To All Presenters:
Search Engine Optimization is big and getting bigger. Everyone wants to optimize opportunities for search engines to find them and so they embrace the fundamentals of SEO - whatever one perceives them to be.
A musician friend of mine recently launched a site designed to promote his musical endeavors and retail his latest CD. In an effort to attract as much traffic as his servers would allow he applied every conceivable keyword/metatag thing-a-ma-bob from "Britney Spears" and "classical music" to "I Heart Kittens" and "free sex".
Creative? Perhaps.
Effective? Not in the least bit.
What he got for his effort was a good amount of emotional abuse and whoppingly mediocre sales. His ambition failed when he thought he could attract teeny-bobber boy-band fans and/or animal loving / pervert types to his brooding neo-gothic retail engine, and wow them into spending their hard-earned allowances on music they don't generally like.
He soon surrendered his creative thinking and gave in to a bland solution - he referenced relevant concepts such as other dark brooding coffee house musicians too obscure to reference here, and similar things that go bump in the night.
It took some time, but his sales took off once that small population who would enter such terms voluntarily found him popping up repeatedly as one of the two results in their obscure keyword searches.
He found his niche-target audience and they loved him. The masses? Not so much.
THE POINT: Sometimes we really do out think ourselves.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Simple is as Simple Does
To All Presenters:
“The art of war does not require complicated maneuvers; the simplest are the best, and common sense is fundamental. One might wonder how generals blunder; it is because they try to be clever.”
- Napoleon Bonaparte
Agenda Magazine has a great article about Napoleon's campaign into Russia in the year 1812 which comments on, amongst other topics, Napoleon's ultimate downfall being a likely byproduct of deviation from his own best practices and generally making things too complex to succeed. Often times creativity in business manifests itself in the delivery of the simplest possible solution. We are too often awed by the size of the problem, so we assume the solution must be equally large.
The old joke that NASA spent billions on a pen that could write in zero-gravity while the Russians used a pencil, though not entirely true, comes to mind.
On a similar front, one might wonder if too many minds are wrapped up in the tech-boom-big-sexiness of trying to become the next great GOOGLE-optimized social media tool. Perhaps we've forgotten the elegance of simple business.
Consider, most business in the world is done by small businesses doing simple things - how could your product or idea help these operators do what they do better, faster or even more simply? As an alternative, how can you take a lofty concept or difficult process and make it simple enough for mass access? Apple does this well - the IPOD made music more simple, the IPAD makes content management more simple.
The strongest organisms tend to be the most simple, the most durable ideas tend to be the most simple and he who has the best sound bite often wins.
THE POINT: Simple may not always be easy, but it usually works.
“The art of war does not require complicated maneuvers; the simplest are the best, and common sense is fundamental. One might wonder how generals blunder; it is because they try to be clever.”
- Napoleon Bonaparte
Agenda Magazine has a great article about Napoleon's campaign into Russia in the year 1812 which comments on, amongst other topics, Napoleon's ultimate downfall being a likely byproduct of deviation from his own best practices and generally making things too complex to succeed. Often times creativity in business manifests itself in the delivery of the simplest possible solution. We are too often awed by the size of the problem, so we assume the solution must be equally large.
The old joke that NASA spent billions on a pen that could write in zero-gravity while the Russians used a pencil, though not entirely true, comes to mind.
On a similar front, one might wonder if too many minds are wrapped up in the tech-boom-big-sexiness of trying to become the next great GOOGLE-optimized social media tool. Perhaps we've forgotten the elegance of simple business.
Consider, most business in the world is done by small businesses doing simple things - how could your product or idea help these operators do what they do better, faster or even more simply? As an alternative, how can you take a lofty concept or difficult process and make it simple enough for mass access? Apple does this well - the IPOD made music more simple, the IPAD makes content management more simple.
The strongest organisms tend to be the most simple, the most durable ideas tend to be the most simple and he who has the best sound bite often wins.
THE POINT: Simple may not always be easy, but it usually works.
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