The Zen of Success – Awareness
Published July 2, 2010 | 
Consumer awareness is such an interesting yet very powerful force that has entire markets in a ceaseless battle to capture it, and of course there are different traditional methods that most businesses are still locked into including “buying” awareness with advertising, “begging” for awareness from the different media (public relations), and “bugging” people one at a time to sell them something.
Now most organizations have a corporate culture years in the making which is based on one of the traditional approaches to create awareness, they don’t know anything else, and are typically not open to any other method that hasn’t been used for years and is taught in business schools across the globe as that’s the way it’s 
always been taught and used in the markets.
Consumer awareness or attention itself has become the new common currency for modern Social Media and Web Marketing, and what is interesting about this notion of attention as a common currency is that once you understand this fact and embrace it, a lot of the other mysteries surrounding this consumer-centric marketing start to fall into place.
Consumer-centric marketing can be simplified to three guiding principles, with the first principle is that customer relationship management (CRM) has ultimately morphed into a business philosophy driven by market forces and supported by technology. 
The second principle is that media channels or platforms are collapsing into a single stream of two-way dialogue between brand and consumer and should be treated as such.
And finally, in the extremely noisy, hyper-competitive digital media landscape that we live in, awareness is becoming the ultimate common currency for the new modern marketing.
If you think of awareness as a medium, it is the first medium where the consumer controls the inventory of this medium, not the Fortune 500 advertiser or the major media company or the ad agency, the consumer enjoys the control, has the leverage in the market, and will direct the awareness or attention where they perceive getting the greatest value in return for their awareness and attention, and giving them additional leverage is the direct and secondary influence they with members of their social graphs and networks.
Understanding Consumer Awareness and Attention
Published May 25, 2010 | 
Social Media has made information and tools readily available to anyone seeking enlightenment on just about any subject imaginable, and the use and assimilation of the information has been directly associated with greatly increased consumer awareness as people become more comfortable with the Web and knowledgeable about their particular individual interests.
In the past, most businesses either just bought the awareness or attention of the consumer market niche, or used public relations from different media to reach the attention of the consumer, and even bugged the consumers with direct mail, phone contact or some other forms of working the market niche one at a time, and now there is a new way of gaining, and even more importantly, keeping the awareness of the consumers that businesses and organizations have set their sights on in respective market niches.
Most organizations and corporations have developed a culture over the years based on one of these methods that have been viewed as the best tried and true methods of generating much coveted consumer awareness, for example, there are some that primarily create attention through advertising, lots of advertising, others through focusing on public relations, and many through working the market one individual consumer at a time to produce sales.
More times than not, the type of culture is determined by the point of view developed during the career of the Entrepreneur or CEO, and the type they experienced and have developed a strong point of view about, so if an Entrepreneur comes through the marketing and advertising track, then what is considered problems are most likely to end up with more suggested advertising solutions and ideas than others.
You must develop the complete understanding that in today’s world of Social Media and Web Marketing and Networking, that you can quickly earn 
valuable awareness by simply creating something interesting and valuable to the consumer, then publishing and providing it online for free, for example, a YouTube video, a Blog, a research report, photos and images, a stream on Twitter, an eBook, a Facebook page, and many others that will help you maintain important value in the eyes and minds of your consumer market niche, and since today’s market presents us with a host of connected, interconnected, and overlapping networks and social graphs, the value can be maintained and easily grown with additional valuable information and insights you provide on a regular basis, as the expert you will grow to be recognized as.