Fast Is Better Than Good

GUEST POST by Rachel Globus, Editor in Chief, Event Solutions

Is it better to do something fast, or take your time and make it perfect? You might think the choice is obvious. Put the time into creating a careful, strategic, well-thought-out plan, and you’ll reap the benefits down the line.

That would have been true 20 years ago. But today, while you were spending months hashing out the perfect plan, somebody else created Twitter and is getting 4 million unique visitors every month. Good luck launching your Tweeter concept.

In today’s world, fast may be better than good.

That doesn’t mean that providing a good product is out the window, of course. Rather, it means that in today’s business climate, successful business owners don’t waste time endlessly tweaking every last element of their latest offering. They do the best they can in a compact timeframe and let the market decide the rest.

This is especially true for marketing in today’s conversation-driven, user-generated culture.

Example. You decide you want to expand your company’s reach and reputation through a new blog. For weeks, you discuss names, hashing and re-hashing whether the “the” should be capitalized (should there be a the?), and which combination of words perfectly encapsulates the essence of your brand and your goals for growth over the short-, medium- and long-term.

Finally, reluctantly, you make a decision. Then it comes time to create the content, and a similar process ensues. The blog’s design inspires yet more fits of time-consuming haggling over the perfect shade of orange, the width of the columns, whether there should be columns, how to integrate pictures, what widget best expresses your identity, and is this blog really the best thing for your company after all, perhaps you should revisit it….??

What the competition is doing. Meanwhile, your competitor launched a blog on WordPress. It may not be perfect (that “W” logo in the corner could look more professional), but she’s got some good ideas and she’s putting them out there. She’s linking to other bloggers and they’re linking back, she’s on Twitter letting her followers know about her posts, she’s starting discussions on LinkedIn and engaging in conversations with people all over the globe about her ideas.

Before long, she’s become the go-to resource in your industry and new clients are actually picking up the phone and calling her because they’ve heard about her from her blog—on that topic you’re still busy refining.

It’s an influence economy. Business owners, bloggers, citizen activists, your neighbor, your competition and you are all empowered to establish your expertise on the global soapbox that is the web. But the window of opportunity to establish your brand’s depth of knowledge, understanding of your industry, high-quality service and thought leadership is limited.

Get on your soapbox faster, and the crowd you gather will help you determine what’s good.