A link letter: Instead of a post by a man too scattered by the winds

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Colleen Kulikowski sent me a sweet card wishing us success with Unchained. Enclosed was a packet of Aster seeds. If I can get them to grow, I’ll take pictures.

Tom Royce sent an email note telling us to break a leg.

Kevin Warmath needs a roommate for Unchained. If you haven’t bunked up and want to split costs with a man who swears he’s not a Neanderthal, give him a call (678-438-3041) and work something out.

My post on transparency was picked up by my long-time friend and client, Richard Nikoley. Richard runs Provanta, a debt-reduction company. Partly owing to my influence, they’ve just switched their on-line presence over to a WordPress blogsite, putting them squarely in the warts-and-all Web 2.0 world.

I said this in email to Richard, an Unchained epiphany all its own:

What’s interesting is that everyone in our world shops this way: Full research, full knowledge of the pros and cons of everything. We might be at the right edge of the learning curve, but it’s all the same curve. Everyone is on it, and everyone is moving our way on that curve. Why would we market any way but as a reflection of how we shop?

Think about it, and I mean think about it a lot: Why would we market any way but as a reflection of how we shop?

That post was also picked up by The Innkeeper’s Resource, a blog for Bed ‘n’ Breakfast innkeepers. Their take: Anonymous reviews are a reality of their business. Get used to it. I offered this in a comment:

Brilliant.

Here’s an idea that can work in any industry that can be hit with an off-site review:

“When Mark and Marie Olson complained about our threadbare linens on TripReports.com, we saw red. Not because the charge was false. It was true, alas. We had let ourselves become so distracted by the big picture of providing a great experience for our guests that we forgot that big things are made up of little things. Not only did we add a quality control procedure to our laundry, we built quality control into every aspect of our business. And we gave the Olsons a coupon for another visit, on us, for them to use themselves or to pass along to friends. We know we won’t always be perfect in everything we do, but thanks to the honest feedback of folks like Mark and Marie, we’re always working to get better at delivering that simply-unrepeatable experience.”

That story line rings true with people. No one is perfect. That’s understood. Are you working to get better, or are you trying to deny or shout down criticism? If you address an unpleasant fact by talking about what you learned for having been wrong, you can turn a topical failure into a broad-based marketing victory.

This goes for us, too. Of all the uncomfortable questions we don’t ask our clients, the most uncomfortable question of all is this one: How could I have done a better job in working with you? And yet simply asking the question ameliorates the issue. And, armed with the knowledge of what you’re getting wrong, you can amend the error with your client and rework your praxis so you never make that mistake again. Praise might make us feel big, but taking and acting upon criticism is how we grow.

Richard Riccelli sent me a very informative article on how newspapers are vanishing from the modern world:

The newspaper is a classic product of the Industrial Revolution. Its manufacture, which has barely changed in 150 years, requires a huge physical plant dominated by complex machines that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase and maintain. Crews of manual laborers must load and unload many tons of paper, take care of the machinery as the newspaper is inked and colored and cut and folded, and oversee the interweaving of its sections. After all that, a brigade of truckers shows up to take the papers on an hours-long delivery tour. This must happen seven days a week, under any conceivable weather condition, every day of the year, forever.

And that is merely the blue-collar side of the business. The white-collar side employs hundreds of workers as well: writers and editors and photographers and graphic designers to fill the pages with copy and images, advertising salesmen to fill them with ads, a circulation department to make sure the paper gets to paying customers, and dozens of executives supervising it all.

This labor-intensive process is precisely the model that has been upended in industry after industry, driven to painful change by technological innovation and competitive threats. When the first such major threat hit the newspaper industry, it came in the form of television news, another labor-intensive and expensive medium. But in helping to shutter newspapers, TV proved to be a boon for the ones that weathered the storm.

However dangerous the challenge from television, the number of stations was, fortunately for the print business, fixed by federal fiat. Meanwhile, there was usually one money-making newspaper in the same local market—the only venue for print advertising by supermarkets and department stores and other businesses needing to let their customers know about weekly sales and bargains. For two decades, those newspapers cornered their markets, generated an enormous amount of cash, produced unheard-of profit margins of 20 to 30 percent, and were as valuable as their TV rivals, if not more so.

This period came to an end with the end of the 20th century. If one new medium, television, had wounded the institution of the daily newspaper with happy results for those who survived, a second new medium, the Internet, has been slowly garroting the survivors.

The substantive reason almost goes without saying. The Internet has turned the daily newspaper into an atavism. By providing readers with news and features every second of the day, cleanly and quickly, it has basically destroyed the rationale behind a once-a-day compendium printed on paper.

A tour de force. Read the whole thing.

Finally, we’re sad that Tom Johnson won’t be able to join us for Unchained. His father is ill, and Tom’s a stand-up guy. But: In the Silver Lining category, he won’t be importing electronics-eating Raspberry Ants from Houston to Phoenix. Don’t mess with Texas indeed!

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