Building your marketing strategy around SEO and SEM is not just a problem of execution or effectiveness. It is also a problem of vision. As in, time to get some new glasses.
Earth is not the center and neither is your site
The web universe is not what you think it is. Understanding it requires a major worldview shift.
It is not a fixed system that revolves around your corporate dotcom. Thinking that way is like adhering to the belief of Ptolemy — the Earth-centered cosmos.
This background belief is what drives you to put your faith and dollars into SEO and SEM. But it’s false. Your website is not the center of the universe — or the internet.
The internet is more like the heliocentric model championed by Galileo, with search as the sun. It is an ever-growing collection of distribution channels, each with their own audience, revolving around an increasingly contextual search experience.
It’s time to expand your perspective to account for this. But, like Galileo, you may have a hard time with the authorities as you start to act on this understanding.
Search is at the center of the web and should be driving your marketing. But search itself is evolving. Engines such as Kosmix, Bing, and Duck Duck Go are re-envisioning the search experience by contextualizing information from trusted sources. Twitter Search has also made waves by offering real-time search results to their community.
Your customers engage with these trusted services and sites where they themselves publish and digest content — networking, video, news, documents, tools, music, microblogging, blogging, photos. Search is increasingly about these contexts where people spend their time doing business and having fun. The recent announcement that Facebook is making public — thereby searchable — the default setting for profiles is huge indicator of this shift.
The Earth Is Not the Center and Neither Is Your Site
The more trusted the source, the more that search engines are combing it for content. In fact, within the Galilean model, your corporate dotcom is just a distant satellite.
What you’re doing when you look to SEO and SEM with Google is you’re trying to pull people away from their interests instead of engaging them from within their interests.
In order to be a real player in the new search, you have to participate outside of your domain. You have to populate these sites with content. Create content not for your dotcom, but for your audience in these different channels.
Take the focus off marketing communications, and you will naturally be inclined to create higher-quality content.
Go with this flow. Your business really is all about your customers.
Think outside your corporate dotcom. Search will follow the content you distribute across trusted channels.
Are you devoting too much time to promoting your corporate dotcom? Where else are you publishing content?
Andrew Davis -
In 2002, Andrew founded Tippingpoint Labs with journalist James Cosco. Since then, he's spent countless hours exploring the online universe and building a methodological approach to developing digital strategies that drive revenue or reduce costs.
Andrew's always asking big questions and analyzing data to understand markets, online forces and even business models. Andrew's research has resulted in the creation of innovative online metrics including Online Brand Value and Category Brand Value, eye-opening graphical representations of website evolution through the New Media Life Cycle and even using online data to predict offline revenue.
When he's not surfing the web, Andrew's traveling the globe speaking to a wide-variety of audiences about everything from social media to the future of print. Andrew is a frequent contributor to the Tippingpoint Labs website and has been creating valuable content since the early 1990s for The Jim Henson Company, CNN, The Today Show and MTV.
He's contributed to a book of short stories, called The Way Things Were and produced and co-wrote Roadside Ambition a documentary film about one small town with two huge balls.
"In a world where content is consumed as rapidly as it's created, companies need to develop a sound strategy to creating valuable online experiences that can, and should, be leveraged enterprise-wide. There is a content solution to every business challenge."
Seth Godin and the Flower Clock
August 24, 2010
The Online Brand Value Chain Explained
Give Most of it Away. The Rest Will Pay.
December 1, 2009
Learned Lessons from SMB18
July 14, 2010
Learning To Speak Media-eses in 5 Easy Stepses
July 9, 2010
Your Workforce is Your Social Media Policy
July 1, 2010
This is why we do article marketing. But, the way you describe it makes me think we should be using all of these channels to distribute content.
I love the analogy by the way :)
Amelia,
So glad you like the analogy. We’ve been working on the right one for a while.
So, do you call it Article Marketing? We’ve been using custom content or content marketing. What do you think of those?
- Andrew
Scott, great perspective on the issue! Corporate .coms need to make their content more accessible and engage people on the platforms where they’re already spending time.
Do you think using RSS feeds are the best way to distribute your content to these channels?
We’re finding that many of the small businesses we’re talking to either don’t see the value in setting up distribution or if they see the value, they don’t understand how to do it. Where do you think distribution services (such as the product we’re developing at Yourmagz) will fit into the mix in the future?
Does there need to be an easy and cost effective distribution service available before everyone can take advantage of the newly discovered “round world”?
I love the analogy as well.
John,
Glad you like the analogy too! I think all the services for effective distribution of your content already exist. Companies have to actually participate where they are distributing their content – otherwise they are not adding any value, so I don’t think just offering an RSS feed for content inclusion really helps.
I’m checking out YourMagz beta right now. I’m not sure how it works or what the premise is, but I think it’s much more than content syndication and delivery – it’s really about a distributed content model – put your videos on YouTube or Viddler or Vimeo, put your documents on Scribd or DocStoc… etc.
What do you think, John?
Thanks for contributing!
Andrew,
Thanks for taking the time to look at Yourmagz. We’re in the process of re-designing the entire platform to make the concept of distributed content simple and easy for everyone.
We have developed applications for the major social, mobile and desktop platforms which allow our users to engage their readers on the platforms where they already spend time.
We’re working towards synchronizing the conversation around content across multiple platforms. So that readers could participate in the same conversation we’re having here regardless of whether they’re reading from their Blackberry/iPhone or Facebook.
I agree that companies need to participate where their content is distributed but do you think there is value in bringing those different conversations together?
We’re trying to go beyond simply syndicating the content, we’re looking to allow our users to engage their readers across multiple platforms in one consistent format.
Thanks for the conversation,
John
John,
My pleasure. It’s part of my job. I like where your going with YourMagz. It’s intriguing. I know it’s in Beta and your working on it – had a bunch of beta bugs appear through the process as I set up my mag.
I think the big difference between content syndication and broad distribution of content is that syndicating content implies a formal relationship between you and the content syndicator (i.e. content syndicated to a channel partner.) Where as broad content distribution implies putting your content where the audience already is. Does that make sense?
I’ll need to really see yourmagz in action before I really understand the three-screen/multiple channel approach your pursuing – it’s not immediately apparent to me.
Anyway, thanks again for participating and keep me in the loop for yourmagz.
Thanks,
Drew
There are definitely some bugs in the system that we’re steadily working out. I’m happy to hear you like where we’re going. I believe we can bring value to people by making content distribution simple and easy for everyone.
We’re close to getting our Iphone and Adobe Air applications live so I will keep you posted as we get closer to putting all the pieces together.
If you have any suggestions for how we can improve the platform I’d love to hear them.
Thanks again,
John