Front Office Box

Summary
Competing in the Many to Many, Free Market can appear to be a race to bottom.  A race in which everybody loses.  I’m sure the sure the custom build auto manufacturers accused Henry Ford of being similarly destructive. In fact, he wasn’t and we’re not.

We are being disruptive, and disruptive value propositions create value in different ways, reducing costs and enabling new ideas.

But being disruptive doesn’t stop at the new product or service.  It takes a fundamental rewrite of the entire business process – marketing, sales, revenue, delivery, service, ROI.

It takes vision, strategy, execution and undoubtedly a good slice of luck.

But most of all it’s about the triumph of new ideas over old.

The Argument
In the Many to Many, Free Market we need to turn competition into a battle between ideas, not budgets.  It’s those ideas which will commit the user to adoption and exploitation, so we can make some money along the way.

Those ideas need, in my view at least,  to do two critical things 1) show the users they have a problem they can solve and 2) add some value to the solution – hopefully in multiple ways.

Our Case Study
In our case this gets to be:

• Problem – lost opportunities and time plus increased effort and stress
• Solution – get organized with relationships, plans, schedules and correspondence all integrated in a single system
• Value Add  – Manage a formal sales process – sell more
• Value Add -  Plan Act Review workflow – be a better manager without doing anything different
• Value Add – Reduce cost and complexity – isolate and outsource the technology

Most people will deny their need for something like this, but they’ll remember the message every time they lose a deal, miss a date, or can’t find that particular correspondence.

Contrast this idea with the competition – CRM and Project Management.

I don’t know about you, but everything I ever heard about CRM was bad and the Project Management systems I’ve seen have all been far to complex with those Gant charts etc.

The battle of ideas becomes one between a) identify, understand, solve real problems versus b) marketing speak acronyms that nobody really understands.  To my mind this should be like showing up at a knife fight with a machine gun and grenades.

The Challenge
But it isn’t – because getting the message heard over all the Internet noise is tough.  Getting people to stop and think is tough, because they’re busy.  Getting them to want to be organized is a challenge, especially those who enjoy the adrenalin rush they get from flying by the seat of their pants.

In theory the search engines are there to help those interested in our solutions find them.

In theory we can meet and engage with people using social media, displaying our wares without overtly selling.

In theory the cream of the Internet rises to the top.  If we’re good we’ll get noticed and go viral.

In my experience it doesn’t work quite like the theory suggests.  Actually getting heard above the noise is the biggest challenge.

The first problem is Search is now a mature technology.  Internet marketers have spent years writing pages crammed with Keywords.  Competition for even long tail keywords is fierce.  Google uses keywords to make Adwords work (for Google, of course).

The second problem is Google, and perhaps others, have moved on from Keywords when finding results for organic search.  It now matches the exact phrasing of the search term with the exact title pages.  The good news is the user gets more accurate results.  The bad news is we have no idea which questions they’ll ask.

The third problem is social media is immature.  We haven’t really established conventions which make it work for everybody.  Right now it’s a torrent pouring a mixture of enthusiam, generous sharing, self promotion, and spam, into a very deep mine of information.  Catching the attention of real people to have real conversations about real problems and real solutions is more a matter of luck than anything else.  And it takes up so much time.

Finding ways to get heard above the noise is now a discussion between even the gurus.  Some highly qualified people suggest the answer lies in engagement and conversation – all day.  Others disagree, suggesting it’s the content that counts and engagement naturally follows quality content.

The reality is probably somewhere in the middle because they’re all experts at both, and established as such.

The Conclusions
The less capable, and less experienced, need to find their own way of building a quality footprint on the Internet.  As part of that group we’ve determined the answer lies in our ideas.

Blogs allow us to write about our ideas from every conceivable angle, addressing as many likely questions as we can think of.  Traffic reports tell us which ideas achieve traction in organic search and that directs the topics of more articles.  Google gradually indexes our pages and watches to see how well they satisfy the searchers.  If we do well for Mr Google he promotes us up the page, and takes more seriously our articles on other subjects.

Social Media allows us to publish those articles in the torrent pouring into the mine.  Along the way we might get Google’s attention and also attract some people to our work.

But there’s another benefit.

Today Google doesn’t have a monopoly knowledge of quality content and where it can be found.  Twitter, Friendfeed, Stumbleupon, Digg, Diigo, Delicious and a lot more all have their own versions and provide search capabilities. And they’re all potentially places where people who are looking for our solutions can find them.

Search engines don’t exist without content and those with the fastest route to quality content will triumph.

The Goal
If we can, with our ideas, help the search engines to satisfy their customers we’ll be able to take ownership, and get heard above the noise.

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August 3rd, 2009 - Posted in Business Internet  |  Add a Comment