ChangeThis published a manifesto by Seth Godin entitled “Brainwashed: Seven Ways to Reinvent Yourself.”

Take time to read it now. Once again, Seth has hit the nail on the head.

He echoes the same themes we’ve been proclaiming on the Center for Social Leadership: the mini-factory model transforming industrial, bureaucratic, and top-down business, government and society; Hub Mentality™ giving businesses and individuals more power than ever before; how the Fourth Turning is reshaping everything; conveyor-belt education versus Leadership Education; the fact that you have to be a producer (what Godin calls a “linchpin”) to survive in today’s economy; why you should pursue mission over money.

Click here to download and read the e-book now. Here are a few excerpts:

“And so generations of students turned into generations of cogs — factory workers in search of a sinecure. We were brainwashed into fitting in, and then discovered that the economy wanted people who stood out instead.

When exactly were we brainwashed into believing that the best way to earn a living is to have a job?

I think each one of us needs to start with that.”

“The pillars we grew up with (things like General Motors, TV, the postal service, retirement, top down media and commodities) are disappearing and are being replaced with entirely new ways of interacting, making a living and making a difference. Not just for organizations, but for individuals — people like you.”

“It’s like this: we were brainwashed. Brainwashed into believing a set of rules that aren’t true (any more). And because the brainwashing has been so complete, the shifts in our world and new opportunities they open up are easy to see as ways to shore up yesterday’s faltering system.

Please, don’t fall for that. Don’t use the tools of today to support your effort to do yesterday’s job better. This is an opportunity to completely reinvent your role in the system.”

Mashable recently published a great article listing five YouTube channels providing excellent education for small business owners.

Their list of five includes the following:

1. Harvard Business Publishing
2. Google Business
3. U.S. Small Business Administration
4. Robert Scoble
5. Fast Forward

Not only will you learn applicable knowledge for your business, you may discover some ideas to leverage YouTube in your own business.

Check them out!

Here’s the bottom line: The easiest, quickest, and best way to build a following on your blog and generate revenue is to cultivate a permission marketing database.

This means a database of individuals who have given you permission to market to them. You provide value, and in return, they give you their personal information, most importantly their name and email address.

Building a database should be one of the primary goals of your website. A database is a ready-built audience that can be leveraged to generate traffic and revenues — regardless of how much new traffic you’re receiving. Without it, you’ll be dependent on the hamster wheel of constantly driving new traffic to your site.

Your alternatives for creating community include people having to come to your site manually to read new content, and RSS subscribers. The problem with people checking in on your site occasionally is easy to see — they’re forgetful. And the problem with relying upon an RSS feed is that relatively few people are web-savvy enough to use one.

So how do you keep people coming around? How do you keep them engaged? How can you capture an audience of recurring visitors, rather than relying on driving more traffic?

You build a database of information from people who give you permission to stay connected with them.

How To Build a Database

Step #1: Purchase Email Marketing Software

The first thing you need is software. You can either use comprehensive Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, such as InfusionSoft, or basic email marketing software, such as AWeber.

For 99% of bloggers, AWeber gives you everything you need including database management, email marketing with an industry-leading deliverability rate, auto-responders, and website forms.

So start by signing up with AWeber.

Step #2: Create a Free Giveaway

You must give people a reason to give you their personal information, and this takes the form of a free giveaway. These can include e-books, newsletters, white papers, videos, podcasts — any type of e-product that can be delivered automatically over the Internet.

Make your free giveaway(s) substantial. Create genuine value for for your customers.

Step #3: Create Delivery Systems

Using your email marketing software, create web forms for people to sign up to receive your giveaway. Once created, it will generate code, which you copy and paste into your website template. Next, create an auto-responder that delivers your giveaway once people request it.

AWeber has excellent instructions on how to do all of this.

Step #4: Display Your Offer Prominently & Market

Include a direct call to action on your home page inviting people to download your giveaway. Sprinkle calls to action and sign-up forms throughout your site so that visitors can’t miss it — but do this as unobtrusively as possible (depending on your niche). In every place that a sign-up form is displayed, assure them that their personal information is safe with you.

Then, market the heck out of your blog using the strategies and tips I provide in chapter five of The Beginning Blogger’s Bible.

How To Manage Your Database

Warning: Your database is like the proverbial Golden Goose. When managed properly, your database will produce golden eggs interminably. But you’ll kill the goose if you break the following rules:

Rule #1: Never, Ever Share Personal Information

Don’t even think about it. To do so is to compromise your relationship with your subscribers. It’s wrong and stupid. It may bring you short-term gains, but it will erode long-term profitability.

