Telemarketers, publishers, and politicians take note:
It’s tough to accept the fact that your business model is fatally flawed, if it has been producing results for many years, but things have changed irrevocably with the advent of Internet forums and blogs.
The marketplace is now so well-connected that positive and negative publicity can reach the furthest corners of the globe overnight. You have to face the fact that your "newsworthy" activities will become known to more people than you can imagine and there is no way to put the genie back in the bottle after word gets out.
Any business model that produces negative reactions to the initial contact is no longer viable in a "connected" marketplace. The bad news spreads faster than you can find new prospects.
We can also include any business model that produces negative customer reactions as a result of the interaction of staff and customers.
I think telemarketing is broken and so does Rosa Say, of Say Leadership Coaching.
By the same reasoning, I also think that newspapers and other mass media which insult a significant percentage of their readership are doomed to extinction. We don’t write letters to the editors now, we send emails to advertisers.
In the bad old days of the 20th century, customers might fume and complain to their friends about the treatment they got at the hands of a corporate ninny.
Today they blog about the experience or log complaints on a forum and the corporation experiences a veritable s**tstorm of complaints and the ninny gets fired or promoted out of sight.
I think politics as we knew it is going to change in the same way. The voices of the crowd are as loud as the voices of those in "authority". Tomorrow, they may be louder still.
Elected representatives of the people will be getting feedback on their actions as never before. Whether they are skirmishing with an intern, violating the law, or just being stupid, there will be no evading the comments of thousands of concerned citizens.
Welcome to life in a fishbowl…