The Go-Giver, The Grateful Dead and Social Networking

Everyone is all “a-buzz” with the “new” ways of doing business. “Social networking, authenticity, adding value” and the like are all being thrown around as if they are new. I admit, for many the concepts of offering value and being authentic ARE new, but they have been around forever. Napoleon Hill wrote about giving value in the 1930′s, and before that, of course was The Bible!
Social networking, aka connecting and sharing have been around since Eve shared the apple!
What is new are the online social tools that allow us to more easily network with others, and the culture that exists within these networks. The culture within the “social networking world” embraces and demands authenticity and a “give value, don’t just promote yourself” mindset.
As I mentioned, principles such as these have been written about for centuries, but “The Go-Giver” by Bob Burg and John David Mann which summarizes them as the “5 Laws of Stratospheric Success”, not only outlines how adding value and authenticity is a business strategy, but also defines the “rules of engagement” for “social networking (online or off).

It astounds me how often I hear people question whether these principles “work”. So, in order to illustrate that the laws do “work”, and that they aren’t “new”. I will use the Grateful Dead as an example. Yes, long before this book, or facebook, there was the Grateful Dead. And they lived these laws beautifully, and successfully! (No doubt they had naysayers then too!)

(For an “optimum experience”, I recommend playing this video in the background as you read!)

The 5 Laws and how they lived them are as follows:

The Law of Value: Your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you receive in payment.

During a time when the average band played for around an hour and a half, the Dead played for three. They didn’t play “just long enough” to make their fans happy, they played until they couldn’t play any more!

The Law of Compensation: Your compensation will be determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them.

The Grateful Dead recognized that their fans wanted to know what they were doing, and wanted them to be a part of it. They created a mailing address where fans could send them mail, and request to be added to their mailing list (no sneaky aweber email capture needed!). They sent newsletters to anyone who requested one, to keep connected. At one point this list was over 40,000 people! And they actually had to pay postage to mail them!

The Law of Influence: Your influence is determined by how abundantly you place other people’s needs first.

The Grateful Dead is notorious for openly allowing fans to record and share their music. In fact, you can hardly google the word “bootleg” without the Dead coming up in the results. Unlike the current trend of athletic and other organizations trying to outlaw “tweeting” or other means of sharing their events, out of fear of “lost revenue”, the Dead in their infinite wisdom reaped the benefit. By allowing fans to “share” them and their music, more fans were born! Whether they “lost revenue” is hard to measure, but they did report earnings of over a million dollars a year during a time when others could only dream of such.

The Law of Authenticity: The most valuable gift you have to offer is yourself.

DUH! If there is one thing that the Grateful Dead could never be accused of, it was being anything other than simply who they were! They didn’t try to be like anyone else!

The Law of Receptivity: the key to effective giving, is to stay open to receiving.

The Grateful dead graciously received the feedback AND adoration of countless raving fans.

They were BEYOND successful, they were legendary. They went beyond “making money” and created a legacy…