27
Feb
2008
Enemy at the gates
I had an interesting conversation the other day with a business owner who was afraid of the intellectual property (IP) invested in his website being stolen by competitors. It was eerily similar to another conversation we had had previously with a client when negotiating what content to put in their website.
On face value their concerns about protecting their intellectual property were a valid one, but it raises an interesting dilemma. How do you promote the value of your business to your customers without revealing the value of your business to your competitors.
I thought it was worth a deeper examination.
Don't look now, but your underwear is showing.
First of all lets deal with an issue particular to the web. Most people are unaware of this, but nearly ALL of your website's content, technology and content is effectively in the public domain. The only real exception is content that is hidden behind password protected areas, and programming that is abstract and carried out entirely on your web server.
Your public text content, graphic design, user interaction (javascript), keywords and marketing / SEO strategy is visible to all – particularly to web professionals who are able to judge and analyse this material. Much of it is archived by search engines and can be retained for years. Successful examples of anything are frequently copied. THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT THIS!
You probably reviewed your competitors when you built your website. They will be doing the same. A web professional can do this review at a far deeper level and copy everything if they wish.
If you have a successful website you are more likely to be copied and learnt from. If your business and your website are not successful then you are safe only because you have nothing to lose.
How unique is your business? How sensitive is your property?
While a business can feel like it's unique, and its features may have cost someone much sweat to develop, usually very little of that business is truly unique. An accountant is an accountant, a masseur a masseur. A web developer for that matter is a web developer.
Much of the information that a business uses to deliver its product or services have been gleaned from other sources, be they educational, experiential, or by analysing competing businesses. You didn't invent it! What is unique is the strategies and capabilities you brought to bear to marshal those resources.
Here at Acorn we know that at a technological level we are way ahead of most of our competitors in the small business market. Very little of that technology was invented by us (we acquired it from others), and our techniques are visible to all. The capacity to recognise, absorb and then successfully apply that technology is what sets us apart from our competitors. That is the only reason we retain our technological advantage.
If a competing business has the capacity to do this collection, evaluation and organisation then they will inevitably be able to do so whether you publish material on your website or not. There will always be another source of information out there that is of equal or greater value to your own.
The subtle little differences do count.
Before you get hopelessly paranoid, please consider this. If you have a successful business there is a great deal of ineffable detail in your business and your website that is very hard to copy.
1. The hard work and inspiration that you have put into your business. It is passion and commitment to that vision that makes your business sing, and which makes your customers come to you rather than to your competitors. That is unique to you and can never be completely copied. It might be possible for a competitor to steal an individual idea from your business, but it is much harder to steal the total experience you give to your customers. This is the human component delivered by you and your staff.
2. Gathering the technical and creative skills, organisational abilities, sweat, inspiration, content and budget to create a competing website is a significant barrier to your competition, particularly for small to medium firms. That is why so many websites are ineffective.
I could tell you, but then I would have to kill you.
Businesses frequently become defensive when considering their IP. The cost of losing their IP seems self evident. But what of the cost of hiding it?
Take the two businesses discussed above. One of those businesses chose to protect some of their IP by not showing it to prospective customers who then don't see the full value of the service. The loss of prospective customers is probably much more damaging to their business than the risk of losing their (not entirely unique) IP. The other business protects the IP of its genuinely valuable newsletter by not sending it out to every prospect that requests it. They've reduced their exposure to plagiarism, but reduced its real value to their business in the process.
And of course customers will always prefer to deal with a business that is confident and generous rather than a competitor that is miserly and defensive.
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