Has Social Media taken Marketeers on a 360 degree journey?

Recently I am reading more articles about how search engines are getting better, smarter and delivering increasingly relevant results.  I have been reading articles like this for 15 years (that's pretty much when Google came onto my radar), lately these articles have made for more exciting reading with the emergence of automated Image Recognition, BIG DATA (see what I did there with the font) and new techniques for fast searches of these huge amounts of data.

Big Data in a nut shell - the Social Media giants and the Search Engine major players have been collecting data about us, lots of data.  Data from ... everywhere.  The usual suspects are browsers and web sites, but they are also getting data from our spending, credit cards, loyalty cards, mobile devices, our cars, our phones, tv's - even our central heating thermostats (google own Nest) soon our fridge will re-order eggs from Ocado (or Tesco's, Asda etc) arrange a convenient delivery date and time and post a note in our diary - because it can.

But its not just the Big Data that I am reading about - what triggered the thoughts in this blog was an article discussing the Automated Image Recognition technology being developed allowing the search engines to extract contextual information from still photographs and video.   So now a photograph can be automatically analysed to determine its actual context / content regardless of how we label it - if its a picture of a cat, its a picture of a cat.  

Basically, the decision on what is relevant content for an audience is now squarely with the Search Engines and Social platforms, no matter what key words you use, now they decide - queue an algorithm update from Google.

Bringing this all together, 'they' have huge amounts of data on us, combined with clever, fast, pattern matching search algorithms = extremely accurate search results, based on what we are interested in matched to what the content is actually about.  Organic results from Organic searches on honest Organic data.

So our social proof is going to be increasingly important as only interesting content will be delivered to interested people.  Its not just the search engines that are doing this - the Social Media platforms like Facebook are filtering who see's our posts.  I have blogged on how Facebook are doing this, you can find that article HERE. 

So, there's where I come to my idea that Marketeers have gone on a 360 degree journey.  The art of Keywords, SEO, meta tags, the 'art' of optimising web sites, blogs and content to convince search engines to rank your material higher is increasingly being trumped by the simple actual relevance of the content to the target audience.  And now that relevance includes search engines and platforms interpreting the meanings in a picture or video for themselves.


Welcome back traditional marketing skills of understanding a target audience, creating and sourcing appropriate content and placing this where it will get seen.  That its now online is academic, the web is completely transparent.


Any one want to buy a Crystal Ball, one careful owner? 

Are Facebook bullying us by restricting our post reach?

You think Facebook are bullying us by restricting our post reach?

When presenting on the subject of Facebook for business, I am often asked about Facebook's strategy for throttling back the number of people that will see your post, the reach, its now down to a few % of your followers.

Many think this is Facebook bullying us into paying for adverts or to boost our posts.  While I agree that it does seem like facebook have moved the goal posts and are then monetizing their position - particularly when many have been investing a lot of time, effort and money in growing their followers. 

But, apologies to those that like too bash Facebook, this isn't what is going on here - Facebook are merely giving 'their' customers what they want, a good experience.  Which is a timeline of content they are interested in.  And they are right, Social Media is, and should be, all about focused, interesting, organic content and an engaged audience.

I admit to being disappointed that Facebook seem so ready to compromise this insightful strategy - in that you can pay for an advert or boost the reach of your Post...  

The thing is, this is how Social Media is going (tribe led) and all the platforms and tools are at it - so don't think you can swerve this and bungee off to carlos-fandango-NET or google+.

If you want to read more here's a good article on how, more importantly WHY, Facebook are managing what posts people see. The Guardian http://bit.ly/1uQOSIE