While going through some old articles I clipped, I came across The Half-Truth of First-Mover Advantage, written by Fernando Suarez and Gianvito Lanzolla, and published in the April 2005 Harvard Business Review.

It’s a gem of a piece, and should be required reading for anyone looking at market-entry or market-creation strategies. The short version of their well-argued treatise is this: The mythical first-mover advantage is more than a business fairy tale but no where near a sure thing, and the clearest predictors of success come from looking at the pace of change, both in the market and in the underlying technology behind the market.

This is more than material for the C-level set; it’s the kind of strategic business analysis more marketers should bring to the table as as a defense against costly mistakes.

The article is behind a paywall, but well worth the $6.50 it’ll cost you to get it here. Want to know a little more before you lay down the cash? I’ve adapted two of the article’s graphics into a summary after the jump. It’s a lot of information and, frankly, it’s worth keeping around, so here’s a link to a PDF as well.

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Network World summarizes a recent study with big implications for online marketers and SEO experts. In short: What you see in search results depends heavily on which search engine you’re using.

No surprise there, right? Except there is a surprise in just how widely the results vary. In first-page search results, on average:

• 69.6% of Google’s [first page results] were unique to Google.
• 79.4% of Yahoo’s were unique to Yahoo.
• 80.1% of Live’s were unique to Live.
• 75.0% Ask’s were unique to Ask.

All in all, according to the survey, only 1% of results appeared on the front page of all four search engines.

The study’s not perfect — it was commissioned by Dogpile, a search engine that combines results from many different engines, and so there’s plenty of self-interest in the concept of single-site search bias. But the study itself looks academically rigorous and was conducted by proper researchers; a copy can be found here.

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Because this is the first week of the Friday outline feature — and because this is so closely related to the first outline on proposal contents — I’m making today a two-fer with the outline below. This time around the topic is proposal processes: What to look at and how to divvy up the work, from the time an RFP first comes in the door until you put it in FedEx.

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Being a creature of habit and schedule, I like recurring blog features. And, as someone asked for a lot of advice, I like to boil things down to outlines.

Which brings us to the first regular feature of Engage: the Friday outline.

Each week, I’ll post an outline relevant to management, business development, marketing, or PR. And because I’m all about priming the pump, I’ll kick things off with three outlines this week.

First up: Creating a great new-business proposal. I’m often asked how to put together winning proposals, either as part of counsel given to clients or water-cooler conversations with colleagues launching their own consulting careers. While best practices are going to vary a bit from industry to industry, the following outline can win work if executed strongly.
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This guy — an assistant managing editor at the Birmingham News (shockingly ugly splash page here) — turned an old news rack, a Mac Mini and some clever scripting into a wholly cool beast: The digital newsstand.

Must. Get. One. Of. These. :::::a small “paff!” as my brain explodes:::::

For extra credit, go look at the comment thread about this item on Engadget — it’s mostly techies wondering why anyone would want one of these when you can get endless news from a Blackberry or PDA. Further proof (if we needed any) that you can’t merely rely on technical prowess for product development.

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A couple of definitions:

Advertising: Think of it as sitting in front of a cozy, warm fireplace, patiently tossing in $100 bills. Every now and then, someone walks by, notices an interesting little tendril of smoke or maybe a crackle from the fire, and says, “Neat!”

Public relations: My goddaughter (an ad-agency account supervisor) counters the above by by defining public relations as: Walking around with a piece of paper that has lots of words on it, calling out: “Is this interesting to you?” over and over…

On a bad day, we may both be right.

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