Brilliant Thinking

This is an unusual post as it’s on a topic not technology related. However, as a business owner like some of you who read this blog periodically, I thought it was essential reading for anybody experiencing one of those panic attacks at 4am on a Sunday, or looking to the bottle …

OK, these are extreme cases, but being aware of the (natural) cycle of emotions that being an entrepreneur embodies helps in understanding and managing their effects instead of letting them manage you.

Here’s a precis:

Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, once wrote:

“First and foremost, a start-up puts you on an emotional rollercoaster unlike anything you have ever experienced. You flip rapidly from day-to-day – one where you are euphorically convinced you are going to own the world, to a day in which doom seems only weeks away and you feel completely ruined, and back again. Over and over and over. And I’m talking about what happens to stable entrepreneurs. There is so much uncertainty and so much risk around practically everything you are doing. The level of stress that you’re under generally will magnify things incredible highs and unbelievable lows at whiplash speed and huge magnitude. Sound like fun?”

The Emotional Transition Curve

• Stage 1: The first stage of the concept is called “Uninformed Optimism”. At this stage on a rollercoaster, just getting to the top of the rollercoaster, you experience feelings of an adrenalin rush, characterized by excitement and nervous energy.
• Stage 2: The second stage is called “Informed Pessimism”. As you ride over the top of the curve you now have a bit more information. Feelings of fear, nervousness, and frustration begin to set in. Perhaps you even want to get off of it.
• Stage 3 – The third stage is called “Crisis of Meaning”. You’re past scared. You feel despair. It’s as if you’re standing on the edge of a cliff ready to jump, and you begin to think “Today the rollercoaster’s going off the bottom of the track for the very first time.” You feel helpless and you’re both terrified and frozen.At this point, you face a critical juncture. You can come off the bottom of the curve and crash and burn, which is when your business goes bankrupt, you lose your marriage, you start drinking, or you end up in a doctor’s office because of stress. Or you can come around the corner because you’re getting support at “Crisis of Meaning” and you can enter an upward swing call “Informed Optimism”.
   
• Stage 4 – Informed Optimism. You’re calm. You’re informed. You might even say you are cautiously optimistic.

The article on the blog (link below) goes on to discuss activity pairing - ie what to do in each of the 4 phases - to help you capitalise on (benefit from) each emotional state. Essential reading for any business owner.

Read the original post on Tim Ferris’s blog

According to ReadWriteWeb: This means that when you tell people you write, read or listen to blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networks and online video - if they give you a funny look, it is now officially them that’s a freak, not you.

The Web is evolving.

In the beginning we translated our physical brands - literature, logos, typographic style, grammatical style, imagery - directly on to the web. Our online presence was a mirror of our offline one. For larger corporates it was a very controlled environment and anything outside this permitted representation was stamped on.

However, the Web allows people to be people. It allows them to interact in ways and with tools that are not available in the physical world. The Web is a very different place. Blogs, podcasts, tweets and all manner of social, human expression have found their way into our way of life.

Already today, companies are being identified by their personality on the Web - through such posts as personal blogs, tweets, videos, podcasts, etc - which puts a human face on the organisation. And in time, a company will be known by the sum of the facets of its presence on the Web instead of just a corporate site.

If this will be the case, will we need a corporate/company website? And if so, what would it look like?

Putting my scrying hat on, I think the corporate website of the future will effectively be a mashup of the different facets of its personality on the web, with judicious filters and content aggregators applied so that a visitor to the “official” website of the business - suitably branded of course - gets to see the one-page corporate marketing spiel (a summary of what the company actually does) and contact details, plus different streams of information that, in themselves, identify the company (provide the digital fingerprint) to people interested in interacting with it.

The filters exist not to hide information, but to heuristically select the most relevant content from the multiple facets and present them to the site visitor. The filters therefore build a stable version of the fluid facets of the brand which becomes the corporate website. If we look at the number of Twitter conversations, blog posts, video casts, social media site posts, etc, that could be happening at any one time we can very easily become overloaded with information, especially minutiae, and we would not want people visiting our “official” virtual home to be overwhelmed and confused. Therefore, we filter to provide them a virtual tip-of-the-iceberg insight into our company.

