Dealing With Smoke and Mirrors
Posted On: 2010-02-25
Here we are working in an industry of smoke and mirrors ... an industry that sells a fantasy or an illusion ... and yet we so often succumb to fantasies and illusions ourselves.
Sure we may like to think that we're experienced ... hard nosed ... and not likely to be fooled when it comes to doing business online but, in most cases, nothing could be further from the truth. We may not be fooled by the very fantasy or illusion that we're peddling to our surfers but even though our fantasies and illusions may be different we're still fooled by them.
Not all that long ago a billing company won an XBiz award for being the best billing company in the business. Today there are a number of paysite owners who are wondering what has happened to their income ... those dollars that they used to get from that very same billing company that won the award.
That billing company that looked so good ... so reliable ... so trustworthy ... the billing company that won such a prestigious award hasn't paid them in several months and it seems that they haven't processed any of their rebills either.
When things first began to go pear-shaped that wonderful billing company did admit that there was a slight problem but they were a bit vague about how serious the problem really was. Then when it became obvious that the problem was a whole lot bigger than what many of their clients realized the communications stopped.
So there we have an award-winning billing company ... a business that just about any one of us would feel safe dealing with simply because they did win an award ... showing us that it's not something we should trust at all.
A few words ... 'award-winning' ... is all it takes to create a perception of trustworthiness in our minds. And we should know that ... we deal in words and perceptions all the time yet we fall into the same trap as everyone else does. We read those words and we believe the subliminal message that they're giving us.
Even if we don't quite believe the words that we read and we want to do some further investigation often all we do is head over to the website and then let what we see in the text and design of the website influence us.
We all know that websites are about as ephemeral as anything could be ... there's nothing solid about them at all. They're easy to build and it really can be a case of here today and gone tomorrow but we still let them influence us ... we still forget about the smoke and mirrors and let ourselves be fooled into thinking that what we're seeing is some sign of how rock-solid a business is.
We fall for the illusion that the business behind the website is solid and when we do business with them we place our trust ... and some of our future ... in the hands of that business. We base our success on what could only be smoke and mirrors and when those fade away we're left with nothing.
But how do we overcome that problem? We work online and, as I said before, we work in the world of smoke and mirrors so what can we do to avoid the damage when something goes wrong?
Obviously we hedge our bets. We never put our future in the hands of just one online business ... we spread the risk so that if one business disappears the amount of damage we take is minimized.
We also never do business with people who don't have some history. Winning an award is not the same as being in business for years and it's not the same having lots of very satisfied customers who have been dealing with them for a long time.
And we wake up to the reality that the way we do business does have considerable risks. Many of us are a long way from those that we might want to do business with so we need to be careful ... we need to be cautious and we need to do some research before we rush in and sign up for anything that could have an adverse effect on our business.
We deal in smoke and mirrors but we need to base our business on a solid foundation so it pays to deal with those who have been around for years and who have a good reputation ... even if they haven't won any awards.