Here’s some of what I pointed out in my presentation.

Set Up Shop – if you’re an independent business and you’re blogging to make content marketing for your business, be sure you’ve built “how to do business with me” into your site. Do you have a “work with me” page? Do you have a “contact me” page? Are you putting out obvious calls to action? Take it from blogging about what you know is cool into blogging about ways to help the customers you hope to attract.

Think Like a Business – if you’re in this for business, always ask yourself how this work ties to more sales (and if you’re not trying to make money, think of “sale” as whatever you hope to convert. Hint: it’s not “more audience.”). If you’re just writing to write, shooting video to get it up there, tweeting because people said you should, rethink all that. Decide what’s going to ring your register and work on that. Use this as marketing if you want, but be sure to have a call to action, then, so that it’s really marketing and not just words.

Be a Consistent Brand – make sure that everything coming out of you syncs with your brand. It’s okay to talk business and personal (without the personal touch, you’ll miss some of the beauty of the human web), but make sure all that you’re doing is as consistent as possible. If you’re positioning yourself as a luxury expert, do you have all kinds of junk ads on your site? If you’re saying that you’re into relationships and quality human contact, are you spamming people with a newsletter they didn’t opt into? If you have other people working with you, are they representing the feel you’re hoping to portray with the EXPERIENCE of working with you?

Extend Your Platform – get beyond the blog. I don’t mean to just tweet, either. Get out into physical space and start meeting people from time to time. Don’t go to social media events, only. Go to the events where clients are, instead of the events where the cool kids hang out. Move your voice into as many places as you can. Consider video. Write speeches and things you’d love to say on a stage on your blog (it’s how I got my start speaking professionally).

Build Small Powerful Networks – go beyond using social media tools just to chat and keep up. Stop playing Farmville and start building networks of people you feel are important, energizing, uplifting, and potentially useful to your future business plans. Get into collaborative efforts with people who share your thoughts. There are lots of people going solo when they could team up and have even more power from the small organization. Don’t overthink this one. Just build networks that extend beyond having a “groups” tab in Tweetdeck.

Equip Your Customers – instead of writing about your stuff, write about your customers. Give them ideas on how they can improve their world, and for a REAL strong effect, don’t even mention your product every post. Your customers need much more than your product to succeed. How else can you equip them? Giving people useful information, useful things, a step up on the world is a powerful way to build new relationships and deliver potential sales.

Focus on the Relationship – to me, the new unit of business should be relationships. You get more fruit from an apple tree if you nurture it and pick apples when it’s ripe, instead of uprooting the tree and forcefully shaking the apples into your barrel. It takes a bit longer, but you’re a farmer and a steward, not a machinist. (This is a great part of why I feel many businesses failed over the last two years)

Make Trust a Must – If you’re in this for the long haul, work to earn trust. People want to trust you. It’s a matter of giving them signs of trust, including being there, being consistent, being everywhere they need you to be, and being authentic to your internal and external needs. People aren’t stupid. They need to feel your conviction and your support all the way throughout the experience with you.

Beyond that, I’ll save the rest for another post.

Does this make sense? Are you ready to get to work? Can you see what should come next from this?

photo credit saad.akhtar

(can’t see it? Click here to watch it.)

I’m issuing a call to arms, a call to action. If you’re still on the fence, get in the game. What can YOU do to help others? What will YOU do with all this stuff you’ve learned? Help me by going out and finding the people around you who could use your help. Share what you know with each other. Form PodCamps and educate each other, and then get out there and embed in the important stuff that needs doing.

What say you?

I thought about the inanity of waking up at 5:45AM after going to bed around 12:45AM and not really falling asleep until closer to 3AM. I thought about what it means to me to be working so hard. I thought about WHY I’m working so hard. Somewhere in my head, I thought about every time in the last few months where someone said I was an overnight success or “but you’re Chris Brogan” and how silly that is when you realize all that I’ve been through and all that it took me to get there. Here’s a quick video:

(click here if you don’t see it>.)

We should talk about this. What are YOU doing to succeed? What would you tell the people who say that you make it look easy? Let’s talk about your overnight success, shall we?

Relationships Matter

Human business resets the core building block from “customer” to “relationship.” We accept that “relationship” includes non-customers, prospects, customers, customers who are leaving, former customers, potential reclaimed customers (to name a few).

Business Structures Matter

Human business recognizes that businesses and their practices are porous and more like fabric than like a machine. We accept that good ideas come from outside the company, too. We accept that our employees and other relationships have lives outside the company, and that our business is actually a bunch of clusters that form, dissolve, and form again, instead of some kind of rigid tree structure.

Small Powerful Networks Matter

The social web gives us a new dialtone, a new TV station, a new newspaper, a new magazine, and we all have one. We are all voices waiting to be heard, and all businesses must now think about a customer base that broadcasts, that networks, that voices its opinions loudly, in the open, and with rapid-paced interactions between loosely-joined clusters of like-minded types.