Should the visitor wish to dig further, they can follow links to all the relevant streams. The filtering technology we use will also be dynamic, and would self-learn so that it adjusts according to what people are looking for - our websites would in effect be self-aware and shift according to the preferences of our visitors, dynamically adjusting filters in quantum steps as patterns of interest change.

This is Web 3.0. And it’s already happening.

You can integrate your Twitter posts with Facebook so they appear in your profile. You can plug in your Twitter posts to Wordpress (I have), and you can grab the RSS feed from anything and parse it to reproduce the content elsewhere - as an example, see our company home page which has the last 5 blog posts. Twitter also lets you track key words so that you can filter updates and receive relevant information - not just everything.

We’re still in the early days of Web 3.0, but there is a quantum shift on the horizon and we need to be ready for how pervasive this shift will be in our physical lives, and ready for it in our organisations digital ones. There is a lot of research being conducted into the role social media will play in our corporate future and I will be following this to see how close to my vision Web 3.0 comes.

We live in interesting times!

Go further:
Does a digital business really need a corporate website?
6 Emerging Trends CIOs Should Care About

A very outspoken post over at The Register makes it very clear what the risks are in this debate. While Cloud Computing is the current “big thing” and everybody seems to be getting in on the act - and we’re even assessing how it fits into future web development plans - there is still a solid argument for sticking with dedicated servers.

The reason is principally one of reliability and accountability, or more to the point that you can call somebody at 3am when the dedicated servers that you are paying hard currency for fail and know that somebody is feverishly scurrying around a data centre ensuring your SLA is upheld. As Ted Dziuba put it:

No matter what the name, you, the developer, will still be dealing with reliability and accountability. Using someone else’s infrastructure for your application will forever be a business risk, but it sounds so much less so with a cuddly name. Your CTO will fall for the next cycle pretty easily. The compunction he feels for his latest data center build-out will outweigh the downsides of an external dependency.

Clouds have been notoriosly unreliable in the recent past (I am sure this will be remedied as Clouds are in their infancy in terms of infrastructures) and it can be very embarrassing when your data goes off-line for a long period, or your applications are down without warning. More to the point - who do you call, and how do you know they are fixing “your” problem when you are just renting a small corner of a nebulous, fluid environment (aether) which (theoretically) provides failover and mirroring to prevent just such an occurrence? When one server goes wrong it can be more easily diagnosed and fixed, but when a segment of the Cloud goes offline, it may be symptomatic of a wider disturbance in the aether.

If you are using Cloud-based systems, you might like to check out Hyperic’s Cloud Status Monitor at http://www.cloudstatus.com/

Contents

Marketing - it (usually) starts once the site is launched (notwithstanding any pre-launch campaigns of course).

However, the marketing plan is a key tool in understanding the needs of the website before design and development begin - the plan helps identify the demographics of your target audience as well as possibly indicating traffic volumes or targets. This information feeds into the user interface, graphic design, site engine, hosting and infrastructure components so that the right systems are designed and built to meet your needs and your audience’s needs.

I am not going to get into a discussion of which marketing channels you should use because there is no hard and fast rule - except to say that you should look at all the channels and decide which will be best for your site, from online communities, through video blogs, podcasts, search engine optimisation, traditional advertising or even targeted mailshots and postcards.

We’re not quite finished! The website is up and running and you are actively marketing it, but you still need to maintain it to keep it fresh and relevant for your audience. We’ll look at that in the next article.

My partner runs her own business - it’s an exclusive personal shopping business with a small but very important client base. They are the kind of people whose buying patterns aren’t the same as the rest of the general population, they buy based on different paradigms. It is true that they do use the Internet, but not in the same way as the “majority”.

Today, I took a call for my partner from a search engine optimisation company. They call my partner’s company periodically touting for business, and it’s usually quite polite. Here’s a typical conversation:

SEO: “Hello, I’m Mr Smith from SEO Company. We have been looking at your website and noticed you aren’t being found in the search engines. We’d like to send you a free report that highlights our findings so that you can see how to improve your search engine results and get more traffic.”

