The Internet's "New World Order" forces you into total commitment to a web strategy. To survive, your business must appear on Page One of search results.

...nor the battle to the strong

In the 1997 science fiction movie Gattaca, a Utopian age of "designer babies" set in the future lets parents control their child's characteristics by cherry-picking from their own genes. What's more, ones place in society is determined by this government-registered gene profile selected by ones parents.  A subplot of the movie is - and some would argue its main plot - two brothers play out their sibling rivalry, with the officially inferior one, Vincent Freeman (played by Ethan Hawke) always outwitting his supposedly superior brother, Anton Freeman (played by Loren Dean). Towards the end of the movie, the weaker brother explains why he always wins, despite his brother's government-verified superior genes. Vincent says he wins because he "never saves anything for the swim back".

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
- Ecclesiastes

As a marketing professional, you often wonder why you're not getting your fair share of prospects. Where do prospects live, congregate and search for products or services like yours, you ask yourself. Is it the recession? Global warming perhaps? Where are they for crying out loud!

Less and less do prospects rely on trade shows, conferences and brochures. More and more do they go to the web to find answers.

"Any noun can be verbed"

You know you're in business when your company name becomes a verb.

Google first broke ground in 1998 and within several years their company name became a verb. You know you're in business when your company name becomes a verb. (I've never heard someone say "I Microsofted it" - although let's be polite and not guess what it might mean if they did). The verb "Google" is so ubiquitous today that actors use the term in sit-coms and other shows. Old people (like me) say "I searched the Internet for it". Young people say "I Google'd it". Google became a verb so fast, spell checkers don't yet recognize the word "Google".

Look at the business you are in today. Perhaps there are dozens or maybe even a hundred or so businesses competing at least a little with yours. Now consider this: unless you are in a tech-savvy, Internet-savvy line of business, only a small percentage of that hundred or so have woken up to the real power of finding business on the web. Is your company in that small percentage, or are you one of the sleepers? In other words, do you even know on which page of search results your website appears today?

Only a small percentage of businesses have woken up to the "New World Order" of the Internet.

Quick check: If your website is boring and competitor's website is far more impressive than yours, you might already be in trouble.

Possession is nine tenths of the law

It is easier to "maintain ownership of the hilltop" than it is to get there, and when your business appears on page one of search results you are on that hilltop. If no one in your space has their act together yet, it will cost you a lot less to take that hilltop today. And once you command that hilltop, it will be an order of magnitude more difficult (and more expensive) for a competitor to displace you (or you them, if they beat you to it). When your website is on the first page of search results, you are generating more profit and using some of that profit to help you stay on page one, the hilltop.

40% of business-to-consumer commerce is secured via the web. Over 80% of business-to-business commerce is secured that way. There's no going back to the old way of finding new customers. You need to commit 100% to your web strategy before your competitor does to theirs.

The question is, are you prepared to save nothing for the swim back?

Perhaps you are a very smart marketing professional. Perhaps you are the "smarter" sibling in that Gattaca movie. Unfortunately, however, everything you learned about marketing in college you can flush down the toilet. The question now is, are you confident enough to let all of that go, and bold enough to save nothing for the swim back.