Joe had built a publishing and consulting business over many, many years but it was changing…and not for the better. Though his clients and customers loved his products and services, he found that sales had been continuing to erode even though he was bringing out new products at a feverish pace.
New products always sold well but it was exhausting to scramble to make them and he had a vague sense that the problem wasn’t his information, his insights or his delivery…it was a shift in how his clients and customers were obtaining what he created and at some point it wouldn’t matter how many new products he shoved into the pipeline…people would stop buying. They were already pretty disinterested in his print, DVD’s or most of the electronic delivery he offered. There had to be a better way to deliver what clients and customers wanted and start to grow again instead of focusing on how to stop the decline in revenue.
All Joe heard about was Web 2.0; how big media was scrambling to be relevant; that people were creating their own content and many tried to convince him to give away his product and build buzz (yeah right…and go out of business to boot!); that the collective intelligence connected via the Internet was smarter than any company, individual or small team so that unless he figured out how to build a community around what his firm offered, he was screwed.
It became crystal clear to him that — just like all the other business types being disrupted by the Internet-as-a-platform and Web 2.0 — he had to quickly map his business on to the Internet while ensuring he didn’t kill his current revenue streams. It was going to require some finesse to shift his current clients and customers over to the Web while still selling them his other offerings…but he thought they would do it. Yep…building a web asset was the key and he set about enthusiastically building one in earnest.
What he discovered wasn’t pretty.
Steve’s Social Stuff