The core Beliefs Holding us Back:

There is a metaphor in the book by Bob Proctor called  “It’s Not About the Money” and he describes the fear and insecurity of rowing a dingy off of an island in a direction that you know might be your true calling.

He says that people will call you crazy and that you shouldn’t leave the security of what their world calls safe for the risk involved in being your own boss.

What most of us have are a set of beliefs that has been handed down over the years.  It starts with some well meaning people telling you that the best way to go is to study hard in school so you can get good grades, and be accepted by a good college, then be hired by a good company.

If you follow this recipe, you can have the security of working for the company, climb the corporate ladder, get the corner office, be well taken care of until you decide to retire on your terms, to play out your years on the golf course.

Anybody else but me see this as fairy tale?  Something has happened to this rosy picture of how things ought to be.  Like it or not, we have been catapulted into the information age and if you think that you can still get away with marking time down at the factory without trying to grab some specialized training along the way, you are mistaken.

Those in pursuit of the American Dream said that if you work hard and save you will eventually have enough to retire on.  Then along came the economic meltdown that has left everybody wondering where their bail out is coming from.  There is a foreclosure every 7 ½ seconds in this great country of ours.

So, where do you turn.  I say you turn to the social media for a glimpse into where this is all going.  Wayne Gretsky was once asked what made him such a great hockey player.  He said it was simple; he just skated to where the puck was going to be.  Think about that as you look over a few of the fun facts from a YouTube video that asks

“Is Social Media the biggest shift since the industrial revolution or is it a fad?

This clip does a marvelous job of painting a picture of where the puck is going.  It starts off by saying that:

• Facebook added 100 million subscribers in under 9 months.  Ipod  sold a billion apps from their new app store in the same amount of time.

• Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more followers on Twitter than the population of all of Norway, Ireland and Panama combined.

• YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world with 100 million videos.

• There are over 200 million blogs on the web and 54% of bloggers post or tweet daily.  34% of bloggers post opinions about products or brands.

About traditional advertising:

• Only 18% of traditional tv ads work. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations but only 14% trust ads.

• 90 % of people who can zap the ads with their TiVo, do so.

• 24 of the biggest 25 newspapers in America have experienced record decline in circulation.

We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.  Same for products and services.  They will find us through social media.

So, how does this tie in?  If you are in business on the internet and you are not tapped into the new world of social networking…well, you do the math.

To get a better feel for what I am talking about, I recommend reading these three books.

• “The New Rules of Marketing and PR”      by David Meerman Scott

• “The World Wide Rave” by the same author

• “What Would Google Do” by Jeff Jarvis

I will do my best to help steer you down the path.  Stay tuned.