Promoter One

Where are we heading now?

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Within the past 5000 days, the web has evolved to a great extent, so has its penetration into our daily life. We are not only using this technology to stay in touch with our friends or to search for information. Today the web serves as a plausible tool for internet marketing; it is a drastic revolution in the marketing industry and is serving to provide endless advantages to the event marketer.

But where are we headed now? Of course innovation and advancement is not going to stop at any point; it is an on-going process. Kevin Kelly will open our minds with some great insights to his view of the next 5000 days of the web in the video below.

So keeping Kevin Kelly’s view of Web 3.0 in mind, how would the next 5000 days, and the innovations associated with it, effect the business environment you are marketing in?

I’m not going to delve into his perspective, but just add a few things to it. Kevin points out that the Web is only 5000 days old and that everything we take for granted has been published online for us to access for FREE within this time period. From Satellite images of the earth, your family tree, our resumes, government forms, all legal documents, properties, maps, regulations, books and the list goes on and on. He also shares a staggering insight when you stop for a minute to think about it. There is not a single business model on the planet that could conceivably have funded such a venture profitably. Getting this amount of information online for the benefit of all humans has been a collaborative effort.

After watching the video you will see how the web and people are becoming one. We are already becoming co-dependent on it as a civilization in the same way we have reading and writing, yet we just don’t realize its magnitude yet. Imagine a world without reading or writing? An interesting reference Kevin made to this point was that when 600 billion people search Google, who is searching who? Google stores this information into their word data base, the machine knows all about us.

With Open Social and hierarchies, the underlying concept of networking is changing tremendously. If the internet is one machine, the greatest machine ever built, and through artificial intelligence people are becoming an extension or a part of this machine, where does that leave relationships? As Web 3.0 bears down on us, our civilization will require total transparency to let the internet personalize itself to the extent of what Kevin Kelly foresees. What will happen to our relationships in a web 3.0 world when our parents are gone and our kids are adults?

In web 2.0 the value of a human relationship has been diminished like no other period in our history. Whilst people marvel in the developments of technology that allows the world to become so connected, who is looking out for the human relationship aspect of this new world?

Online business leaders have member lists in the hundreds of thousands and are happy when less than 10% of the email recipients open their emails. Given this fact it’s become the norm for business online to expect 90% of our customers to ignore us. I don’t know about the people listening to me and following my posts but these numbers are not acceptable to me. I utilize the internet to broadcast my message to the world without dependence on media corporations, by getting my listeners to distribute my content across the internet I broaden my audience-base. However, when it comes to my business community, i.e my customers who rely on me to solve problems for them as a service - I could never be happy if 90% of this community was ignoring me when I spoke to them, nor would I revert to some of the tactics I have seen some marketers pull, like waving bank check’s in front of their audience to articulate how much money they make, to entice customers to listen above all the noise.

If this is what I must expect of doing business in a web 3.0 world, then I’d be glad to unplug my computer and call it a day. I don’t believe it is though. I love the fact that I am part of the web, I get a chance to establish so many more relationships through my new world - more interesting, prosperous relationships who are aligned with my thoughts, it excites me to no end. Is Kevin Kelly suggesting that to continue to enjoy this, I must prepare myself to do so at the expense of the value I place on long-term good quality business relationships?

With technology today, I can chat with people, talk to them, collaborate with them, share computer screens with them, attend courses and conferences with them 24/7. I can now do this in my pyjama’s from the comfort of my own home set on 3 acres, in a national park looking over one of Australia’s premier tourist destinations. Why would I want to get out?

Let’s not allow such a marvelous advantage in modern business facilitate the decline in the value of what made social networking online such a movement in the first place. Human relationships! The irony here is that the people who least need to hear this message are reading it, whilst those most in need of a wakeup call are busy sending cut & paste messages like the one I just received a minute ago:

“Hi, it’s great connecting with you. I am looking forward to getting to know you. Here is a link to a video all about me”.

How is this strategy meant to inspire me to get excited about a new relationship with this person. It’s clear to me that they have initiated the connection as a pretext to drop a link in my face. Why is it not clear to this person, that it is going to be clear to me, that this is their only intention? These same people are the ones who have grown to be satisfied with as little as 5% or 10% of their audiences listening to them which is hardly surprising and the most unfortunate reality of all this is, these people are probably making money doing it.

