In the social business marketplace brands that hope to build loyal and growing communities do so most effectively when they demonstrate their core values and allow a community to build and engage around it.

In today's social business marketplace Facebook is one of the best places for nonprofits to be discovered and connect with a larger audience on the basis of shared values. So to get started a non-profit should launch a Facebook page and invite your existing real world community to connect your cause and their networks.

The social business marketplace is effectively forcing brands to engage with consumers on the basis of something that is meaningful to them. More often than not this takes the form of some core value that finds expression in a non-profit cause.

As a speaker business leader or marketer of any type the onus is now on each of us to become equally capable of communicating very personally with a seemingly endless number of people connected by social technologies.

Not since the digital revolution in the early '90s has technology placed such a comprehensive burden on business employees and individuals to reinvent their business plans services and products and themselves to keep pace with the changing marketplace.

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.

Modern poets talk against business poor things but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

We don't have a monopoly. We have market share. There's a difference.

The invisible hand of the market always moves faster and better than the heavy hand of government.

We think the Mac will sell zillions but we didn't build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren't going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.

I was always interested in fashion and beauty. I was fifteen when I was scouted in a flea market. Two years later I arrived in New York. I was in awe because it was like another planet.

The game in beauty is changing so much if your product isn't high tech or can't make a unique performance claim - plump your lips reduce your lines look glossy and stay on for 24 hours - you can't go to market today. I'm not just talking about a $20 lipstick but a $5 lipstick!

Avon invented the concept of direct marketing and direct selling beauty. And that's still very valid to us. We'll have a firm that will be around for another 114 years as strongly as it was the first 114.

Teachers believe they have a gift for giving it drives them with the same irrepressible drive that drives others to create a work of art or a market or a building.

The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.

Back in the days when the market was a kind of secular god and all the world thrilled to behold the amazing powers of private capital the idea of privatizing highways and airports and other bits of our transportation infrastructure made a certain kind of sense.

Smart businesses do not look at labor costs alone anymore. They do look at market access transportation telecommunications infrastructure and the education and skill level of the workforce the development of capital and the regulatory market.

One already feels like an anachronism writing novels in the age of what-ever-this-is-the-age-of but touring to promote them feels doubly anachronistic. The marketplace is showing an increasing intolerance for the time-honored practice of printing information on paper and shipping it around the country.

Regardless of age regardless of position regardless of the business we happen to be in all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.

Situational unawareness in the private marketplace or on the battlefield will cost you your livelihood or your life. In the Age of Obama however such willful ignorance is a job prerequisite. The less you know the better.

I'd like to talk about free markets. Information in the computer age is the last genuine free market left on earth except those free markets where indigenous people are still surviving. And that's basically becoming limited.