The New York Times is reporting this morning that Ask.com is no longer a search engine and instead is returning to being a question-and-answer service.
Lots of lessons to be learned here, the most important of which is to be nimble. AskJeeves and then Ask.com hit the market with a lot of fanfare and when Barry Dillard bought it in 2005 for $1.8 billion it looked like a sure winner. But even Barry Dillard’s money couldn’t catch Google.
Local advertising/marketing is changing not only because consumers are moving to the Internet for shopping information but the Internet itself is constantly moving as well.
It’s not like the old days when the biggest thing to worry about was that some newspapers had different column widths than others. Now we have to watch Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, foursquare, Google, Bing, mobile, QR codes and on and on.
The lesson is that you can’t rest on any single local marketing strategy. Instead, make your content digital, flexible and customizable and be ready to disperse it in ways you never dreamed of…and then kiss that strategy goodbye.