KickStart
is an overnight sensation, 15 years in the making.
Way back before the internet, I used to do the very geeky thing
of eating my lunch in front of my computer. Since the WWW
had yet to be invented, there were not 2.8 million sites on woodworking
or Dilbert to distract me. There was also a dearth of
valid, current information on business development. ...so I read
the news on USENET. ...USENET may have been the epoch
of electronic news. - Brief, valid, low bandwidth, and no
pop-ups! Believe it, you don't know newsgroups if you don't know
USENET.
It was great, so great in fact that I had to share. First sending
the
information to my boss, then to others. Eventually we had a
distribution list of 800 folks within the corporation I worked
for. ...All was well until PR heard about it. - - Shut down
tight in a matter of minutes.
Things finally got paved for the process, people understood that the
digital domain was going to stick around.
People learned that stymied creativity in a new realm is counter
productive.
,,,And just as importantly, the PR Director's 3rd level boss started
subscribing to it.
The process has been improved monumentally
through technological advances. Through Mosaic, and Netscape, and
PERL, and HTML, and xtml, and Linux, and BLOGs, and ASP,
and RSS, and...
The one thing that has uniformly held true is that valid news sources,
delivered and read in a timely fashion can make for a terrific
edge. Even when
you've got access to "the inside scoop" of a company it is great to be
able to take a step back and understand what the rest of the world is
thinking, ...or even what is being said outside the propaganda mill of
one's own company. Lately, I've come to appreciate the small to
midsized companies and what a boon it is just to get them out of the
mushroom mode when they are needing to compete on such quickly changing
subjects as homeland defense, BRAC or aviation support.
I've got a great example of how KickStart hits the mark.
...A few years back I was speaking to a crowd of kindred spirits.
The nice folks that invited me put me up in a very nice hotel in one of
those major northern cities. You put your shoes out at night and
in the morning they were shined. More importantly, right beside
them was a copy of the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, AND your local
paper. These guys understood customer appreciation.
My regular schedule was getting up around 4:00, and putting out
"KickStart". I'd listen to Headline News until I memorized it,
shift over to the other cable fare, and then listen to the local
news. I guess you could say I'm a bit of a news junkie. An
interesting metric emerged from this effort. Headline News gave
the same 7 or so stories, and none of them were valid to my
needs. USA Today had a 4 page spread on Shaft, the movie (this
was a while back) some colorful pie charts, and quite a bit of
information on who was voted off the island. ...But nothing on
what I NEEDED to know. Wall Street Journal was some better,
it had 6 articles that hit the mark, good meaty stuff on Aerospace and
Defense. Sure, mostly it was from the investment angle, or the
CEO's profile but definitely worthy stuff. I know this, because
I'd ran across every single article an hour earlier when I was kludging
together "KickStart"! It wasn't called "KickStart" back then, but
believe me, I'm trying to limit the confusion factor.
"KickStart", on the other hand, had 63 articles that morning, some on
subjects that WSJ would never be interested in ...but all of them would
be devoured by the folks in Huntsville that thrived or withered on
information. All 63 passed the litmus test that KickStart still
uses ..."what is current, accurate, and should be acted upon".
Some were financial, some corrolated to personalities, ALL had a
strategic bent, and ALL told an important, epic, story if you read them
over time.
The current KickStart builds on all my previous successful iterations
of this business journal format ...with a few exceptions.
...Instead of focusing on a single
corporation, the current commercial version looks at Huntsville and
northern Alabama.
And
instead of taking its lead primarily from a few executives and
marketing wonks, it listens
to all of its Readership.
You could use KickStart to define "eclectic". But then you could
substitute "KickStart" with "Huntsville", so there ya' go.
KickStart works to capture the needs and interests of its readers, and
uses some sophisticated search engines and refined experience to
provide a
business journal the likes of which Huntsville has never seen.
With the advent
of the myKickStart.com website even better tools are coming on line to
make it the 1st stop for Huntsville business news.
Stick around and see how things develop.
Get a free 30 day subscription to what we've been talking about by clicking here and typing
in "sign me up" ...type in whatever else you'd like to say too, there's
a real human that reads and listens at the other end!
All the best,
- Hugh -
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