Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The Chinese e-commerce giant launches one of the largest stock-market debuts in history — and points the way to our economic future.

The story of Alibaba has already become legend. Fifteen years ago, Jack Ma, a former English teacher, and his co-founders set up their Internet company in an apartment in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, not far from Shanghai. Today, Alibaba’s online shopping sites in China — mainly Taobao and Tmall — handle twice as much merchandise as Amazon.

The company’s initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange will bring in a haul of some $21.8 billion — bigger than Facebook’s — and values Alibaba at $168 billion — four times more than Yahoo....

...Media were no less giddy when it came to Apple’s media announcements – declaring intentions to live tweet these announcements and coveting their invitations to attend the media briefings in person as if they were non-transferable invitations to a royal wedding. Yet today’s Apple announcements are the latest example that this passion for the brand is slowing eroding – and along with it may go their biggest strategic advantage as well.

Let me explain. Apple, perhaps more than any other consumer brand, has always relied on evangelism from early consumers to propel its success. The loyal Apple devotees rave about the new device, and bring new consumers to it despite the significantly higher price tag than competitors. This raving led to their market share growth, ability to charge a premium for less and penchant for dictating unfavorable terms to strongarm partners such as mobile carriers into desperate exclusive partnerships to sell their products.

The big announcement of the iPhone 6 and Apple Watch today signifies that this era may be over for five reasons...

By far, the best online marketing strategy is being able to seize a new opportunity before any of your competitors have a clue what’s going on. But it’s not just about setting yourself up to be the early bird.But it’s not just about setting yourself up to be the early bird.

You have to be ready to catch the worm and ride the wave of popularity at its peak.This will enable your blog, service, or product to enjoy rapid growth, and hopefully a higher level of repeat business in the long term.

...A better model is the model that’s been working in digital since day one: Create, seed, iterate, keep seeding, iterate some more and then “pivot” if necessary. Who gets it totally right on the first try anyway? Twitter started as a podcasting company called Odeo. Rovio created 51 games before they made Angry Birds. Flickr was originally just a tiny part of an online game. The founders of Yelp tried to revolutionize email before actually revolutionizing local reviews. And Instagram started out as a Foursquare competitor, but then scrapped the idea in favor of photo sharing. There’s a reason that “pivoting” is now a start-up cliché. Today’s more progressive companies are starting to talk about agile development. Some are even employing it. But the need for change is bigger than that. It’s not just about an agile method of development. It’s also about an agile method of budgeting and marketing....