Wrong ingredients for a business recipe

Ok you have 5,000 hits to your Myspace page (cool. throw that in the bowl)

Ok you now have 1,000 friends on your Facebook page (cool. throw that in the bowl)

Ok you have 30 blogs that link to your blog and you easily have 1,000 unique hits a day (cool. throw that in the bowl)

Ok now you have 500 people who follow you on twitter (cool. throw that in the bowl).

Mix it all up. Now what do you have?

A whole bunch of people who know about you.  

Ok now put together a statement of what your product/service is (cool. throw that in the bowl).

Ok now state who your target market is (cool, throw that in the bowl).

Ok state who your competition is (cool. throw that in the bowl)

Ok talk about the competitive advantage - what makes your product better than your competitions (cool. throw that into the bowl)

Mix it all up.  Now what do you have?

Something of potential value in the marketplace that people will want and you can begin developing an actual business around.

It seems to me that I hear more often about how many twitter followers someone has than what value the business (or person) is actually offering.  It is on just about every social network that companies advertise everything and anything - yet there isn't any real discussion around if this is really the right marketing strategy to reach their target market. 

It seems in today's web 2.0 world that all people are really trying to do is cook up schemes to get attention, followers, friends and hits.  That  in and of itself is not a problem, but what I think becomes problematic is that people are focusing more on how to leverage a Facebook profile to their benefit or get followed on Twitter than actually doing the hard and difficult work of creating a business idea that will survive - whether it's linked to a social network or not.  It seems that often the process of building and developing an  idea and creating something of value for the marketplace seems to take a back seat.

So in a slightly adjusted version of the original - If you can't cook, then put the ingredients and mixing bowl down and get out of the kitchen.