Did you Miss the Online Train? Is it too Late?

Even if you don’t have a website, blog, Facebook page, Yahoo! or Google listing, it’s still not too late. It really isn’t. That’s what they said in 1999, and again in 2005, and every day. The future just keeps on coming, day after day. Jump on now, and you can look back later.

Seth Godin, one of my favorite bloggers, has an excellent post titled is it too late to catch up?  He suggests some things to do about it, and one very interesting thing not to do, which is (quoting):

Don’t have any meetings about your web strategy. Just do stuff. First you have to fail, then you can improve.

That’s pretty aggressive, but it makes sense in context of the rest of his suggestions. Seth has suggestions like putting the president’s real email on every invoice, giving bonuses for blogging, getting Gmail email addresses for everybody. Good stuff.

And even this one, which, despite my years as a consultant (and maybe that’s because of) I also like a lot:

Refuse to cede the work to consultants. You don’t outsource your drill press or your bookkeeping or your product design. If you’re going to catch up, you must (all of you) get good at this, and you only accomplish that by doing it.

However, there’s this irony: Seth’s writing it in a blog. I read it in a blog. I’m recommending it in a blog. And the people it’s intended for, those who don’t have websites or blogs or Facebook pages, probably aren’t reading blogs. Sigh…

(Image credit: schlaeger, via Flickr cc)

Comments

  • smichm says:

    Great post – I recently saw Gary Vaynerchuk speak about this while promoting his new book, Crush It. There’s still time to catch the train but people must move quickly. It becomes quite apparent to me when I chat with anyone out of the tech, marketing or media industries that this has not reached its complete tipping point as most of them shruh socmed off as a fad/joke/ waste of time.

    I just wrote a blog post and addressed it here, Social Media For Small Business – http://myhosting.com/blog/2009/12/social-media-small-business-part/

    Cheers,
    smichm

  • Kristen Pike says:

    Tim,

    I really enjoyed reading this post. I think anyone who is just getting started is really lucky. There’s so much we can do to strengthen our business and our marketing efforts by making a presence online.

    The other reason that now is a great time to start is because everything changes so quickly. You can try, succeed or fail, learn and then move on to the next big thing without skipping a beat!

    Kristen

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