That isn’t a comment about a play on Broadway. It’s a suggestion about the words you use.
One of the most useful phrases in business is, “You can only manage what you can measure.” It’s a very demanding and challenging phrase. A new forum was added to the Cre8asite Forums a few months back. “Measuring Your Success” it’s called. The Cre8asite Forums aim to “Build Better Websites Together”. So is success the best indicator of whether you’ve achieved what you set out to do.
Any word can only be assessed in terms of how people in general use it. So what is success? If something is a success, then you may well break out the champagne and have a party. It’s almost an all-or-nothing thing. You have it, or you have a failure: or perhaps it’s so-so. So can you really measure success on some kind of scale. Can you really manage success?
Is there some other parameter that will allow us to manage our websites better? It seems to me that ‘Performance’ is exactly the word we’re looking for. Performance has a whole host of associations that work well, particularly considering the sports analogy. Setting goals, measuring, analysis, training, practice, improvement, achievement – they’re all there.
pushes the same message for businesses in general. Here is what they currently say on their Home Page: “High performance is about closing the gap between what a company is achieving and what it has the potential to achieve.”
So in our Internet Marketing, let’s not go with that over-simplification involved in the word, Success. Let’s rather look to our Performance and see how we can make it the best that it can be.
