Are You in the Right Business?
A Threat to Google?, AIPDA’s
Have you correctly defined what business your company is in? Do you define your company by the products you offer or by the needs you meet for your customers? Perhaps the most critical thing you can do when building a company is to properly identify your mission.
This becomes of critical importance when there is rapid and drastic change. In his book “The Black Swan”, Nassim Taleb discusses uncertainty and how dramatic and highly impactful events not only will happen - they are happening more often. As improvements in technology and especially communications gallop forward at an ever increasing rate, one of the effects is that geography, and especially time, are being compressed. Also, as systems become ever more complex and entangled, the incidence of unforeseen consequences increases - and their magnitude is amplified.
Building Wagons Instead of Cars
For example, the buggy manufacturers of the late 1800’s thought that their business purpose was to build wagons. That proved to be too narrow of a definition when rapid technological change occurred in the form of the automobile. Most were left behind. If they had instead identified their true business mission - providing means of transportation - they might have been able to adapt to the evolutionary (revolutionary?) jump from being wagon manufacturers to being automobile manufacturers. A few did, perhaps, but most were trapped in the narrow definition that they had created for themselves.
This is almost intuitively understood by venture capitalists. They always “encourage” (in quotes because VCs don’t really encourage their portfolio companies - they mandate things to their portfolio companies) their companies to be careful about defining themselves in terms of their products. They want their companies to define what needs their customers have that motivates them to buy those products.
Examples of Doing Things Right
One that I’m personally close to, they started out as ArtUFrame.com and that’s the product they provided - the ability to purchase and try different framing options online. I was with the founder of ArtUFrame.com one day when his phone rang. He looked at me and said that he was being offered the domain name Art.com for $50,000 and should he take it? I said don’t put down the phone until it’s done. He ended up selling the company for $200+ million dollars to Getty Images a few years later. Which never would have happened had he remained in his original niche.
It’s almost hard to remember that Amazon started out as an online bookstore. But their central mission was to provide a dependable, convenient and efficient online shopping environment for their customers. Mission accomplished.
This is another one that I’m close to as AudetteMedia founder Adam Audette has worked with Zappos since early 2001. Even though all they sold was shoes at first, they never labeled themselves in a way that would indicate they sold only shoes. Of course they had to start with something and shoes were what they chose to built their model around. But their true mission was to create raving fans (what a great business - creating raving fans!). After they accomplished that (in spades), they expanded their product line, and recently sold to Amazon for a substantial sum.
AudetteMedia (no mention of search marketing in our name) is engaged in internet marketing. While not confined to organic search, SEO is one of our core competencies and we do a substantial amount of business with it. Search marketing is exposed to a perfect example of what Taleb calls a Black Swan, an unexpected event with large consequences. Suppose that overnight (and a lot of things on the ‘net happen overnight) a development occurs that largely displaces the search function at Google? Impossible, you say? Well, I can even imagine one and I am 100% certain that it is being worked on as I write this.
The Artificial Intelligence Personal Digital Assistant (AIPDA)
I’m aware that we have used the term PDA for many years. But the devices are really pretty primitive in terms of their capability. Suppose we develop a PDA with artificial intelligence that we can turn loose on the internet? Somewhat similar to the spiders currently used by, yep, Google. When you boil it all down to a fine residue, Google’s mission is to provide relevancy - a means to find what you are looking for on the internet. They have a lot of goodies besides their core value proposition, but not much that can’t be duplicated by others. What they do a great job at is delivering relevancy.
Well, your AIPDA could (and will) do better. As you spend time with it, it will learn about you. It will know what kinds of movies you like, what kinds of restaurants you like, what kinds of books you like. And then it will use that information to continually search the internet on your behalf - your personal and intelligent mini Google machine. It will report its findings back to you in any frequency and manner that you prefer: every 10 minutes on your mobile device, every hour on your computer. And it will continue to learn more about you as you select some of the findings that it reports to you. It will also save everything in a meaningful way that will construct your own personal universe and make it even easier for you to find things moving forward.
Which means you won’t use Google as much. And companies won’t use AudetteMedia as much for optimization of their organic search marketing efforts. Potentially depressing. But, fortunately, there is a solution.
The Business We’re In
We are an internet marketing company. We have purposely built a highly capable core competency in organic search marketing, we devote a lot of our time to it, and we generate a lot of our revenues with it. The reason we have done that is that we consider organic search to be one of the best ways to meet the central need of our clients - expanding their online business. Search marketing happens to offer one of the best price and performance values in internet marketing at this time so that’s what we concentrate on. But we also have built, and continue to build, capabilities in other forms of internet marketing. If the environment changes we will change with it in order to continue to deliver on our central business mission - helping businesses expand their online business.
In short - AudetteMedia is not an internet marketing company because we do SEO - we do SEO because we are an internet marketing company.
Gotta go - working on developing AIPDA bait.
What business are you in? Is it the right one?
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Nicely stated! I talk to many companies who have themselves firmly painted into a corner - vulnerable to every change in the wind. Why do they do this? Comfort. They’re in the zone.
It was “comfortable” to keep building wagons, or buggy whips. The jigs were built, the casts were made, the system clicked along with minimal effort.
These comfort periods are lasting shorter and shorter amounts of time. You could “drag on” as a wagon mfg. for 5-10 years and still make a living - but today, things change in 12-18 months.
Said Scott Clark on January 7th, 2010 at 11:34 am