Posts About Strategy

You may be unaware that you actually do pay for free services on the Web. The form of payment isn’t always obvious: your personal information.

There are a couple lessons to be learned here. Read on.

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I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the business of software and how it’s changing. It’s expensive to produce software, but the rewards are there if you produce something special.

But what happens when your software becomes a commodity? It’s not quite as special as it used to be. I believe that you should release it as open source.

Read on to see my reasoning. You may still be able to pull ideas from this post, even if you don’t necessarily sell software. Other things can be “open sourced” as well.

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Another E-Myth Revisited lesson that seems obvious (but isn’t always that obvious).

Customers want a consistent experience. If you are to be a rock star, they want a rock star every time. It’s not acceptable to give them a rock star the first couple times and then dial it back some.

If your customer experience isn’t designed with any forethought, you’re going to disappoint. If you offer coffee at one touch point and not at the next interaction, then you’re going to disappoint. If your website is a shiny example of excellence and your customer service rep sounds bored and hollow, then you’re going to disappoint.

Your customer experience needs to be designed, measured, and monitored. And it needs to be consistent and predictable. The customer wants to feel in control, not the other way around.

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You are not your business unless you want for it to be that way. Can your business run without you being there? What if you want to take a vacation, are sick, or just plain aren’t feeling it for a spell? At that point, you haven’t signed up to run a business. You’ve signed up for a job.

I’m over halfway through Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth Revisited. It really is changing the way that I think about a lot of things that I do.

Sure, you must “be your business” at first (in a sense), but this shouldn’t be your end goal.

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Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing

This is a great introduction to basing your customer experience on personas. If you can analyze your customers to the level where you can write specific stories about them, you can base a better experience by analyzing their needs.

Read on for more thoughts about the book.

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If you’re into marketing at all (which I’m trying to teach you about), you need to be producing all kinds of social artifacts. There are a lot of tools out there that you need to be learning. A lot of them are online.

I will be sharing ideas about the more common social artifacts: video, audio, articles, presentations, blogging, and document sharing.

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I really like this idea about management, transcribed from a 1986 speech by Richard Hamming:

When your vision of what you want to do is what you can do single-handedly, then you should pursue it. The day your vision, what you think needs to be done, is bigger than what you can do single-handedly, then you have to move toward management. And the bigger the vision is, the farther in management you have to go.

The bigger your vision is, the bigger the ship that you need to steer to get to that vision. Just this idea alone can tell you where you need to go in your career and whether you’re on that ultimate goal.

It can also be a criticism of leaders that have no vision. Why are managers in their current positions if they have no vision of where to go?

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Having a blog in a crowded industry is difficult and discouraging. Everyone has a blog about marketing.

I’m not the only one with this problem, and this problem isn’t limited to my industry. There is a lot of noise out there. The difference is that a lot of people aren’t even aware that they have this problem. Do you have it too?

I will cover who I’m writing to. And I hope this post will influence you take a second to think about who you’re writing to as well.

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GateHouse Media filed a lawsuit against the New York Times for linking to one of its sites. Their argument was that by linking directly to the article, the NYT-owned site was causing visitors to bypass the home page, which contains ads that support the site.

This is very flawed strategy on GateHouse’s part.

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There are a few good reasons to check out Paul and Marcus at the Boagworld Web Design Podcast, even if you’re not a web designer. Read on to find out why.

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