How Big?

Last week, I had an instructive discussion with a senior officer of a highly successful online business. We were arguing about the need for ‘brand ubiquity’.

Brand ubiquity is the art of being EVERYWHERE on the Internet that conversations are happening about your company.

Their’s was recovering from the fallout of a flood of bad PR following a glitch in their product delivery process. And irate buyers (along with gleeful critics and nay-sayers) were trashing the company on multiple forums.

This multi-million dollar company ignored all the backlash – and failed to communicate in a consistent manner about the problem – until almost 3 months later (yes, it took that long to sort out the mess).

Sadly, that delay (in communication) is not acceptable or desirable in today’s networked marketplace, where word-of-mouth travels at lightning speed in circles where your prospects meet, gather and talk about you and your business.

Which brings up the question: How BIG do you want to get?

Not everyone needs to aim for ‘Fortune 500′ status – it depends upon your goals, targets and purpose.

For some dreams, a client base in the thousands, or even millions, is necessary. For others, a few hundred, or even dozen will do.

And depending upon how big you want to grow, your business planning must change. Steve Jobs can launch Apple from a garage – but there’s no way he can continue to RUN Apple as a multi-billion dollar operation from the same garage!

If your goal is to service thousands of customers, sell huge volumes of products, and bank millions of dollars in profits, you can’t run your business like a ‘mom-and-pop’ operation.

And having people and processes to handle fall-outs like bad PR, failed product launches, technical glitches and more is no longer optional. It is mandatory.

Brands are everywhere in the globally linked digital economy that thrives on the Internet. And conversations happen around your brand – all the time.

It is up to you to scale to a level at which you can manage to stay on top of the conversations happening around your brand. At the point where you fail to keep up, you risk brand damage – and must prepare for a costly and time-consuming brand rebuilding exercise.

Even then, your name will be tarnished – maybe irreparably so.

Think about how BIG you want to be next year. Then, plan to grow that big. Make sure you have a social media strategy in place for it.