Bill Gates retires from Microsoft tomorrow. He’s a brilliant man, one of the richest people on the planet. He may end up more famous for his philanthropy than for his software company. And he never got the web.
As Time Magazine notes, “…there is no greater blinder than success, even for a visionary like Bill Gates.” So tied was Gates to the Windows monopoly, he missed, for a time, the fundamental change the web wrought. Once he realized its importance, he miscalculated the way to respond, leading to a costly antitrust trial and countless bad PR.
Every business faces competitive threats. Every day, in fact. For many small business owners, those threats will come via the web. Or the mobile web. It might be internet print shops threatening your brick and mortar store, Amazon’s avalanche crushing your retail outlets or online brokers breaking your bank. You can’t avoid competition. And you can’t necessarily continue as you always have.
But, that doesn’t mean you’re doomed. All it takes is looking at what you do and how you differentiate yourself from online only competitors (hint: service is often a big plus). Remember, threats to you also reflect threats to your traditional competitors and opportunities for you to exploit. Heck, despite their mis-steps, even Microsoft seems to be doing just fine these days.
So, maybe you want to be like Bill Gates after all.
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Quick Friday link love this week, folks, whilst playing tourist in London. Enjoy and see you next week:
Catch you next week.
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During our discussions over the last couple weeks about whether social marketing is ready for business, I mentioned how you can “…test the viability of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, widgets or what-have-for very low cost.” Seems like at least one political candidate understands this. Mack Collier on Twitter pointed us to an example (originally pointed out by @tawnypress) of Barack Obama using LinkedIn to engage in dialogue with constituents. This is more than just having a profile. They’re actively asking people what they think – and have gotten over 2,500 responses to date. Let’s hope the campaign listens.
Admittedly, these techniques may work better for a politician than other brands, in that most politicians are (at least so far as we can tell), real people. But, since social is about real people, you must have “brand ambassadors” or “evangelists” or just regular, old “customer service folks” (do you really have people in your business not in “customer service”?!?), y’know, real people, interacting with your customers like this. Whether your goal is to be a social marker or sell within social networks, you’ll never do it as a faceless entity. Sure, there are some risks. Maybe your return on investment will fall short of your goal. Maybe your company ambassador will become more famous than your brand.
Maybe you should be so lucky to have that happen.
What are you waiting for? Get out there and mingle, people.
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