I’ve been looking at what’s going on with internet commerce these days and how folks are dealing with the explosion of websites, blogs and users. I’ve come to realize that for many practical reasons the cost of SEO (search engine optimization) has put it out of reach for many small businesses. It’s an overstatement to say that SEO is dead, but it is definitely dead as far as most small businesses are concerned. The good news is, we don’t need to do more than the basics SEO work to thrive because internet marketing has changed.

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I came across a recent article from a person who is a sales trainer (no names to avoid embarrassments and conflicts) and who seemed to have suddenly awoken to discover that consumers and businesses are no longer buying the way they used to buy. “Gosh,” I thought, “where the heck have you been?” On the other hand, the comments made the point that I and others have been making for over a year now – maybe close to two years, namely that things have changed and they aren’t coming back.

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I admit to feeling inadequate. It seems as though I’m supposed to be able to multi-task, according to what I’m told by many people and according to what I observe others doing. But I can’t really. I try sometimes, but it just doesn’t work for me. I am not interested in “chatting” if I’m watching a television show (I rarely watch TV, it’s got to be something of immediate interest to me). I get annoyed if I’m deep in the middle of a spreadsheet, writing a blog post or wrestling a PC problem to the ground and the phone rings. I can’t read and also listen to music or radio or podcast.

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For lots of reasons, I love my work. One of the reasons is that I get to address a wide variety of challenges in a wide variety of companies and industries. Yet, while the details and personalities are different, many of the issues boil down to being pretty much the same. This week, I was revisiting the issue of an executive totally frustrated with business forecasting. He was “losing sleep” over the feeling of helplessness at missing a forecast through no fault of his organization. It was causing major stress in his life.

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Toyota apparently felt they had done well by convincing the NTSA to limit the recall investigation. Oops. It’s backfired. Now the money they saved is going to be lost and more. The banking industry seems oblivious to the disdain of the consuming customers and is already finding “sneaky” ways to charge higher interest. They are also fighting Credit Union requests to allow the Credit Unions to lend a higher portion of their assets to small businesses. They never learn.

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In part 1 of this series on Social Media Marketing I gave a brief overview of what seems to be going on in this young medium. In part 2 of this series, I walked through some of the tools that I’ve found to help me with managing the task of getting involved in Social Networking sites. Next, I’d like to share with you some of the additional tools I’ve found to help me manage the time involved. As I mentioned, I’m doing all this from the experience of a Novice. It won’t take you long to zoom past me once you get started.

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I’m sure it’s obvious from my last post on this topic, that I am definitely NOT and expert in Social Media Marketing. I am only interested in passing along what I’ve found so far. Also in that post, I mentioned I’d share some tools to help with Social Media. There are “tons” of them and they are growing everyday. So this post is not comprehensive by any stretch of the imagination. I’m sure that some of you will already find other tools as or more useful. My intention is to share with you what I’ve found so far and leave any “improvements” for future posts. After all, that’s what this is all about, right? Sharing useful information.

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I’ve found myself right at the event horizon of the black hole known as Social Media. I’m holding in a stable orbit at a safe distance, but I know it wouldn’t take much for me to drop in and you’ll never hear from me again. [Okay. Stop cheering.] I’ve noticed a few friends zooming by me and I don’t think they’ll escape. Other friends are so far away that they have no hope of keeping up with the rest of what’s going on. It occurs to me that either situation, too far away from Social Media or too deep in the black hole, you loose.

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Finding people is a consistent problem we encounter just about every time we ask CEOs or key executives what their biggest issue is when it comes to hiring. If it isn’t in the top three it is always in the top five.

Yet when you ask them what their process is to find top talent most reply in the same way, “We run ads” or “We post it internally.” That is the way 80% of all companies go about finding people.

Below are three real life examples of alternative ways of finding people.

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I’ve been thinking about the Toyota “sudden acceleration” problem. Back in 1984 Charles Perrow published a book entitled “Normal Accidents: Living With High Risk Technologies” (ISBN 0-691-00412-9). Few lay people seem to understand the theory. A system accident is an “unanticipated interaction of multiple failures”[1] in a complex system. This complexity can either be technological or organizational, and often has elements of both. In today’s world, we are seeing complexity increase exponentially: from the cars we drive to the devices we use to listen to music or view video, and to the way we gather information and news, our world has become incredibly complex. That complexity in itself creates more complexity for us.

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