Suddenly, its as if every doctor, lawyer, accountant, consultant and professional services provider, is naked.

This is the feeling you get being in one of these vocations, in the age of transparency, the age of the Internet. Your secrets, if you had any, are laid bare to the world through the web, and when anybody wants to ogle you, they Google you, first.

(Is is coincidental that Google spells Go Ogle?)

The amount of information available about nearly anyone and any company is staggering.

Oddly, this wealth of data doesnt make us stand out as unique.

It commoditizes us. We all seem strikingly similar, offering to deliver, fundamentally, the same satisfactions.

Before this naked era, we could choose to disclose information, and our prospects faced a fairly daunting challenge when they wanted to shop our prices and proposals. Surely, they could use Yellow Pages, but there was an implicit understanding that this represented a very tiny sampling of the universe of potential services providers.

Lets say you want to sell training to a corporation. How would you go about it in the old days? Youd send information, invite people to see you in public seminars, and possibly send in an audio or video along with supporting puffery.

And lets say they liked you. Theyd look at your price and make a decision, and if they felt they needed a second bid, theyd have to work fairly hard to find your competition.

Today, as you know, they can search under training and find tens of thousands of suppliers, many of which have demonstration videos streaming at their sites. Instead of being the star performer, one of perhaps two or three under consideration, youre an extra in a cast of zillions, just praying to get a big break.

So, whats the answer?

Its a lot like promoting monogamy in an era of licentiousness. To be chosen as The One, we need to have significant, interpersonal interactions that promote a feeling of fondness.

Think of the Internet as one big singles bar. Even if we meet a potential match there, we have to spirit them out of the joint, to some quiet, solitary spot as soon as we can.

Otherwise, theyll just dizzy themselves with available choices, until all of us look the same, and now its just a matter of price.