Archive: January, 2007

The Times Colonist of Victoria BC that is! The original article was published to the paper this past weekend. Please check it out here. It’s very interesting stuff!

Remember how awkward and geeky and freakish you felt in your adolescence and teenage years? Do you recall the nastiness of high school gossip, kiss-and-tell social cliques, and angry aggressive jocks/gangers? Have you come to terms with that weird overarching sense of exstistential angst almost everyone confronts in their teens? If I remember correctly, it sucked.

Flash ahead a decade or so. At age 15, the search marketing industry is acting well, like a 15 year old.

There is always simmering debate in search marketing circles about the value and virtues of SEO. Once in a while that debate flares into flame-wars and cat-calling. In the past, these disputes tended to confine themselves to industry forums and chat-rooms, rarely escaping the inner-world of the search marketing community. It doesn’t work that way anymore.

What might appear to be an adolescent squabble to all but the keenest of observers is in fact the fallout of four years of increasing specialization. You see, the practices of the search engine marketing have changed dramatically over time. Where only a few years ago search marketing meant SEO and perhaps some PPC, today’s online environment demands proficiency in social networking, audio or video editing and constant content management. It is rare to find a search marketing agency proficient in all aspects of online marketing. The SEM sector is factionalizing behind skill-sets, forming cliques who will argue for or with each other like high school kids. Our good growth is being expressed in our latent regressive tendencies.