The Benefits of BingYa!
July 30, 2009 by Jim Hedger
Filed under WMR Blog
Yesterday’s announcement of a 10-year pact between Microsoft and Yahoo! changed the trajectory of the search engine industry. Where there was no apparent competition in the business of search last week, the alliance between the second and third place search engines has at least laid the foundation for a credible though not necessarily dangerous competitor.
Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft’s new search engine Bing will serve algorithmic search results on Yahoo!’s network. Yahoo! will, in turn, take over the provision of paid search advertising and contextually based ad placement across Microsoft search and web properties. Microsoft will support Yahoo! with revenue guarantees for the next 18-months and Yahoo! cedes all its search technology, including its deep well of patents, to Microsoft.
Though Yahoo! will be taking over the paid search advertising end of the business for both companies, Microsoft’s Ad-Center will be the PPC ad-buying platform, replacing Panama, the platform Yahoo! spent the better part of the last four years building.
Yahoo! will be able to drastically reduce its expenses through employment redundancies and savings from no longer maintaining or improving its search technologies. Microsoft’s Bing gets instantly propelled to the #2 position providing about 1/4 of all search results.
In battlefield terms, Microsoft has managed to ally with a former foe in what can only be described as a mutual defense alliance against a much larger enemy, the equivalent of the Greeks and Visigoths getting it together to fend off advances by the Roman Empire. Microsoft has closed one battlefront in order to focus on the more pressing problem of a much greater one.
At first glance, observers note that had Yahoo! seized a deal offered by Microsoft last year, shareholders and employees would likely have been better served though Yahoo! would have lost total control of its destiny. There are many who might argue that Yahoo! had already lost control of its own destiny, a power pushed away by the combined forces of the markets, two clever competitors and poor planning in the first half of this decade.
Whichever the view, all agree something had to change. The coupling of Microsoft and Yahoo! will create seismic shifts in the various businesses and marketplaces surrounding the search industry. Let’s take a look at the various sectors immediately (or very soon to be) affected by the new-born beast known as BingYa!
Microsoft
The biggest benefactor of the deal, Microsoft has taken the number two spot in its bid to disrupt the juggernaut known as Google. It has also put itself in a position to slowly subsume the search businesses developed and previously funded by Yahoo!. After the introduction of its new search engine Bing in late June, Microsoft needed to find a way to monetize it. While it owned its own ad-serving platform, it had not developed the technology to properly serve contextual paid advertising.
Microsoft spent most of last year trying to purchase Yahoo!. Last year, Microsoft was offering nearly $40billion in total for all of Yahoo!. This year, it got the parts of Yahoo! it wanted, (search), without paying a cent. Financially, Microsoft has guaranteed revenues at Yahoo for the next 18 months.
Microsoft projects about $1billion in extra revenues per year under this agreement.
Yahoo!
It is hard to say how badly Yahoo! has fared as a result of this agreement but from where I am sitting, it does not look as good as it could have.
On one hand, the company survives with its name intact and the ability to focus on providing media to what is effectively the world’s largest content network. It also gets to continue selling paid search advertising, the literal golden-goose of search revenues. Yahoo! projects a combination of expanded revenues and cost savings boosting their bottom line by about $700million.
On the other hand, Yahoo! is no longer in the business of providing search results. Yahoo! is no longer an independent search engine. This must be a bitter pill to swallow for the company which was once the brand that represented search with one of the most talented development teams on the Internet. Yahoo! gives up a lot of technology and a decade’s worth of innovation. As Danny Sullivan has noted, Yahoo! suddenly looks a lot like AOL.
Google
It is very hard to say how this impacts Google in the long run. In the short-term, the deal will have no appreciable effect on Google which is by far the most popular and profitable player in the search industry. Google never had to take Yahoo! or Microsoft too seriously in the search-space as it has held an virtually insurmountable lead against its two largest rivals for so long. Google actually made more money in the second quarter of 2009 than Yahoo! made in all of 2008. On the surface, Google’s got nothing to worry about.
In the long-run, a rejuvenated Microsoft poses a couple concerns for Google. One is that Microsoft might actually get its act together on the cloud computing front and in mobile markets. Google is investing a lot of energy and money in developing an operating system and ancillary services for hand held computing devices. Google’s Chrome, Wave and Docs are all geared towards collaborative computing on hand held devices with documents stored on remote servers. That’s the basis of Google’s not-so-secret smash-Microsoft’s markets strategy. Now that Microsoft does not have to concentrate energy on monetizing search, it can throw more resources into its core businesses, operating systems and productivity suites. The deal with Yahoo! gives it a way to further monetize both in the long run.
