Recently, the nature of my services have being changing. New offers for helping small businesses with their website, marketing and social media presence have included the 1-to-1 Get It Done Squarespace websites and the New Media New Marketing Playground group mentoring program. Both are collaborative processes where I work with people directly and respond to their specific needs in a customized way.

While good listening and personalized responses have always been a crucial part of the value that I offer, at least to some degree, recently, I find myself calling myself a mentor more than a consultant. Yes, of course, I’m still offering strategic guidance and helping clients to connect the dots amongst the myriad of marketing choices and technologies available. But somehow, as we sort out the priorities, the “know it all” quality of a consultant no longer seems appropriate. It sounds too top-down vs the kinds of collaboration that are happening more often these days.

Part of it also is probably that I am attracting and connecting with smaller businesses who are not so much looking for high level guidance (for example, connecting their marketing with their sales efforts as a larger organization might do) but rather they simply need help, want hand-holding, and to be shown by an expert how to do the things that they want and need to do.

The biggest challenge for small businesses these days seems to be overwhelm. This is what I have been calling The Grand Canyon Gap between People and Technology since 1990. Now, with social media and the realization of The Video Web, there’s even more information and more kinds of marketing communication technologies consider.

The good news is that New Media and New Marketing are increasingly less about technology and more about human connection. I still emphasize that it’s the communication, not the technology that’s most important; but these days, even more, I am emphasizing the human dimensions within the communication that are necessary to make them more engaging.

My joy is not just helping to sort things out and chunk things down so that moving forward is managable, but I’m also quite consistently pointing to my humanistic values of ease, fun and authenticity as the foundation of an approach to online marketing that is enjoyable as well as effective. I call this The Humanistic Marketing Revolution.

My passion for this approach is also encouraging me to continue to work on more educational programs, like the webinar that I did in December which will soon be available for sale, and the courses that I am currently developing which are about the value and importance of leading with humanistic values. More on these insights and these courses very soon.

Meanwhile, I am thoroughly enjoying these new collaborative ways to support small businesses to grow while they develop the capacity to actually enjoy and embrace social media and the New Media environment.

It really is a Playground for me and I’m open to more playmates. The more the merrier, really! This is especially true when we all are keeping our hearts open and having even more fun. How many “consultants” can say that?