Search engine optimization, organic search, paid search, link bait, social networking, long tail search terms, bread crumb links…I was enthralled. Being a (very) long term techie I was absorbing everything the speaker was saying…envisioning the business models these techniques could be used for. Then I came to my senses. While I was imagining all kinds of business scenarios, the speaker was not mentioning any, except for a few very general references. I looked around at my fellow attendees only to see wide stares, confused looks, eye rolling, and various states of disinterest. Funny, seeing that everyone seemed very excited to hear how all this “New Media Buzz” was going to help their businesses, clubs, organizations, etc.
Don’t get me wrong, the speaker was great from a public speaking point of view and had a great command of the technicals. He was entertaining, humorous, animated, and all the other things that tend to keep an audience going. Had he been speaking to a group of people wanting to know the technical aspects of SEO/SEM/Internet Marketing, he would have been very effective. The problem was he was speaking to a group of business people that wanted to know how they could use all this “Buzz” to improve their “Biz.”
After the meeting I was chatting with a few of the attendees to get their point of view on the presentation. They thought it was “informative,” but most still did not know how to apply it to their Biz except in the vaguest of ways. Well, at least they know there is this whole “toolbox” out there to use, even if they are not really sure how to use it just yet. From this point of view the presentation was great, as I have no doubt several of the attendees will be contacting the speaker’s firm for a consultation and he will close a few deals. This may have been the speaker’s intent from the start, though I think he would have done a better job and gotten more qualified leads had he taken a more interactive approach with this audience and focused more on the Biz.
This was just one speaker, so I did not assume this was indicative of the industry. Over the months since this presentation, however, I have noticed a bit of a trend in this industry…a very heavy emphasis on the Buzz, and fitting the Buzz into the Biz. I may be a bit old school, but this seems backwards to me. To be fair, however, I have noticed that a lot of the SEO/SEM/Internet Marketing organizations in this area (Denver) are not full-service business service organizations; they are basically specializing in the technical implementations of what I will call “New Media Marketing.” This is not a bad thing…as long as they realize that and recognize the limitations that come with it. If they focus on the technicals, they should have some sort of affiliation with someone that knows the business side of things, and how the business model, processes, and procedures of a client work with all these “New Media Marketing” tools.
I have several clients that have been “Buzzed” by good organizations here in the Denver area. Each one of them did well with the technical improvements implemented by these firms. Well, they did much better than letting their websites sit out there as they were, in any event. I have not replaced them, I have merely supplemented their Buzz expertise with my Biz expertise. I have become the interface between the client and the SEO firm. This was not an easy process for both of the SEO firms involved. There was much marking of territory with gallons of urine sprayed around websites, AdWord accounts, web tracking code, and many “lost” reports and “forgotten” passwords to various tools. Some clients wanted to dump the Buzz firms due to this silliness, much of which could be contributed to my own naivete.
Not wanting to do the technicals myself, I finally managed to get everyone on the same page. I have been coding for over 30 years (mostly revenue producing systems involving heavy interface with marketing, sales, and executive elements), and the shock and awe of technology for technology’s sake wore off decades ago…I enjoy the Biz side of things and had no problem “outsourcing” the technical and operational aspects of these projects. After searching quite a while for “entry level” positions in this industry, to no avail, I finally found my niche in the Biz side and I intend to stay here. There seems to be much more of a market for someone with significant business/product engineering/branding experience that has a clue about the technicals, than there is for the technical side itself…at least at my age.
My challenge now is to educate those organizations that do not have robust business development/product engineering/branding expertise on-board as to how Biz and Buzz work in conjunction to provide the client a more rounded, full-service experience than either one alone could provide. This makes for a happy customer and expanded business opportunities for both of us. We can each co-exist, focus on our own Biz, and be very successful and profitable. To this end I propose to post the next two parts over the next few days, assuming:
- I do not get thousands of Thumbs-Down ratings on this post
- I am not banned from the site before I get a chance to post them, and
- I am not tracked down and publicly flogged as an example to the others
The next two proposed parts will give brief case studies on two clients, their business environments and models, and how New Media Marketing tools were used to solve their particular problems. It should be noted that each of these clients performed a significant degree of business and brand re-engineering to accomplish their goals and maximize the benefits of New Media Marketing. The two selected cases are fairly interesting in the little twists, turns, and quirks that the processes took. Each one uses different business models and product types, and each required different results from the marketing efforts.
I will leave it up to the group to decide if there is any interest in this type of posting in this venue.
Cheers,
Kelly
