If you've been around a while you know by now that I write the same way most people make pizza.
I lay out the base and then begin to throw all the ingredients around, freely.
The net outcome being most of the posts are mere fragments of a greater idea.
Hence the choice of blogger as the platform and the mosaic tiles.
The pizza squares.
Tasty fragments.
Some ideas. Some questions.
With a dash of spice and the occasional insight.
And while I'm on the topic of pizza I mentioned yesterday that an old post analysing Pizza Hut's on-line ordering business model with Facebook had popped on Google search during the Football.
Truth is it had popped for the past 5 days. The "big data" indicated Snowbound America was busy thinking Pizza Delivery.
But was it a case of Cause or Correlation?
Now I know the vast majority of readers here are Americano.
But some are not.
So I'll let you in on a secret
This week is the 20th Anniversary of the first on-line pizza order. And to celebrate Pizza Hut broadcast this on American TV.
The pop in traffic was simply another of example of old media driving traffic to new media.
The exact volume?
Yesterday it was 265 page hits or about one third of the annual Google search traffic to that page.
And an estimated 0.001% of the audience watching the football on TV.
As I have said before.
New media is nano media.
You'll have more engagement writing the school newsletter.
But I console myself with the idea that it may be a measure of the level of intelligence of the football consuming public who choose to indulge in pizza during the festivities.
But alas I digress.
But it does provide us with another example of how PR and Advertising ignites a conditioned response.
Provides the catalyst for viral growth. That elusive pop in traffic.
As I have said before, if traditional media is the catalyst, then Google is the annuity.
Social the measure of your success as a social proof.
Which brings me to a question @frabcus posed on Twitter earlier today.
If a market has lots of products in it that few have heard of and fewer use, is it a useless space, or just one nobody good has attacked?
The reason most tech fails to ignite the imagination is because the purveyors of the technology have failed to identify the social proof.
The raison d'être for the technology within the social setting.
They spend their days thinking as engineers and not potential customers.
That's why they are endlessly surprised with what users do with their technology when it is set free into the wild.
Few, if any engineers, are their best worst customer, simply because they are, in the main, how can we put this delicately?, dare we say? socially challenged? :-)
The challenge for all developers is to think like buyers. Not makers, and definitely not sellers.
This then is the art of marketing.
To imagine a world awash with product of your own making.
To imagine the conditions.
The preconceptions.
The beliefs.
The attitudes.
The habits.
That would make the product indispensable.
Or, in the modern parlance: viral.
The ability to get inside the customer's head.
To discover the answer to one simple question: Why would I want one?
Not tomorrow.
Not the next day but now.
Which leaves you with two choices.
You either make the market by creating the narrative that excites the imagination or you tap into an existing market.
A tribe. A niche.
At the tipping point where it is about to go mainstream.
All of which is to say the challenge is cultural.
Not technological.
After all strategy is not the only thing culture eats for breakfast, morning coffee, lunch, dinner and tea.
So have a think about that... at least until next time.