Archive for September, 2009

web2 and relevance to current businesses

Friday, September 25th, 2009

Had dinner with a friend and her CEO.

The idea was to discuss web 2.0

Now the CEO was only vaguely interested, and she noted her board was less interested.

Their current site is a poor web 1 site , about 8 pages, most of the good content crammed onto 1 page (so poor SEO).

They do bi yearly PDF newsletter.

They aren’t a mega organisation.

The value of web2 to them, is difficult. I came down to a few reasons :

1. it needs to fit your company. web1 fits traditional business with large budgets for marketing and media buys

2. web2 fits better where you have time to grow, and community fits better

They keep asking on how they control the whole web2, and how they sell to the web2 people.

So I guess they want the web2 traffic, and just abuse them the old and traditional methods.

The marketing manager, my friend, started to get on board. I don’t think the CEO gives 2 hoots.

We also discussed how web2 dis intermediates a lot of groups , including:

– ad agencies
– media buys
– web site builders, and content maintainers
– marketers in general

the idea is you get closer to your customer, spend more of your focus on your customers, and less time/money/effort on marketing/advertising/interupting.

I guess long term, its about building trust, respect and value, as opposed to spending money and abusing.

This article has similar ideas acidlabs

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Top australian marketing blogs

Friday, September 25th, 2009

woohoo – I am in the top 164, in the charts with a bullet – up to number 160.

Atleast I a made it into the charts.

I now have to climb a little harder.

http://adspace-pioneers.blogspot.com/2009/06/top-164-australian-marketing-pioneer.html

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competitive advantage on the web

Monday, September 7th, 2009

I am just reading ‘entrenpreneurship 101’ , trump-university (Michael E. Gordon).

The book is simple, has simple concepts, and is a reasonable read for those that are starting their first business. Lots of motherhood statements, and bleeding obvious, but we all need to learn the simple lessons some how.

He does make an interesting point :
“sustainable traffic is THE source of competitive advantage on the web.”

Whilst I don’t truly believe its the only advantage, it might well be the most powerful.

Lots of the web 2.0 community success supports the focus on traffic.

I also believe reduced internal cost (and I dont mean price) is also another way to compete. Basically do something similar, but do it cheaper (sort of basic Michael Porter analysis).

I also like his ideas to opportunity models. The pictorial of a lot of ideas into a funnel, a matching criteria, and only a few opportunities out is simple, but well presented. The book positions an idea that fits as an opportunity, some of the fit characteristics included:
– personal fit
– capabilities
– interest/passion
– profitability
– scale

Whist an obvious idea, its simply over looked by many starting their first business. My advice to all new projects/business’/products is simply, if we do reasonably well – how much can we make ? The answer needs to be huge, at least some multiple of a salary.

The book also talks about a ‘money making machine’ – with strategy/operations/revenue. This is how I tend to focus new business ideas, can I mechanise large parts of the business, what are the business systems that need to support the business. I go back to strategy changes to ensure before I start, that the margins are high, and you are building a core business system. This was heavily influenced from my reading of  ‘rich dad, poor dad’ books.

I start with the idea, work out margins, what business systems are needed to support the operations, mechanise, strategy to increase margins and increase automation. Then I work out how to capture the customers, and then go back to strategy, to make sure that there is a fit between margins/strategy/customer capture. Customer capture is clearly the number 1 business system. The rest is your money making machine.

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