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The internet has caused me to go to stores less often. I can’t remember my last time in a department store. The mall, where I once browsed, now bores me. Wal-Mart’s size scares me. I still enjoy Apple stores but that’s often for the education and the free wi-fi and sometimes for the opportunity to ask a fellow cult member for advice. Stores have become dull. Their merchandise is the same and they have less selection than I find online. They are stocking fewer items and running out more often. They charge higher prices than I can find searching the internet. Sales clerks give me less information about products than I can get from Google and fellow customers. And I have to drive to stores, using ever-more-expensive gas and time.

The store’s salvation is its customers. Rather than treating the internet as a competitor, retailers should follow Vaynerchuk and use it as a platform. Enable your customers to help you stand out from the crowd. Why should I go to your sneaker store, car dealership, or wine store to buy the exact same merchandise I can find in a thousand stores and sites just like yours? Price will no longer get me there; I can find the best prices by Googling, not driving. Good service? That should be assumed. Information? I’ll trust it more if it comes from the community of shoppers. How can you connect with that community? How—to follow Zuckerberg’s law—can you help them organize? How—to follow Vaynerchuk’s law—can you build a ball field where they want to play? Turn the store inside out and build it around people more than products. Your customers are your brand. Your company is the company it keeps.

Utilities

Google Power & Light

GT&T

Google Power & Light: What Google would do

Here is our one example of an industry being remade in Google’s image that is not hypothetical. Google.org, the company’s philanthropic wing—supported with 1 percent of Google’s equity and profits—is trying to reinvent the energy industry and with it, our energy economy. It is funding companies and research looking for ways to make power that will cost less than that generated with coal. Their geeky name for the initiative: REUnlike Google.org’s other projects—devoted to early warning of health crises, better management of public services, and entrepreneurial growth in the developing world—REAt the World Economic Forum meeting at Davos in 2008, I attended a forum at which Google’s founders presented their energy vision and I came away with a sense of how they would manage other industries and even how they would run the government (more on that later). It gave me a window into the engineers’ worldview. Just before this Google.org forum, I had attended a session with Bono and former Vice President Al Gore. They presented their core causes: extreme poverty, debt forgiveness, and disease for Bono; the planet for Gore. The two men tried to insist to the powerful in the great hall that their causes were complementary—can’t solve one without addressing the other, they agreed—but in truth, they were competing