More About @CindyKing On Twitter

@CindyKing On Twitter

Here’s a quick introduction for people I meet on Twitter.

I’m a Cross-Cultural Marketer & International Sales Strategist, helping businesses get international clients. Originally from the Bahamas, I’m now part European & based 40km south of Paris. If you are interested, you will find more personal triva below.

First, some people have asked me about how I tweet. I’m interested in all subjects related to, or leading to, cross-cultural competence, cross-cultural marketing, international sales, international business, international networking and international social media.

How I Tweet

Sharing Different Opinions For Better Awareness & Understanding

There are many different skill levels on social media.
I communicate with many different cultures on social media.
“Culture” is a topic that can bring out inappropriate reactions in people… sometimes off topic, sometimes weird, sometimes offensive.

As in international marketer there are topics that I like to share simply because it is best to know about them if you want to do business in that part of the world. This does not mean that I share these opinions or values. Although it does usually mean that I am curious. I would find it an interesting face-to-face discussion if we had the opportunity for a real discussion. I am always interested in understanding different points of view. Again, not that I would ever change my own personal points of view. I am used to international communication and this effects how I tweet.

First, I rarely share my personal viewpoints on sensitive subjects on Twitter. 140 characters is too short, these subjects are usually private and I am online for business.
I retweet lots of different opinions and they are not mine. I easily accept that others think differently than I do and do not feel aggressed in any way because of it. But I am often curious as to why people think differently because they usually have a very good reason for it. These differences effect international business. My blog is about widening cross-cultural and international skills. A big part of this is learning to do business with people that do things differently and putting personal baggage aside.

Here is how I share information:

“RT” in the beginning, usually has a @Name and the rest is a word for word retweet. These are not my own words. I am merely spreading the message and you should hook up with the person mentioned in the @Name if you want to join the conversation.
When I find something interesting, this does not mean I share the exact opinion or value, and I try to put “Via” @Name at the end of the tweet. Sometimes there is not enough space and I put in “RT” at the end. These are conversations that interest me a bit more. Again they are often word for word retweets, or at least as much as possible.
When I do put in a personal comment, it is after the link and the “Via”.

Occasionally there are people who think that my retweets reflect my personal opinions. These are usually people who read too quickly, or who are new to Twitter and still have to get the hang of it, or who have heavy personal baggage on that subject.

In international business I have often been in similar situations in live encounters and feel very comfortable in handling this. It’s OK if you’re not comfortable doing the same sort of thing. You probably don’t have the same level of cross-cultural & international business skills as I do.

Of course, I fully understand when others only want to retweet things that are in total alignement of their own personal values and opinions. If I were online in a personal context, or if my business interests were in a totally different field, I might choose to do the same. But I have always dealt with different opinions, different ways of doing things and people with different cultural baggage. And I know how to navigate the different lines between personal, social and business contexts.

Close Twitter Friends

You will find some names popping up more than others in my Twitter or social bookmarking feeds. These are my social media friends and I hang around them because they:

Are online for business or have a professional orientation
Do not actively promote things that I personally dislike, such as “The Secret”, or MLM, or too much politics
Are not extremists or fanatical activists on either side of an issue
Also take the initiative to hook up with me, or say hello, in some way online to keep the connection.
Are overall nice people and always positive to be with

Personal Insights

Want To Know More?

Bahamian I’m from the Bahamas. I grew up in an ex-British colony and a 30 minute flight away from the US. So, British school system, no American literature in the local bookstores when I grew up. The first American book I bought was after coming to Europe. All books on my island were imported from the UK back then.

But we were lucky to be close enough to Florida that I grew up on American TV and American radio. The Bahamas is a very small, independent country. I’m white. This means that I grew up as a minority in my country. And it was interesting to live through and observe what this meant during the first years of total independence.

Many people today think I am American. No. Bahamians are culturally very different to Americans. In some cases I have noticed more similarities with other people from small former British colonies.

My core culture, the one that creates the foundation for my cultural identity, is definitely Bahamian. The Bahamas is where I grew up, went to school, and worked for a year after high school… It’s where I feel at home.

Then I moved to Europe and have lived here for the other half of my life so far and I’ve always worked in international sales, marketing and business development. So my cultural profile has morphed somewhat through these diverse cultural experiences.

European

The first four years in Europe were in Berne, Switzerland. The next three were in Paris and then the next three after that were in London. After this I moved back to the Paris area where I have been ever since.

Over the years, a marriage to a French man, speaking and raising 2 children in French, and working in international environments with international responsibilities, I have developed a sort of European filter.

What is interesting is that I can personally identify myself in some ways as being European. But I cannot say that I am French by culture, even if I do have the nationality. Now I describe myself as someone with both a strong North American and a strong European profile.

Curious

I am naturally curious and thirsty to understand new things. I am not interested in learning a language at home. In fact, it is not really the language skills that interest me. It is understanding people from other cultures and understanding them and their culture. I like living in a country until I feel I understand it, or crack their “culture codes”.

The first language I learned by choice was German. And yes, there is a story behind it. I wanted to learn German because when I was about 9 or 10 years old I had a girlfriend, Sylvia, whose family had escaped from East Germany. And the story of their escape could have been made into a film. As a child with a bedroom full of toys I remember how Sylvia and her brother felt extremely lucky because their family had managed to bring a mecano set with them. Their only toy from home. Tragedy struck a few months after their arrival in the Bahamas. Their father panicked when snorkeling too far from shore and drowned. He had been so captivated while snorkeling that he did not realize how far away from the beach he was. It was a stupid accident. Their mother, who did not speak any English, decided to move back to West Germany and I lost touch of my girlfriend.

