The ability to nurture is one of the most overlooked skills in today’s marketplace. Whilst the technological revolution has accelerated connectivity and provided an apparent ease of doing business and reaching clientele, the ability to nurture is never more important.

With super connectivity, an ability to reach your client comes within an instant, yet with this ability there is a need to nurture these relationships with earnest intent. The minefield of various social media outlets, notably Facebook and Twitter, serve as evidence of those who treat said avenues as an opportunity to meet and greet the marketplace with others shouting out the moments’ sale offering.

As social media moves into the future the near Neanderthal approach of screaming sales, including the obvious log-rolled affiliate program, will slowly disintegrate and only those who foster open, earnest relationships with clients will prosper. As positive is the improvements ushered in with technological improvements, this retracing of building business relationship is extremely positive and will further bring about more creative solutions to marketplace needs.

This draws an interesting set of crossing business paths as while systems accelerated and bridge all communication barriers, they must be used to return traditional notions of adding value to your community.

The paradox of bridging the communication gap is that as connectivity accelerates those who slow down and get to know their clientele will prosper and additionally enjoy a more enriching career.

John Davies is available on his personal page on Facebook and Twitter.

As the weave of social media grows over the internet and radically reshape its forms, the need for engagement accelerates yet for the most part it has resulted in precisely the opposite.

The great turning part of social media, though difficult to pinpoint, clearly started with youthful vigour. Building relationships through a cyber wonderland, yet maintaining a youthful joie de vivre. It was a frontier world of cyber rights and wrongs, at least of a cyber generation and for the most part without the watchful eye and certainly lacking an overlay of business. Yet as you cut away all the little subtleties it did something that is sorely lacking now; there was engagement. The simple action, albeit in a cyber version, of reaching across the aisle and engaging in conversation was both sheer brilliance and natural but also something sorely lacking in today’s version.

Of the present social media world, many corners of it appear to be more of endless colonnade of overturned soapboxes for good natured souls and hucksters to sell their wares. Pounding out manufactured, if not simply fixated scripts for the all-mighty but rarely engaging. The failure of many, that will be there undoing is that social media requires honest engagement, an open handshake of improving the lives of your community.

In this manner, social media can be used as the ultimate of business tools, well beyond a simple analysis of your Profit and Loss Statement but to truly bridge gaps with the marketplace and establish your brand.

Yet the pendulum will swing both ways as failure to earnestly care of your client wishes will rear its ugly head and if all you are concerned with is the quick sale, be ready for a long wait. Those who do not honestly engage in conversation or for that matter earnestly care for their communities’ best interest will watch their businesses decline. The present failing of social media is that is in many corners turning into yet another magazine, rife with advertisements and endless photo ops but rarely content that is worthy of intelligent consumer lifting in from the newsstands.

In the strange twist of events, the new business frontier looks a great deal like the old and once again, the importance of being earnest is at the root of success.

John Davies is available on his personal page on Facebook and Twitter.

While few would doubt it beforehand, the Goldman Sachs US $50 billion valuation of Facebook and subsequent US $450 million minority interest investment served notice of the not simply the potential social media giant but the enormous change in methods of communication.

Though the handwriting has been on the wall for quite sometime, the stunning endorsement of Facebook’s value should trigger to the entire business community, both large and small that lines of communication and relationships to the marketplace will continue to evolve as they have over the last decade. While hand-to-hand relationship marketing will always have its place, to ignore marketplace horizon is akin to business suicide. Those who do not respond and adopt proactive social media plans, with the aid of skilled professionals, will be a vestige of the past and quite possibly fighting for the business survival.

Social Media has went through a drastic serious of changes in the last decade from the networking of MySpace to the then upstart Facebook, with its youthful base. Despite the near shock of the valuation price, Facebook is undervalued at $50 billion. The massive “country” called Facebook with well more that 500 million subscribers, is well positioned for an IPO, with Goldman now in line to handle the deal. The maturation of Facebook from its early days has triumphed the financial growth of social media but more importantly for these purposes signalled the delivery of information, including marketing and news. With technological improvements and design changes to Facebook and heavyweight upstart Twitter, connectivity with clients has made the medium the first route for expeditious contact with the marketplace, the crystal palace of Marshall McLuhan’s Global Village where the medium is the message.

Prepared by J. Davies
©Helix World Media, 2010.
All rights reserved

While Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg attempted to defend the company’s privacy practices in an open editorial in the Washington Post, it lacked clarity in understanding the problem for the general user as well as long-term concerns for business.

