‘Speed’ is proving to be a source of competitive advantage. The big boys of social media – Google, Facebook & Twitter – are squeezing out every ‘second’ of ‘wait’ time from their platform to gain ascendancy over each other.
Take video. To view it a link has to be clicked – thereafter it takes an eternity – I mean 3 – 5 seconds, to down load. Or on another occasions the link has to ‘copied & pasted’ for the video to download, which takes at least a few seconds to download. No matter what the route to view a video there is a frustrating wait spanning 3 – 10 seconds.
Facebook decided to address this pain point of its customers by introducing Auto play Video – the video is embedded in the content & is always ready to ‘play’. A user merely has click to appropriate button to start viewing it, without having to wait for it to down load!
Let us shift to Google & Twitter. More & more people are consuming content on their mobile screen. And loading of content takes an eternity – I mean 3- 10 seconds. But for Millennial it is an eternity too long!
Google & Twitter are partnering
to create a web link & article storage system that would load the content in a few milliseconds - in a blink of an eye!
Twitter has already squeezed out precious seconds from ‘live broadcasting. Periscope empowers each one of us to live broadcast events around us – uncensored & instantly! BTW even live broadcast is actually a ‘delayed’ telecast to ensure that faux pas similar to ‘Janet Jacksons wardrobe malfunction’ does not get broadcast ‘live’ into peoples living room. There is always a ‘delay’ of up to 5 seconds even in live broadcasting!
Business lesson for us: This is an era where ‘speed’ of delivery of service will impart competitive advantage. It will be measured in milliseconds. That’s the level of service your company has to prepare to deliver.
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In this series, Rajesh Srivastava, Business Strategist and Visiting Faculty at IIM Indore gives you a regular dose of strategy case studies to help you think and keep you one step ahead as a professional as compared to your peers. Rajesh is an alumnus of IIM Bangalore and IIT Kanpur and has over 2 decades of experience in the FMCG industry. All previous
Strategy with RS posts can be found here
