Small Biz Bites Blog
New Business Ideas in the Ginormous Internet Petri Dish
Sunday's NYT has an article on how innovation is not some "eureka" moment. Years of sweat usually precede the next cool thing.
In the online age, however, innovators do have it easier in one important respect: getting attention.
The number of media outlets has probably increased by an order of magnitude since 1995, if you include topical websites and blogs. The latter might not have the mass audience of a big magazine, but the audience can be targeted just as well or better.
Professional journalists and bloggers are always hungry for a new story, especially if it can be tied into a trend. (Which is not too hard.)
Plus, the reach of these online media outlets is usually nationwide. So even if you've got a narrowly defined target market, you've got potential customers from coast to coast.
I've run across a bunch of examples in the past few weeks: The company that stages (and documents) elaborate wedding proposals, Jill Vegas's home staging service, Doug Donaldson's instructional youth sports video site, Rosemarie Monaco's Car Tatts, and this new company which enables inducement prizes. They may not all thrive, but they'll get ink.
What does this mean if your business is built on a new idea? Your PR effort involves reaching out to many more outlets, and can trigger new business more easily than before.
