Total Marketing Solutions

As one of many SME’s located in the South West of England, we’re flabbergasted by the Government’s decision to halt the planned roll-out of next gen broadband across  Cornwall. Whilst we ourselves are lucky enough to have reasonable broadband capacity at the moment, sufficient enough at least to help us deal successfully with clients throughout the UK, like many other businesses in the region we were looking forward to broadband speeds of up to 100mb to enable us to better use the web as a business enabling tool.

It’s all the more frustrating that the plug has been pulled because this is a project which could undoubtedly create jobs and wealth in the south west region and help achieve the government’s ambition of rebalancing the economy away from an over-reliance on the public sector.

So here we have a unique situation in one of the most deprived areas of Europe, where small businesses have fought hard to overcome any geographical hurdles to be able to compete on a wider stage beyond the Tamar but where the new Government sees fit to halt access to vital next generation broadband. A real case of cutting your nose off to spite your face.

There’s no getting away from the fact that when you take the time to measure an activity, it gives you something very tangible you can then set about improving. Seth Godin points out that thanks to constant developments in IT, it’s easy to optimize just about every aspect of our working lives. And whilst we as marketing consultants have extolled the virtues of a well-optimised website or blog post, or the improved effectiveness of a well-targetted, optimised ad campaign, it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that somewhere along the line, the main focus should always remain on actual creation - not on optimisation.

It’s still a fine line to walk, because you can of course optimize your creation time as well by developing new habits to get the most out of your thought process.  But a never-ending cycle of optimization can also become a crutch, a place to hide when you really should be confronting the real issues your business is facing. It’s a salutory lesson that while Yahoo was optimizing their home page in 2001, those cheeky chaps at Google were inventing something totally new.