Guest blog: Paul Buvarp -It's not what, but when

If you could travel back 500 years in time, what would you bring along? Me, I'd go down to my local grocery store and buy all the pepper they could give me. It was because of spices like pepper that Christopher Columbus and other explorers began searching for a swift route to India. Pepper accounted for nearly 70% of the entire spice trade at this time and was extremely valuable. It has been estimated that the cost of pepper where it was picked (the Spice Islands) was sixty thousand times less than where it was sold (mainly Western Europe). Think about that the next time you grab an extra packet of black pepper from McDonalds.

Five hundred years is a long time, you may say. And I'd have to agree with you. But if we look back just 150 years ago, one of the most valuable things you could bring along on your trip through spacetime would be ice. Ice, of course, was used to preserve and store food, and the American market in the middle of the 1800s, was immense. New York City, Brooklyn, Boston and Philadelphia together consumed over two million tons of ice a year. The man behind the ice business, Frederic Tudor, eventually became very rich, just from the idea of shipping ice to markets where it was needed.

The point of these exercises is to understand that expensive things today may be mind-numbingly cheap tomorrow, and that essentially value is a function of time. Rich people, three hundred years ago, used to blacken their teeth, so as to show they could afford to buy a lot of sugar. Today, sugar is the main component of our cheapest foodstuffs. Times change, and it is the skill of an entrepreneur to foresee and gamble on these changes.

The Business Consequences of the Way We Connect

Everyone and everything is connecting, but is the trend of connection really significant for the way we will do business in the future?

Connecting seems to be the common denominator in just about everything lately. We are connecting on Facebook, Twitter, or Foursquare; the Na'vi people in Avatar the movie are transferring electrochemical signals such as thoughts and memories to the trees, plants, and other creatures on their planet; today many of us are working in network organizations; you can store your data on a network drive; there is public Wifi; more than 4 billion mobile phones; we have webservice accounts for just about anything; we connect to the right information when we need it; we scan bar codes with our phones; share pictures instantly; and connect to other people’s ideas and preferences, so that we can keep our own ones fresh and fertile.

So we are connecting ourselves to our tools, to each other, to other tools and to our global brain, the world wide web. Great! But isn’t this just an augmentation of what humans have been doing for centuries? Have we not always been connecting things, only perhaps limited by our technological capabilities? What makes it different today?

I believe there are at least four important reasons why the way we are connecting today is significantly different. These four aspects of the way we are connecting now are characteristic of the time we live in, which is a time of great paradigm shift. Though, shifting paradigms are not the topic of this post, the business insights that the way we connect can give us are important pointers in a time of great change and uncertainty.

1. First of all, the initiative to connect is increasingly at an individual level. Emerging networks and organizations are less hierarchical and less centralized than before. Attempts to centralize power and control are subject to protest. Consider Facebook’s privacy issues this year. More people than ever before are more empowered to connect to whom- en what- ever they wish. Thus all types of decisions and initiatives are increasingly decentralized. Consider the growing popularity of home solar panels: they represent the way we connect to energy.
Business insights: Strategic focus, modular products and services, and ‘do-it-your-self’ as a proposition are all important business concepts to investigate.

2. If you were to visualize these decentralized connections, or rather networks, the way they look will be increasingly organic in structure, rather than orchestrated and systematic. They resemble a starry night with lines drawn between countless stars. And as we know, stars are born, they live divers lives, they eventually die, and there are infinite amounts of them. This means that complexity and uncertainty are on the increase. There is almost no-one today who claims to understand how it all works and relates to each other.
Business insights: In an uncontrolable and networked world, agility, intuition and spontaneity will become more and more useful traits for your business and her employees. Notice how they are closely related to creativity.

3. As you may expect in a less centralized world, we are more equal in the way we connect and are thus becoming more equal on many levels; but not identical. So: more equal, and more diverse at the same time. In fact diversity is one of the great drivers of connection. Equality has to do with the things and people we have access to, while diversity refers to the increasing mix of cultures, genetic backgrounds, and interests at the places we meet (virtual or IRL). On one hand, in a more equal world, this means that markets are getting bigger. But, on the other, in a divers and less segmented world, it becomes more difficult to pin-point your target audience.
Business insights: Do not painstakingly try to profile your customer, rather profile (emerging) desires and needs.

4. We have seen that the way we connect has also led to greater uncertainty. Well, let me add one more: increasingly often, connections we make will be about potential and not so much about intention. Linkedin invites are accepted because you never know whether you may do business with him or her someday in the future. You become a fan of a group because you have a brief moment of liking. You bookmark webpages just-in-case. In fact many people have stopped connecting in the definite sense all together, because we can connect, if we need to, in less than a few strokes of the keyboard. A click of the mouse and Google connects you to the right information, many times more accurately tomorrow than today. An app on your phone tells you what you need to know about the festival you are visiting the moment you ask for it, or maybe even before you felt the need. Tomorrow, being valuable to others is not based on your ability to connect, but rather on the uniqueness and depth of what you have to offer.
Business insights: Your Facebook fans aren’t going to help your brand unless you become a resource to them. So help them connect to a richer and more purposeful life.

Maarten-Bas Backer is a futurist and business developer - www.basbacker.com

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) basics for all levels of entrepreneurs

The World Wide Web is a very large and complex system. Trying to figure out the best ways to market your products or services (locally or internationally) online can be a very hard task when you’re just starting out. The goal is to dominate each key word term or key word phrase that deals with your niche, seems easy enough right? Not at all…

With search engines changing their algorithms constantly its hard to know what new seo trend is the best to help your Page Rank (PR). Consequently if you chose the wrong trends to help boost page rank you can inadvertently sabotage your seo initiatives. Search engine directories have started to crack down on Black Hat seo tricks and penalizes websites by either, dropping their rankings, or worse, banning the site from their directory.

