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Embracing New Technology Is Good Business and Good PR |
July 23, 2005 |
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Posted by Don Dunnington at July 23, 2005 05:31 PM |
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Wired Magazine (July 18) reports poker-playing robots have just completed the first World Poker Robot Championship. In commenting on the event in his blog, Online Public Relations Thoughts, PR consultant Jim Horton contrasted how at least one Las Vegas casino has embraced threatening technology, rather than trying to fight it the way the music industry fought file sharing. Horton wrote:
"In spite of talk about the need to change and to keep up with competition, most industry leaders don't like change. They want to freeze competition around a set of rules and play by those rules far into the future. The telephone industry worked exactly like [that] until deregulation.
Rapid technological change upsets economic models and injects mortal risk into the game of business. No wonder most industries would rather fight than switch."
And while Binion's, the Las Vegas casino that hosted the robot poker series, was largely motivated by the publicity, they also recognized that embracing new technology will eventually help grow their business.
We recently saw a similar effect, but in reverse order, at K-Tron when we introduced the Bulk Solids Pump (BSP). This is a feeder unlike anything that has come before, and in this case the technology was embraced foremost for the sake of pushing feeder technology forward. The PR that followed BSP's introduction was an added bonus. On the day the BSP announcement was published in the Powder and Bulk Dot Com Newsletter, we saw an unprecidented jump in traffic on ktron.com. Since then BSP has been featured on magazine covers and has help propel K-Tron in winning numerous awards.
Is there a technology out there that's going to alter your business? Certainly the Internet, from e-mail to the World Wide Web, demonstrated that some technologies impact the way we all do business. Will blogs and RSS also have revolutionary consequences for us all? It could be harmful to the future of your business (and to your ability to promote your business) to bet against it.
Don Dunnington