That’s the story behind my inspiration to learn and understand German. And I only stopped learning German, and moved on to learning French, when I felt I understood how the German language influenced German history. The story of learning German also has a side story. You see, coming from the Bahamas, I did not know that Switzerland, with it’s strong Swiss German dialects, was not the best place to learn German. In the end, I’m very happy to have learned German in Switzerland. Yes, I do have a funny accent when I speak German, and there are snobs out there who may snicker.

Today not only do I speak the “right” German, but I also learned to understand every single Swiss dialect. This may surprise some Swiss people, but I was young and went out every night with a very large group of Swiss friends for 4 years. Curiosity and being young helped me to pick up all of the different dialects.

The desire to learn new things also led me to night school for the first 10 years in Europe. These were always university courses on languages and business. I stopped night school when my first daughter arrived. Then started studying again when both of my daughters were in high school. That was a few years ago now. This time my interests led me to copywriting and a wide variety of topics centered around international web marketing.

Creative

I also have a visceral need for a creative outlet and this has always involved hand crafts of some kind or another… this is a part of my life that I keep private. But this creativity comes through in the way I learned languages. My new international friends would always get a laugh out of my choice of colorful metaphors when trying to get my message across with the words I knew. Later in business I applied creativity in finding the right actions for better in cross-cultural communication.

Thinking outside of the box and looking for creative solutions to communicate without words has helped me get out of complex cross-cultural sitautions. This is a subject that fascinates me. Today I admire the people who use creativity in visual communication and hope to some day create the time to have some fun with this too.

About Cindy King

You can read more about me in the more traditional About Cindy King page.

Personal Trivia

Here are 25 tidbits, as this seems to be popular right now…

My mother’s family were one of the first to settle in the Bahamas and my father’s family were one of the first to settle in Canada.
I grew up in a teeny country where the majority of the population is black – but never felt I lived my life as a minority, nor did I feel any less important than anyone else.
I have been asthmatic all my life, but only remember this when it is a problem.
I spent the whole summer when I was 16 with 6 other teenages and an aunt on a small island in the middle of the Exumas. Some of the most beautiful waters in the world.
Different cultures and other languages were always fascinating.
This is even in my last high school year book… where I stated “Je veux être linguiste” before even knowing who I would become one.
I ended up learning German before finishing off my high school French.
I learned German in Switzerland which means there does not seem to be any German-based dialect I cannot understand.
I even follow conversations in Dutch and can read the sign posts in Luxembourg.
I have also dabbled in Malay, Italian and Spanish but have let them slip.
I learned Italian simply through osmosis, sharing a girlfriend with 3 sisters who used to come to work every morning and tell me what she did the evening before in English… and then repeated it on the phone in Italian to her 3 sisters.
I am Anglican, but have worked in an all-Muslim, all-Catholic and all-Jewish environment… at different times of course. I think the fact that I am used to being associated with a small minority with skeletons in their closet did not make it an issue.
I strive towards an authentic cross-cultural connection and do not like to spend much time with people who are stuck in their own prejudices.
The concept of fatality just does not go down with me.
My left brain likes to assert itself in soft skills such as cross-cultural communication – I like to measure cross-cultural communication skill levels and interaction.
Although I started with an interest in languages, I quickly became more fascinated with business.
I am very business focused. And by this I mean I like to know how everything fits into the process of making money. So my marketing is always sales-focused. I guess living in France balances this out. It is culturally unacceptable here to say that you like making money and that is the reason why you work.
I was very fortunate to start my career working within an excellent management team.
I enjoyed developing skills in cross-cultural marketing and international sales in all of my work.
The web naturally led me to become an adept of copywriting and I love studying written communication… for international readers.
And I’m fascinated in how all of this comes together in international websites, international business development, cross-cultural communication, social media, written communication and international content marketing.
I have taken my two daughters twice to the Bahamas on three month long trips island hopping and full of adventure, so they would understand their heritage. Of course, this was in between jobs. The best investments I have ever made.
I wish I had listened to the advice a friend gave to me before getting married: if you marry someone from a different country, things usually work out better for the woman if she gets married in her own country. Raising children in an foreign country and in a foreign language is not easy. Neither is divorce.
I found out I have celiac disease a couple of years ago. This means I cannot eat flour and anything with flour in it. It took over a year of radical change to sort of adjust to this. Goodbye bread, cake, cookies, pasta, pizza and lots of other yummy stuff.
I now live about 40 km south of Paris, near a town famous for its castle and its forest: Fontainebleau. This is on the edge of the Parisian suburbs and the French countryside.

If this inspires a comment, or something you would like to share, tell me about it @CindyKing Twitter is my favorite activity when I’m on a break. Please do not be shy about sending me a direct message at @CindyKing to share anything you find interesting.

Connect With Me

Thank you for visiting! If you found this page by accident and would like to follow me on Twitter, click here and hit the follow key. In addition to this blog on cross-cultural competence, I also have Get International Clients – a website and action guide with strategies to help small businesses build their international business. If you are interested in all things cross-cultural to build an international business, sign up for my tips – very short emails sent out about three times a week. Please also ask to connect with me on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Tell Me About Yourself

Now it’s your turn to tell me about yourself. Either below, or tweet me at @CindyKing