خط ها را از خاک پاک کردن

CHAPTER TWO

Erasing Lines in the Sand

In 1997, shortly after I launched WineLibrary.com, I was invited to a conference hosted by a local chapter of the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce to talk about online selling. It was my first speaking engagement, and I was pumped. I sat in the wings, trying to stay calm, as the speaker before me walked out onstage. He wore a tie. He had VP credentials and a fancy PowerPoint presentation. And the theme of his talk was that dotcom retail was a crock. It wasn’t practical, and it would never take off because, as the data on his PowerPoint slides revealed, nobody in Middle America was buying, nor would they ever buy, on the Internet. Mr. PowerPoint asked the audience, “How many of you have heard of Amazon?” A solid number of people raised their hands. He went on to ask if they really thought people would abandon the relationships they’d built over the years with their local bookstores, or even bypass super-stocked Barnes & Noble. They didn’t. It would be another two years before CEO Jeff Bezos would be named Time’s Person of the Year, his name underscored on the cover by the subhead “E-commerce is changing the way the world shops.” It would be another four years before Amazon reached its first quarterly net profit. Mr. PowerPoint compared the company’s rising market share to its nonexistent profits and said that one day we would all look back and say, “Remember Amazon?”

My short-term dream at the time was to become the Amazon for wine, and the audience I was about to explain that dream to was staring at this PowerPointing clown’s charts and graphs as if they were carved stone tablets brought down by Moses. As he finished up, he said, “This kid’s now going to tell you how he’s going to sell wine on the Internet. How many of you here would ever buy wine on the Internet?” Only one or two people out of sixty or seventy raised their hands.

You know if this had happened in 2010, the talk would have been recorded and I could have posted it to show everyone what a jerk he was. But believe it or not, even though he called me a kid, he did earn my respect for calling me out. I like people with competitive spirit and bravado; they bring out the fight in me. Not that I won any battles that day. I walked out onstage and opened my talk by saying, “With all due respect to Mr. PowerPoint, he has no idea what he’s talking about. He is going to be on the wrong side of history. I feel bad for him.” I went on to tell my story, and gave my audience my best, most heartfelt argument as to why the Internet would be to retailers what the printing press was to writers. To the end, they remained a very skeptical, uninterested crowd.

Entrepreneurs have a sort of sixth sense that tells them when big change is afoot. The Time magazine article that accompanied Bezos’s Person of the Year award describes it best:

Every time a seismic shift takes place in our economy, there are people who feel the vibrations long before the rest of us do, vibrations so strong they demand action—action that can seem rash, even stupid. Ferry owner Cornelius Vanderbilt jumped ship when he saw the railroads coming. Thomas Watson Jr., overwhelmed by his sense that computers would be everywhere even when they were nowhere, bet his father’s office-machine company on it: IBM.

Jeffrey Preston Bezos had that same experience when he first peered into the maze of connected computers called the World Wide Web and realized that the future of retailing was glowing back at him.

Looking back, I can’t hold Mr. PowerPoint’s skepticism against him, nor can I blame the audience for dismissing most of what I had to say. Most people’s DNA simply doesn’t allow them an entrepreneur’s anticipation skills. They don’t see potential in the unknown, they see a threat to their comfort zone, so their knee-jerk reaction is to draw a deep line in the sand between themselves and anything new or unproven, especially when it comes to technology. Close to 90 percent of Americans own cell phones, but people my age can still remember when many questioned the need to be, and even the wisdom of being, reachable by phone at any time. Just four short years ago, we actually used those phones for talking, not texting. And no one was playing Farmville on Facebook.* How many of today’s more than 500 million Facebook users swore they’d never use the site?* There’s a reason the divide between innovators—people who eagerly embrace new technology—and the majority has been described as a chasm.

Most businesspeople spend far too long on the wrong side of that chasm, hiding behind tired sayings like “You can only manage what you measure.” That’s how my nemesis won back in 1997. He had numbers from sources the audience trusted; any numbers I might have been able to point to came from research that still hadn’t made its way to the mainstream. No matter how strongly I could feel the vibrations of the future, without hard numbers from old-school sources indicating that the Internet was going to change how Americans thought about buying and selling everything from books and wine to toilet paper and asparagus, I couldn’t win over the corporate mindset.

Corporate America loves ecommerce now, of course, but business leaders and brand managers and marketers have simply drawn new lines in the sand, this time putting distance between their companies and social media, all the while desperately clinging to the security they still believe numbers can provide. Unfortunately, if you wait until social media is able to prove itself to you before deciding to engage with your customers one-on-one, you’ll have missed your greatest window of opportunity to move ahead of your competitors.

Resistance Won’t Kill You Right Away

What should the horse-and-buggy driver have done when he noticed the automobile? Should he have waited until he was down to three fares per day to consider that maybe he needed to make a change in how he was going to make a living, or should he have quickly sold the horses? Sell the frigging horses, of course! Company leaders may not see their lack of participation in social media reflected on their P&L statement, but I promise that, unless something else sinks their company first, they will. Just because you ignore a threat doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Will you die if you smoke? Not necessarily. Not everyone who smokes dies of lung cancer, and if smokers live long enough, there are plenty of other things that can kill them. Likewise, you’re not going out of business tomorrow if you’re not on Facebook and Twitter and blogging and creating content and building community. But the risk that your business will die before its time grows bigger every day that you don’t use social media. You think Barnes & Noble and Borders didn’t see Amazon coming in 1997? Of course they did. But the numbers distracted them, and the numbers said that Amazon was nowhere near making a profit, and Barnes & Noble and Borders were still the number-one-and-two book retailers in the country. Even if some Borders and Barnes & Noble execs could sense that change was coming, they probably preferred to believe the story the numbers told them. To doubt the numbers would have meant revamping and hustling like crazy, and it is so much easier to do things the way they’ve always been done before. B. Dalton, owned by Barnes & Noble, didn’t go out of business in 1999. It didn’t happen in 2001, or even 2003. It didn’t happen until January 2010, when the last store finally closed. But it did finally happen, and it didn’t have to. Like the guy who quits smoking only after being diagnosed with lung cancer, by the time B. Dalton realized that Amazon was a force to be reckoned with, it was too late.

No big company loses to a little company if they are totally committed to winning the fight. There is no reason why mammoth companies like Barnes & Noble or Borders could not have spent real money and hired the right people to come at Amazon with everything they had. Barnes & Noble went online in 1997, but they didn’t go in 100 percent; they couldn’t have, or Amazon wouldn’t have taken over so much of their market. They should have done the same thing I do every time a new liquor store that could be a threat opens up near me—pound the competitor’s face in with advertising and marketing dollars (even if they’re not opening up close to me, you can bet I’m paying close attention to what they’re doing). Barnes & Noble should have come at Amazon the way Fox and NBC came at Google, when they developed a true rival, Hulu, to combat Google’s YouTube.

Right now, I’d say that social media is a bit like a kidney—you can survive with only one, but your chances of making it to old age are a lot better with two. Eventually, though, I think social media will be as important to a business as a strong heart.