Barring extraordinary developments, ten years from now Google will likely still be the number one player in the search sector.
Search Engine Optimization Experts (SEO)
Perhaps the sector with the most to gain and the most to lose from this deal, BingYa! has been widely praised within the SEO industry. SEO clients care about Google placements almost to the exclusion of placements on Yahoo! or what was Microsoft Live. I have the sense that SEO clients are as interested in Bing as other Internet users are however Google is where the vast bulk of search referred traffic comes from and therefore Google is front-of-mind for SEOs.
Bing is generally thought highly of within the search marketing community. It is a good engine, perhaps better than Yahoo!’s. It is also fairly easy to optimize for, relying on a number of common signals such as title, text, internal site structure and topical relevance from page to page within a site. Because Google has basically defined SEO technique for the past five years, optimizing for Yahoo! and Microsoft Live was always a second thought. The advent of a two-search engine system might increase the perceived importance of non-Google placements, especially when one considers that the combined reach of Yahoo! and Bing is nearly 30% of the total search market.
Paid Search Engine Marketing Experts (PPC)
The agreement between Yahoo! and Microsoft will have an enormous impact on the PPC business. Yahoo! is the world’s largest content network. Microsoft owns one of the world’s largest content networks. Combined, the two networks are too large to be adequately described. Imagine being able to contextually place advertisements throughout that network?
It is going to take between 18 – 24 months (after regulatory approval) to combine Yahoo! Search Marketing with Microsoft Ad-Center. When the two are merged, Yahoo!’s already developed sales force will use the Ad-Center platform to enable PPC advertising to the biggest passive audience possible. The real question will be, will Internet users actually choose to visit Yahoo! or Bing to conduct searches. Pushing contextual ads to content sites is one thing. Having consumers come to you and pre-qualify themselves before having advertisements pushed across their monitors is quite another.
I suspect the deal will turn out to be very beneficial to the paid search marketing sector and might further popularize contextual online advertising for businesses.
Traditional Media Players
Note to Disney, Time Warner, Sony, Fox and others traditional media makers; re: The Future
That thumping sound you hear is the last nail in your collective coffin being positioned or it’s the sound of consumers dancing on your graves. I’m not sure which because I can’t really hear that thumping myself. I only have your confused and often off-point descriptions and convolutions to judge the noise by and I can’t be sure you have the background to properly describe it in the first place.
Remember Lloyd Braun? He was the guy who worked for Terry Semel when Semel was chief Yahoo in the early part of this decade. He was nicknamed Hollywood Lloyd, in part because of his connections with the movie and music industries and in part because it was his job to collect professionally produced content for Yahoo!’s media network. His Burbank initiatives failed but the set of offices opened for his team remains.
You’re not going to see Lloyd again. He is rumored to be searching for the super-secret poker game Elvis, the Big Bopper, Buddy Holly and Marvin Gaye have going 24/7 in Bolivia. What you will see is a renewed effort from Yahoo! to capitalize on convergence. Expect it to be their mantra but don’t expect them to want to pay much for your media. It’s not media anymore anyway, it’s content now. Content isn’t worth as much as media once was. Get used to it.
The Yahoo! – Microsoft deal, for traditional media, represents a perfect storm of convergence and the ability to distribute internally monetized content. Where the traditional media businesses controlled distribution and made its wealth on excellence and exclusivity, the Internet allows anyone with access (about 1/4 of the world’s population) to be as excellent as their talent allows. Knowing that both Microsoft and Yahoo! desperately need to expand distribution channels and, knowing that both now have the ability to concentrate on either creating or acquiring those new channels leads me to believe we’re going to see something disruptive on the distribution front in the next half-decade.
End Note: I’m not even thinking about the video game market in this piece. That alone is worth another column and a lot of thought. There’s a number of other areas I’m not actually touching on in this piece. In the future, I want to think about display, real estate, news aggregation, instant messaging, file sharing, social media and a host of other patented tricks owned, operated or in development from Microsoft or Yahoo!.
