POWER OF FREE! #1: Intelligent Content Marketing in the Connection Economy: Connections & Tribes

Because of the advent of the Internet, and the increasing interconnection of everything that we do to that internet. All the ways that we’ve done things historically are coming to an end. Everything that we’ve done historically, has just been the modern evolutionary reality of the industrial economy getting more and more sophisticated. But the moment that we introduce connection economy into that mix, all of this starts to fall into obsolescence.

So it used to be before the Industrial Revolution. We lived in an agrarian society. We came off the fields, and we came into the marketplace to trade our goods. To gossip, to have relationships with people. It used to be that as humans, we were able to have relationships in a very limited way around the marketplace within a village and our neighbours and our family. When the Industrial Revolution came along, all of that ended. All these people started to go into the means of production, the factories. This is how schools were invented.

Connection economy model

Because, you know, schools were designed to produce human beings at a certain intellect to be able to go and sit or stand in a place for eight or nine hours a day without a break, doing the same thing over and over again. Yeah, so the whole industrial economy model is sputtering, to an end. Because as we’ve introduced the connections into this, the whole facet of relationships now comes back into play. This is why social media is so alluring for the human psyche because it gives us an opportunity to connect.

As a result of that, and because of the evolutionary imperative, you have to start to think that the business that you’re going to have is going to be projected onto the internet, in such a way as to accord with the realities of how you would hope to have relationships with the people who are interested in you. So because the industrial era is ending, we’re now in the realm of connection economy.

Tribes

Now, Seth Godin wrote a book called Tribes. What he says is that in a connection, dynamic like we have, there will always be somebody who is good at one thing. Everybody else that’s also good at that or interested in that will, by virtue of the technology, find you because it’s a community of interest. So if you are in a position to use your expertise, you can demonstrate your expertise to people within your community of interest. That community of interest will begin to organize itself around you naturally because it’s the merging of the human evolutionary perspective and the realities of how technology and connections enable all of this to happen.

So what has happened in my business, inadvertently? I only learned this after the fact, when Seth Godin told me about it. In his book. I built a tribe, because everybody in Hong Kong, that’s a foreign national, invariably, has to think about immigration for at least the first seven years of their lives here. So that affects almost every foreign national in this town to one degree or another. Now, I always knew that that was the reality of the marketplace. But what I didn’t understand at the time that I was building my business was the reality of tribes. I put myself at the centre of that community because there’s effectively nothing else comparable in that niche.

Connection economy revolution

That marketplace such as you can call it begins to organize itself, in this instance around me. So what you have here is not marketing because that belongs to the industrial economy. Marketing is where you make stuff, and then you go and find people to buy it. Right. But, you know, what you really should be doing is you should be giving everything away that people need and then recognize that what they’re ultimately getting from you is the one thing that they can’t get anywhere else. It’s not a matter of just, you know, holding something back.

It’s a matter of truly understanding what your proposition is, and being able to position yourself with your proposition, specifically into the intellectual mindset that you’re dealing with. So, the connection revolution is what it’s all about. So I asked you at the beginning, what about the opportunities of you still being in business two years from now?

From my experience, all you need to do is to understand what your expertise is. What your proposition is. And understand that you can do it better than everybody else. Get there before everybody else, and the tribe will organize itself around you.

THE REST OF THE SERIES

Getting Started
Laying Down Your Platform
Getting Smart
The Evolution
Connections & Tribes
Generosity As Strategy
Being Better Than Others
Publishing is the Key to Success

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