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Two business lessons about your customers

By Becky McCray

Colton and @debworks try maps on the Galaxy Tab. #140conf here we come!
My nephew tries out Deb Brown’s
Galaxy Tab. (It works with Flash.)

A story with two points. 

In New York City, I asked my nephew to use my iPad to find restaurants. As he clicked through to the restaurant websites, some rendered well on the iPad, some didn’t. One site didn’t come up at all, just a background color. We finally guessed it was an all-Flash website, incompatible with iPad.

And that brings us to Point Number One:

Businesses with Flash-based websites lose potential customers. 

When I tweeted about this, one person replied that we should have bought an Android-based tablet. “Should have” is not the issue. That’s trying to reconfigure customers to suit yourself. Some of your customers did buy iPads. You have to adapt to suit them, or cut them out. Cutting out incompatible customers is a valid business decision. Just make sure that is what you mean to do.

And that brings us to Point Number Two:

“Our job is not to configure customers, it is to configure our business to serve customers.”
Liz Strauss, at BlogWorld Expo 2009



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About Becky McCray

Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.
  • Zoom Towns: attracting and supporting remote workers in rural small towns - December 10, 2020
  • In an economic crisis, spend your brainpower before your dollars - November 25, 2020
  • Video: How to fill empty car dealership buildings for the holidays - November 6, 2020
  • How has 2020 changed the challenges rural small towns face? Tell us here - October 20, 2020
  • The Idea Friendly Method to surviving a business crisis - October 6, 2020
  • Join me for the Rural Renewal Symposium online Oct 13 - September 26, 2020
  • Cheap placemaking idea: instant murals - September 11, 2020
  • Refilling the rural business pipeline - July 7, 2020
  • Huge vacant buildings: grants to renovate? - June 9, 2020
  • Economic self defense for small towns  - June 7, 2020

July 14, 2011 Filed Under: marketing, mistakes

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  1. Jennifer Wilson says

    July 14, 2011 at 4:33 pm

    We had a similar experience yesterday in meeting with a small community’s village president. He would love to be using the forms that local assistance providers have developed, but he doesn’t have MS Word. He is relatively tech savvy for this age and uses Open Office. Well we all know how finicky Word gets with forms and formatting, so its no surprise they broke in Open Office. We’re going to convert them to PDF forms for him, but usability is something a creator still needs to think about, perhaps more than ever.

  2. Becky McCray says

    July 14, 2011 at 5:16 pm

    Jennifer, that’s a great parallel. Thanks for sharing it!

  3. Deb Brown says

    July 14, 2011 at 8:16 pm

    Becky,
    It was my pleasure to play with techy toys with Colton. Ease of use, quick downloads and great content — three leading things viewers want. If you don’t provide that – you can ‘forget about it’ as they say in New York!

    Deb Brown

  4. Kris Vockler says

    July 16, 2011 at 6:11 am

    No truer words have ever been spoken. I I take that back, It’s the old “the customer doesn’t know what they want” mentality. It might not drive the majority of your subscribers away but something worse happens, they won’t be raving about you.

  5. Dave Kemick says

    July 23, 2011 at 5:42 pm

    As a web developer I can’t begin to describe how important your comments in this post are! Having a proper mobile website that renders well not just on a certain platform but across all mobile devices is as important as having a website that renders well across all browsers and not just IE6!

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