A Sunday Lost to Mental Meanderings on Media
June 29, 2009 by Jim Hedger
Filed under WMR Blog
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There’s no beating the feeling of waking to a lazy Sunday morning, especially one that demands no urgent work, phone calls, a quasi-mandatory dinner with the parents or anything else but my own private exploitation of the diminishing personal space I call my life. Yesterday was one of those mornings. Even Hypertext the Cat could sense I wanted to luxuriate like she does all day, an appreciation that stopped her from waking me by batting at my head as she does most mornings. Two interesting things happened in quick succession yesterday morning to dispel any luxury I might have felt at having a lazy day of quiet contemplation. The first was a special report on citizen journalism by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The second was an instant message from Chicago based web analytics management consultant, David Dalka relaying comments on “saving the media” from a former University of Chicago professor (now US federal-court judge) of his, Richard Posner. Both events happened within minutes of each other. Clearly the universe was conspiring against the concept of me taking a day off, even on a lazy Sunday.
I listened to the CBC show over morning coffee while trolling the half-dozen or so online newspapers I frequently read. The show probed the value of online journalism vs. traditional journalism, falling heavily on the side of traditional news gathering organizations. It was a smart and well researched episode, one Canadian listeners have been conditioned to expect from our federally funded broadcaster. The CBC was one of the first major media outlets to take advantage of the Internet to widen and grow its international audience. The corporation continues to use the Internet to distribute its high quality of national and international news though in recent months it has suffered sever funding cutbacks, an ironic equalizer that brings the CBC’s budgetary problems in line with those of commercial broadcasters and other news gathering organizations. There is simply not enough money coming in (whatever the source) to cover the enormous costs associated with professional news gathering and high quality reporting.
During the CBC broadcast, David Dalka forwarded the URL of a blog post from a former University of Chicago professor of his who is now a federal court judge, Richard Posner. Posner writes on media, society and IT. Like many other public policy thinkers, Posner is deeply concerned with the sustenance of a professional media, considering it one of the bedrocks of a democratic society. A few years ago, Posner predicted the current financial state of the mainstream media. Yesterday’s post postulates a solution, making webmasters receive permission to link to stories in the traditional news media, likely with payment attached. Before dismissing the idea as ludicrous, consider that others see this as a valid revenue model as well, most notably Barry Diller, head of IAC corporation and his arch-rival Rupert Murdoch, owner of NewsCorp.
For experienced webmasters, the idea of paying for a link that brings no commercial benefit is so obviously silly it is easy enough to dismiss however, news aggrigators such as Google News and Yahoo! News do see commercial benefit from stories researched, written and published by traditional news gathering organizations such as television, radio and newspaper reporters. It isn’t the presence of paid-search advertising that attracts me to Google’s news aggregator though it is those pay-per-click links that monetize thus sustain the service. What attracts me are the stories, none of which have been researched, written or originally published by the news aggregators. One can fully understand the frustration of major publishers and broadcasters watching their bottom lines push them into positions that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.
It used to be said that publishing a newspaper was a license to print money. Local businesses and services had to advertise their wares somewhere and the daily paper was one of the places most adults in a community would look at least once per day. Similarly, local television and radio were advantageous mediums for advertisers, allowing the traditional media to charge whatever rates they felt necessary to sustain news gathering operations. In many cases, those operations spread across the globe bringing a diversity of well researched opinions on virtually any international issue or event. Today, foreign bureaus are long gone from most news rooms and even the biggest news organizations such as the NYTimes, CNN, the Globe and Mail and the Times of London are pulling back on their commitments to find, research and report stories about international affairs.
I am old enough to remember a time when newspapers published multiple editions per day in order to keep the general public as well informed as possible. In my family, it was not unusual for two editions of the same newspaper to be brought into the house each day, one delivered early in the morning, the other coming home from school or work with myself or my father. While I recently moved to a city blessed with four major daily newspapers, most other communities I could have chosen to live in are not as fortunate. In the city I moved from, the single daily newspaper ceased publishing on Mondays to save money. In Denver, a city I visited less than two weeks ago, one of the major dailies stopped publishing altogether a month ago.
Are we any less informed than we were a generation ago? In some ways yes, in others not nearly. Perhaps the best example of this contradiction comes from the streets of Tehran where a sizable portion of the population risked violence, arrest and continued harassment to protest what they believe to be an election stolen by hardliners in their government. As the protests grew, the Iranian government moved to expel foreign journalists though a few were somehow able to remain and report. For most of us, news from Tehran was relayed straight from the streets via the social networking application Twitter and the burgeoning citizens’ TV portal YouTube. While the veracity of such reports can rarely be confirmed, it is easy enough to argue we in the west would have known far less about the democracy movement in Iran without citizen journalists with access to web technologies.