Gatejumping Matters

Human business doesn’t have to follow the traditions that came before it. The social web amplifies different aspects of these businesses. There are different centers of power. In a world where we know Paula Berg from Southwest Airlines, Frank Eliason from Comcast, Jenny Cisney from Kodak, but not the senior team, we have a new kind of power, we have a new hierarchy, a new kind of relationship-centric communications method.

Alternative Economies Matter

These tools help us with awareness, reputation, and trust: currencies that were in such low demand before, but that now seem to be more important than ever. We can buy spots on TV, but no one notices. We can pay for shiny clothes, but we can’t buy a reputation. Trust isn’t something that one picks up at the store. And yet, we can transact a lot of exchanges that use those three things as part of the payment mechanism.

Further Definition

This is not utter chaos. This is a redefinition to better align with organic and social sculptures that make sense to all of us, whether or not we were willing to acknowledge this before. Example: when our old encyclopedias stopped mattering, we wrote our own. Example: when we ask the social web for a hotel, the social web answered back.

This is not a new marketing channel. This is not a new technology. This is not a movement.

It’s more. And yet, it’s so easily misappropriated and malformed and co-opted that it could just as easily be brushed aside. This isn’t the battle of who “gets it” and who doesn’t. It’s the battle to shape these new pathways with the help of these new tools and methods, before some other rigid structure pushes itself in place.

Or, it’s just a bunch of feel-good nobodies tweeting and facebooking.

You say?

Photo credit kalandrakas

I never once asked for permission. I never once worried that someone else had done it or that someone had done it differently. Most times, it never dawned on me to think about those things.

No one told Richard Branson he couldn’t reinvent air travel, or space travel, or record stores, or dozens of other business categories. No one ever told Jeff Pulver he couldn’t rethink how we communicate via voice. And when people do choose to tell you that something can’t be done, or that you’ll never succeed, don’t listen. Everything worth doing seems impossible. To other people. To you? It’s what comes next.

Rethink everything. Do it all the time. Tom Peters taught me that (with Re-Imagine!).

If you don’t reimagine, if you don’t reinvent, if you don’t start something because you know it’ll work, where will you be? When will you do it?

There are no locks, no gates. Now what?

Photo credit, Darwin Bell

First, Who I Am and Who I Am Not

• I am human. I most certainly conduct myself like one.
• I am a blogger. I write about what captures my attention.
• I am a business man. I run a company of marketers and business communicators.
• I am a marketer. I promote my clients, and help them gain more business.
• I am an author. I write books about things I feel are helpful.
• I am a father. I have two loving children I enjoy playing with.
• I am a husband. I have a supportive wife (who made the collage in this post).
• I am a speculator/future-thinker. I love thinking about what’s next.
• I am a community guy. I love people. I live in that world. I love community.
• I am a friend. I have lots of friends, and often wish I could give each of them more time.
• I am a fan. I love lots of things: hotels, media making, reading, scotch, liquor.
• I am a consumer. I buy and use products all the time. I have opinions.
• I am a publisher. I write a successful and well-ranked blog.
• I am NOT a journalist. Wish I had that training. I’m a reporter at times.
• I am NOT a PR or Marketing person by education. I’m a hack.
• I am NOT ever going to sell out my community for a dollar. (Though I would for $10 million.)

I could go on for a while. You get the picture.

For some reason, people seem to think this is hard to keep straight. When I wrote the list, I didn’t have to think too hard about it. I just wrote down some things that I am and some things that I am not. I believe we know what we are and what we aren’t. I tend to like for my actions to prove what I am and what I am not.

Sometimes, that can get murky. I understand that. In my case, I disclose and report, and comment, and explore when those kinds of moments happen. I jump right in. If I feel I should, I apologize (though I receive many emails telling me that I apologize too much, so I can’t seem to win on that one).

The Future of Human-Shaped Business

Humans are messy and complex. They are non-linear. They don’t think in straight lines. They don’t act in clear-cut ways. They don’t fit into simple slots very easily. Thank the sweet *.deity for all that.

Business, however, tried really hard for many decades to push us into those slots. It still does for most of the world. Here’s the thing: factories aren’t here any more (for the most part). Industrial-age workers aren’t necessary. The entire US school system is built to educate children to take jobs as servants to the factory culture, when what the world needs most right now are entrepreneurial-minded individuals, who understand the importance of execution, and who can form and dissolve business to match their goals and objectives instead of as a means of sustaining the corporate construct.

Social media and social networks are just one signal that things are shifting. If you’re a publisher online, you are often in a shop of one, or two, or less than a dozen. That makes you sales and editorial. (Oh, there went that journalist’s wince.) That’s just one example. Business never was neat. Now, it’s downright frayed and smudgy and organic.

Ahhh, organic. Human.

I am fully and utterly embracing my facets. I make no apologies. Instead, I aim to educate, to build bridges and interfaces, and I intend to inject this human-shaped-business DNA back into the corporate culture until we all come back into alignment between our passions and our vocations, and have companies to fit those shapes.

And My Point?

Call me by whatever label suits you best. I’m making my own game. I’m bringing it to my networks. I’m spreading it with idea handles.

Sound familiar to any of you?