The great fear that hung over the business community in the 1970s was death by regulation and the great goal of the conservative movement as it rose to triumph in the 1980s was to remove that threat - to keep OSHA the EPA and the FTC from choking off entrepreneurship with their infernal meddling in the marketplace.

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.

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.

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.

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.