Time for a Prediction
I don’t claim that this is an original thought, but I wanted to put it out there for discussion. I just read an e-newsletter that talked about demographics of the U.S. population and, in a separate section, how colleges and universities can use Facebook for marketing.
It made me think about what we’ll be doing to attract the class of 2011. Here’s the prediction:
- Social networking *sites* will be irrelevant as each reader (user) will carry with them the context that they are now creating on sites like Facebook.
To the contrary of some experts, devices like XFN will make sites less important while increasing the importance of specialized or vertical search engines and even personal portals as those tools continue to develop.
SEO and SEM are going to get real interesting real soon. I can’t wait!
OPD & PageRank?
Real quick: A bit has been written about the move away from managed directories like Mozilla’s OPD toward algorithms like Google’s PageRank.
But now we have a convergence, of sorts, with Google Co-op.
Marketers of all stripes and industries should be able to see the value in this. Now any savvy individual with enough time on their hands can create their own Trulia or Zappos (or their own Petersons or College Board) and pull in a few bucks from ads. Sounds cool.
Obviously there’s a downside. Shady SEM’ers will quickly build their own tunnels to their sites with the hope of pulling in dollars from on-site ads. I guess the question would be, can they target their own spammish Adword campaigns effectively enough to avoid landing in their own tunnels. Probably.
But enough of the dark side. Spammish ads for “Find ‘bobrobboy’ on eBay” haven’t deteriorated PPC to the extent expected (yet?) so we shouldn’t condemn personal search so quickly.
Gotta run. Need to set up my own search engine for home roasting!
Update
Done! Use my coffee roasting search engine! Next up “The Best College Search Engine.”
Second Update
So here’s my second attempt:
So? How’s it work for you? Comment here and let’s work on this together!
