Last week I attended a seminar where they talked about the importance of diversifying your financial portfolio. Any good IFA worth their salt will tell you that you should never have your investments in one place, or even in one type of investment, i.e. stocks & shares, property, ISA’s, the list goes on. Financial wealth is determined by the number of sources of income you have. The more sources the more financial wealth you can acquire.

This got me thinking about Emotional Wealth. Do we allow ourselves to have a diverse portfolio of emotional wealth? Before I carry on, I think it important to give you how I interpret emotional wealth. Assuming that financial wealth is being financially abundant, that gives one freedom to have the life they want, I see emotional wealth as something that ensures we have balance in our lives and have many more good days than bad days. As a starting point I believe it starts from within, understanding how our emotions impact on all our parts of our lives. Being emotionally wealthy is about have numerous sources that feed our emotional well-being.

The diversification of your financial portfolio is dependent of your mindset and attitude to risk. Does your emotional wealth depend on your mindset and attitude to risk? Well maybe. The sources of achieving financial wealth have already been mentioned, what could be the sources of emotional wealth?

Well for starters I would say

These are the ones that I can think of. Are these in order, well they are in the order I thought of them. Mindset and risk play a part in the number of sources you have. For example from a finance point of view if you are risk averse you are more likely to put your money in a savings account than into stock & shares. If your personality allows you to take more risk you may invest in the stocks and maybe property. How does this relate to emotional wealth?

If you are risk averse you maybe reluctant to have many sources, i.e. the fear of all these people letting you down, or them judging you would be too painful. Allowing yourself to be open to others can be a risk for some. However once you start to communicate and start contributing the joy and reassurance this can give you is invaluable.

Social Media is something relatively new, however here to stay. When you look at the activity of social media forums, there is an overriding contribution to emotional wealth. Social media has allowed us to be more open about our needs in the business community. This is shown by the number of people giving testimonials, recommendations or generally saying nice things about each other, without the attachment of wanting anything back.

One immediate tool that has allowed this is twitter. By only allowing up to 140 characters you have to be succint in your message. Follow Friday (#FF, where you recommend people other’s could follow) feeds ones emotionally well-being. When someone recommends you to thousand’s of others, that they could follow you, it makes you feel good.

One of the sources of emotional wealth I mention is advocates. An advocate, in this context, is someone who speaks and recommends you when you are not there. Ultimately this is the role social media plays. The different platforms that are available, twitter, facebook, ecademy, linkedin etc, allow us to communicate not only to people we know, but to people we don’t. If they read or see something that interests them, there is a chance they would want to share this with others (how keen are you to tell your friends if you’ve been to a nice restaurant or seen a movie you liked).

Two things happen when this occurs, one you feel good (increase emotional wealth) they like you, as you have not attached anything to this recommendation( their emotional wealth increases). The likelihood is they will do the same for you and recommend you to others.

Do we need multiple sources to be emotionally healthy, no, however like finance, if you do have multiple sources the chances are, that most of your emotional needs will be met. This includes business. It is very easy to think that emotional needs are only valid in personal relationships with your spouse, children, family or close friends. We all know this is not true, to be emotionally wealthy within your work setting is essential.

Various surveys show, when you feel valued in your place of work, performance increases results are better and morale is high, all because the emotional needs are being met.

With the demands we put on ourselves to be successful in what we do, it is essential that we are emotionally wealthy. So like an IFA would do a financial health check, conduct a emotional health check on yourself, or better still get an expert to do it. Looking at the list above, how many of these sources do you benefit from? Can you think of other areas where you can increase your emotional wealth.

Since the turn of the year, most of my thoughts about taking my business to the next level have focused around social media. Thinking about this objectively, this got me thinking, is this just a fad or is it here to stay?

Some facts…

1. Average person spent five and a half hours on social media sites in December 2009, up 82 percent from December 2008. AC NIELSEN

2. Marketers will also be spending more time and money on social media sites in 2010 – Alterian

5. Facebook is still by far the most popular social networking site worldwide, with 206.9 million unique visitors in December

6. 67% of global social media users visited the site during that month, spending an average of about 5.5 hours there per month, up from just three hours in December 2008.

7. Twitter received 18.1 million unique visitors in December 2009, up from 2.7 million in December 2008 (a remarkable 579 percent rate of growth).

8. Time spent on blogs and other social media sites increased 210 percent year-over-year, and the average time spent per person increased 143 percent.

9. Australia led the world in time spent on social media sites with 6 hours and 52 minutes per person, United States was second (6 hours and 9 minutes) with the United Kingdom close behind (6 hours and 7 minutes)

10. 20 million people are online on SKYPE at peak time, 445 million subscribers in Q1 2009, 30% usage for business purpose, 3.1 billion call to mobiles and landlines in Q3 2009, More than 190 certified hardware products.

11. Facebook available in more than 70 languages with 900+ employees. Facebook banned in Syria and 70% users live outside US. Features more than 350,000 application. Over 2.5 Billion photos uploaded monthly and faster growing demographic is women over 55. More that 300,000,000 users.

12. Approximately 150,000,000 videos on YouTube. 70% of the registered users are the American. Every minute 20 hours of video is uploaded. Localized versions for over 22 countries in 19 languages, total times of videos watched in 9300+ years. Estimated revenue of between $120 – $500 Million.

13. 54% of respondents said social media was ‘increasingly important’ to the overall marketing mix, with only 14% believing it to be ‘critical for success (Alterian Research Study)

14. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web

15. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour;

16. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.

17. Hitwise UK reports indicate as top three sites for the week ending 16/01/2010: Facebook (51.60%), YouTube (16.10%) and Bebo (2.26%) (social networking category).

18. 51% of journalists read blogs for story ideas.

19. 28% of top search engine results are Social Media sites.

20. Universal McCann reports that 77% of all active internet users often read blogs.

21. Delicious (bookmarking site), has more than five million users and over 160 million unique bookmarked URLs.

22. According to Compete, In Q4 2009 Digg saw a 91% increase in traffic, while Stumbleupon and FriendFeed recorded a huge increase of over 180% and 3100%, respectively, as compared to 2008.

23. Wikipedia currently has more than 13.5 million articles in more than 250 different languages. The site attracts over 60 million unique visitors a month and it’s often hotly debated that the information it contains is more reliable than any printed Encyclopaedia.

24. There are overall 234 million websites as of December 2009. 126 million blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse)..

Data compiled by Sorav Jain: Social Media & Digital Marketing Blog