Everything was so simple then… When search engines ruled the Internet, all we had to do was optimize our web sites to get some love and we’d turn up at the top of the results page. The most effective way to rank highly was to have high quality links pointing to our web pages. These inbound links were the coins that were deposited into our SEO piggy banks. They were the currency of Internet marketing.
Why is this conversation in the past tense?
Because of so-called “walled gardens” like Facebook and iTunes, that’s why.
Earlier this week, I wrote “Search Engine Marketing: I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means” in response to Wired magazine’s article, “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet.” Their point was the Internet is simply a collection of pipes that form a content delivery system. The “Web” is essentially HTML sites that do not block search engines. iTunes is an application, not a web site. Facebook is (mostly) private and can’t be crawled by search engines. They are walled gardens.
This means that search engines aren’t as omniscient as they used to be.
…Which means they aren’t as influential in Internet marketing as they used to be.
……Which means that links aren’t as valuable as they used to be.
During JitterJam‘s weekly Creative Coffee session this morning, we were talking about how to identify influencers in social media. As we kicked around various ideas and returned from tangents, one of the ideas that crystallized was that in our brave new world of social media, the coin of the realm is changing from links to people.
In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “The Tipping Point,” he examines the phenomenon of messages going viral. One of the main ingredients to an epidemic, he suggests, is a set of people with specific gifts:
Mavens are “people we rely upon to connect us with new information.”
Connectors “link us up with the world … people with a special gift for bringing the world together.” People tend to think of the Internet as a single, enormous, amorphous glob of people when, in fact, it is a series of groups. Connectors act as the information conduits between these groups.
Salesmen are the charismatic persuaders.
As we try to establish our own influence online and spread our ideas, we still need to be doing SEO and collecting links. But we need to leave room in our piggy back for the new coins of the realm also; mavens, connectors, and salesmen. They are the ones with the keys to the walled gardens in which search engines are persona non grata.
Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.
This week’s High Five is about protecting and promoting content.
#5: DMCA Muscle Kills DVD Copying, for Real
I’ve been covering several different lawsuits in which the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is prosecuting a scorched earth assault against its own customers guilty of piracy. While those arguments are about the punishment fitting the crime, this story is much more disturbing because it deals a serious body blow to the “fair use” aspect of copyright protection. This is the principal that makes it legal to make a copy of a CD (music, program, or otherwise) for your own personal backup purposes. However, in this case a judge has ruled that the crime exists in the breaking or bypassing of any encryption.
#4: Bogus Copyright Claim Silences Yet Another Larry Lessig YouTube Presentation
This story is a preview of things to come. In previous “High Five” posts, I’ve linked to articles about legislation that could threaten net neutrality by compelling Internet Service Providers to police their user base for copyright violations. If forced to do so, it will lead to several undesirable side effects. First, and most obvious, it will increase prices as these service providers will have to invest in additional resources to police their own customers (not to mention insurance policies for increased risk). Second, it will lead to far more restrictive policies as their terms of use will no doubt give them final say in what is or is not acceptable – legal standards will not be applicable because they will be more concerned with avoiding litigation than their own users’ rights. Finally, this story is obviously an example of an automated software application that is simply looking for digital footprints and stomping them out with extreme prejudice and no room for fair use.
#3: Apple Stacks The Deck Against Amazon’s Kindle App
It’s no great secret that the true source of success for many devices is the “killer app.” The most famous example is VisiCalc for the Apple II. The real secret to Apple’s domination of the personal MP3 player market was the iTunes store. This article discusses the potential impact of the iPad’s e-reader application being directly linked to the iStore, and how a couple of mouse clips could be a serious impediment to Amazon’s Kindle Reader application.
John Dvorak is no shrinking violet, and has been making bold assertions and predictions for many years. In this article, he makes the case that the New York Times’ decision to begin charging for online access is another example of the industry shooting itself in the foot. Like most brash pundits’ predictions, the vast majority of his predictions prove not to be true and I actually disagree with his opinion on this latest move by the times. So why am I including it? Because in describing the newspaper business’ past sins, he uses the simplest and single best metaphor I’ve read on the subject. After describing how publishers reacted to declining revenues as a result of underestimating the effects of online classifieds by laying off beat writers, he concludes that “It was like attempting to fix a flat by letting the air out of the rest of the tires.” Perfect.
#1: What The Heck Is Inbound Marketing (and how you can maximize it) With Brian Halligan
“Inbound Marketing” is the single most important concept that will determine the degree to which businesses, associations and individuals will be able to spread their ideas and gain visibility. In this interview, David Garland speaks with Hubspot CEO Brian Halligan, who literally wrote the book on Inbound Marketing. If you take the time to watch this video (and I hope you do), I encourage you to think about the concept of inbound marketing for your own personal online identity as well as that of your organization’s.
