the man of few words became even quieter because he is embarrassed when he doesn’t hear the conversation around him.

Dad does not fly. On airplanes. Ever. He has never been on a plane, so the hour twenty flight on Southwest becomes a fourteen hour road trip. His travels have taken him exclusively to the Southeastern United States with one epic road trip to visit my sister in Denver. And he does not travel like I do (big surprise). He loves to stop and stretch, get a “snack”, take pictures of the state line signs and enjoy extended stretches at a local McDonalds. We don’t eat there, we just go to the bathroom and stretch.

Dad does not speed. He has the latest fuzz buster that money can buy. He loves gadgets. It beeps incessantly and I believe every state trooper in the world was on the highway just hoping to catch him going one mile over the speed limit. No chance.

Dad wants the best deal on gasoline. Period. If fuel is one cent cheaper on the other side of the Interstate, he will find it. And he wants it without Ethanol.

But you know, I also realized on this trip that Dad loves his son. I knew that fact, but it dawned on me in a resounding and refreshing sunrise of realization. He’s proud of me and likes to be with me. I tower over him physically, but at five feet five inches tall, he stands a gentle giant. A soft-spoken, stubborn man that has ideals and values that would benefit all of us Americans – oh yeah – and me.

He still can’t figure how his sperm produced me. I remain an enigma to him.

I have eaten octopus brains and veal’s heart and dined at a thousand different gourmet restaurants, I talk incessantly and have never met a stranger, I have flown over a million miles around the four corners of the world, I don’t have a fuzz buster and have been known to drive over 120 mph in my little white car. When I get behind the wheel, I make him extremely nervous and he continually warns me about the speed limit. I don’t look at the price of gasoline either – I realized I am probably paying ten dollars a gallon and I now suspect they may use 99% Ethanol.

His sperm did produce me though. I see it more every day.

I also realize that I should call some of his blacks black. He has a lot to teach me, this soft spoken giant of a man. This trip I learned a lot of things I did not know. That he likes romantic movies and ones that make him laugh (there is a bit of irony there – that he watches movies at all – we were not allowed a television set when I was growing up – ah, yes, he is changing, too). He likes to smell the roses on a trip and the journey is as important as the destination. He also LOVES the Atlanta Braves and took great pleasure in telling me all about the new players.

We both love peanuts. And cool baseball hats. And hamburgers. And Chipper Jones. And nice cars. And baseball.

And we love each other.

For that, I am eternally grateful. This was three days I will never forget. In all the best ways.

Oh yeah, Go Braves!

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I posted this originally one year ago this month.

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