eBusiness
is combining both business and the digital age and putting
them to work for you!
As mentioned before, most of the original “.com’s”
of the 1990’s disappeared as quickly as they arrived.
Much of this had to do with the fact that many of these companies
were still thinking too conventionally. They weren’t
quite catching on to the concept of what digital media could
do for them. They were not putting enough of that “e”
in their e-biz. So what are some ways to really take advantage
of that “e”?
To effectively plan a successful internet business, we must
identify and reconcile two seemingly obvious, but very important
variables: 1) the nature of business,
and 2) the nature of the internet.
We are all fairly familiar with what business is even if only
in a basic sense, so I won’t go too deeply into this,
but if you think about it in an extremely reduced way, business
in its most basic sense is nothing more than an avenue for
simple exchange. That is all it
has ever been for millennia now. Sure, we no longer swap furs,
wives, horses, or grain, but just because we swipe or tap
plastic cards today instead doesn’t mean we aren’t
basically doing the same thing our ancestors did thousands
of years ago. Someone has something I want, I give them something
I have/they want in exchange for that item. Pretty simple.
Remember this: our primary function and objective with our
e-business is to exchange some sort of “commodity”,
our product, for revenue. Now because we want to conduct this
exchange over the internet, we have to reconcile this with
that second variable, the nature of the internet.
One cannot simply exchange any old product or service over
the internet alone (at this point in time anyway), so we must
identify the types of commodities (or at least some form of
these commodities) that can lend themselves to being electronically
exchanged over the internet. Luckily for us as online business
owners, what we want (money) is extremely easy to exchange
over the internet and is done all of the time. The new dilemma
is figuring out a clever way to give our customers what they
want over the internet as well! This can be a little tougher
to figure out at first, but it just takes a little bit of
creativity. Once you get a feel for it, the ideas will just
start flowing! Examples of items that we can exchange electronically
at this point in time would include information, communication,
media (video and sound), software, and even money! Now all
we need to do is think of new and creative approaches to improving
some of the ways we are doing things conventionally now!
|
