Opening the Kimono – Welcome to Full Transparency
Another important aspect of conscious commerce is one that makes most service providers nervous – it’s called “transparency” and in this context I mean being open, honest and collaborative with partners and clients in providing services – only then can you be in equal exchange and ultimately prosper.
Just this morning I entered into a client engagement led by a strategic partner. In the meeting with the client our partner “opened his kimono” so to speak… and made it very clear to the client that our TWO companies would be providing services together to meet their needs. Two year ago this would NEVER have happened. Instead the partner would have represented themselves as the one-stop solution and managed the whole project behind the scenes for the client keeping us invisible in the process. What’s worse is that the client would have EXPECTED something like that! And in the end, the façade would have hurt everyone and lessened the ultimate result for the client.
Instead, this time, our fully transparent approach made it possible for us to collaborate to maximize our profit, minimize cost to the client, expand the deliverable and put our collective “best team” in direct contact with the client to ensure them the best possible result for their business. Literally everybody won!
I know what you’re saying: “Hey wait! I’m open and honest with my clients!”
Yeah… Some of you, maybe. But not the way I’m talking about. You see… in a conscious commerce environment, you’ve limited your offering to ONLY those things you are truly expert at in the interest of providing REAL value for your clients. But since you offer fewer services now, you might not provide a full solution and so it’s necessary (if you’re smart anyways) to select strategic partners whose true expertise compliments yours and makes it possible for the “alliance” to provide an even better and larger service than individually before. BTW, if you don’t pick strategic partners yourself, your client will do it for you. Don’t take that chance!!
What’s important and different about these strategic relationships now is the level of openness and transparency required between all parties who are involved – much more than before. In conscious commerce, one needs to adopt an “open kimono” philosophy in order for strategic relationships and partnerships to succeed. When partners are open with each other about services and fees they’re able to structure deals that keep them in balance with one another. When a similar openness takes place with clients, each party is able to remain in equal exchange with one another and success for ALL parties is far more likely to occur.
So… go ahead and give it a try – open the kimono and see what happens! You’ll be amazed at how refreshing the breeze feels 
Promoting the Promoters: The latest “zig” to Google’s “zag”
As the world turns, and the earthquakes shake and the poles are shifting and the earths atmosphere is warming and the water levels are rising and the food shortages and drought and melting of the polar ice cap sets in…. there’s another, somewhat less meaningful shift taking place at Google. It’s the inevitable, and never ending shift in their beloved and secret search algorithm.
This round of change affects backlinks and their value. You’ve probably noticed (if you follow these sorts of things) that large percentages of your website’s backlinks have been disappearing from Google’s indexed listings lately. If that has been happening to you, you are likely one of the countless millions of people whose backlinks have been devalued by Google to such a degree that they have been dropped from their listings. The unfortunate side affect of this is that your search engine ranking will follow right behind – plummeting into the abyss of Google’s devalued indexed pages.
What Google has begun to do is look much more closely at the authority of the backlink source and not just the number of backlinks themselves. If the authority of that site/page isn’t high enough, it simply ignores the link in their account of your site and the resulting indexed listing for your pages. The result can be devastating for those who built optimized sites around a network of relatively low authority backlinks.
What this means in SEO terms is that the game has changed. Again. Instead of getting sites to “promote” your site (aka backlinks), you must now “promote the promoters” in that your SEO activities need to promote not only your site but also the sites that hold the incoming links as well.
“But Wait!!!” you say… “that’s going to have a logarithmic affect on our SEO activity and investment!!?!”
Yes it will! Unless, of course you can figure out how it’s done, or find an SEO firm who understands how to play the new game
Conscious Commerce can only exist when one has achieved balance in every aspect of a business relationship. To be in balance, individuals, the companies they work for, owners, clients and vendors must all be in balance with one another. An easy way to look at balance is through the lens of equal exchange.
When one party is in equal exchange with another, they are giving something that has equal value to the person who receives it, as the thing that person or entity is giving back in return. For the employee-employer relationship, parties are in equal exchange with one another when the value of the work performed equals the monetary compensation provided in return for that work. In a client-vendor relationship the same holds true.
Notice the VERY big concepts I’m including, like “value” and “balance”. These ideas have all but disappeared from the equation of successful business, but are being forced back into our vocabulary by the shift in our global economy and the personal and business values that drive it.
Get used to these concepts. Understand what they mean to your and your business they are here to stay and will redefine how we operate. Those who adjust quickly have an opportunity to leap to the top of their industry, while those who languish in the old way of thinking will see themselves become irrelevant, unimportant and ultimately disappear.
There’s only room for equal exchange now. Only balance will do.