“now” these days. Because of the fatalistic culture in the single- channel days, once the season’s campaign was put together we tended to start planning the next one. All we could do was potter down to customer services each day to check the day’s orders and get excited and depressed as required.
It is not only the constant flow of information that keeps you on your toes today. It is the pace of change. For instance, almost everyone when they optimise for search aims at Google. Google, bless them, in order to provide their users with the most apposite information change their algorithm once every three months. Usually this can have a marginal effect on most businesses but the odd few can find their rankings drastically affected. And every now and then Google slip in a doozy. Last year’s update, called variously Panda and Farmer, penalised low-content sites and those that copied their content from elsewhere.
So if you were a site that had a large inventory and either had minimum content, because you did not have the time or sold well-known branded products, then you were in trouble. Alternatively if you screen-scraped the copy for your site from the manufacturer’s you were also in trouble. The sites Google were aiming at were “content farms”, those content- stuffed sites that seem to exist to redirect traffic. If you had backlinks from these in the hope of improving search position from these sites then your search position could have been compromised too.
What’s nice about this is that it showed basic skills are still required. Google moved good copy from the optional list to the necessary. Admittedly there is a way to write copy for websites that differs from catalogue copy but then copy for different media has always required specific styles, structure and content. It’s interesting that Google’s influence has now spread from promoting the technical to the traditional.
The dominance of Google however is something we are trying very hard not to think about right now. Most companies use Google Adwords for ppc, they use analytics for optimising usability, webmaster tools for testing site improvements and aim their SEO at Google natural search. Three out of the four services are free and the majority of clients I see use them. There is a whole range of skill sets required today just to deal with this one organisation, which not only can provide the majority of traffic to your site but the ability to make sense of it. Our current Google dependency is worrying and cannot last. How can so many vendors put half their online business and all of their analysis in the hands of one company, even if its motto is “Don’t be evil”? It is a touch worrying.
However there is some “comfort” at hand. That rate of change I mentioned earlier. If we were talking about search engines 10 years ago we would have been talking about Alta Vista. It was the top rated search engine at the time but it is now all but forgotten. And that is the world we are living in now, where although companies gain dominance their reign may well be short lived, as others find new ways of using the internet.
Take the companies ranked 2 and 9 by Alexa - Facebook and Twitter. These two along with the site ranked number 3, YouTube (scarily owned by Google) are part of the Web 2.0
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CHS_CEB_advert_April_2011.indd 1
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(remember that?). The interesting thing about all of them is that they were all sites adopted by consumers and then co-opted by business tempted by the phenomenal global user bases. One other interesting thing is that none of them existed in their present form until 2006. (Facebook was in existence before then but was not open to all.)
YouTube offers the opportunity to demonstrate, build brand and search position. Twitter offers the opportunity to interact and is being used as a way not only to give great customer service but also show that you do. Facebook is going to be really interesting. It offers not only the one-to- many communication of the other two but also allows you to incorporate different types of media right there on the page. Not only can you have a fan page (I can’t bring myself to say like page) but now you can actually have a shop and sell things. You can employ a system that allows your site visitors to see which of their closest and dearest FB friends like products on your site. And you can have selective advertising to its 600 million worldwide users.
As usual with these things, we in the UK are running a bit behind the curve as compared with the States. In America plenty of companies are able to measure how Facebook and Twitter are actually paying off financially – it will not be that long before more than a handful of companies can say that here too. My current advice to clients regarding social networking is similar to that which I offered about having a website in the 1990s – “You’ve got to give it a go at least to get your hand in and learn how it works, because one day you might very well need to.”
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