One business analyst just “loves the model” that the online game called FARMVILLE is based on. Just go to Facebook and after enrolling you can pay real money to get the fullest experience of the game.

Pay REAL money to buy VIRTUAL feed for your VIRTUAL cattle and VIRTUAL pigs that live in the VIRTUAL barn that you only VIRTUALLY have to upkeep. (Thank goodness for that task being virtual!)

When challenged by the more level-headed and pragmatic host of the show Stuart Varney, the analyst responded, “What’s not to like? It’s a money maker! Don’t underestimate Americans’ need for escape – like when movies shot up in popularity.”

Later in the show another commentator described and dismissed it as “selling distraction in a hard economy.”

Distraction is one thing. Delusion another. Broken down to its barest bones here’s what I see going on:

1. A vendor has made available the online illusion of owning a farm along with the necessary animals and chores that go along with such a real world enterprise.
2. The owner pays REAL money for this virtual business and all it entails.
3. The owner never has to get down and dirty with the beasties, or drive the necessary vehicles, etc. Just click away from the comfort of a keyboard.
4. The costs are REAL, the rewards virtual, i.e., NOT REAL.
5. Some make money, most lose money. (Hey, THAT’S not what MLM stand for!)

Can’t begin to tell you how many people I have run across, asking for real help for a MLM business run very much as described above – virtual.

Hard economy. Virtual business. Delusional satisfaction.

Happy New Year.

When the real world comes a’knocking on the door of your virtual reality and you need help, just ask. I and my team have real world solutions for any MLM – provided you don’t ask us to feed the pigs.

tony@ajlauria.com

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Of course you know the basics of this argument. But rather than rehash all the polemics on freedom of speech and separation of church and state, I would rather take up another angle to this issue. A metaphysical one on what I believe makes so many nervous when viewing the Nativity.

Take a look and ask yourself what you see.

What I see are people. Human beings adoring a newly born baby.

My niece delivered a beautiful baby daughter a little over a year ago and every time I have been around her and the baby and the family, guess what? Everyone, including me, is going goo-goo over the baby.

Yes, adoring her.

Her beauty, her promise, her innocence, her helplessness, her need for love and protection and care. Adoring it all and real-izing our individual responsibility to her.

The characters in the image above are human beings doing exactly the same but in a so-called religious depiction. But just exactly what makes it religious?

There are only two major religions that venerate a once living human being: Buddhism and Christianity.

The Buddha and the Christ. The Enlightened One and the Anointed One.

The esoteric message of the Nativity is not simply the birth of a child some 2,000 years ago, but the birth of a new humanity – the real-ization of the divinity of each and every one of us.

Sad to say, yet I believe that too many of us refuse to admit and embrace the living divinity among us that we encounter daily. Even in ourselves. It’s just too much work to have to deal with others – and ourselves – with so much respect.

The Nativity makes so many nervous because it is too graphic a reminder of a gross collective neglect carried out planet-wide and across time.

But give us time. A minority now living among us believes that the message of compassion and love for our fellows on the planet, a message first appearing some thousands of years ago, will enjoy its full real-ization some thousands of years in the future.

We, now living, are simply charged with keeping that evolutionary possibility alive by practicing it to the best of our individual ability.

It is that responsibility that gives too many the creeps when they gaze upon the scene of the Crèche. 

 Merry Christmass.

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No one ever bought anything in an elevator

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So the saying goes. And since I couldn’t say any better what Seth Godin has to say about the noise of social media, I’ll borrow his words. Enjoy it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

The Trap Of Social Media Noise

If we put a number on it, people will try to make the number go up.

Now that everyone is a marketer, many people are looking for a louder megaphone, a chance to talk about their work, their career, their product… and social media looks like the ideal soapbox, a free opportunity to shout to the masses.

But first, we’re told to make that number go up. Increase the number of fans, friends and followers, so your shouts will be heard. The problem of course is that more noise is not better noise.

In Corey’s words, the conventional, broken wisdom is:

Follow a ton of people to get people to follow back

Focus on the # of followers, not the interests of followers or your relationship with them.

Pump links through the social platform (take your pick, or do them all!)

Offer nothing of value, and no context. This is a megaphone, not a telephone.

Think you’re winning, because you’re playing video games (highest follower count wins!)

This looks like winning (the numbers are going up!), but it’s actually a double-edged form of losing. First, you’re polluting a powerful space, turning signals into noise and bringing down the level of discourse for everyone. And second, you’re wasting your time when you could be building a tribe instead, could be earning permission, could be creating a channel where your voice is actually welcomed.

Leadership (even idea leadership) scares many people, because it requires you to own your words, to do work that matters. The alternative is to be a junk dealer.

The game theory pushes us into one of two directions: either be better at pump and dump than anyone else, get your numbers into the millions, outmass those that choose to use mass and always dance at the edge of spam (in which the number of those you offend or turn off forever keep increasing), or

Relentlessly focus. Prune your message and your list and build a reputation that’s worth owning and an audience that cares.

Only one of these strategies builds an asset of value.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The noisy chatter of a cocktail party or the one-on-one conversation of focused individuals? You choose.

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Perhaps less well known - but logical once we think about it - is the idea that business people run their businesses less on emotion and more on reasonable action.

All smart and successful business owners know this so they reasonably use emotion to appeal to buyers. Hence all the excitement and hype about products, services and opportunities. Not to mention advertising.

Many MLM business “owners” employ this very strategy: excite any potential business partners with the drama and the dream of owning their own businesses.

Question: Once the recruits have gotten “on board” with emotion, can they succeed with that only? In other words, how far can one get solely on emotion?

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Adversity And The Route To Success

Resource-rich regions often fall behind in developing significant industrial and cultural capabilities. Japan does well despite having very few resources at all.

