Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

...This is the formula for building a business: You figure out how you are creating value. You identify a set of operations that repeatedly create value. You figure out a way to efficiently conduct these operations repeatedly.

There are three broad ways that businesses conduct these operations repeatedly and get things done:

1. Get employees to do the work.
2. Get algorithms to do the work.
3. Get users to do the work.

Let’s think through the problem of navigating the web for the most relevant information of the day. Three companies try to solve this in three very different ways:

1. Yahoo: A bunch of editors decide the best content for the day.
2. Google News: Algorithms decide the top news of the day.
3. Twitter: Users’ tweets and retweets decide the top news of the day.

For those of us who read the earlier article on the three broad models for problem-solving, here’s the interesting part. These three approaches correspond exactly with the three models for problem solving....