indie_preneur

Are you hip to the shift(ing) business principals

1.20.2010

By indie_preneur

I am not sure when this started, I’m sure way before I was even paying attention to business, or business principals. Most likely it was way before I cared to know what business was (I sure hope so, I’m not that old). Then again, I’m not sure how much I really pay attention to these even today. But what I do know is every business that I choose to follow, read, interact and involve myself with, the following four principals can be found within most of them: great content, transparency, active listening, and a focus on the consumer.

I’m not sure I’m actively seeking these ideals, I think it naturally just happens. Perhaps when I got deeply interested in the marketing and business aspects of web design and development I really took note of this. Some of my favorite follows on twitter happen to be plain ol’ businesses. Before twitter, and social media itself took hold of us (and changed us), the thought of caring what a business had to say was laughable. Unless I was really a sucker for being told what I needed to buy and why, I can’t imagine even taking much note of any.

Great content makes a site worth visiting

Before this shift, a website content (for the most part) was all about the business itself. Whether it was about a product they were trying to sell, or a service that we were told we needed, it was sell copy. And with SEO coming of age in the late 90′s, it was uber-keyword rich and super-corporate speak filled. Basically, it meant nothing to the consumer except the fact that we couldn’t, or shouldn’t, live without product A or service B. If I land on a new site and find that the content is not user-centric, meaning it’s mememe, then 99% of the time I’ll bounce out of there. I get enough of traditional marketing offline, I don’t need it online. I feel that if you either have an awesome product, or do an awesome job, it will show in your work, your tone, and the content you provide on your site. Talk to me about your business, but don’t talk at me about why I need to do business with you.

Transparency, it’s not just for the President

The Obama 2008 Presidential campaign made ‘transparency’ into the latest buzzword. However, this is a very important concept in business these days. I used to often visit sites and they might have a section for ‘Our Staff.’ This section might have a picture of some people (usually only ‘important’ people with manager or more in their title) and a snippet of their bios. This was decent enough, but as I know from personal experience, it doesn’t tell me sh*t about what they do at the company and how involved they are. Lots of companies today (typically those actively involved in social media) have most, if not all, of their staff actively involved in at least their blogging. I find this highly beneficial as it shows me that the company A) cares what their employees have to say and contribute to the business, and B), they believe they have great people representing their brand.

Another important aspect of transparency besides with their employees, these businesses nowadays are very keen on sharing their projects, and often while they are working on them. I can’t imagine this sort of thing happening even a few years ago. In fact I know plenty of businesses that wouldn’t think of doing this today. What this shows me is that the business is so confident in their ability, but also that they are open to failure. No business can produce 100% effective campaigns every time. Especially not when a lot of these campaigns are in the ever changing web landscape. But, they are not afraid of criticism and failure, as this very often makes them a better, more effective business.

People are talking, so listen (and learn)

Consumer input used to be just getting a focus group, taking what you’d learn there, updating your product, and then advertising the crud out of it. And for a while this worked just fine. Well, to a business it worked just fine, because we as consumers had no real way of telling them that their product needed a change. However, with the social web, this is not the case. If I buy your product and then find it out it’s not everything I thought it should be–I’m going to let the world know (or at least those listening). And, you as the product seller should A) care about this negative feedback, and B) want to do something about it. If you’re not open to consumer reviews, then you’re not into sustaining business.

If you sell anything–a product or a service–your website should let me, or at least show me, review / rate my experiences with this. If I see this on a site of a company I am already much more willing to do business with them. I hear that CEOs are afraid of giving consumers too much of a voice, but it’s way too late for this. All you can hope to do is to listen, engage, learn and [hopefully] put out a better product.

Focus on the consumer–well duh, right?

This one’s seemingly a no brainer. And it’s a combination of all three. This is a major fail for a lot of companies I know, and have had dealings with. Sure, on the outside this is the corporate mission statement. But when you get right down to it, the consumer is the last person on the totem pole when it comes to critical business decisions. I find that if none of the above are being done, or done well, then it’s the consumer who ends up suffering. Without a focus on great content comes a lack of caring for the consumer. With a focus on transparency comes an attitude that we know best and that whatever we do is good enough. Without a focus on listening to your consumer comes a lackluster product. Too often a decision is made because it has great ROI, or because it will save the company money, but rarely is a decision made because the consumer will greatly benefit from this.

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I am not a business man (yet), and I realize these are generalizations, but this is just my feeling about how some (a good amount happen to be web focused) businesses have shifted. I feel that this is going to be the way more and more businesses need to shift in the future to sustain viability and respectability, both of their peers and of their consumers.

Am I completely off-base on these assumptions? Would you add others to the mix? Have at it and let me know.

Post this goodness to twitter.

Tags: business principals, web

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 5:53 pm and is filed under marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.