Trust is money — sharing personal information from your database is like flushing money down the toilet. When your customers subscribed, they gave you and you alone permission to market to them.

Rule #2: 75/25

75% of your contact with your database should be designed to create free value for them. Give them tips, insights, and resources without trying to sell them anything. Limit your direct product offers to 25% of your contact with your subscribers.

Rule #3: Strike the Right Contact Balance

Every niche is different, but you must be very careful with the number of times you contact your database — too few contacts and they’ll grow cold, too many and they’ll get turned off and unsubscribe.

Rule #4: No Carry Over

If you start one thing and get a list of subscribers, then start another, unrelated project, don’t carry over your previous subscribers to the new project. You can tell your existing subscribers about what you’re up to, but don’t automatically place them into your new database.

Each project needs its own list of people who have subscribed specifically to that project. Someone who signed up for your health newsletter isn’t an automatic candidate for your e-book on dog training. Build separate databases for each online project.

Ready to create wealth? Look past the gold of profits to cultivate the golden goose of a permission marketing database.

Social Media Explorer recently published an article highlighting the following statistics on social media:

• Time spent on social networking sites increased 277% in 2009.
• Web users are 51% more likely to buy from your brand if they follow you on Facebook
• 60% of web users are more likely to recommend your brand if they follow you on Facebook
• Twitter has served 10 billion Tweets
• Web users spend 6 hours a month with social media
• 18% of all new content found online is found through social media
• 70% of Internet users reported “trusting” consumer opinions posted in social media
• 86% of companies in the largest 100 of the Fortune 500 use social media [PDF]

And if you’re thinking that it’s just young people using social media, check this out.

The demographic with the highest growth rate of using social media from January 2009 to January 2010 was 55-year-olds, with a growth rate of 922.7%. Next up was 35 to 54-year-olds with a growth rate of 328.1%.

In Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Myths that are Destroying Your Prosperity, Garrett Gunderson and I highlight the following study, which is found in Getting Rich Your Own Way by Srully Blotnick:

In 1960, Mr. Blotnick began a study of 1,500 people representing a cross-section of middle-class America. Throughout the twenty-year study, they lost almost a third of participants due to deaths, moves, or other factors.

Of the 1,057 that remained, 83 had become millionaires. When Mr. Blotnick’s team interviewed participants at the beginning of the study, the most widely shared impression they found was that “great wealth can come to you only as a result of doing things you don’t want to do.” They also noted that from the start, most participants assumed that chance would play a decisive role in determining who became wealthy.

They found that the 83 successful people shared five characteristics:

1. They were persistent
2. They were patient
3. They were willing to handle both the “nobler and the pettier” aspects of their job
4. They had an increasingly noncompetitive attitude towards the people with whom they worked
5. Their investment activities — aside from their main career — consumed a
   minimum of their time and attention.

Writes Blotnick, “We originally expected the people in our sample to become wealthy by taking the money they earned at work and investing it wisely, in such things as stocks, bonds, and real estate…We thought there’d be no way for [them] to become rich unless they used their surplus income to generate more income…It didn’t work out that way…More often than not they made little or no money investing.”

In short, what the study unveiled was that the main source of wealth for the successful participants was that they found something they loved to do and they did it well. “In case after case,” says Blotnick, “they did increasingly well occupationally, while their pursuit of investment profits proved to be largely a waste of time. In the long run, it was their work which made them rich.”

Blotnick concludes that investing in yourself, what you do, and with whom you do it are the most important determining factors of wealth.

So what about you? What lessons do you draw for yourself from this study? How does it change your perspective?

If you don’t have good answers to more than three of the following questions, you need to hire experts to help you take advantage of the massive shifts that have occurred in business, marketing, and technology:

Do you know what website analytics are, how to install and use them, and how to analyze the data to optimize your website? Do you know what a conversion rate is? Do you know what a bounce rate is?

Do you know what Persuasion Architecture is? Do you know what a persuasion scenario is? Do you know how to wire-frame your website?

Do you know what a permission database is and how to cultivate it? Do you know what CRM software is? If so, are you using yours properly? For example, do you have auto-responders set up?

Do you have a clearly-defined and flawlessly-executed sales funnel?

Do you know what search engine optimization is and how to do it?

Do you know how to use social media appropriately? Are you?

Do you know how blogging can benefit your company?

Do you know what content marketing is and do you have a solid plan to execute it? Do you have the ability to generate, produce, and market content such as videos, blogs, podcasts, and webinars?

Do you know what email marketing is? Do you know how to do a split-test broadcast? Do you know how to avoid being caught by spam filters?

Do you know what personas are and how to cater to them? Do you know how to create accurate demographic and psychographic profiles?

