The Year In Review 2007
Everybody that has a marketing blog has written or will be writing a “year in review” article and even though I am something of a non-conformist, here is mine. From a business perspective 2007 has been a very good year for me and Get Found Now. I am not referring to financial success, which we had, but success that led to vindication of my ideas and techniques.
2007 was a year that many of the theories I had about using community based strategies for my client’s Internet presence management were proven. I have been using social network marketing type strategies for a long time, starting off with PHP Nuke and phpBB as integral parts of Internet web site strategies. It was mainly due to security issues that I got away from these forums to a more secure system – WordPress.
Even though I always knew that having social aspects to a website was a great way to interact with site visitors, the forum system wasn’t really search engine friendly. That is what makes WordPress special, the way it interacts with search engines, and how it can be a powerful stand-alone system or better yet, a part of a larger web site structure.
WordPress has 2 things that make it so powerful:
- XML-RPC - it automatically updates search engines and other directory or news sites every time your site is modified. This is vital to keeping your site fresh in the eyes of search engines. Having spiders crawling your site 2 or 3 times a day is mighty powerful mojo. My post Search Engine Optimization and Social Network Marketing has a lot more info on XML-RPC including the directories you should be using.
- RSS – it is meant to be syndicated. RSS syndication is going to be the next big thing. Most of my readers already know all about RSS, but the general web user doesn’t fully understand or use RSS. This is even more apparent to site owners and companies that use the Internet. Now that social network marketing is seen as a legitimate marketing tool in the business world, the next big step is RSS integration. See my post RSS Syndication Explained for more details.
I have to say that the best part of 2007 for me was the legitimizing of social network marketing and seeing my theories about RSS connectivity work for me and my clients. Now lets take a look at what happened in 2007 that made these things possible.
Social Network Marketing Takes The Stage
The absolute popularity of sites like FaceBook, Digg, MySpace, You Tube and Flickr pushed social network marketing into the spotlight, but even more important was the way mainstream industries like real estate embraced it. 2007 will be remembered mostly for the amount of money spent by major companies like Google and Microsoft on social network marketing ventures. All the big online players threw their hats into the Web 2.0 ring spending billions of dollars on social media sites that have yet to have a substantial plan for monetization. To me this is reminiscent of the “dot bomb” spending debacle of the 90’s, but then what do I know?
For those of you new here, I am going to digress and give you a quick insight into just what Web 2.0 is. In 2004 Dale Dougherty, an O’Reilly executive, coined the phrase Web 2.0. He and Tim O’Reilly explain Web 2.0 as opposed to what the World Wide Web used to be (Web 1.0):
Web 1.0 –> Web 2.0
DoubleClick –> Google AdSense
Ofoto –> Flickr
Akamai –> BitTorrent
mp3.com –> Napster
Britannica Online –> Wikipedia
personal websites –> blogging
evite –> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation –> search engine optimization
page views –> cost per click
screen scraping –> web services
publishing –> participation
content management systems –> wikis
directories (taxonomy) –> tagging (”folksonomy”)
stickiness –> syndication
Here’s a graphic from the page as well that is a good visualization:
For those of you that prefer a video explanation there is an awesome video on my Social Network Marketing Web 2.0 Explained post that visualizes Web 2.0
The fact is Web 2.0, social network marketing or whatever you want to call it, is here to stay and 2007 has proved it.
Search Engines Expand Their Results
The other major event of 2007 as far as I am concerned is related to search engines. The major engines changed the way that they display the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages) to include more media and other goodies. This can actually be put in the Web 2.0 category since the changes in the SERP’s put media in the top 10 results and certainly gives even more credence to social network marketing.
All the major search engines added what is now referred to as blended searches to their index results. It all started in May when Google launched Universal Search (Read The Changing Face Of Google). The next major search engine to jump on the social search bandwagon was Ask.com with their Ask3D. Live Search joined the party in September, and Yahoo added its blended search results in October along with the useless Search Assist.
These changes have had and will have a major impact on search engine optimization. SEO guys are going to have change their game and actually think about marketing! I had a feeling this was coming as you can see in SEO is Dead Long Live SEO. The fact is that blended search is a good thing for me and my clients and for all of you that follow our school of thought. You just have to make content the king of your site, have a means to stay in touch with the search engines through XML-RPC or XML site maps, and use WordPress! If you don’t have these things and want to get cracking visit my page Internet Presence Management to find out how Get Found Now can help you out.
I hope that 2007 was as good for you as it was for us. Happy New Year!
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