I attended a breakfast meeting of the St. Louis Chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) last week. The presentation was called "20 Tidbits about Search Engine Marketing" and was presented by the very able and impressive Kelly Kochert of NSI.
As a senior project manager familiar with digital technology, I knew many of the tidbits--not all--and learned enough to consider myself more knowledgeable after the presentation, and probably more dangerous. The thing that impressed me the most, however, was how ravenous people are for SEM information. At my table alone there were bankers and corporate trainers and car rental company representatives--all salivating to hear the secrets of SEM and how to apply them to their online challenges. As I was leaving the meeting I overheard one attendee remark, "I'm ready to hire her."
Regardless of the business, professional role, and technical acumen, it seems that everyone needs SEM. Kelly's presentation is downloadable from the IABC web site.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I find this outlook amazing in todays IT industry. Specificly the "Sell it at all costs" approach to SEM and SEO.
There are litterally BILLIONS of websites on the internet, 25 will come up in the first page of a serch, of those 25 the user will click from the upper 4 that seem most relevent from the summary and title.
This is all suuming they're even searching and not using a more practicle means of finding the information, like a phonebook (or yellowpages.com in the digital sense).
Powerusers and IT people use search engines for EVERYTHING but the average home consumer searches for a new toaster at Target, THEN the internet if for some reason Target stopped carrying toasters.
I'm not saying SEM/SEO is bad, it's a great industry and there are certian types of high profile global sites where it makes complete sense to sink 2/3 of your budget into it. The problem I have is firms and agencies who see it as another high end line item markup they can use to bilk a regional or local client out of literally tens of thousands of unneeded fee's.
The "Amazon is doing it" mentality sucks these poor clients in and they never stop to think if they will be growing a justifiable customer base as a result of it, they just sign the dotted line.
Post a Comment