"Anyone can be an entrepreneur who wants to experience the deep, dark canyons of uncertainty and ambiguity; and who wants to walk the breathtaking highlands of success. But I caution, do not plan to walk the latter until you have experienced the former." - An Unknown Entrepreneur
I first saw this quote in an email sent to me via dial-up on my then Netzero account (I couldn't afford anything else) at the world headquarters of my newly minted Internet start-up New Media Strategies (a.k.a. my Capitol Hill apartment) by our first official investor, Oron Strauss.
As New Media Strategies enters its second decade of operations in 2009, I'm reminded of that wisdom nearly every day.
In 1999, the term "social media" had not yet been coined. Nor had "Web 2.0" – it was still very much a Web 1.0 world. That said, the ideas and technological underpinnings for the social media explosion already existed. Most importantly, through all of the ambiguity, we saw a clear path.
Inspired by the Cluetrain Manifesto idea that "the Marketplace is now a conversation," we set out to create a company to bridge the gap between brands and consumers — to serve as our clients' "eyes, ears and voice online." Our original (and current) mission statement was bold: to "fundamentally change the way companies and brands communicated with consumers." No other company was viewing the conversation online as valuable enough to tap into and harness. More so, no other company, firm or agency was encouraging and guiding companies and their clients to join that conversation.
In our first few years, the only thing interactive about the Internet was message boards and chat rooms, so we focused our online intelligence and engagement efforts in those areas. As we all now know, the rapid rise of the blogosphere put the marketplace on steroids (and our business followed suit). Soon after, social networks multiplied that impact exponentially.
And while we have evolved our technologies and methodologies to adapt to these new platforms and to the increased level of participation, one thing has remained an essential constant: the people. It is tempting to reduce the online space to a vat of harvestable data, but then you miss the nuances and beauty of who is on the other end and how best to engage them. For these reasons – and for the basic reason that to be social, you have to be a living organism (h/t Wikipedia) – human analysts and communications experts are at the core of our intelligence gathering, blogger interactions and online community engagement.
Looking back, I think we have been able to faithfully execute our mission statement and even more. In fact, if you explore our interactive Timeline you will find a number of "firsts" and accolades over the years, and that success certainly is rewarding. But, at the end of the day, history is littered with pioneering companies that failed to continue to innovate, adapt and expand their share of the market.
As an entrepreneur, the thing I love about my job as CEO is that we are able to build a company, a culture, an industry, while our market continues to evolve. And it changes almost every three months. Acting as the "eyes, ears and voice" for our clients in the marketplace will continue, but we need to adopt and evolve the impact and action from communications and marketing to research, design and CRM – to a much deeper place and into the fiber of how companies are run.
There is so much more to do, so much more we can accomplish and I couldn't ask for a better team of innovators, experts and pioneers to help lead the way as New Media Strategies begins our next decade.
