The great news is that so many of the skills that the new breed of social media writers are discussing on-line and in their books are in fact – nothing new!

The core skills that they describe for businesses are the same that Jay Abraham wrote about in the 80s (marketing), and that many of us were teaching in the 70s and 80s (marketing, sales, customer care and customer service).

And the what they describe as the key people, and communication, skills, behaviours and attitudes are the same as Andrew Carnegie was writing about in the mid 1800s and bear a strong resemblance to what St Paul wrote here.

Which is all great news for those of us who went to school before electronic calculators! It means if we embraced the skills 20 or 30 years ago, we are at the cutting edge today!

Why?

Because the challenge for the on-line, social network world is not to define new skills that make ours redundant. Rather, it is how to harness the new technology so that those skills may shine. It is also to overturn the trend of the last 10 years, where so many people involved in marketing, sales and customer service have forgotten how to engage with people.

Many people have read the books of Seth Godin, Penny Power, Gary Vaynerchuk, Chris Brogan and others and have dismissed them as either being the emperor’s new clothes reincarnate or as “same old, same old”, but to do so is to miss the point. None of them is saying that the behaviours and skills that they describe are new.

What they are saying is that the combination of those skills and behaviours with the latest networking technology will create a powerful new paradigm from which individuals and organisations may profit.

How do you see this unfolding during the next decade?

Enjoy the remainder of 2009

Nic