John Chambers runs the Internet.
His work touches almost everything on the Internet. He has a presence in almost every cranny of the Internet. From the router than runs the broadband connection in your home to the network switches, gateways and such that run businesses and telecommunications networks, Chambers' company is driving today's Internet.
And John Chambers has no intention of slowing down the progress of the company he leads--Cisco. He envisions the Internet 2.0 where real-time video replaces the ubiquity of today's text-based world.
The economic downturn doesn't dissuade him from his vision. Chambers looked at the history of economic cycles, the tech industry and his company in devising a gameplan. The Wall Street Journal, in a interview with Chambers, outlined the four pillars of his gameplan for a tough economy:
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Be realistic. Gauge how many challenges are created by the economy and how many are self-inflicted
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Assess your situation. Establish a timeframe that you anticipate a downturn to last and how deep it could be
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Get ready for the upturn. Prepare plans to compete for additional money that comes into the market when consumer and business confidence rises (normally small companies do this better, so a large concern like Cisco has to be attuned to the nuances of the uptick).
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Get closer to your customers. Chambers says that the company crashed hard during one of the tech recessions because they didn't stay close enough to its customer base to see when the customers started feeling the economic downdraft.
Whether the customer is a tech officer, a media buyer or a donor, Chambers' four elements in his gameplan are good for every business and non-profit.
Eat your own dogfood
Cisco believes so strongly in Internet video, that the company travel policy pushes employees to fully exploit the company's videoconferencing capability instead of flying. Remember, Cisco wants to stay close to its customers. In fact, the Dallas Morning News notes Cisco was among the Top 25 companies in travel spending last year. But things have changed: the company has been able to save over 50 percent from its travel expense using videoconferencing and a new travel tool that reinforces the travel policy.
Simply put, Cisco eats the dogfood it makes.
Traditional Media: Current scale victors
Traditional broadcasters and publishers can see a bit of the path that the architects of the Internet plan with video. Whether radio, newspapers, magazines, book publishers or even TV stations, one-to-one video seemingly makes a media mogul out of anyone with something to say.
The biggest difference is scale and time. Today, a relatively successful video on YouTube can touch 3 million people in two weeks. A single network TV ad or a single radio network ad can each touch 3 million people in one minute.
When a book publisher wants to hit the Amazon top sellers list or the New York Times best sellers list, then the publisher needs to sell lot of books in a really short period of time (typcially, one week). That's where the brute force of tradiitional media casts messages faster and in a more controlled container for the marketer.
Network television and network radio providers are the aggregators of traditional media. Soon, aggregators that can identify target online video content and delivery marketing messages in a contextually welcomed manner will be able to deliver large audiences fast enough to compete for time-based delivery. YouTube doesn't deliver that promise yet because they haven't discovered the 'contextually welcomed manner' where viewers will pay attention to the message.
Until the online video aggregators discover ways to present contextually welcomed marketing messages, traditional media will continue to win the race. But traditional media providers need not be comfortable, the challenger is approaching fast.
