John Battelle of SearchBlog

Earlier today I wrote a post about a new policy we’re implementing at my business. I thought readers here might enjoy the post, so here it is in its entirety:

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In the past few years, the weekend has taken on a new meaning for me. In short, it’s now defined by work. The weekend is when I catch up on work I can’t get done during the week, in particular work that requires long form thinking, the kind of thinking that powers drafting considered memos and strategy documents, even posting to this or other blogs. Read entire article.

Posted in Leadership, productivity

OK, so maybe that title is meant to provoke a response, but is that so wrong? This post is about arguments, after all. Or put another way: I’d like to argue that the best businesses are, in essence, arguments.

There are many definitions of the word “argument,” but the one I want to focus on is the one that comes up first when you type define:argument into Google: “A fact or assertion offered as evidence that something is true; (as in) ‘it was a strong argument that his hypothesis was true.’”

In my experience starting businesses, and in my study of other businesses that have succeeded wildly (like Apple, Google, or eBay), every great business is founded in a thesis, a statement of what should be true. It’s then the business’s job to go prove that thesis - in essence, the business becomes the argument that proves the thesis.

Wired, for example, was founded on the thesis that digital technologies were forever changing the face of human society - from culture to politics, business to pleasure. We then made a business out of proving that thesis. Every single issue of Wired, every page of HotWired, every book we published and every deal we did was an argument proving that thesis. Read entire article.

Posted in Leadership, Planning & Strategy

In the past few posts I’ve focused on the idea of business as conversation, arguing that the Internet is the new transit of that conversation, and therefore, you are now in the Internet media business. So what next? You have a business, and that business has a site on the Web. You know all about SEO (or, more likely, you’ve read a lot about it and possibly even hired someone else to help you know all about SEO). A while back I promised some simple steps you can take to make your site ready for this new conversation.

But as I think about it, I’ve realized that the best advice I can give you has nothing to do with changes to your site, per se. Rather, it has to do with changes to yourself. If you change how you use the Web, your site changes, well, they’ll come by themselves. Read entire article.

Posted in Planning & Strategy, Sales & Marketing, Technology

While I was plotting my next post about how to make your site more conversational, a reporter from Businessweek rang, asking for my thoughts on how smaller companies might leverage search, and in particular, what I thought about the practice of “reputation management.” He ended up running our conversation as an interview, which you can find here. Some tidbits:

For a small company, to what extent does your first page of Google results define your company or your brand?

It’s all relative to each business and the category they’re in, but I think it can be said that a significant amount of the encounters that any potential customer or current customer has with your brand has very little to do with you getting them to think about you, but rather them coming across you through one way or another via search.… Whatever the results are is what they’ll think of you, and whether or not that’s fair is kind of beside the point. It’s just true…

Read entire article.

Posted in Planning & Strategy, Sales & Marketing, Technology