Peter Kim posted today his collection of social media predictions from some of the big players in the industry. But I was completely shocked that he didn’t seek the guidance of the one and only Jedi master, Yoda himself. I’d venture to guess that if Yoda were here, he’d have some sage guidance for us in his inimitable form.

You must unlearn what you have learned.

Business operations as we know them have been focused at a macro scale. Mass production, mass distribution, mass communication. Cast the net wide and see what we catch.

But in order to succeed in tomorrow’s (today’s?) hyper-accelerated and wired world, businesses have to adapt to a more modular framework. They must be nimble with their operations, able to swap pieces and parts out seamlessly to put resources and people where they’re needed most (and be prepared to change that when the time comes). In communications, that means understanding the architecture that holds all the channels together, but adeptly and fluidly working within and between online and offline. Shifting your weight as you need to. In short, being available where and when your customers want to talk to you.

We’ll have to jettison some of the ballast holding us down; cumbersome internal approval procedures, ruthless control over our idea of perfect messaging, the idea that there is only one right way to portray any one brand.

Do, or do not. There is no try.

No more procrastinating. This is happening around and in spite of your business. Adapt or perish.

That doesn’t mean adopting every bleeding edge tool and getting on every conceivable social network, fracturing your efforts and attention across a bunch of places that you don’t understand.

But it does mean you must make a concerted effort to shift your perspective about how you’re executing your communications. You must be planning to better integrate and bridge your brand from online to off. It needs to be a self-sustaining cycle of communication with your customers that doesn’t have an endpoint. Tomorrow, if you aren’t viewing your customer interactions completely holistically, someone else is going to beat you at your own game.

Are you making your website a destination, and are you making it a place where people can hang out and talk? Are your traditional marketing efforts still shouting and hoping someone is listening? Are you being ruthlessly targeted and focused, and are you talking across the walls in your company to understand how your relationships work with the people paying your bills so you’re spending your time where it matters?

Fear is the path to the dark side.

Honesty: we don’t trust anyone to do our communications for us, including and especially our customers.  We are convinced we know best, so we carefully craft key messages and talking points and official corporate responses to everything. We are terrified of criticism, and we don’t know how to respond to our detractors, so we put out official statements and hope it all blows over.

Truth: Canned is for green beans. You must face you fears about losing control of your message and what to do when someone calls your integrity, quality, or reputation into question. Consumer-generated content doesn’t stop at a spoofed YouTube video. Your fans and your foes are out there building whole versions of your brand without your input. Would you rather be working hand in hand with them, or sticking your head in the sand and hoping no one notices? No one expects you to be perfect, flawless, without error. They do, however, expect you to be authentic, honest, and responsive. You must equip yourself to be such, and be brave enough to face your fears.

Size matters not.

Juggernaut companies don’t win on sheer size anymore. The companies that will win are the ones that understand and embrace that their business cannot be the same business tomorrow as it was yesterday. Startups that get it are going to go flying past the big behemoths that labor under their own illusions. And some elephants will surprise us all by lacing up their ballet shoes and dancing right on past the entrepreneurs fretting over irrelevant and cumbersome pieces of their business that neglect to put their customers – their revenue generators – front and center to the whole equation.

It’s not the size of your budget that matters, either. It’s making smart moves, listening carefully, and making the resources you DO have work a hundred times harder than they ordinarily would. How? By asking yourself, with every dollar you spend, how is this improving our relationships with our customers so they’ll spend more money with us, come back often, and bring their friends too? How are we making people love us and want to be part of this alongside us?

Always in motion is the future.

Complacency sucks. “We’ve always done it that way” is the first step to irrelevance.

Alas, Yoda is not here to guide me. But here’s my promise to you in 2009. My entire world is going to be dedicated to considering all of the above, but distilling and providing the HOW. I’m deconstructing. I’m pulling it all apart and putting together a blueprint that will help you actually activate each piece of this puzzle. With occasional exception, I’m going to leave the philosophy to the philosophers and focus on what I do best, which is the doing. I’m going to be one part architect, and a thousand parts Bob the Builder.

We’ll talk about why, but only in the context of how. I’m going to ask a lot of questions. We’re going to put a lot of theories to the test. Why? Because that’s how we know what works (and what doesn’t).

With me?

Photo credit: yapsnaps

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