You won’t find the secret to business success online.

So stop looking.

Because everyone is scrambling to produce better content more often, there’s great incentive (eyeballs and wallets) to create new and better guides for business.

I mean, Brian Solis told us how to create and cultivate a brand in social media in just seven steps.

Chris Brogan just shared a simple formula for blogging success that got him 50,000 subscribers.

Forbes thought it prudent to create a slideshow entitled “In Pictures: How To Fire Someone”

And the list goes on.

But as wonderful as these resources and others like them are, their content is really only a distillation of a larger, more complex set of ideas. I won’t disagree that it takes a lot of mental work to reduce a complex issue to 500 words. But there is always something lost in that reduction process—nuances flattened, subtleties ignored.

The Easy Stuff’s Been Covered

If you’ve been reading business blogs—especially those relating to the marketing and PR aspects of social media—for anything more than a year, there will come a point at which every article starts to sound the same (I don’t mean to pick on Solis again, but did we really need another article this week telling us engagement with customers via social networks is a good idea?).

So if we’re looking to learn more about something like how to buy a Facebook ad quickly, we’re golden.

But if we really want to achieve great success, we’ll have to move beyond the simple concepts presented in blog posts.

And in my humble opinion, that means spending more time thinking and doing work offline than we spend online.

Online consumption is fine, but if we’re not acting on all those tweets and blog posts, we might as well be watching cats on YouTube.

As my friend Shane Mac would say (and did say in his forthcoming book [vulgarity warning]), “stop being such a consumption whore.”

The Real Work

This isn’t to say that simple concepts can’t inspire us to great action. Ben McConnell’s 1-page strategic plan post completely changed the way I present strategic business planning.

But the post didn’t replace the hard work of creating a strategy that fits my business, finding the resources to enact it, tracking results, and revising accordingly.

My fear is neither that the Internet is making us stupider (sorry Nick Carr), nor that our online habits prevent us from deep concentration (sorry again Nicky), but that reading and talking about action feels like a great subsitute for real action.

I mean, it’s easier to retweet Charity:Water than to actually pull out your credit card and make a donation, let alone create a campaign.

It’s a lot easier to talk about becoming “trust agents” who “crush it” than it is to actually wake up every morning, get out of bed, and bust your butt.

Let’s Examine What We’re Doing Online

First, there’s the issue of the content we’re consuming.

There will always be a place for bubblegum posts like “Dr. Evil’s 7 Tips for Achieving Worldwide Marketing Domination,” but I think that perhaps more importantly, we have a responsibility to seek out and demand content that describes phenomena and puts it into a specific, actionable context.

Take Umair Haque’s “From Business Models to “Betterness” Models” for example. In the article and others that support it, he describes what’s happening in the marketplace and gives  us a framework for thinking about how business is shifting.

We need to read people who are making these kinds of contributions.

And second, there’s the issue of our own action.

If we really want to make the most of the tools we have at our disposal, we’ll not just participate in the conversation, we’ll take action to move it forward.

And that responsibility starts right now today.

It starts with asking ourselves, “how am I going to use the time I spent reading and interacting online today to achieve specific, actionable goals?”

So what are you going to do today?

-Andrew

Image credit: mikebaird on Flickr. See original for copyright information.

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