These are 7 questions that have been keeping me up at night since I read them this weekend on Chris Brogan’s blog:

What are the basic, bare-bones components of our business? – Use small words. Describe it as briefly as you can. No matter if you THINK you know the business, try it again.

How do we share? – Inside the business, outside the business, it’s important to figure this out. Think broadly about “share.” With social tools, there are lots of implications, but inside the company, it’s crazy and potentially bit.

How do we collaborate? – Similar but different to sharing, the question is: now that we have these amazing tools, how do we best apply them to collaborative efforts: business-to-customer, customer-to-customer, business-to-business, etc. The last of these, business-to-business, is harder than you think. Do you dare open your company up for external collaboration? Software companies do it all the time. Would it work for you?

How do we wire new networks? – Let’s accept that social software like Facebook and Twitter are part of what’s next. How do we tap these in concerted ways? How do we build interactivity for our own business purposes into these tools? And here’s one: what would happen if one of them went away? Do you have a plan b?

How do we make new distribution points? – I have a new favorite thing to say at conferences with regards to distribution: Walmart and the Mafia are both masters of it. In both cases, they learned how to bypass prior roadblocks, they learned how to shift materials faster into buyers’ hands. They know how to distinguish between buyers and non-buyers. Do you? And are you expanding your distribution? Are you jumping gates?

How do we develop relationships that yield? – It’s great to have 100,000 friends on Twitter. How many take action? Of the 36,000 folks who subscribe to my blog, I usually get between 50-100 comments per post. That’s less than 1/3 of 1%. If comments were my business, I’d say that stinks. Relationships that yield are how we separate “friends” or “community members” from “customers” in our various business buckets. They overlap, but for the sake of this question, think strongly about “yield” and what it means to you.

Where is that yield and how do we extract value? – You’ll note that I don’t ask you for much in the way of money. I like to ask big companies for it. You? I like to give things away for free, because it’s also a strong way to advertise what I know, because I want you to succeed, etc. But somewhere along the line, baby needs to eat. Where do you extract value from your efforts? (This one is particularly tricky and important.)

In his Fast Company article this week, Sam Ford used a quote about the death of the incomparable Capt. Lou Albano:

“Somebody once said that to understand America, you have to understand pro wrestling.”

Ford found

“wrestling often acts as a carnival mirror to our culture, stretching and magnifying the underlying fears, prejudices and tension points amongst us. However, I think wrestling provides all sorts of learning that corporate America should pay attention to as well.”

8 things companies can take away from Pro-Wrestling:

-An Appropriate Level of Spectacle Is Crucial: In pro wrestling, steel cages are always 15 feet high. Tall competitors are nearly 7 feet tall. Crowds are always “hanging from the rafters.” Wrestling shows pull out all the stops to make their shows as dramatic as possible. On the other hand, wrestling promoters can’t overdo it. Case-in-point: the now defunct-World Championship Wrestling put on a live three-hour television show every week, with the announcers constantly proclaiming it was “the biggest main event in the history of the show.” Eventually, nothing they did could feel special anymore. While corporate communicators may not want to be so guilty of exaggeration and hyperbole, big events should always be conducted with a dramatic flair. However, it’s also crucial to save that drama for the particularly “big” moments (in the case of the WWE, big pay-per-view events like Wrestlemania) so that it will be truly effective.

-Humor and Charisma Always Make a Connection: Many a wrestling villain has suddenly become a hero because of his gift of gab on the microphone. Even when audiences don’t want to, they often can’t help but be won over. Likewise, many wrestlers pushed to be fan favorites, or “faces” in wrestling parlance, are met with silence if they don’t have that natural connection. Corporate communicators have to value that human connection and cannot underestimate the importance of wit, charm and authenticity. As they say in WWE, the best performers are those who “play themselves, with the volume turned up.”

-Create a Serialized Connection with Your Audience

-Your Audience Uses You as an Excuse to Build Community

-Your Audience Is Always Performing

-Take Every Opportunity to Listen to Your Focus Group

-Your Audience Will Tell You What They Think

-Listening Could Lead to New Business Models

To see Ford’s full article click here

I was reading at a blog yesterday about how businesses are venturing out into the world of social media, trying to grasp how they might leverage this “new” vehicle to drive sales, develop their brands and interact with their customer base. Social media is actually founded on more simple, classic principles of doing business. Incidentally, this is a major contributor toward the success of social media in becoming a powerful vehicle for marketing communications.

In the end, simple and classical business interactions are what lie at the foundations of social media, and ultimately will ensure its ongoing success. So when a client asks you about the “new” thing – social media – you might prompt them to consider whether it really is something scary and new, or something tried and true!