It’s at this point that the call is usually transferred to me since we look after the web side of things.

Me: “Many thanks, but we’re not looking to increase the number of visitors to the site. The service is aimed at a small number of clients and we only take on clients through word of mouth and personal recommendation.”

SEO: “We see that you’re not appearing in the top results for phrases such as ‘personal shopper’, and our free report can help you improve this and achieve a high ranking for a number of phrases, including ‘blah blah blah’ and ‘an other phrase’.”

Me: “Thank you. However, the personal shopping service is bespoke and clients are effectively ‘hand picked’ and so additional search engine traffic is not necessary. We’re not looking to generate volume sales through the website so do not need SEO.”

SEO: “….”

After 2 or 3 rounds, the SEO company I am referring to get the point that we don’t even want the free report (which will try to sell their services of course) and usually politely end the conversation and we both go about our businesses.

However, today, the SEO representative - and I don’t know if they were sitting in a call centre somewhere doing cold calling, or were actually in the company offices - was of a different breed and left a very sour taste in the mouth.

It all started quite politely …

SEO: “Hello, I’m Mr Smith from SEO Company. We have been looking at your website and noticed you aren’t being found in the search engines. We’d like to send you a free report that highlights our findings so that you can see how to improve your search engine results and get more traffic.”

Me: “Many thanks, but we’re not looking to increase the number of visitors to the site. The service is aimed at a small number of clients and we only take on clients through word of mouth and personal recommendation.”

SEO: “We see that you’re not appearing in the top results for phrases such as ‘personal shopper’, and our free report can help you improve this and achieve a high ranking for a number of phrases, including ‘blah blah blah’ and ‘an other phrase’.”

Me: “Thank you. However, the personal shopping service is bespoke and clients are effectively ‘hand picked’ and …”

But I didn’t get to finish the sentence today …

SEO: “So, why have you got a website then?” He cut me off and questioned the business model. I suspect this was on the basis that he couldn’t figure out how to get a sale based on my polite refusal and thought that by wrong footing me he’d maybe spin a sale.

Me: “Because prospects still like to see that Street Chic is a credible organisation even if they are recommended to us personally.”

SEO: “So, you need to increase your rankings for ‘personal shopper’ so that you can generate more leads.”

Me: (still polite, but now frustrated that the usual 2 or 3 exchanges didn’t conclude the conversation): “No, we don’t. Our clients purchase a service such as ours using completely different criteria to online shopping and our marketing strategy does not require any SEO components in order to reach them effectively. I’d like to …”

I didn’t get to finish:

SEO: (muttering) “right then” (click)

It sounded as if he was saying something else under his breath as the receiver went down - I couldn’t quite hear - but he was not happy and definately the candiate for “worst telephone manner during a cold call.” He was aggressive, rude and disrespectful - all in the space of 3 minutes - to a company he was trying to win as a customer.

And this is where the question of branding comes in. This experience with this individual reflects directly on the brand that the SEO company is trying to build. In the past when they had called I had a mental note that, maybe, I might use them in the future for a client project if that client fitted the profile of their company’s SEO offering. However, this representative has completely undone any goodwill and completely undermined the brand experience to the point that I will actively avoid them.

A brand is much more than a logo, a picture or a design. It’s a whole company philosophy that appears at every touch point for that company. I wonder what his briefing was like? Maybe something like:

“Get as many free reports out as you can. Don’t take no for an answer. Use any method in the book, as well as some that aren’t, but get the free reports out. We’ll worry about converting them later.”

If that’s how they plan their own sales process, what does this say about how they plan their SEO campaigns? Could it be inferred that it is by the same scatter-gun approach and they’re only interested in the numbers rather than the results? That may be a leap of faith to some, but in my mind this is how the company’s brand is now perceived (remember too that his sales pitch was more concerned about visitor numbers instead of targeted visitor numbers?)

A brand is a sensitive object and all representatives - even call centre operators - must be aware of the core principles in order to communicate the brand effectively, even if they don’t make a sale.

As an aside, there is a good tool from Market Leap (not the people who called) to check your website’s visibility for different search terms. You can find the “keyword verification tool” here. They also have a good incoming link checker.