Another example is recalled from a few years ago when CBS news carried a story on the National Guard record of former President George W. Bush. The story was supported by papers said to have come from the Texas National Guard showing the former president had neglected to even show up for the weekends he was supposed to serve while avoiding fighting in Vietnam. The papers CBS relied on were forged, a falsification uncovered by bloggers. Dan Rather was forced to resign as anchor of the CBS News team over the incident. In this case, citizen journalism worked to vet a falsity which would otherwise have been reported as fact.
At the same time, the quality of critical analysis of events in Tehran, Washington, London, Beijing, Ottawa or Timbuktu is eroding rapidly. While we can read broad strokes, we are left without the fine touches only a professionally edited writer with dozens of unimpeachable sources can offer. Because most citizen journalists are writing about topics they feel passion for, we lack the clarity of the dispassionate observer. This is good for issue identity groups but very bad for democracy as a whole.
Sadly, it all comes down to money. While many will suggest if the newspapers don’t want people or news aggregators to link to their stories, they should simply not publish on the web. That’s a rather silly suggestion considering a growing percentage of the audience is increasingly using the Web exclusively to get information. The problem for Internet publishers is complexly simple. Ad revenues derived from Internet sites tend to be far lower than those drawn from traditional mediums. That’s why the medium-market news organizations are unable to properly serve their markets any longer.
Is the idea of paying to link to traditional news gatherers a good option? Probably not. The web doesn’t work that way, at least not today. While Posner’s comments are less than useful and more than insulting to a University of Chicago grad worrying about the respect his or her degree might receive when their professors make foolish comments, at least someone is trying to brain their way through this mess. More of us should as well. We need good journalism as badly as we need a freely accessed Internet. As one commentator on the CBC said yesterday, “I doubt we’ll see any citizen journalists devote their time to civic agencies, boards and commissions. The next fifteen years will be a heyday for corrupt municipal politicians without a free media covering their actions and decisions.” He may be right but I’m not thinking about corrupt local politicians skimming or swaying millions of dollars. I’m more concerned about major information corporations and the billions of dollars to be made off the distribution of knowledge to a global society.
Those sorts of thoughts get me thinking about what we are trying to accomplish with WebmasterRadio.FM and how the experiment is working from a media for the masses perspective. We have an unwritten responsibility to provide honest, reliable and timely information which I think we’re managing to exceed. There are no real rules governing what we’re doing on-air beyond the common rules of nicety, respect and decency.
WebmasterRadio.FM is a pioneer in the online space. Until WebmasterRadio.FM hit the scene five and a half years ago, there was no radio format content dedicated to the business and people of B2B marketing. We made a radio network devoted to webmasters and the business of doing business online. We’re likely an example of the near future, the micro-focused media.
Because we draw a surprisingly diverse but reasonably specific audience, WebmasterRadio.FM is able to exist serving a set of rather large niche communities. The number of people involved in the B2B (and now, B2C) markets we cater to is enormous and will continue to grow rapidly. You know how there seems to be a print magazine for literally every topic you can imagine? The ability to broadcast digitally created content via the web allowed us the ability to ape those magazines via podcast to the online B2B and B2C worlds.
Our advertisers tend to like that sort of thing which stands to reason considering the groups that listen to us tend to be most likely to consider our advertisers’ offerings. Niche marketing on a macro scale.
Our show hosts are experts their fields, business leaders but not trained journalists. Our audience, for the most part, doesn’t need us to provide a lot of journalistic content beyond the top-of-hour newscast. Our audience is looking to hear voices they can relate to from their business, marketing, PR or technological standpoints. That’s what we deliver and that’s why our audience numbers are growing so quickly. Such is the nature of popular niches.
This brings us back to the topic of the mainstream media and the importance of settling the money trap the mainstream media model has become. Conflicting problems are inherent in the mediums used to publish content.
For traditional broadcasters and print publishers, getting information to consumers is expensive and labor intensive. Advertising rates were priced to cover the costs associated with each medium used to communicate with the public. TV and radio relied on local, regional and national advertisers to sustain their operations while newspapers could rely on local businesses and voluminous classified ad sections. For generations, the ad-driven model worked as a tightly regulated and difficult to access business that ostensibly served the public good.
The Internet has obiviously destroyed the foundation supporting the traditional media business model. The Web has eliminated many of the labor, material, and distribution costs of getting information to the people. It has also (almost) eliminated the concept of information boundaries. There is a lot of content to place ads around online and virtually no limitations to entry for new content publishers. In a classic example of the laws of supply and demand, advertising rates online are far too low to sustain large news gathering operations.
