Ricky’s Online Business Blog

Some time ago, I was asked to take over and transform an online dating and matching service.  Its web site was still typical Web 1.0 style which was almost dead with very few members and traffic.

Trying to keep to my principle not to do what others were already doing, I proposed a new strategy to the owner.  However, I didn’t proceed in the venture as we couldn’t agree on the right business model.  At the end of discussion, the owner still preferred a business model 90% identical with the existing one!

Nowadays, many youngsters look for friendship and relationship on social network web sites, But besides casual relationships, there are others who look for serious life partner.  So there are many offline dating and matching services around.  Naturally, some of them get online and here come these online dating and matching web sites.

The problem is that, do people trust the Internet to look for their future husband or wife?  Most do not.  They don’t think Internet as a safe place.  Instead, they consider it full of cheaters.  The trust for the channel is just not there.  We may disagree, but this is the market perception, at least for my (older) generation.

Internet presence might work for an offline matching service using the Internet to promote their service, automate some business processes and value-add to their offline offerings.  But how about a purely online matching service?  Will it work?

If you were to operate such an online matching service, how do you make it big on the Internet?  Difficult, if not impossible.  This calls even more badly for a blue ocean strategy.  Let’s not be so bounded and bondaged by the same old thought just as other competitors in the industry.

Yes I admit I’m a blue ocean strategy fan.  My PC desktop is an ocean viewing.  I even tend to look at everything through the lense of blue ocean vs. red ocean.

The problem is, we just can’t ignore competing in the red ocean, whether now or in future.  Perhaps our industry is still red.  Perhaps a blue ocean will also turn red after some time.  Competitive strategies still have an important place in business and marketing.

I heard that a telecommunication company in Malaysia has two teams of people planning their business strategy, one called “Compete Today”, another called “Compete Tomorrow”.

As the names suggest, the “Compete Today” team plan strategies to outsmart their competitors in today’s market.  Whereas the “Compete Tomorrow” team brainstorm and explore new markets and plan strategies for the future.

So I’m learning not to just look up to anything “blue ocean” as good and look down on anything “red ocean” as bad.  A more holistic perspective is required.

According to the blue ocean strategy, one way to find your blue ocean is by targeting and turning current non-customers of your products into your customers.  It is interesting to observe how non-users of a product can be turned into users by innovative offers and technologies.

Looking at the development of Internet in the past one and half decade, we can see the role of Internet users changing, from mere consumers of information in the 90′s, to producers and publishers of information on the Internet nowadays!

Just think about it.  In the good old days, we surfed the World Wide Web to read up what the site owner wrote. Then with the development of web authoring tools, the more technical people among us learned to design and publish web pages on the Internet.  Around the turn of the millennium, any IT student (including me) could do up a web page!

With the flourishing of social networking web sites in past few years, even non-technical people got to express themselves on the Internet.  Nowadays, more than 9 out of 10 college students own a piece of virtual property on Facebook or Friendster!

When blogs were popularized in more recent years, we change from owning a member page on Friendster to owning a blog!  Now virtually any Internet user can express themselves and shout on the Internet by blogging.  Even those who used to consider Internet as a scary place started to speak up!  Think about it.  It’s easier to learn WordPress than Microsoft Word!

So the Internet population has been transformed from content consumers to content “prosumers” (producer-consumer).  The technologies have turned non-users of the Internet to voice our thoughts, to using the Internet to rave about anything!

But many people in this country are still not using the Internet yet.  But watch and see.  When mobile Internet becomes so pervasive in our mobile phones, there will be more people surfing the Internet on mobile than through PC.

If most mobile users know how to send an SMS message now, they will know how to “micro-blog” in the future.  Microblogging tools such as Twitter may not be so popular and useful now.  But it will be in the future as more non-Internet users become Internet users via mobile phones.  At that time, even more people will publish content on the cyberspace!