I have been espousing the message of change, especially when it comes to the adoption and integration of Social and Digital Media for Professionals and Business, for a long time, but I have a different story to tell you now.
I’m done trying to convince you; I’m going to follow my own advice and focus on speaking from my heart and telling you what I know.
The truth is, you are losing your trustability. Inaction and a lack of foresight for what is to come have shifted the game.
You see, the Social Media boat has already sailed and you are likely already living and breathing that changing reality. However, that doesn’t mean you actually know what to do to integrate Social and Digital Media into your career or business, it just means you simply sense the impending change.
Many of you are hiring marketing agencies, recruiting internal personnel or experimenting on your own. However sadly, many of you have the wrong ideas, fueled by the misconceptions that conventional marketing has brought to the table.
The future is NOT about finding new, more leveraged ways to ‘pitch’, coerce and convince. Content Marketing in the conventional sense is just about spamming the world for your own agenda.
No … the real change that Social and Digital Media has brought is human interconnection.
(You also need to know that technology and leveraged systems are going to make more than 50% of the skilled jobs in our society redundant over the next decade or so.)
Through the Industrial Revolution, we created a focus on the commoditization and packaging of human value. Now technology (and in the short term, offshoring) is set to destroy the illusion that the Industrial Age and then the Knowledge Age provided us.
I say illusion because the greatest human value has never been about skills or knowledge.
The greatest value that one human can offer to another can never be commoditized. It can never be delivered by a machine or piece of software.
Technology does not consume value, it creates it. Only humans consume value and only humans can provide humans with the greatest value of all. That means they can never be redundant from the equation.
When it comes down to it, what we all value the most is never about material possessions or assets – not unless we are lying to each other and ourselves. You see what we all value the most, is our connection and interrelationship with others.
We are about to enter a radical and extreme period of the new ‘haves and have-nots’. I know it in my bones and my very DNA.
You see, your ability to create and scale human connection is the future of your value.
Authenticity is the future, ‘pitch’ is the past.
Your ability to manifest Trust + Reach + Influence at scale will determine whether you are a ‘have’ or ‘have-not’. You cannot do it without Authenticity, without self-awareness, and you cannot do it without an understanding and embracing of connected networks.
Put away everything else you are working on or think is important.
Ask yourself, ‘Who am I?’ and more importantly …
‘How can I be myself at scale?’
Baz Gardner
Baz Gardner is a Social Business evangelist, business authenticity advocate, System Buster, Entrepreneur and Founder of The Social Adviser.