WebmasterRadio.FM feels the pinch doing our form of news gathering. We feel it is our responsibility to cover large marketing conferences, events and conventions because those are the places where virtual-world news makers and industry leaders meet in person. It’s expensive to gather news in person but even in a virtual world, that’s the best way to get the job done.
So what to do about citizen journalism, the failing foundation of an out modded model, and the inability to figure out how to pay for professionals? Who the hell knows…
WebmasterRadio.FM does a great job of webcasting and making podcast content available for download to a definable set of diverse niche communities. We’re experts, and we make what sounds to me like good talk radio for our audience, we’re not journalists in any real sense of the word.
Aside from the content, what makes us interesting from a media perspective is that we’re one of the few online radio stations who are actually making a successful go of the advertiser business model. That’s why I suggested earlier that the WebmasterRadio.FM network is actually a pioneering venture in the web space. We’re demonstrating a working ad-revenue model as webcasters and podcasters. We’re a likely example of how to make media work in the new-world web environment.
That doesn’t put food in the bellies of traditional journalists and that’s what these meanderings were all about to begin with. Sundays rock eh?
Restraining content is an option but it is an odious one. The web is about getting and distributing information for free. Free is good but free often means no pay. Creating better copyright rules and giving content creators means to exercise their rights sounds like a good idea but even the brilliant compromise of the Creative Commons licensing experiment doesn’t put food in the bellies of most content creators.
Writers used to find refuge in newspapers. Not so much anymore and blogs don’t pay the bills. I find prolonged attempts to think how newspaper publishers solve a problem like Craigslist can make one’s head feel funny after a while so let’s not even go there.
In a world where quantity defines the part of problem, quality becomes part of the solution. The other part of the problem is the perceptual divide between the virtual and the real sides of the world we live and work in. Quality content can attract good online advertising revenues if distributed to the right communities. It’s all about targeting. That’s a lesson the mainstream media will have to learn but one it takes at steep peril because the mainstream can not be directly targeted online. Whatever the Internet mainstream is, it is too big and too factionalized into micro-interest communities to be truly definable, a major strike against traditional news gathering operations operating online.
The people need to stay reasonably sharp if our thousand year old experiment in western democracy and personal liberty is to survive and prosper. We all need to be well informed on general news items as well as on our personal interests and professional specialties. The job of keeping us well informed has traditionally fallen to the free media which, as any publisher or broadcaster will tell you, is far more expensive than it is free. To keep itself honest, reputable media has developed a well honed system of checks and balances including editing and the right to respond for readers and news subjects. That model is broken and the issue has come to a head.
I wish I had words of deep wisdom beyond noting how WebmasterRadio.FM’s ability to fill the needs of several niches is wonderful and cool and probably an example of the model we’ll see more of in the future. I love what we’re doing and think it is good for the web marketing industry but I’m going to miss being as generally well informed as I am and I worry about who, if anyone, is going to attend the next civic planning meeting on my behalf.
Search Marketing Reset
March 17, 2009 by Jim Hedger
Filed under WMR Blog
dyeing – the use of dye to change the color of something permanently
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
The practice of SEO is dyeing. It’s not dead, not by a long shot, however the meteoric advance of alternative marketing channels on the Internet has fundamentally altered the way SEOs are thinking about web marketing.
The Internet and the World Wide Web are different things. The ‘net is the super-conduit upon which the super-highway of the Web is built. In the very near future, the Web we’ve become used to using might well seem as arcane as an AOL disc, at least in the way we use it.
It all happened so quickly. A year ago while we were wondering what would happen to Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter were meeting the mainstream. Neither had become the behemoths both appear to be becoming but social media marketers were taking notes and making names. Today, Facebook and Twitter can, in some cases, drive more traffic to a page or site than Google does.
Social media is not the only new game in town. In fact, amongst serious digital marketing gurus, social media is starting to feel a bit old. Two trend-lines are worth watching in the coming months, both of which combine social media, search and, most importantly, content that the bulk of entertainment starved consumers want to consume.
The first involves getting and delivering information and entertainment, the second involves the devices we receive that information on. To say everything is about to change would be saying something trite and after the fact. We’re well into the midst of that change. Ask any print publisher, television producer or commercial actor. Given the economic conditions under which the old-media business model is breathing its last breathes, that change is happening in a most happenstance fashion.