Do you know how to translate features into benefits and is this done on all of your marketing content?

Do you know how to generate word-of-mouth buzz? Are you?

Well?

In this brief clip, the erudite and articulate Joe Dirt shares the single most important lesson for business owners and marketers:

*If you’re reading this in an RSS reader or email, you may need to click the title of the post to view the video.

Thanks to Eric Dowd for bringing this insightful article to my attention. It reinforces why your organization must embrace and institute Hub Mentality as soon as possible to harness the power of these trends.

Brian Solis highlights key points of this report that details the evolution and future of social media, including the following tidbits:

“Starting in 2010, social networks and sites will recognize the preferences of users, but more significantly, they will also recognize personal identities and relationships to customize the experience based on preference and behavior.”

I taught one way to take advantage of the following shift:

“In 2011 – 2012, social networks will eclipse corporate websites and [customer relationship management] systems…communities will become a driving force for innovation and as such, companies will be forced to formally cater to communities, signifying the trading of power towards connected customers.”

Those who embraced social media early on will have a distinct advantage over laggers when it comes to the following development:

“The biggest opportunity for the expansion of social networks is to build bridges between these isolated islands to deliver a more fulfilling, meaningful and productive experience. As I see it, we will start to see a the social web not as a collection of distributed islands, but as one greater collective better known as a human network –- a contextual and relationship-based network that consists of like-minded individuals no matter where their profile resides.”

How is your business adapting to these transformations? How are you building and tapping into community? How are you engaging with customers on their turf and level?

Have you fully instituted Hub Mentality, or are you still stuck in cold advertising mode?

Read the complete article here.

Wired reported today that the Authors Guild is objecting to the new text-to-speech functionality found in Amazon’s Kindle 2. The updated version uses a digital voice to read books audibly.

“Until this issue is worked out, Amazon may be undermining your audio market as it exploits your e-books,” the guild told its members in a memo Thursday.

This is a classic clash between the old, Industrial Age business mindset and the new, Information age mindset.

The Authors Guild was founded in 1912, and, as their current actions indicate, they’re still stuck in the 1912 mindset. According to their website, “The Authors Guild has been the nation’s leading advocate for writers’ interests in effective copyright protection, fair contracts and free expression since it was founded…”

The old business model was closed, protectionist, proprietary.

In contrast, the new world view necessitates openness, authenticity, generosity, and relinquishing control.

Technology gives customers unprecedented control. The music industry is fighting the exact same battle as shareware has exploded across the Internet. The newspaper industry is dying while a few within the industry refuse to read the writing on the wall.

The Authors Guild and the music industry may win a few battles here and there, but the war has already been won — by consumers.

Are consumers breaking laws, even being unethical? Probably. Should companies use the law to protect intellectual property? Sure.

But they shouldn’t fight wars that cannot be won. What the Authors Guild is doing is like farmers in the 19th Century fighting against industrialism. It’s like Saddam’s Iraq fighting the United States.

Give it up already.

Consider these comments by angry consumers taken from the report by Wired:

“So what you’re saying is if I read aloud to my kid I have to buy a second copy of each book? What if I read it to their friends? Do the blind have to have an authorized audio copy for everything read to them by a Kindle? Blatant abuse of copyright, and complete abuse of process to get more money. Ebooks often cost at least as much as the paperbacks without the printing or distribution costs…so free money anyways! Let them rot.”

“They’ve got to be kidding.”

“ok guild… guess you hired the wrong law firm to represent you in the first place…This is downright silly. Go home.”

“That’s kinda stupid. My computer has the ability to read my email or whatever text I need on demand. How is this added function on the kindle any different than the text to speech software available on my pc?”

What could the Authors Guild do for authors if they accepted inevitabilities, transformed their mindset, and put their time, energy, and resources into adapting to the new rules of Information Age business?

What if they became creative, rather than defensive and reactionary?

Whether you agree or disagree with the market shifts is irrelevant. The fact is that massive change is upon us. The new model — where your material is going to be distributed through technology whether you like it or not and regardless of copyright law — is here to stay.

So what does this mean? How can it translate into your business?

If you’re an author, give away your content by blogging your entire books. You’ll find that you’ll actually sell more printed books.

If you’re a real estate investor with amazing trade secrets, give them away and make money by monetizing a blog through advertising, products, and affiliate offers.

If you’re a musician, give away your music and make money selling merchandise to your tribe.

Shift your advertising dollars away from interruptive media, such as billboards and TV ads, and into social media outlets instead. Become a part of the conversations your customers are already having and serve them on their terms.

The core principle is to relinquish control.

Get out of the driver’s seat, let your customers drive, and you provide the car that they want to drive.

