The longer ("Extended mix") of the piece I wrote for Seth Godin's ebook - "What Matters Now"

There are thousands (probably hundreds of thousands) of businesses making many millions a year in profits that have still never heard of twitter, a blog or facebook. Are they all wrong? Have they missed out or is the joke really on us? They go about doing business through personal relationships, by delivering great customer service and it is working for them. Big time. They are more successful, by any measure, than most of those spending hours pontificating about how you will lose if you miss out on social media and the latest wave. They are doing business. Not writing about it. Doing it.

They missed out on the last dot com bubble and bust. Maybe they will miss out on the next one. Are we so sure they are wrong?

Ironically, the online world is enthralled with the TV series Mad Men. It provides a captivating window back to when work was social in that old face to face way. Work looked sexy back then because it was. No bicycles in the office, no Foosball tables and empires were built without so much as a single tweet. Advertising is broken!... we all like to cheer. But is it broken because we are all too busy to be "interrupted" by it? And is that good? Or, just as it always has been, do we tune out bad advertising and, because good ads are so rarely engaging, we move on. I don't remember loving every commercial growing up but I can tell you I remember a truck load more of those jingles than anything I could remember in the past 10-15 years.

I am continually amazed by the number of people on Twitter, the sheer number of blogs that now exist and the growth of people (and brands) on Facebook. But I also am amazed by how so many of of us are spending our time. The slaves we have become to our mobile devices and the glow of our screens. It used to be much more simple and, somewhere, simple turned into slow. It's not. Simple works. Always has and always will. And yet we strive to make it harder for ourselves. We worry about twitter followers, blog subscribers and getting "Dugg." Does it make us a dime? Really? Does it help us make a dent in the universe? For a very few, maybe it does and that makes us all chase after that small glimmer of gold. But for most of us it has put our heads in the digital sand. Is it possible that we are so busy managing our "friends" that the power of real friends is fading away? Does anybody pick up the phone anymore?

What would happen if you unplugged back to 2000? Just simple email that you dialed in to check a few times a day and a phone that tethered you to a chair for a while.

Why are we sending emails and direct messages to see when a good time to call might be? When did picking up the phone to quickly resolve an issue become inefficient?

For the person with 368,000 Twitter friends I ask, how connected to people do you truly feel?

I love the idea of all of these tools and am amazed at their possibilities. But I wonder how many are truly getting something more positive out of it than the alternative.

Are they actually improving interactions with brands or, as it always has, does your experience with a brand come down to how great or not great the person you had to call when something went wrong was in solving your problem? Layer on as much technology and social media icing as you want, for any brand, YOU are the product! My new iPod may be shiny but, if the Apple Genius is a jerk, then I am not liking the brand. My Audi salesman acted like a jerk when I decided to not lease a new Audi this time around. It changed the way I think about Audi in a small but important way. Social media cannot change that fact.

What happens to what it feels like to be part of a business that is doing something truly great if we are spending more time protecting our personal brand? What did business do to all of us that made building your personal brand more important than doing something great together?

The echo chamber we are building is getting larger and louder. More megaphones does not equal a better dialogue.

We are busier than ever before doing more disconnected activities than ever before. Multi-tasking has become a badge of honor. I want to know why.

We walk the streets with our heads down staring into 3 inch screens while the world whisks by doing the same. And yet we are convinced we are more connected to each other than ever before.

Don't get me wrong, what we can do now is nothing short of spectacular. And yet the ability to generate real wonder and awe is fleeting. We no longer care how an airplane can fly us around the globe, we grouse about the food or the fact that you cannot check your email at 37,000 feet and 580 miles per hour. We rage against a short Twitter outage when it is a service that we get for free but shrug our shoulders and wait it out quietly when our paid electricity gets knocked out by a storm. When did we become so entitled to that which we don't value enough to even pay for?

I don't have all the answers to these questions but I find myself thinking about them more and more. In between tweets, blog posts and facebook updates.

There is a lot of talk about businesses discovering their “story.” What I don’t hear much about is how to decipher your true story from your false story.

When I say “false story,” I am talking about the lies and rationalizations we tell ourselves to prove ourselves right or wrong about things that happen to us in life. That false story is really the filter that we run every experience through to fit into the world as we want to see it. This story is the result of years of old and often incorrect thinking which simply serve to protect us from some painful truth.

Businesses are prone to false stories too. How could they not? Businesses are run by and comprised of a whole bunch of people that each has his or her own set of these false stories. A business’s false story might be comprised of reasons why they won or lost a client, reasons why they are not making enough profit, reasons why their competitors stole that client away, how the customers are all a pain in the neck, are never happy, etc, etc.

All Stories. False ones.

If we are honest with ourselves, perhaps in a private moment, we might recognize such stories as the excuses they often are.

If your competitors were really as bumbling and awful as you are convinced they are, how is it that they are not only still in business, but are competing with you so well? If you were really right about your story, you would have more business than you could handle.

What if you told yourself that you lost a piece of business because some of your competitors, right now, really are better than you? What if you admitted to yourself that you really didn’t pay proper attention to the personalized service you touted during the sales process? Would that be so bad? You wouldn’t have to close your doors or fire the staff. But you would have the chance to find a different way. Owning up to your false story allows you to find your true story.
Only your true story provides a solid jumping off point to take aggressive action and effect lasting change.

Practice drill: Lose your story, find your truth

Think of the last three to five clients you lost or the last few prospects that chose your competitor over you. Write down the reasons you told yourself and/or everyone else why you lost. Look for your false story.

Now write down what the truth could be about each situation.
See how much easier it is to see how to take action from the truth list? The false list lets you sit idly by ranting about how unfair business is. A waste of time and opportunity.
Now write down the first action you can take. Turn those actions into initiatives in your business and real changes will occur in the culture and feel of your company. Quickly.