What Matters Now

Seth Godin has a very interesting and provocative e-book, ‘What matters now’ (free to download - scribd version here). It’s a collaborative effort involving a lot of people from different fields who share what occupies their minds as they move into the New Year.

I particularly liked Seth’s thought of Generosity; as he says ‘in the digital world, the gift I give you almost always benefits me more than it costs’. Another one I liked a lot was Tim O’Reilly’s idea of Government 2.0
One thought that I missed (at least overtly, though many have touched upon it) is the idea of ‘personal’. I believe we are moving towards a time when we will increasingly be communicating one-to-one or one-to-few rather than the one-to-many that we have become so used to.

This is of course partly driven by more personal means of communicating and touching people; but more fundamentally it harks back to one of our very primal need to connect with individuals as much as with larger systems. This could mean many people and marketers may have to re-set their
expectations from their marketing initiatives. It may mean being happy with a handful of very strong connections rather than thousands of weak connections.

Very similar to the game of oneupmanship played out in the early days of social networks where the race was to have more friends in your networks. And now as we know, people are rushing to de-friend inane, long friend lists.