Let’s change this. Technology is becoming more aligned with humans every day. Google Friend Connect is a good example; this rot will be forced out of social platforms because of the way they interact over the next couple years anyway. Why wait though, if we can initiate change now. I tell people who approach me in this manner that it’s not appreciated. If they are that interested in me and are so excited by the prospect of getting to know me then they should visit my profile for 5 minutes and learn something about me, come back and approach me again with some respect. The interesting thing is that after hearing this, most do just that. In fact some of them thank me for the advice. They realize they are caught under the spell of this machine and the machine is driving them. It’s taking over.

The opportunity before us all today, more so than ever, is for us to collaborate together in mapping out our social blueprint for relationships into our web 3.0 future. It’s all happened so fast of late that we haven’t had time to pull ourselves back to look at where we have traveled. We are well versed through videos like the one on this page to where its all heading but what about where it’s come from. The declining value of the human relationship.

If each individual was a corporation and our values were defined by stock prices, then our value as individuals are plummeting whenever we forget to preserve the value of our relationships. Our inner circle of contacts in business are stock holders in us, as companies. The richer our stock holders are the more secure our companies become, and I believe the time has come for us to work together to reassess our inner circle of business relationships online, and for us to take more pride and prudence in the relationships we invest into. Imagine if with every new relationship we entered into, we focused on adding value to the other parties efforts instead of focusing on asking them to add value to ours. Now, if this was understood, each individuals stock price would rise because of such mergers, that’s if both companies are good ones. What if we replicated this across 10 relationships? wouldn’t all 10 stock prices rise considerably, including yours. Now, what If we each selected 10 relationships that we were prepared to invest time into adding value to what ever it is they did. Everyone in the group would have to become more valuable as individuals, if again, they remain true to each other and this mind set. This is not about sharing office space, this is about putting our heads together to focus on quality connections where each of us add considerable value to the efforts of others. You know, ask not what your inner circle of business connections can do for you, ask what you can do for them…..sound familiar?

Tell me, what would your stock price be worth as an individual if you became involved in a talented group of professionals who were all committed to helping you succeed in what ever way they could. What if everyone in this group was connected to a second group of people who all worked the same way. What would the stock price of the individuals throughout such a network be worth, if everyone remained true to each other and this mind set?

If you look closely enough you will see this is how the people at the top of the internet marketing world succeed, they continually invest their time into increasing the value of their inner circle, over the years these individuals have become hugely successful together, as a group. Why do you think when one person launches a new product the same 15 marketers all promote it. The top tier are members of the same mastermind group who meet and speak regularly. They become successful online together, because it’s way to difficult to achieve it alone.

An email list of 50,000 will not carry the same weight in the next 2 years. Open social changes this concept. If you have quality contacts (whether they are 10 or 100 people), who will all act when you make the call, you will be in a much more influential position. Ever since the social networking revolution took off, its fickle nature has been its only downside. After going a little haywire, sites like Facebook and Mulhulo (the manned search engine) are trying to ‘real’ it in to put some depth and value back into online connections.

Basically, we’ve driven a line between quantity and quality – where quality is given more precedence. After focusing on quantity for over 5 years, it’s coming down a few notches because of apps like Google’s Friend Connect. Friend Connect allows anyone to join your network and watch your work on different social apps, without having to join those apps themselves.

This is a journey we have to take together. I have some interesting posts coming out next week leading into my book “Social Traffic” launch. Come with us and join in this journey - it’s going to be an exciting ride for all of us. It starts next week. What I am going to ask everyone who is on board to do, is call 10 people who they consider potential candidates for their inner circle business network and ask them to join us. You are going to need to work on drawing ten people into this conversation, people who you talk to regularly, and most importantly who you respect and trust will act when you need them to. You will find out why next week. Don’t send them a link until you call them on the phone to tell them you will be sending them a link, after explaining what it’s all about.

Send your ten inner circle connections to read excerpts from my book here first, then pull them into next weeks posts so they understand where we are heading with this.

If you have not signed up for “Social Traffic” yet, you can do so here.

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Have a great weekend. I am looking forward to Monday!