Reading George F Colony’s Blogcalled the Counterintuitive CEO on how what CEOs will face next with respect to the recession and how it will act a s a gateway connecting 2 different era’s got me thinking on the top things CEOs should be considering to get them through this gateway or portal with business intact.
- There is always opportunity. It just looks different, maybe now it is less abundant, but it is there. Opportunity + Planning = success. Testing ideas online is cheap.
- There is no such thing as an unprofitable business. Just unprofitable business models.
- Stay clean, squeaky clean. The digital trail never dies. Manage your life and your associated online reputation carefully.
- Invest in your digital properties and digital footprint. Proactively managing your online customer and future customer base is key. Make sure your selection processes for vendors and software are sound.
- Educate yourself on all things digital. Take a course. Invest some time. Understand search engine marketing (SEM) and especially search engine optimisation (SEO) and how it applies to your business. Read more…
Competition minister Craig Emerson it appears has decided that competition is not such a great thing and out an end to the new Choice Grocery website, which was due to go live next week. Read the full article on News and The Australian, or maybe there is more to it and we the citizens are not considered sophisticated enough to understand why anything that will help manage duopolies and potentially keep prices down should be a good thing.
This was a well funded website, with good resources involved. The first effort is reported to have cost around $6m before being canned and the Choice Grocery, to date reported at $7m of the $13m. With 1 week to go before the site goes live, why would you cancel such project? The only possible reasons maybe:
- The supermarket lobbyists are a lot more convincing than we might think
- The supermarkets can bring a lot more pressure to Government that we might think
- Some powerful people out there really do not want any sort of spot light brought onto grocery prices
- The site was really really bad, $7m how bad can it be?
According to Livenews, they just come out and say it. Pressure from the big supermarkets is believed to have caused the Government to abandon their election promises and admit the site is not feasible. Seven million dollars later…
Choice was not told direct and Mr Emerson communicated the news after meeting with Grocery retailers. Hang on a second. if this is correct, he decided this was not feasible with the very people it is meant to manage and potentially cause to reduce their prices and profits. So the players decided the aims of the site which is being developed by an independent part, being the trusted consumer brand Choice, were not feasible. There just has to be something wrong with that picture, I cannot put my finger on it right now though.
Read more…
This is interesting. Michael Kordahi, a Microsoft employee built the blind search engine I think to sell more Tweetshirts. The search engine comparisons exclude any blended search compnents such as News, Blogs etc.
Go check it out at http://blindsearch.fejus.com/