R2R: A New Business Mind Set

The traditional mindset in business is to “destroy” your competition. The warlord analogies are rampant and the strategy is firmly entrenched in me versus you.  Well the difference between sports and business is that in sports, only one team can be the official winner. But in business, there can be many winners. The most important win, in my view, is to create a business that deeply satisfies the owner and its employees. Each owner is going to define her/his satisfaction in diverse ways, even if the majority share the core desire to make a lot of money.

I am not inclined to want to crush anyone. I believe there is plenty of market share available in our industry and therefore plenty of room to be successful without destroying anyone else in the process.

So I was intrigued to read in the March issue of Inc. Magazine that research out of the University of Texas, Austin (of all places!) demonstrates that "rival CEOs who form friendships are at a distinct advantage over those who go it alone."

So I am coining "R2R" - rival to rival - as a new way to approach business management. The internet brought us B2B and B2C. The internet is bringing us increasingly customer-dominated purchasing and selling patterns. The internet is developing previously unthinkable markets and services. If you want to serve your customers, then being on good terms with your competition can help achieve that goal.

It's difficult to be all things to all people. When we can refer someone to a colleague who offers something we don't (including lower prices) we earn respect and potential future referrals. We also convey confidence instead of neediness, professionalism instead of pettiness.

People who used to be considered our rivals are now working with us because we have each learned to identify our core skills and have realized we can be more successful collaborating.

It's difficult to know everything. What a joy it is to do business when I know I can ask or answer a question with a colleague. I love that there are so many ways to differentiate ourselves in the marketplace; nuance can now be communicated powerfully and with relatively minimal effort.

Viva the blog and the podcast for encouraging this R2R dialog among peers.

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Use Google Alerts to Protect Company Assets

Would you know if others are grabbing your content and placing it on their web sites without your permission? Using Google Alerts can certainly help. Here’s a real example of what happened with us. There’s even a happy ending to this story.

It really helps to have a Scorpio on staff. In the case of Bare Feet Studios, that would be Shane Robinson. For those of you not up to date on your astrology, Scorpios are great spies and trackers. When applied to technology, that means great trouble-shooting abilities as well as making it really hard for people to sneak things past him.

One of his tools is Google Alerts. Google will be your very own research assistant and send you news once a day, as it happens, or once a week on the topics ("keywords") you specifiy. It integrates automatically with your gmail account. Don't have a gmail account yet? Contact us for an invitation. They are free, but currently are available by invitation only.

Last night Shane received an alert about one of our BizzyCasts. He followed the link, and low and behold, there was one of our business podcasts re-purposed without attribution on the home page of another web site. He sent off an email alerting the site to copyright infringement, and requesting A) that we be given attribution and a link or B) removal of the audio file.

This morning, we revisit the site, and there is a lovely paragraph and link to us, along with the audio file. We consider this a great internet networking response. Our thanks to Internet Marketing Radio and Google Alerts. You can check it out yourself here:
Internet Marketing Radio

In case you miss it, here are the before and after screen shots:

COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Ryan
URL: http://www.hawaiiup.com
DATE: 04/07/2005 09:49:37 AM
Oh, man, that guy? He's spamming all the podcasting lists and some of us by e-mail. Seems he may mean well, but his tactics are so brazen it's annoying. Glad he made the tweak for you.