Alvin Toffler said “Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who can’t read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.” He drew this from the full quote by Herbert Gerjuoy who said:
“The new education must teach the individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary, how to move from the concrete to the abstract and back, how to look at problems from a new direction — how to teach himself. Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who can’t read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.”
Toffler synthesized further to say:
“The illiterates of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write
but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn”
You have been operating in your business in more or less the same way since you began, right?
I am now going to say that – Unless “your business way” has a built in “unlearn and relearn” pattern to it – then many of your tactical actions are at best sub-optimised and at worst irrelevant.
Your core strategies may be still valid, or they may have been weakened by the structural changes that have accelerated massively in the last 100 years. The most obvious of these changes has been the internet. Information is now available on almost every product, and every supplier – with feedback from almost every client or customer online and instant.
This means a relatively new role called “online reputation management” will be very common in the short term. A year ago – almost no one had heard of it. I predict that within 12 months from now – even in provincial cities like Townsville – it will be a commonly used term in business circles.
If you don’t ‘get it’ yet – have a look at this Google search for ‘new cars townsville’. http://goo.gl/xpFlM Notice that Google now values and publishes reviews about these car dealers. From looking at this single page of search engine results – it is clear that these businesses have not yet heard of “reputation management”, or done the maths about how much even a single review from an unhappy customer is going to cost them.
We might even suggest that these large and successful businesses at this stage are in denial. They do not have the basics in place to get the best value out of their web presences. An example of this is that many do not even have not even claimed their Google Plus Business Pages – which may be the place on the web where they are most easily found by prospective customers. (Thanks to Google Plus/Local Places – which used to be the maps that appeared in a Google search page.) If I am considering buying a new car – I am likely going to read the “reviews” that appear in front of me. Will I be put off a brand or a dealer when I read how the dealership “ripped off” or gave bad service? As a human – yes.
If there is a mix of good and bad reviews, but each bad review has a reasonable response from the dealer – it may increase my probability of using that dealer.
This example of a structural change (the internet) has many ramifications. One is that as your potential customers now have almost perfect access to comparative information – then unless you build an uniqueness into your offerings – you will be increasingly treated as a commodity provider – which means you will be selling on price alone. And that is a tough place to live.
Another ramification is that protection of your integrity is vital. If you slip up, or a member of your team makes a dubious decision – it WILL become public knowledge – just about forever. The way that we now must deal with conflicts with customers is to consider them as a marketing cost to fix. It is far, far cheaper to give a refund (or whatever it takes) than to attempt to clean up stream of bad reviews, blogs, comments and bad feeling on the internet. It is expensive and time consuming to “manage” (which means minimise/hide) black marks on your internet presence. If you plan to stay in business – then deal carefully with potential conflicts with your customers.
Cheers
James Hooper
Townsville Business Enthusiast
