[Iota]

With the current disruptions in technology and industry, it is hard to tell whether Google, Microsoft, e-Bay or any other may be the leader in their respective domains in the next five years. Like the giants, to maintain your position or go beyond it, you need more innovation and only innovation. You have to innovate in the way you treat your team mates, innovate your organisation, innovate your products and services, innovate on how you treat your customers and you know the only other option extinction. You have to either innovate or you die. How then can you talk of strategic planning? Forget about it. Keep going and look out for more opportunities.

[Iota]

How can that be?

[orange2323]

Challenging yourself is funny.

Strategic planning is looking at the market to find the opportunities and then making a plan to get there. We have a competitive market analysis that we developed and have been using for 30 years which looks at where you are, where your competition is, and most importantly where the market is. If you can make a map of the market (which you can through quantitative market research) then you can identify how you can use your resources (time, money, quality) to best touch your targets. It is not impossible, or magic. It just takes time, knowledge, and initiative. Many companies (and yes even the big dog fortune 500) rush things to market and essentially throw their marketing and products at the wall to see what sticks. You don't have to waste your time and energy guessing the answers are out there.

Cheers,

Brendan

[Dylan Phelan]

Iota,

I think you have failed to grasp what strategic planning encompasses...

[Gaulkin]

You get eaten

ex. microsoft eats yahoo

[webgal]

Innovators are often planners. They're just people who act on it faster.

And once you show up on searches it's the other networking that keeps you going not just keywords and search engines. So if you have a site that survives on google adsense and keywords getting people there, offers nothing that would inspire anyone to post any content, link back or bookmark you, you are at the mercy of the whims of technology because you have no visitor equity.

How do you think coke and pepsi survive? How about budweiser? Think they forge out there reactively with no marketing plan? No way. They have a plan. More than one and they have them for several different markets. Even when I've worked on Benedryl they repackage the product to cold sufferers, allergy sufferers and so on. They respond to trends, jump on them as opportunities.

It doesn't have to be a 5-year plan but if you have no plan, you'll get buried in mediocrity. I see generic business websites all the time. What would inspire me to click away from amazon.com to another puny, pie-in-the-sky bookstore that someone puts up simply because they managed to get their shopping cart to work? Nothing. If you're selling books, make it something that amazon is not. Pick a niche or genre. Add more personal reviews etc.

If you enter a market, you have to figure out how you can carve your place within it. That takes some planning. The people who don't do it will putter aimlessly around and get a trickle of response. Those who dig in and do their homework and learn to take advantage of trends as the opportunities arise, are those who succeed on the internet these days.