Well-rounded and popular people rarely change the world. The one voted most likely to succeed probably won’t.

Genuine success is scarce, and the scarcity comes from the barriers that keep everyone from having it. If it weren’t for the scarcity, it wouldn’t be valuable, after all.

It’s difficult to change an industry, set a world record, land big clients, or do art that influences others. When faced with this difficulty, those with other, seemingly better options see the barrier and walk away.

Why bother? The thinking is that we can just pump some more oil or smile and gladhand our way to an acceptably happy outcome.

On the other hand, people who believe they have fewer options take a look at the barrier and realize that even though it will be difficult to cross, it’s the single best option they’ve got.

This is one of the dangers of overfunded/undertested startup companies. Without an astute CEO in charge, they begin to worry more about not losing what they’ve already got than the real reason they started the project in the first place. 

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/11/adversity-and-the-route-to-success.html

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Over the past few days some cretins hacked into my blog and installed themselves as users. As a consequence you may have received notice of postings that are totally out of character for me – thank goodness they weren’t pornography.

The scoundrels have been booted, the postings trashed and I’ll keep a sharp eye out for any recurring offences.

Again, my apologies.

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When you have legal problems, you visit an attorney.

And when your pipes break and your house is flooding, you call a plumber.

Yet most new network marketers won’t attend their sponsor’s and upline’s training. Instead they complain that their business isn’t growing.

Remind your new distributors that they don’t have many network marketing skills from signing the application, so they should invest the time and energy to learn some skills at your trainings.

When you decide that you want more skills for yourself and your team to kick your business to the next pin level, register for an ongoing webinar series featuring the 25 Essential Skills for Network Marketing Success.

The series is live each Saturday at 1pm and will resume on November 19^th. In the meantime you can review past sessions in the archive. All for free. Register here . . .

http://www.MLMreadysetgo.info and please use my name as your inviter ~ Tony Lauria.

This is not an affiliate program.

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The ‘Self-Reliance’ Menace

By FRANK J. FLEMING 

At a San Francisco fund-raiser last week, President Obama warned the audience that if he’s not re-elected, it will bring a new era of self-reliance in America. 

In this dystopian future, people wouldn’t be able to rely on the government to give them health care or college or anything else we now consider a need. That’s just an awful, scary thought these days. Which begs the question: Are we too sissy for freedom anymore? 

Not everyone acknowledges how scary true freedom is. Sure, you get to make your own choices, but then government won’t be there to catch you when you fall.
Some people considered freedom worth that risk, though. When the Pilgrims came to America, there was no government to make sure they had food or shelter or even anti-bullying laws that kept others from making fun of their silly hats with the buckles on them. 

Similarly, in the 19th century, settlers moved out West despite the complete lack of cellphone service there. Again, no government awaited to make sure they’d be all right, and if they were attacked by bears, they couldn’t call animal control to come help them (no cell service, remember). 

But we’re a different kind of people now. All the federal government did back then was basically keep an eye on Canada and make sure it didn’t invade. Today, more than half of the federal government’s budget is spent on entitlements and safety nets. In fact, a fifth of federal spending is devoted to making sure we have crummy retirement savings that no one can live on.  

If the Founding Fathers ever found out about that, they’d probably shoot us with muskets. But the fact is they’re dead, and we’ve decided we have other needs as a people. 

Right now, getting rid of any entitlements is unthinkable. If left to our own resources, we’d be too worried about starving to death or not having access to broadband.  

We’re just used to the government taking a larger and larger portion of our paychecks while putting lots of regulations on us to ensure we’re all safe and minimally cared for. It’s not quite all-expansive liberty, but then again, how often do people get mauled by bears these days? 

Entitlements keep increasing, though, as we keep finding new things that we all need and that the government should have a hand in providing. A lot of people consider health insurance a right, while the people who founded this country never even heard of it. Of course, they never heard of electricity or running water, either — other necessities — and probably had to fight off lots of bears while wearing silly hats. No one wants to live under those conditions anymore. 

Problem is, an ever-expanding amount of America’s wealth is tied up in just making sure we have whatever it is we consider necessary now. When settlers relied on themselves, they devoted all their resources to getting ahead. That eventually led to this awesome country that has Disney World, the Internet and cheap and readily available nachos everywhere.  

Maybe the fact that more and more of our resources are used for maintaining the status quo is partly why we’re in such doldrums: With so much of our wealth spent making sure we get basic necessities without having to be self-reliant, we have little left to put toward succeeding.  

Because that’s what freedom is: a chance to succeed — married with a chance to fail. As a country, we’ve decided that success just isn’t worth the risk of failure. Or bear attacks.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_self_reliance_menace_gtEW8snBHWpgrawho0CV0J#ixzz1ch2jvMCu

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We attempt to soothe their fears by saying things such as:

• “Try our business. We have a 30-day money-back guarantee.”
• “Try our product or service. We have a 30-day money-back guarantee.”

Did you ever notice that these guarantees seldom close the prospect? The prospect feels embarrassed to take advantage of a refund, so the prospect never makes the initial commitment to try the product, service or business opportunity.

You’ve noticed that, haven’t you?

So why not try this? Give your prospect the “truth” guarantee. It will shock your prospect and create a “fear of loss” motivation. Say:

“I have one guarantee about our business. If you don’t try anything, you are guaranteed that nothing will change. The commute time to your job won’t change. The limited time you have with your family won’t change. Your current paycheck won’t change.”

Want more neat prospecting ideas?

There’s an ongoing webinar series devoted to the skills Big Al teaches. You can register for it and get all the details at http://www/MLMreadysetgo.info and please use my name, Tony Lauria, as your inviter.

And No, this is not an affiliate program.

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