Yesterday I was reflecting on the upcoming surge of activity in the direct selling, network marketing and affiliate marketing industries and of all the incredible tools that are becoming available to the budding new business owner, whether it be in the latest word-of-mouth venture or as an online entrepreneur. It is going to be an exciting time as commerce moves more positively into this space as companies realize (finally!) that this type of marketing is the most cost effective and target effective there is. It is also the oldest form of marketing. At the same time I know that the biggest hurdle many will have to overcome to be successful entrepreneurs is the negative stigma the MLM industry has created for itself.
The very word "opportunity" puts peoples' defenses up. How can that be? After all isn't "opportunity" supposed to be a positive word? Even Webster's defines it as "a possibility due to a favorable combination of circumstances". But when you add words like "business" or "online" or "home-based" in front of this noun, it changes its context into something less positive. We all know the dreaded words coming out of the mouth of a family member or friend: "I would like to invite you to a business opportunity meeting tonight". We immediately scramble for any credible excuse!
So how do we change this paradigm? How do we clear the path for legitimate business opportunities so that both the suppliers and the marketers can flourish in this new emerging world of...opportunities. Well, one idea that came to me at midnight was to create a new classification to separate the good from the bad that would be immediately recognizable to any normal individual. That led me to try and find an antonym to the word "opportunity" and the best I could come up with was "flopportunity"! Now this word is not yet in Webster's but I am working on it and the definition will probably read as: "an impossibility due to an unfavorable combination of circumstances".
So this is how this will work. When being approached by that family member or friend, and not coming up with a truly credible excuse on the spur of the moment, all you would have to ask is whether this is a "business opportunity" or a "business flopportunity". This will put them off guard as you follow up with a series of other questions (which I will discuss in later blogs) to test whether they know what they are talking about. In fact, we could take this a stage further and start creating lists of "opportunities" and "flopportunities" that people can refer to to avoid making those terrible mistakes we have all made in the past in this industry.
We will allow you, the unfortunate victim, to give us feedback so that we can upgrade or downgrade both opportunities and flopportunities. A sort of consumer-run grading system. As this register starts to grow it will have an impact on the MLM industry as a whole and the suppliers will have to take notice and make sure they tread the "straight and narrow" with their overstated promises and complicated compensation plans and payouts. I can see it now. People logging on to flopportunity.com to get the real story and a truly qualified second opinion. As far as I know, this doesn't exist today.
But before you run off and try and register the domain name flopportunity.com, I have already taken it! Right now it will just bring you back to this blog but we will be working behind the scenes to create this compendium for the word-of-mouth community that could become the Dun & Bradstreet for our industry. In the meantime, come back and visit us on a regular basis as we will be posting interesting updates and articles in the meantime. See you at the top!
Oh, by the way, check out our antonym website: opportunity.com...it will be at the top of our positive list!
Colin Buckingham - Global Internet Entrepreneur
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