In the not-so-distant past, information and entertainment used to be found, disseminated and written by professionals, that is, people paid to find, compile and write it to relatively high standards. The mechanisms for getting that content to the reading, listening and viewing audience were expensive and labor intensive, requiring vast sums of capital investment.
That capital was supplied by advertising and since each traditional medium reached a predominantly local audience, advertisers had good reasons to spend monies sustaining those professional operations. As long as there was a local reading, listening and viewing audience, the advertisers had good reason to spend their money. News might be regional, national or international in nature but at the end of the equation, all ads were targeted at the locals.
Today the predominant medium is by its very nature international in its scope and reach. The narrow local funnel that gave the traditional media a stranglehold on power is gone and with it went control of the advertising monies that sustained it. Now, virtually anyone can post information regardless of training, intention or veracity. Where few outlets reached a specific local audience, now hundreds or even thousands publish to those markets. Ad values have therefore declined as there are far more places advertise.
This phenomenon is most pronounced around television. The last few years have not been kind to television. Ad revenues plummeted while consumers are now spending as much time on the Internet as they are watching television. New programming is prohibitively expensive and advertising monies are no longer there to provide economic backfill. That’s why we have reality TV. It’s cheaper to produce and market than fantasy based sitcoms or dramas are. How TV programming is to be produced in the coming years remains an open question.
For digital content creators and distributors, the big problem with the picture is that online advertising makes far less money per ad than advertising in traditional media does. No amount of targeted advertising can make up for the seriousness of this shortfall and, because the Internet has fundamentally destroyed the funnel of locality, there are few options for the traditional media business model. That means there are now fewer professional content creators capable of compiling better than average information and entertainment options for consumers.
How consumers will watch TV or view other information is not in question. The positive trend line here is that consumers are increasingly turning to the Internet for access to entertainment. Firms like Netflix and Hulu are becoming defacto television broadcasters by replaying TV shows on demand. Similarly, daily newspapers are starved for revenues while their digital versions are now seeing more visitors than their print versions are seeing readers. Terrestrial radio is shrinking, in part because of corporate conglomeration and in part because of declining ad revenues. At the same time, online radio and podcast networks are starting to thrive.
The breakdown in profitability for mainstream content vehicles is being mirrored by a second consumer revolution, that of portability. Fifty years ago, computing devices stood in large rooms. This morning I am typing on my large but relatively compact laptop computer, the same one I am going to pack up and take to the office in an hour or so. If I get bored on the way to work, I can watch an American AM news show, listen to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation or tune in to WebmasterRadio.FM on my cell phone while in transit. While not nearly as profitable, information is more portable than ever.
With more consumers increasingly accessing media using portable devices, more media is being made for portable devices. If, as Canadian intellectual Marshall McLuhan postulated in 1964, the medium is the message, consumers of digital information will be overly stimulated by ever shrinking devices with content created specifically for those devices. A similar quote from McLuhan in 1967 suggested that going beyond message, each medium was also a massage in that the different devices we use to consume information create a sensual bond between medium and consumer. Think about the smell of an old book, the tactile feel of newsprint or the comforting click of the keyboard. Each medium makes its user feel something and that feeling has an effect on their understanding and comprehension of the content.
These changes might or might not be good for a democratic society built on the free flow of information. The pendulum swings both ways. In some cases, as with the 2008 presidential election, digital media can be used to inform and to misinform. It can be used to reach extraordinary numbers of people or abused to find and flog untruthful statements about an opponent. In the near future, it will be far harder for professional journalists to find employers able to pay them to gather and disseminate news. At the same time, it is far simpler for common people to post information to the masses on blogs, through Twitter or on video via YouTube.
Marketers need to be where the eyes are. The purpose to marketing is to pass messages to prospective consumers and where the consumers go, the marketers must follow. For the first time in modern advertising history, the dog is actually wagging the tail, not the other way around. So what does that mean for the practice of SEO? It means SEOs need to learn to use the emerging venues as marketing tools.
The transfer of user habits from the broadsheet of newsprint and the broadcast of terrestrial radio or television to the interest-cast of the Internet has been astounding from a socio-economic perspective. Everything about our society has changed because of the ways we ingest and interpret information. That change is far from over but we are far past any point of thinking about the ways media worked in the olden days. In my own decade long digital marketing career, this is the fourth epoch of amazing change. Change is good but the rapidity of change is daunting. For old-school marketers, such change is terrifying. For emerging digital marketers, such change is challenging but also a bit frightening. It will be most interesting to watch the outcome of this short era as eyeballs move from Google search results to social media and the newer digital versions of old-school media.
