Newspapers are crumbling! In-store retail is floundering! Non-digital music is in its last throes! We’re all going to die! Maybe not but everything is changing. Why hasn’t business as usual?
If that’s all overblown hype, and it is: what’s changing? Access.
Access has ballooned and established media are falling into a fetal position in a corner and trying to get us to come along. They should be embracing it. (If only because access is fundamental to the free market principles they hold so dear.)
Here’s an example (there are dozens) of how traditional business reacted to a situation and how tools could have created a better different outcome:
Organic farming has taken off because those with money (fewer and fewer each month) enough to buy healthy are looking for the best. Agribusiness reacted, forcing ambiguous guidelines for “organic” and filling shelves with their same assembly-line produce.
Instead, organic farmers themselves could have used social tools to build awareness, creating their own customer base. Direct-to-consumer programs could have been instituted at little cost (and still can). Consensus on standards could have been found and “Big Farm” would be avoided entirely.
It’s not dropping profits or copyright infringement that has corporations anxious, like Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton pathetically calling for “guardrails” (great rebuttal by TechDirt here). It’s that the role of the corporation is losing its stranglehold.
Journalists don’t need publishers to get their stories out. Consumers can use online retailers rather than drive to a big-box giants to pay mark-up. Musicians with low-cost equipment and a MySpace account can reach a global audience (theoretically).
Pre-internet, we needed corporations. Now, most of our food, entertainment and news come from fewer than twenty mega-corporations. Consumers are learning they can find better elsewhere. Business has to adapt because the market already has.
How?
- Leverage your vast resources
- Commit to lessening global impact, conserve resources
- Give consumers a reason to buy from you (outside of “because I told you to”)
- Use new media how your market is using it, interact with your consumers
- Stop suing your most avid customers
- Leverage your vast resources (it needs repeating)
Tags: corporations, digital reputation management, journalism, online