I was just blown away by Jarvis’ analysis of media, education, advertising, retail, manufacturing, services, health care, and the financial markets.

Jarvis tells us that in this new world open is the new currency. You make your information, your products and your services open to your customers and you will thrive assuming you have the information, products and services they want.  In the old world, competitive advantage hinged on hoarding information and knowledge and controlling its release. In the Google-like world, that’s suicide.

After all, how can you be found through search if you’re hiding your value to the network?

I’ll post more thoughts here over time especially how this thinking pertains to the newspaper industry - which is my industry and the one I obviously care the most about.

I agree that newsPAPERS have low prospects for growth given the now undeniable shift from newspaper advertising to the Internet especially from the high-margin classified business. But, I don’t agree that media companies who happen to own newspapers have low prospects for growth.

At Times-Shamrock’s 15 Web sites (that we track), we attract more than a million unique monthly visitors. That’s a fairly compelling audience that local advertisers in those markets would most certainly benefit from attracting. Add in the fact that those Web sites are more than just the local source of information — they have local video about local newsmakers, high school sports statistics and game analysis, information about advertisers, maps, search, archives, etc. — and the story local media companies who happen to also own profitable newspaper operations is pretty bright in the growth area.

IMHO

Kathy

You can read the story here. I’m underscoring the quote because I’ve seen so many newspaper publishers budget up their 3% ad revenue and 1.5% circulation revenue year after year only to see shortfalls of double-digits. They never wanted to budget to reality.

I hope that’s changing now that reality is as stark as it can be.

I took pictures of every piece of clothing, grouped like items together, wrote descriptions and uploaded everything to eBay.

Labor Cost: At least 20 hours of my time at a conservative $15 an hour = $300
Listing fees: $29.49
Total cost to post to eBay: $329.49

Total revenue from eBay: $37.92

Profit(loss): ($291.57)

Since I only sold 8 of the 26 sets listed on eBay, I created a photo gallery and sent the link around to stay-at-home moms in my area. At this point, I was in the hole so I just wanted to get the clothes out of the corner of my bedroom and get some money for them. I was willing to sell the whole lot for just $150 (or less!).

I wasn’t getting any bites through viral marketing so I decided to place a free ad in the Pocono Record and poconorecord.com (where I also happen to work). The placement took less than five minutes. Here’s the ad copy:

Mostly MOTHERHOOD brands
Entire lot, $150, 28 shirts, 4 skirts
13 pants, 2 shorts. Pick-up only
Call 570-582-3814

I couldn’t fit the long link to the gallery in the lines allotted but two days after the ad ran in PRINT, I got a call from a woman in nearby Tannersville, PA who was interested in buying the whole lot. I e-mailed her the link to the gallery, she called me last night after checking out the pictures, and we’re finalizing the deal at noon tomorrow when the buyer comes to pick up the clothes.

Print ad cost: Free
Total revenue: $75

(Okay, I’m not counting the $300 in labor because I already spent that on eBay.)

Lesson: Print still drives quality leads. Online works well as a tool for more information. Why can’t we have unlimited pictures with our free ads online? Oh, because our online classified marketplace is so tightly tied to print we can’t leverage what’s good about online while also leveraging what’s good about print. We have to fix that.

And, eBay is over-rated if you have a lot of stuff and no time to spend learning the ropes.

1. Direct communication - if you have a phone tree, you’re behind the curve.

2. Amplification of consumers - everyone is a critic and has the ability to share their critiques with 1 or 1 million people easily.

3. Authentic stories -being the brand you say you are (can’t give different messages to different groups).

4. Speed - if you’re competition is faster, they win.

5. Long Tail - Amazon gets 1/2 their revenue on books that Barnes and Noble doesn’t even carry. Choice creates new audience.

6. Outsourcing - if certain costs go to zero, you can change the business you’re in.

7. Dicing of everything - Google molecularized the Internet. You don’t have one front door anymore.

8. Infinite Channels - to talk about what you do and if you don’t like any of them you can create your own.

9. Consumer to Consumer - no middle man.

10. Scarce & Abundant - the two have flipped-flopped in some cases and if what you sell used to be scarce (NEWS) and now it’s abundant, you need to change what you do or how you do it because things in abundance don’t make money.

11. Big Ideas - is the product.

12. Permission - collect people who want to hear from you every day and complain when they don’t. Daily Candy is a good example.

13. The New Rich - what people are willing to spend money on today is surprising.

There were 14 but I missed one. If someone knows the 14th trend, please share.

Godin’s theory in summary — Carve out your niche by connecting people to each other.

Some examples: threadless.com, replacements.com, zappos.com.