So how can we make sure we’re doing the right things to gain better page rank? Or how can we be sure that our initiatives won’t hurt us in the long run? By sticking with seo basics, you will be able to focus your time and energy in other areas of your business and not have to worry about being penalized from search engine directories.

SEO Basics

• When developing your website make sure each page has its own (title, meta, data) descriptions consistent with the information that can be found on that particular page. If your website has multiple pages make sure each page has its own separate title, meta, and data descriptions.

• Directory submissions should only be made once your website is fully optimized for the search engines. When you are ready to submit your link (URL) to a directory, first target the larger well known directories such as Google, Yahoo, Dmoz etc. The next step would be targeting specific country directories, or niche driven directories. Some directories ask for a fee, and others are free, so do your research to find the best, or cost effective placement.

• Building links within your niche is a very powerful way to boost page rank. There are many ways this can be done. You can find other websites within your niche and ask if they would like to share links, or ask them if they have a links page that you can submit to. Next, you can seek out blogs that speak about your particular area of business, and comment on the topic that is being discussed (make sure your comment doesn’t come across as a sales pitch, make it more relevant to the topic at hand). You can gain two links back to your website through this method, once within the authors signature that must be filled out before posting, and the other could be coded within the body of your message to the topic. Make sure you research if the blog is a DoFollow blog, this way when search engine crawlers come to crawl that page, your links will be recognized.

Benito Vazquez is the founder of MyWeddingIsOver.com

On Copyright and Doing What You Love

Intellectual property has been the driving force behind technological and entrepreneurial advancement since the dawn of the industrial revolution. In response to immaterial, purely conceptual valuables, nations all over the world quickly built defences for these kinds of possessions. Knowledge and genius became a commodity, one that became harder and harder to steal.

Such is the nature of law development: continual reaction to the needs of the modern age. We may believe that at this point in time, the law system nears fulfilment, a point at which the protection for businesses and individuals will be watertight, comprehensive, and most of all complete, but this would be self-delusional. One hundred years ago, people probably believed the same thing and could not imagine what developments lay ahead and what sort of legal protection they might require. But the motor-car became faster and headier, the radio bloomed and gave way to the television, airplanes conquered the skies, et cetera. All of these developments demanded new systems of protection, whether it was to protect pedestrians, or decide what the public could see on the TV, or regulating the aviation business.

We may believe the end of copyright in an age of cerebral theft amounts to the death of intellectual property. But it is the same invisible leap to the superlative 'end of ends' that infests this prognosis, as grips the prophets of the End of the World. The missing words constitute the tail: "the end of the world as we know it".

Copyright and intellectual property will not one day disappear. Entrepreneurs of all people understand and appreciate the value of doing what you love and doing it for the betterment of society. Those who proclaim that the death of copyright (and with it, the creative spark, the entrepreneurial spirit) draws near, fail to recognise how the Renaissance took power away from the Church but opened a whole new class of artists and geniuses, how the French Revolution gutted the aristocracy but enabled much more stable and profitable forms of government, and how the industrial revolution not only stripped the skilled worker of value, but also grew the global economy in unfathomable leaps.

The end of copyright is not the death of intellectual property. The end of copyright is the end of intellectual property as we know it. The end of copyright marks not only a huge socialization of artistry, but also gives rise to a much expanded horizon of big thinkers sharing what they know because they are doing what they love, and doing it for the betterment of society.

Social Media Marketing - would you or your brand benefit?

Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, flickr, Killerstartups, and countless others share one thing in common…they are dominating the Internet! What does this mean for traditional advertising? You might need to rethink your marketing budgets, while redeveloping your marketing mix to include social media as a larger portion of your marketing initiatives.

Commercial print advertising has come a long way since 1704, and we can all agree that although it would be nice to purchase a spot ad on a major network for $4.00 as Bulova did some 49 years ago, those days are long gone.

But as we reflect on the past to see just how much the marketing and advertising landscape has changed with respect to; cost, vehicles, or methods - one aspect seems to be constant, or at least has stood the test of time… Grass roots!

Prior to the early boom of what is now considered traditional marketing, individuals learned of new products or services through word of mouth. A major set back in those days was the inability to reach a large number of individuals on any given day, thus adding to the delay your message was seen or heard outside of your natural surroundings.

With technology ever changing and new social websites becoming overnight success stories and attracting visitors and registered users in the tens of millions, grass roots marketing has finally become more useful today then ever before. The question now is, will your brand benefit from social media?

The simple answer would be…YES!!! What are you waiting for?

Not only will your traditional marketing budgets be drastically reduced, you now have the potential to reach millions of people with a simple suggestion or even a short response to a discussion, all from a click of a button.

Marketers and brand managers are able to create and generate buzz with very little effort (effectively lowering the cost of traditional CPM), and it doesn’t look like there will be a plateau anytime soon.

However, it must be noted, - you must take great measures to make sure your social media presence is not viewed as “Spam”. Research the best areas where your brand can have a positive impact on its viewers, and make sure you engage others as individuals not as customers or clients.

Social media marketing has reintroduced grassroots in a way that will increase brand awareness exponentially. Thus allowing us as entrepreneurs, the ability to create campaigns that can become viral to the point of reaching more then your intended audience.

Benito Vazquez is the founder of MyWeddingIsOver.com