Are you scared of  this new Web 2.0 world?  Or do you find it exciting, and empowering?

We now live in a world where review sites are rampant. A world where consumers have the power to voice their views about you, me or any other business or product to potentially millions of others consumers.

A world where consumers ask the Web powerhouses like Google and Yahoo! to check in before they make purchasing decisions and show them what they should be doing, who they should be hiring, and who they should be avoiding. Web 2.0 has taken transparency to a whole new level with self publishing made easy. The most popular sites today are those like YouTube and My Space.

People have embraced self expression, blogging is growing in popularity, and social networks are growing everywhere. People are "friending" each other all over the place, and sharing their personal opinions. No longer is word of mouth limited to a few friends and work mates. RSS feeds a bad experience that infuriates a consumer can now easily be transmitted to multiple networks and potentially millions of consumers.

The Power of Word of Mouth Online is Staggering. And it can can be used to empower or destroy? The key as i see it is participation, not perfection. Learning to invite honest feedback from your customers, setting that up from the beginning of your relationship. Learning to really listen during your client/business relationship and opening up the lines of communication is what transparency is all about. Success in a Web 2.0 World is not about control but about true communication between businesses and customers, and learning to respond to feedback promptly and use it to help you build a better product or service , using it so that your customers will rave about you because they loved you and want to help their networks and friends find you amongst the masses.

So how do you stop being scared and start feeling empowered? How do you kick start this revolution to empower you and make it easier for other consumers to know, like and trust you? And more importantly find you?

Well start by accepting you can always get better? And decide you want to , and  invite and welcome feedback from your customers as a starting point.

Secondly realize the most important measure of how you are doing is what your customers are saying during and post their transaction with you. You need to  start asking them and listening even if its not quite what you wanted to hear- with the view of continual improvement.

You need to let them know from the beginning your intention is not only to do everything in your power as a professional to get them the result they want but also to be recommendation worthy. To let them know from the beginning of your relationship that you will be asking for feedback from them and that it matters to you as much if not more than the final transaction.

Your customers are talking about you whether you like it or not, and they always have. But now its more important than ever to tap in and use these conversations to learn and help grow your business. It's time to be proactive about enlisting your customers and learning to transform them into powerful advocates for you. Are you ready to join in and start the conversations rather than running scared and waiting for damage control?  

Instead of spending so much time and money  finding new customers, there are things you can do today to transform your existing Customers into a Consumer Army who want to send you new business.

Its all about creating some ILM in your business,and taking the time to show customers you really care and delivering this powerfully and in unexpected ways.

What is ILM? Well, it's an I LOVE MOMENT ...  a little thing you do that shows another person you really are interested in them, it brings a smile and it shows you are passionate about what you do. And yesterday I got an ILM from Mike Barnett, CTO of RealTown and RISMedia, and Vice President of Technology at InternetCrusade. Thanks, Mike.

So what did Mike do that had such an impact?

1. Despite it having nothing to do with his role at RealTown, he took the time to ring me, out of the blue, after reading my new blog post, Have You Been Googled Yet? Very unexpected, but also very cool.
2. It made me feel special that he had read and enjoyed my article. Proving the reach of Blogs and Social Media and reconfirming my committment to being an active participant once again.
3. He showed me how to make my article even better by pointing out a spelling error in the opening sentence, which allowed me to fix it before too many people saw it.
4. He encouraged me to get even more involved by pointing out some other features like the ability to form Groups on the RealTown platform.

So why did this mean so much to me? Well if you know me reasonably well, you will know that spelling is a bit of a sensitive topic for me. When i first started blogging, writing articles and putting out my newsletters, I was publicly criticized about my poor spelling, punctuation errors and numerous typos.I used to put it down to the fact that Aussies and Americans spell very differently and tried to brush it off. Until one post that said because of these errors they felt I was very unprofessional and although I had a great vision and could feel the honesty and passion behind my writing that they felt it would hurt their reputation to come on board at IlovemyAgent.

I did comment back, letting them know my blog was from me personally, written from my heart and unedited as I sat out on my deck on the beautiful Gold Coast and that I hoped he would be able to forgive my spelling and learn to love me anyway and gain value from the messages. I also pointed out  that the website www.ilovemyagent.org  had been professionally edited by an experienced American Journalist and so if he joined he would not be attaching any typos to his reputation. 

However I let it upset me so much that a year ago I stopped blogging and writing, despite my love of it and all the wonderful things it had done for me professionally and personally. I invested my time and energy in travelling, studying, learning and not doing, not sharing my value with the world. Although I thought big and had a big vision for ILOVEMYAGENT.ORG I let fear dictate my actions and I started playing small, serving only my personal coaching clients and helping them focus and overcome their fears and achieve and surpass their goals.All the while not really facing the fact that it was my FEAR of criticism  that was holding me back from achieving mine.

Anyway once I learned that I decided to face my fear and reclaim my Abandoned Blog, with the help and support of Frances Flynn Thorsen, and of course now the criticism is still forthcoming but now I love it! I am learning to make Spellcheck my friend, and keep a dictionary close by. I know my strengths and I know my weaknesses, I know I am not perfect but I am confident in my abilities and know why I am hereand I am totally committed to making that happen.

So, Mike Barnett, a Big Thank You for the I Love Moment yesterday. I am officially an Advocate! It is a powerful reminder of how it is the little things we do and the way we do them that is the transforming factor in relationships with our customers. Won't you join me in watching this short, powerful, true story shared by Ken Blanchard and Barbara Glanz on the Simple Truths website www.simpletruths.com of how a grocery bagger transformed the business he worked for www.barbaraglanz.com/simpletruths/dvdvideo/index.html  and think of some things you can do to show your customers you really care. Just like Mike Barnett did  to me yesterday. 

 I have and I love it. I love that people can learn a lot about me before they decide to contact me. I love that wherever I am in the world people can Google me and decide in advance if they want to get to know me further, if they want to trust me, and if i am a great fit for them as a client, a coach or anything else for that matter. I love the Google Phenomenon.

As many of you know I have been travelling around the world for the last year, (I am currently in Arizona)  and The Power of Google has travelled with me.  I applied for short term apartment rentals in places as far apart as New York to Paris to a tiny countyside town of Panjas in The Gers in France, in Tuscany, In London and I was Googled by everyone! I was both surprised and delighted to see this was how people globally were researching things that mattered to them. How they decided to see if I would be someone they should rent their homes to, and I was delighted at the results. It was easy as people already felt like they knew me, liked me and they already trusted me to look after their homes and pay them on time. How cool is that.

The Google Phenomenon is Building in ways I never imagined, Colleges are Googling prospective students,  Google is Googling prospective Job Applicants, Customers are Googling Products and Services, We are Googling Everything. We are in Google Mania.

Why? Good old fashioned honesty and trust. We Know, Like and Trust Google, and we trust the results it delivers us, we know they will offer the best match they can find to our search and its unedited and untwisted by traditional spins we find in paid advertising.

The Google Phenomenon is not going away in fact its gathering steam and now more than ever we have an incredible opportunity to be proactive and really add some focus and activity to building our reputations online. We need to start working with all our clients from the beginning to ensure a wonderful customer experience, we need to let them know in advance we are going to be asking for their feedback during the process, we need to embrace a new vision, that the goal of working with a client is to get their feedback and an online recommendation not just a transaction.

I love to watch “The Big Idea” on CNBC with Donny Deutsch. Last week aired “Customer Service is Your Secret Weapon ...” 

Wake up and smell the roses, the power is shifting ... you don’t have it anymore; it’s in the hands of us LIARS!