Let’s examine the key attributes of a hyper connected world and the ways businesses must adapt to each of them:
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The idea of having “business hours” is already almost anachronistic. The hyper-connected world is always on, since our social networks are no longer local. The sun never sets on the hyper-connected business and effective business leaders need to find ways to handle the inevitable client call or business emergency at three in the morning.

There are several ways of accomplishing this. One is to rely on outsourcing and automation services to handle overflow. Many small business owners make use of services like eVoice to route business calls to other phone lines during certain hours, allowing them to work seamlessly from multiple locations.

More generally, it’s becoming a standard for the modern businessman to blend his work and social life, always being on call to handle business from a mobile workstation. Some people adapt to this way of doing things more easily than others. The key is finding a way to be flexible and still maintain balance, and it takes a lot of practice. On the positive side, interactions that once required an in-person meeting can now be accomplished with a text message; if you can manage to deal with the stress of constantly being on call, you can actually get a lot more accomplished.

Rich Information and Interactivity
Gone are the days when you could put up a website with contact information and an “about” page and wait for the business to come in. Customers expect to have access to rich veins of information about your business from multiple sources before they ever make actual contact. Some of these information sources you can control: your business homepage, social media identities, press releases and marketing content are all in this category. Other sources are generated outside of your control and can be very harmful or very beneficial. These are review sites and customer forums, as well as interactions over Facebook and @ mentions on Twitter.

The modern businessman has to understand that an important part of his job is the management of all of these streams of information. For the ones you have control over, make sure you provide a wealth of information in the form of detailed FAQ’s, well-developed product descriptions and responsive social network presences. Just remember that if you don’t provide the information, someone else will and it won’t always cast you in the best light.

A lot of time will have to be spent monitoring and responding to customer discussions in public forums and over Facebook. Leaving these things to grow wild is an increasingly untenable policy, as the negative voices will always drown out the positive. Google alerts and careful use of SEO techniques to drown out the noise are essential to this process.

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