Clifford Stoll displays the presentation notes scribbled on his hand.
I was watching a TED video of Clifford Stoll last week, during which he was asked to talk about the future. He confessed that he didn’t think he was the best person to ask, saying “In fact, I think if you really want to know what the future’s going to be, don’t ask a scientist, a technologist, a physicist… No, if you want to know what society’s going to be like in twenty years, ask a kindergarten teacher.” I mention this because earlier that very same day, I was paying attention to my four daughters, all of whom were in the same room and all of whom were consuming one form of content or another in a different medium on a different device. What was running through my mind was the fact that these kids are not only going to demand content delivered on their terms, they will demand it.
Throughout this post, I am refusing to discuss a certain gadget announced by a certain company named after a certain fruit that will be released amid much fanfare next month. The first reason for this is that everyone is growing weary of such discussions. The second is that this first product release is only the beginning and will be opening the door to a new class of products that will heavily influence expectations and demands from upcoming generations.
And So It Begins
I bought my daughter the movie “Sitck It!” on DVD for her eleventh birthday yesterday. The cover proudly hailed, “DVD + Digital Content,” which I thought was strange because a DVD is digital content, but I was pretty sure a knew what they meant. And what they meant was that it contained a second disc with a DRM-signed file in iTunes and Windows Media Player format. My daughter was beside herself that she didn’t have to sit in front of the television to watch it. Instead, she could load it on her iPod, take it with her, and watch it wherever and whenever she chose.During the time when I was helping her download the movie into iTunes on our family desktop PC, her older sister was on a laptop watching videos posted to Facebook by her friends, her seven year old sister was watching an iCarly television episode on her iPod and her four year old sister was interacting with friends from across town on the Club Penguin web site. Not a single person sitting in front of the boob tube. No two people consuming the same content at the same time.
New Rules
Taking Dr. Stoll’s advice, I have combined my own habits and preferences for content consumption with observations of my own household to form these five rules that I think will dictate content consumption patterns five to ten years from now. Kids growing up in the digital age will expect and demand that content have the following qualities:
It must filterable. They will not tolerate having to spend their time reading through ten articles they don’t care about to find one they do. This is another way of saying that content distribution is going to flip from a push model to a pull model. If your content doesn’t have handles, it won’t be going anywhere.
It must be asynchronous. Again, I don’t think people appreciate the parallel universe our kids live in these days with DVRs and iTunes. We all grew up in a world where our schedules had to wrap around broadcasts (think not just television, but library and store hours, magazine and newspaper deliveries, etc…). This generation is entering a world where the broadcast schedule wraps around them. Content is downloaded now and consumed later, at their convenience.
It must be portable. This is a mega trend I see that, despite what many feel is a large amount of hype, is actually being underestimated. Most people think of portable in terms of taking content on to a plane or in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. I am talking about taking content into the other room or out on the porch – a few feet (meters if you prefer) away. In a family with four children, I am watching the splintering of content consumption with great interest as, at any given time, you will see four or five family members reading, listening to, and/or watching different content at the same time in the same room.
It must be compelling. Content production used to be expensive and time consuming. Amateurs can now upload high definition video with integrated graphics and subtitles that exceed the quality of professional versions from just five years ago. This can be uploaded to YouTube in seconds and viewed by hundreds or even millions in a matter of days. All this for the cost of a $500 flip camera and an hour of time. This democratization of content production and distribution means that, to a certain extent, all publishers are in the fashion business now. It’s not enough to have technically sound content; it must be visually appealing and grab attention.
It must be interactive. As a software developer, I know first hand how expensive a mouse click is. It’s astonishing how rapidly human tolerances can recalibrate, and a few extra mouse clicks can literally destroy a product. One inadvertent click might even cost you $150k. This is all to say that people are having less and less tolerance for hunting for answers and it needs to be embedded, linked, or otherwise a single click away. An article about cyber security, for example, may reference a particular news story. Many people will inevitably want to pause reading the article to gain a deeper understanding of the incident by reading the full account of the incident. Path of least resistance. Instant gratification. And so on.
Maybe publishers think I’m being an alarmist. Somehow, though, I can’t resist a shameful attempt at borrowing from Dirty Harry: “I know what you’re thinking. Will it take ten years or only five? Well, to tell you the truth in all this excitement I don’t know what to think myself. But being that this is the Internet, the most powerful change agent in the history of publication since the printing press, and can blow your publication clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky?”
Everything was so simple then… When search engines ruled the Internet, all we had to do was optimize our web sites to get some love and we’d turn up at the top of the results page. The most effective way to rank highly was to have high quality links pointing to our web pages. These inbound links were the coins that were deposited into our SEO piggy banks. They were the currency of Internet marketing.
