The 10 greatest unsolved mysteries on-line

Where there are great mysteries, there are great opportunities – opportunities to explain, to solve, to discover and to reveal.  Take the Internet for example. It has exploded into our lives with a leading-edge that hugs the horizon.  In the wake of so much accelerated change comes an ever increasing tail of mysteries and yet-to-be explained phenomena for opportunistic leaders to capitalize on.

A treasure trove of crystal skulls, temples, last crusades & lost arks

One person’s mystery is another person’s understanding.  What follows are my greatest unsolved mysteries on-line, and without doubt you will have your own list – which I’d love to read.  Here’s mine:

1. Obsessive volumating

It’s a mystery to me why there’s a near universal obsession with gathering high volumes of fans, friends and followers – at the expense of developing deeper, richer and mutually valuable connections.

2. Cashless content

It’s a mystery to me how to monetize content on-line.  In the beginning were the words, and the words became cash – for the chosen few.  The words that seem to sell without fail are those telling us how to sell words without fail.

3. User confusion

It’s a mystery to me how FriendFeed works, and why it’s up to me to have to work it out.  With best-sellers like Don’t Make Me Think, brain-dead easy user interfaces like Google, and the ‘Press-here-Dummy simplicity of iProducts, such user-friction mystifies me.

4. Search dilemma

It’s a mystery to me as to which works harder to help the right people find your content – S.E.O. or great content.  For every article I read about the benefits of S.E.O., I hear of yet another S.E.-NO! rebel who describes how magnetic content attracted endless targeted traffic.

5. Social ambiguity

It’s a mystery to me what social media is.  It seems that a whole industry of experts and room-fillers has sprung up around this term, without any clear agreement of what it is.  Maybe that’s the point – the ambiguity creates the industry.

6. Magic formula

It’s a mystery to me why so many people seem to be seeking a magic bullet by which to succeed on-line.  There’s a myth that this secret success formula is just one book, blog post, webinar or tweet away – and if I keep my hands out long enough, it will drop out of the sky and into my lap-(top).

7. Post-rate perplexity

It’s a mystery to me as to how often to post blog articles.  Given there are so many blogs, so many blog experts and so many companies that depend on blogging for their income, it mystifies me that there’s so much confusion around this issue.

8. Layout labyrinth

It’s a mystery to me what an optimized blog layout looks like.  Just as in Mystery 7, with the massive and universal vested interest in blogging, it astounds me that the pathway to presenting an optimized layout is such a labyrinth – with almost as many recommendations and templates as there are blogs.

9.  Success unsustainability

It’s a mystery to me how to make on-line success sustainable.  When I see those who others hold high as on-line leaders – those who have ‘made it’ – working so long and so hard at it, day after day – travelling the globe from pillar to post – looking so exhausted on their free videos – I wonder just how sustainable this all is.

10. Helped-self enigma

It’s a mystery to me that with all the self-help resources, self-improvement tips and keys to success so freely available on-line, why more people aren’t succeeding financially, health-wise, relationally and emotionally?  Or is it that if we all implemented the must-know how-to, we would have nothing to chase or write about?

Your leading thoughts…

As a leader who reads this blog, your opinion, experience and contribution to this conversation is highly valued.

• What are your greatest unsolved mysteries on-line?

• What’s more important to you, the discovery process or actually solving of the mystery?

• What do you believe will be the emerging mysteries over the next decade?  How can we capitalize on them?




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