You can’t control what customers do. But you can facilitate the fulfillment of their wants.

In the case of the Authors Guild, they would better serve writers, as well as consumers, by embracing the new technology and urging writers to get Kindle versions of their books as soon as possible. They should see Kindle as a profound opportunity, rather than a threat.

So what’s your attitude? Do you feel threatened, or invigorated by new media? Are you in harvesting-opportunity mode, or put-on-the-gloves-and-fight mode?

The seven major societal institutions are family, community, religion, academia, business, media, and government.

Family

The role of the family is to ensure responsible citizens, preserve society, and balance the desires of individual liberty with the demands of community responsibility.

As James C. Ure, professor at George Wythe University, has written,

“The family is the bubble in which a child…feels safe enough to explore his individuality. It is also the first place a child learns to make personal sacrifices for the good of the whole.

“In the family, it is natural for a parent to expose a child to various activities or ideas to determine what unique interests the child may have and to give the child an enhanced sense of self. It is also natural for a parent to ask a child to sacrifice personal interests to benefit the family, such as to provide help with cooking or cleaning.

“In the end, this is not very different from what makes free societies tick…It is in the family that children are expected to learn the core values and beliefs that democratic institutions later draw on to perpetuate themselves.”

Community

The original concept of federalism meant that as many decisions as possible were made at the lowest level possible.

As Cleon Skousen taught, strong, local self-government was the keystone to the original American system.

Understanding that power centralizes and expands, the Founders knew that the bulk of our political decisions should be made on the community level.

The role of the community, therefore, is to prevent the centralization of power by keeping responsibility and decision-making close to the people.

Religion

John Adams wrote that,

“Religion and virtue are the only foundations, not only of republicanism and of all free government, but of social felicity under all government and in all the combinations of human society.”

George Washington affirmed,

“Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure…reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

The role of religion is to remind republican citizens of their duties to and reliance upon God. Virtue is the bedrock of free society, and religion provides a constant reminder of that fact.

Furthermore, religion serves as a venue where citizens serve God by serving their fellowman; philanthropy is enacted in large part through religion.

Academia

Academia advances culture through knowledge, helps to prevent socio-economic inequities, breaks through boundaries of human ignorance and fear, helps societies to avoid repeated historical mistakes, and serves as a check on the government by keeping citizens informed of civic affairs.

As John Adams said,

“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people…They have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge — I mean, of the characters and conducts of their rulers.”

Business

The role of business is to provide exchange, commerce, and ultimately widespread prosperity. In a free market economy prices tend to decrease through competition and innovation, the ultimate benefactors being end consumers of products and services.

In a free market economy poverty decreases, the standard of living rises, and people are able to find self-fulfillment as their subsistence needs are met.

In The 5,000 Year Leap, Cleon Skousen wrote that,

“By 1905 the U.S. had become the richest industrial nation in the world. With only five percent of the earth’s continental area and merely six percent of the world’s population, the American people were producing over half of almost everything — clothes, food, houses, transportation, communications, even luxuries.”

The occurred because of our free market economy, where business was left free to fulfill its role.

Media

The role of the media is to disseminate information, highlight important current events, and to essentially stand as a witness, an observer of cultural, political, community, and educational events.

A healthy media provides a check on the government and increases the political astuteness of republican citizens.

Government

The role of government is to protect unalienable rights. Government is the institutionalization of force, and as such should not do anything that would not be right for an individual to do (such as steal).

As Thomas Jefferson said,

“…a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”

Why It Matters

Freedom occurs when all seven of these societal institutions are on an equal plane, with no one form being more important or having more power or influence than another. When one gains predominance, some form or level of tyranny always emerges.

For example, having family run society results in the mafia. The Dark Ages illustrate the problems of religion ruling. When business is predominant, the society is oligarchic. When the government is predominant, this usually occurs as a monarchy or aristocracy.

The best way to ensure that all seven institutions remain on a level plane is to keep the government within its proper role.

Since the government does not produce — it only takes what others have produced and redistributes — any time it favors one institution over another it does so to the aggrandizement of the one favored and the detriment of the other.

When government tries to get into the business of philanthropy through wealth redistribution, family, community, and religion are weakened.

When government stifles the press, the media is obviously weakened, and so is academia as citizens are kept in the dark on important matters.

In America today, government and business are predominant over the other five societal institutions. Furthermore, they are often joined together, forming an oligarchic structure that harms small business, decreases widespread prosperity and increases discrepancies in wealth distribution, and increases the size and scope of the government.

If America is to survive and thrive in the 21st Century, it is imperative that the power and influence of the government and business be reduced and the power of family, community, religion, academia, and media be increased.