The New Business Environment – Don’t be a Dinosaur!

Until a few years ago, people (like our parents and grandparents) were ok going through their lives in one job, with basically one time learning. People went to school and high school or college if they had the opportunity and they never had to study anything else for the rest of their life, because that one time learning was good enough to carry them through their life in one profession.

Today, that’s no longer possible. We are living in an accelerated changing market place, that is changing so fast that we can have just one new invention and it will wipe out a whole industry over night.

So one of the things that I’ve learned by being a business owner, is that success in anything today is about lifelong learning and this learning can be found very easily through the right advisors and mentors.

If you look at all the top professional athletes today like Tiger Woods, you will see that they have coaches and advisors which deal with different aspects of their performance like fitness coaches, nutrition coaches, PR coaches etc. This also relate to today’s top performers in the business arena. Ask any successful entrepreneur if they keep investing in learning and personal growth and you will be amazed with the response.

Learning in today’s marketing environment:

Take today’s marketing environment that is technologically advanced beyond anything that we can even comprehend.

Until recently marketing used to be about placing Billboards, Newspaper ads, TV ads, Radio ads, sending out Press Releases and basically hiring an Advertising agency to tell the world about your product.

Through the years everyone understood that finding ways for creating good Word of Mouth is the best strategy.  but here’s what’s interesting about today’s marketing environment:

Today, the loyal customer is actually the advertising agency. It’s the loyal fan that has become the biggest ambassador telling the world about your product. Today the No1 goal is not about helping the advertising agency tell your story, the biggest goal is to help the raving loyal fun be the big ambassador and share their story about your product with their friends. And it really isn’t about the product anymore, more than it is about the lifestyle that this product offers and creating viral marketing around it.

So if you are a business owner, unless you are spending every waking moment trying to figure out how to be technologically relevant in your business, you are almost a Dinosaur! How many of you parents out there had to ask your kids to help you with your computer or even your cell phone?

Today we can take a product and we can be global with it, but we have to learn how to use these new technologies and be in continuous learning mode. Today’s marketers need to know about Pay per click, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Video Marketing and basically all the new technologies which have developed through the internet.

We are in a situation where we have Marketing professors in Universities and books that are not relevant anymore and students spending their best years in Universities studying for jobs that won’t even exist by the time they finish University.

So do your own research in the field that you would like to receive learning,  find the best books, coaches, mentors and advisors in the specific field and get them to help you with your learning. The good news is that today, all this learning can all be done over the internet in the comfort of your own home!

Recommended Reading: The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Blogs, News Releases, Online Video, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly, 2nd Edition