Though Mr. Zuckerberg noted in a well-crafted statement the social media titan had “missed the mark” with its privacy controls and will be implementing changes to rectify the problem, it comes up far short in understanding the broader implications. Facebook, as he noted, “has evolved from a simple dorm-room project to a global social network connecting millions of people” and to control the flow of personal information might be impossible with commercial traffic.

Facebook, like the former giant of social media, Myspace, now relegated to being a punch line, has grown because of the super connectivity and the web of contacts with like interests. To pull those or at least place roadblocks on the network, starts the deck tumbling downward as it slowly dilutes the affiliations and ultimately business dealings are the coldest of cold calls.

In light of this recent turmoil and given the company is intended on a mega IPO within the next eighteen months, the company will “add privacy controls that are much simpler to use,” Mr. Zuckerberg claimed. While there is still a broad jump between statement and fact as the company say’s it will allow users to turn off third-party services, it quickly has the selling feature of sending out a bulletin on Myspace.  With the latter, it simply does not work and is merely an automated release that the overwhelming majority will ignore.

Regular users have seen this as since the halcyon days of 2005 to the now open door policy, the lack of privacy has gradually eroded the true connectivity to consumer. As the company chipped away at its privacy settings and saw a massive demographics shift it lacked a “cutting edge” and the organic relationship to user or for business, the consumer dissipated. With this lack of privacy, the ability to reach your consumer, without them feeling like they are under the looking glass is impossible, yet with it, new releases have the allure of a flyer at your doorway.

Though the jury is out on whether the company can rebuild its reputation with respects to privacy, there are significant questions ahead for business users. It must find a way to recapture its youthful exuberance that “Tumblr” exudes and the free flow of information the “Twitter” provides.

Yet on the broader horizon lays the message that business entities need to create their own self-sustaining campaign that invigorates customers to not simply enjoy the brand but become the brand. By creating a sense of a digital dialogue, the company not only allows its consumer to feel they are shaping its future but showing loyalty to the needs of core clientele. That reciprocal function sits at the root of a positive social media campaign.

Prepared by J. Davies
©Helix World Media, 2010.
All rights reserved

As the media has went from a modest simmer to near complete boiling over of Facebook’s change of privacy, founder Mark Zuckerberg is facing a sharp pendulum of public mistrust, a failure to recognize what made it successful and an aging corporate vision.

The success of the company, built upon the template provided from the original form from the Phillips Exeter Academy yearbook, explicitly tapped into a youth market but from the subtle twist of the present day decorum. Key to its growth was a freshness that represented a youthful coming of age in 2005 but in many way’s, or at least it appears as such in hindsight, it was simply by accident. It was “here”, “now” and not your parent’s dowdy yearbook with the requisite photos of band and a pimply faced world but was uniquely successful because its content was inherently by its readership.

Facebook’s success came via endless strains of interoperability the connected its users but with an honest edge that was contingent upon privacy. Though it seems impossible to believe now, the site once had a “pulse”, which drew you into the allure of the “right now”. Those halcyon days are long gone as the portal has either forgotten its youth or simply aged from the corporate top down.

The gavel has not sounded yet on Facebook but far off in the distance the gallows are under construction. The youthful dalliances that turned Facebook into vibrant source has shifted to the polar opposite, as the fastest growing demographic is women over the age of fifty-five and the site rarely edges towards key market information, much less the sales close. Though the company is quick to point out that active users are surging, the backlash over lowering privacy is creating a storm of deactivation but equally a testament to its changing feel. The issue of deactivation and even privacy is a debatable point on a company ready to launch an IPO in the next eighteen months with a value estimated to be US $11 billion but what is a problem is its usefulness, its connection to the youth and recognition of growing trends.

In an era where information moves fast and businesses hit the “tipping point” in a blink, Facebook is looking very much like a company that grew in its youth but is now weighed down with age and a burgeoning waist-line, complete with old brown shoes. The once powerful informational stream of the 18-24 market is a faint heartbeat and replaced by agricultural daydreamers and applications with a debatable flow through to a business bottom line. The company’s engineers may be ushering in a series of changes to features but their connection to the youth seems long gone. Mirroring the errors of MySpace, where the endless spam of bot-driven sites made personal walls and bulletins useless, Facebook is nearing a point of return if does not regain its youth, it will become a very modest vehicle for savvy businesses.

This should come as no surprise because like all businesses they must maintain a timeliness and exist within the knowledge of the present day market and forward thinking. With one glance at the iPad and the variety of competitive tablets, along with assorted applications, it should be clear that the shot across the bow has been made. Someone has recognized trends and along with making them, staying neck and neck with a vision of tomorrow, today.

Prepared by J. Davies
©Helix World Media, 2010.
All rights reserved