We have a large book store in my town is the kind of place you picture in your mind when you think about the big independent bookshop.
This is ideal for viewing, with plenty of comfy chairs to relax. The book displays the enticingly. There is little coffee shop, so you can relax with espresso. They are your favorite writers come to read, so there is always a sense of events and excitement.
They do everything correctly, and they have always had a lot of clients.
But they still closed its doors last year.
No, not for reasons you might think. He was not Amazon who killed them, or distribution of free content on the Web site, or the crappy economy.
They closed shop because they lease their big, comfortable building. and when the lease ran out, their landlord tripled the rent.
Literally overnight, their business model to work. Just income does not exceed the costs. The decision taken by the other party, it has no control over, took a remarkable business and destroyed it.
And that's exactly what you risk every day you make your business is completely dependent on another company.
It could be Facebook. It can be eBay. It may be Google.
This is called digital sharecropping, and this means that you're building your business in a foreign land.
And this is a recipe for heartbreak and failure.
Digital sharecropping is a term coined by Nicholas Carr to describe a peculiar phenomenon of Web 2.0.
One of the main economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production in the hands of many and the concentration of economic benefit in the hands of a few.
In other words, anyone can create content on sites like Facebook, but that content effectively belongs to Facebook. The more content we create free, becomes more valuable Facebook. We do the work, they reap the profit.
Sharecropping general term refers to the practice of agriculture after the civil war in the United States, but it basically the same thing as feudalism. The big landowner allows individual farmers working on their land and occupies a large portion of the proceeds from the crops.
The lessor has all control. If he decides to get rid of you, you will lose your means of livelihood. If it decides to raise his fee, you go a little bit hungry. You do all the work and the owner gets a large portion of the profits, leaving you to get money to life.
Well we have more than a subsistence economy, and our work does not imply 12-hour days in exhausting conditions. So it's a sharecropping still dangerous?
This, for several reasons.
More and more small businesses are moving all of their marketing on sites like Facebook. It's local, it's free (or at least cheap), and it does feel like they are doing something good.
But what happens when Facebook thinks you have done something that violates their terms of service and delete your account? Or change the way you can talk to your customers?
Facebook is particularly fast-moving platform, but this is not the only one. The entire industry has grown based on trying to figure out what Google is going to do tomorrow, and as a search engine and advertising platform.
If you rely on Facebook or Google for delivery in all your new clients you sharecropping. You hope the landlord will continue as you and support your business, but the fact that the lessor has the slightest idea who you are and are not interested, actually.
Another problem with shared is that the owner may or may not be here next year.
Sharecroppers have put millions of hours in sites like Digg or MySpace. And these sites still exist, but they are no longer in traffic, they once did.
Sharecropped land, in other words, has over time become less fertile.
Maybe Facebook or LinkedIn or Google + will buck this trend. Maybe they will continue to remain healthy and viable for decades, rather than in a year or two.
The best that we can make this assumption. And if we think so, our business is slow and steady decline.
Of course not. Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter and many other sites are all excellent tools to add to our marketing mix.
The secret is to spend most of your time and creative energy to create assets that you control.
There are three assets should be created today and should continue to focus on throughout your business:
Well-designed Web site or blog is filled with a lot of contentAn to choose in the list, ideally with a reputation for high quality autoresponderA to ensure impeccable valueThese things are equivalent to the purchase of your building instead of renting it.
Now you can view either a victim of outside influences. Building the shop can burn down. And your site can be hacked, your mailbox is closed, your reputation smeared.
But repairs of your assets in the control. You can fix the hacked code, export the list of e-mail addresses to another provider and effectively manage your reputation.
More importantly, you can actively protect these assets, website security, avoiding any spammy or dodgy practice with your email and loyal audience who will vouch for you as one of the good guys.
You've put a lot of time and effort in your business — not to jeopardize it by building on the leased lands.
How about you — do you feel confident that you are developing your own online assets? As the balance between the assets that you control and third-party sites like Facebook or Twitter?
Let us know in the comments.
