why reinvent the wheel
Posted by Eric Hsu on September 19th, 2007I’ve been getting these same questions from day to day and I don’t blame anyone for asking them. It’s like hearing your friends talk about iPhone and all of a sudden you have to have one yourself. Or learning about Bluetooth for the first time, and the next thing you know, your oven talks to your computer over Bluetooth. New technology is exciting, but it doesn’t mean you have to build one from the ground up.
So what’re the questions I keep getting time and time again?
“Can you build me a blog?”
“Can you build me a social network?”
“Can you build a video player for my website?”
etc. etc. etc.
My answer is always the same. If the purpose of these new “toys” is to drive traffic back to your website, then “if you build it and they will come” is nothing but daydreaming. Use tools, great tools, that already exist out there for everything you can think of under the sun. These tools not only give you more features than you could possible dream to use, they also provide you entry to something bigger, a bigger audience, a bigger pool of potential visitors to your websites.
Take youTube for example. Why host your videos on your own site, and pray that someday, someone is going to stumble across your videos when you can upload them to youTube, and instantly, you have millions of viewers doing all kinds of keyword searches, and might just be looking for video clips on wineries, wine tasting, or what have you? Same goes for your blog. Being a part of a blog community is great. Most blogs will let you be part and sign up for different communities, groups of people who are blogging about the same topic, with feeds flying all over the Internet.
So don’t reinvent the wheel. It defeats the purpose (driving traffic back to your site), and you’re spending money on building a tool that will never stand up to what’s already out there (youTube, Flickr, Word Press, the list goes on and on).
September 19th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
Spot on Eric. There’s another angle to this as well. Inertia is committed to doing one thing really well: opening up the direct sales channel for wine online and increasing the sales through that channel for all of our clients. If we were also blog developers, video programmers etc, then we wouldn’t be able to focus on providing the best products and services that our clients count on receiving from us.
Thankfully, as you’ve mentioned, there are organizations that are focused all doing all those other things, often in a way that can be easily integrated into any site’s content.
September 21st, 2007 at 3:02 pm
I spend every spare moment doing all these extras Eric talks about (Gee. Thanks for telling me about them and sealing my coffin, Jefesito!). Crooner Hsu is so right. IBG & RTE is doing the most important job: SELLING WINE! For all my other add-ons, marketing aids, and voyeristic personality crutches, I go to the source. It is all about spreading out on the web for more exposure. Bring the mountain to Mohammed (Peace be upon him). The consumer will no longer come just because we are us. We must be, by our efforts, top of mind.