Last week when I was traveling, I didn’t notice that Folio:’s Dylan Stableford had mentioned that all the new small business websites are not exactly blazing new trails. As he includes some quotes from an item I once wrote recalling the “miserable failure” (my term) of the first iteration of SmallBusiness.com “one of the lowest points in my business life,” I’d like to update that seven-year-old news by saying, I’m way over it. Anytime one has to throw in the towel on a business — and lay-off 25 people (including ones-self) — it’s a low point. However, that’s ancient history. (And, technically, at the time of its first iteration, the business entity that operated SmallBusiness.com was not a part of Hammock Publishing, although I was very involved personally.)
I’m a lucky person — and the journey I’ve been blessed to travel has taken me far from what I thought at one time, was a miserable failure.
Despite trying for the past two decades, I’ve never come close to boiling everything I believe about marketing into a statement so efficient as the following one I read in the NY Times this morning in an article about Nike and where they are spending their “advertising” dollars these days.:
“We’re not in the business of keeping the media companies alive,” (Trevor Edwards, Nike’s corporate vice president for global brand and category management) says he tells many media executives. “We’re in the business of connecting with consumers.”
Only change I would suggest: Instead of using the word consumers, use the word runners.
It’s budget-planning season for lots of people I know. That’s the time of year when goals and strategies developed using Excel spreadsheets are translated into pie charts and graphs and imported into scintillating Power Point presentations. Here’s a poem for you to contemplate the next time you’re sitting through such a presentation:
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
by Walt Whitman
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts, the diagrams, to add, divide,
and measure them,
When I sitting heard the learned astronomer where he lectured
with much applause in the lecture room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
