No, 37Signals, Planning Is Not What You Think
timberry.bplans.com
timberry.bplans.com
However, I don't doubt that they are "planning" on writing another post next week that looks at a common business practice from the completely opposite direction. Then a thousand bloggers will write about how wrong they are.
At that point we start calling it by fancy terms like brand awareness, or, in general, marketing.
Aside from that, who is trolling more here? 37signals for writing the original article? Or this bplans guy, to whom we are paying attention only because he picked a fight with 37signals?
SEO is done on-site and is a process of organizing your information architecture so it is search-engine-friendly, and then creating content that is relevant to your target market. That way you can get indexed for the terms you want, so that you appear on SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) exposing you to your target market at their time of need.
Once that's done, SEM begins which is about attracting off site links that get you ranked high on those SERPs so you get traffic. (There's another side of SEM that's about PPC.)
SEO and SEM go hand-in-hand, but they are still two different things. (Not being snarky, just pointing something out. I'm an online marketer and client education is the biggest challenge of my field.)
That said, I think things like the 37 signals post are too easily classified as SEO when it's really just publicity seeking with no real intent on improving the sites rankings.
From Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_marketing )
"Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.[1]. The industry peak body Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), also includes search engine optimization (SEO) within its reporting, but SEO is a separate discipline with most sources, including the New York Times defining SEM as 'the practice of buying paid search listings'.[2][3]"
http://is.gd/16x87 (GoogleFight! ;-) )
http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engi... (intro to SEO article which talks about linkbait).
Note: Not being snarky. I've been an online marketer and spoken on SEO. I think client education is important-- but we should focus on what's important and not the subtleties of acronyms.
I'm similar in the way that when I make an argument for something, I don't like to soften it up with various "but it depends on", "your mileage may vary", listing various other methods that might work better in other situations, and so on.
I also think it's refreshing to have people actually take a stand for something — whether I agree with it or not. I'm tired of bland semi-advice that's watered down to go over well with everybody.
I keep checking out 37signals products because people make a fuss about it, so it's working, except I can't see what anyone sees in them.
It seems pretty obvious that 37signals, when talking about 'plans', refers to the massive business plans which are the hallmark of people who don't have a chance of seeing them through.
But this is really just a debate between a guy who happens to sell business plans and a bunch of guys who happen to sell un-business-plans, soooo...
This is probably not the first time he's read something he "disagrees" with at 37signals. It reads like a lot of pent up frustration is finally being let loose.
If it's pretty obvious, I don't see it. From Matt's article I also gather that he sees any formal "plan", i.e. a set of steps and activities put together in advance, as something to restricting and necessary. Just as on the issue of bootstrapping vs. external funding the 37signals people seem too rigid in viewing their choices as being the best and only correct.
The quotes posted below describe the situation perfectly.
It's better than that, this is a debate between a guy who happens to sell the same business plan that 37Signals gives away:
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1599181908/187-6998830-4936328?...
" ... In The Plan-as-You-Go Business Plan, Tim Berry makes these points much more eloquently than I ever could. Tim argues that the planning process (along with regular reviews) is so important that business owners just need to get started somewhere, anywhere, and continue to build your plan as your needs change. This is 180 degrees different from the classical "big bang" approach to business planning where we work for months at a time developing a huge document before we ever get started working on the business."
As an example, I work as a design engineer in the R&D wing of an automotive supplier. If we were to just start building products on a hunch, without any market research or project planning, we could easily spend hundreds of thousands of dollars or more before we knew if we were headed in the right direction.
Ultimately planning is imperfect and comes at a cost (time and resources), but that needs to be compared to the cost of no planning at all. In the web app business the cost of trying a new idea may be next to nothing, so trial and error becomes the most expedient method. In my industry, we're aware that our plans are imperfect, but if they allow us to cut a few very expensive iterations out of the development process then they're worth it.
If anything they're doing MORE planning, because whenever something gets in their way, they have to put some effort into coming up with a new plan or changing their existing plan.
Gen. Dwight Eisenhower
'Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential' -- Winston Churchill
Does anyone else find "getting real" a horrible horrible term that sounds like old people trying to be hip, and completely failing? Or is it just me?
It's one thing to argue against trying to nail down all the details far in advance, but whether you're running a business, or even, as Tim suggests, heading out on a trip, you're going to need some sort of a plan.
Those who keep quiet? I suppose it's better to be loud and wrong and get noticed, though, than silent and invisible.
You did a lot more planning than you seem to think.
Excellent observation.
People do more planning than they might think, so the question is, how deliberate do you want those plans to be?