In this edition of Web Enlightenment we'll be talking about one of my favorite playwrights and why we all need to love the unreasonable man.

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Love the Unreasonable Man

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, he died in 1950. He is the only person to have won both the Nobel Prize (1925) and an Oscar (1938) - and who could not love Pygmalion. OK, It appears my love of theater is showing a bit but that isn't what we're talking about here today.

One of my favorite quotes from Shaw:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

I love this advice - it applies directly to the Internet and to technology generally. You see this is one of the most common mistakes that Internet Entrepreneurs make, they strive to adjust their business to the technology and Shaw is absolutely right - doing that creates no progress at all.

Way back in 2003 when I was running my old firm KISS Computing we had a client who made lanterns. Well, not just lanterns - high end handmade custom lanterns that are really period pieces of reproduction quality. To put it another way, these lanterns start at a few hundred bucks each and run right past a grand, especially when you order in pewter.

So the guy that runs this shop is just the sort of person you would think he is - a metal craftsmen with a love of history and building things by hand in the old way. The lanterns are drop dead gorgeous and you can be sure that you'll be dead long before anything you buy there wears out. When we moved to Maine I almost took the fixtures we had installed on our Cape Cod house with me but the real estate agent explained that is a big no-no.

So our lantern maker has a perfect web product, right? Small specialty, hard to find, the idea of $ 750 handcrafted lanterns sounds like it comes from a web success textbook, couldn't get much more ideal than that. But when I met this guy he had been through many different geeks, had constructed three separate websites over a period of years - and had never successfully sold a single thing.

Our lantern craftsman made a big mistake - he was reasonable with all of his geeks and he attempted to adapt his business to the technology in front of him. See the trouble was that custom handmade period lanterns are a heck of a lot more complicated than you might think - they come in three or four sizes, three different metals, they can be electric or not, they can use different types of antique glass - and each one of these things changes the price.

So when these folks first went online they used a generic shopping cart and attempted to adapt it to their product - and we've all seen that stupidity online. Small instructions at the top of the page often say things like: "In the comments section when you complete your order don't forget to tell us what size you'd like and then please call us after your credit card is charged to determine if your color choice is available."

Yeah, that's real likely to happen - I'm also building a small fire out in my yard so I can try to send smoke signals to the grocery store in the hope they will deliver some Cheerios. If it isn't easy and simple people are not interested - that's a cardinal rule of the web.

So our lantern craftsman needed to do something he really didn't want to do - he needed to be unreasonable. He needed to say "I don't care how your shopping cart works because that isn't going to work for my products" and make it clear that the only thing he cared about was how well a site might service the most important people on earth, his customers. Now I do admit that I pushed him a bit in this regard and he didn't get a personality transplant overnight or anything, but at the end of the day Michael agreed to be unreasonable - which was the perfect thing to do for his business.

So we built him a custom shopping cart, one that allowed folks to see all the options on one page and have the price update as they made changes. At the time this was pretty high tech stuff and we were oh so proud of the little popups that explained bulbs, metal, and glass types.

So - then what happened? Our lantern craftsman saw his sales take off, and what he initially thought was a ludicrous first year online sales goal was exceeded by more than 65%. Subsequent years went even better and he remains a customer of my old firm to this day.

When you get that feeling in the pit of your stomach about the Internet don't hesitate to do the right thing - be unreasonable and force the technology to adapt to the way you do business.

As many frazzled geeks can attest I am really quite excellent at being unreasonable in this way, so if you need some tips just hit reply and tell me about your situation. I will gladly provide encouragement and probably a few additional playwright quotes to boot.

Upcoming Speaking Events

Discover New England: Making Money with Alphabet Soup - April 28th, 2009

How to judge your own web marketing efforts with a sharp pencil and without mastering geek speak. I will be presenting two seminars on internet marketing for tourism industry professionals at the Discover New England Tourism Summit on April 28, 2009 at Sunday River Ski Resort in Bethel, ME. These information-packed sessions will be aimed at marketing professionals working for hotels, motels, restaurants, inns, and attractions throughout the New England states. These professionals are attending this conference to garner more information on how they can attract more visitors from international markets, including the European countries.