All Things Amazon: What Does This Have to Do With Your (Online or Offline) Business?

Our guest blogger today is Phyllis Zimbler Miller author of several books including Cast the First Stone.

Is Amazon poised to rule the world?

From my perspective this is quite likely and you should definitely consider this NOW for your online or offline business growth.

I attended the event “Hollywood’s Digital Gold Rush” at UCLA hosted by the Haas Berkeley Alumni Club of LA and UCLA’s Anderson business school:
Moderator John Gilles from digital design agency A Different Engine moderated a panel with Aaron DeBevoise, EVP of Network Programming at Machinima, Inc.; Sheree Chang, International Business Development at Hulu; and Richard Cardran, Senior Project Lead, Program Management and Digital Strategy for the Distribution Technology Group at The Walt Disney Studios.

While the questions posed by the moderator and answered by the panelists were interesting, I kept waiting for mention of the elephant in the room — Amazon.

During the question-and-answer period, I asked about how the panelists viewed competition from Amazon. (Apple had already been dissed for not playing well with others.)

Cardran said he wasn’t at liberty to respond to the question; Chang said that Amazon’s video streaming business was “nascent”; and DeBevoise has the backing of Google’s YouTube as Machinima is actually platformed on YouTube.

But as a self-published author on Amazon with several Kindle fiction and nonfiction ebooks and as the co-founder of an Internet marketing company, I believe that any company — large or small — NOT paying attention to Amazon is in for a VERY BIG SHOCK down the road.

Why is this? Because Amazon has global access online in the native language of host country Amazon sites and Amazon wants to rule the world (and have the consumers of the world help Amazon do this).

(As UCLA MBA student Steven Chang reminded me after the presentation, Amazon is already searching for movie and TV properties per Amazon Studios, which I know about because I have projects there.)
Amazon in the movie and TV viewing business: Here in the U.S. if you want to watch movies or TV episodes rented or purchased from Amazon, you can do this now. And I expect this segment of Amazon’s business to grow exponentially in the future.



Why? Because so many of us already go on Amazon to buy books, ebooks, electronic equipment, etc. — and Amazon has our credit cards on file and our preferences stored in secret algorithms.
What’s in this for your business?
If you are only an offline business, you might want to consider how you can utilize Amazon’s different fulfillment opportunities to expand your business. Okay, a dry cleaning establishment can’t dry clean clothes online (at least not yet), but the business could, for example, sell its special cleaning fluid through Amazon.
If you are an online business, you need to consider whether you can be on Amazon besides your own site (and besides being on YouTube, for example). If you want to reach your niche market in perhaps the future’s largest marketplace, then being there now instead of later is a good business strategy.
If you aren’t watching Amazon yet, start doing so now. The business you save could be your own.
You’ve been warned!
© 2012 Miller Mosaic LLC
Phyllis Zimbler Miller has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the co-founder of the online marketing company www.MillerMosaicLLC.com
She is also the author of fiction and nonfiction books/ebooks. A new nonfiction ebook of hers is the book publishing and marketing ebook TOP TIPS FOR HOW TO PUBLISH AND MARKET YOUR BOOK IN THE AGE OF AMAZON and her newest fiction ebook is the cozy mystery CAST THE FIRST STONE: A REBECCA STONE MYSTERY.