The smallest remarks can sometimes spur the greatest conversations.
Case in point, yesterday on a blog by Professor Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University made a very simple interaction with his students that many of us might remember during our time in college, regarding school and learning, and posted it on the Digital Ethnography blog:
First day of class …
I took an informal “raise your hand” survey of my 200 Intro students.
Me: “How many of you do not actually *like* school?”
… just over half(!) raise their handsMe: “How many of you do not like learning?”
… no hands
You may remember their video post Digital R/evolution.
I left a comment regarding the post citing similarities with educators and marketers:
As a professional marketer, it is my job to reach an audience and make a lasting impression regarding a product or service. In that same respect, as an educator you are trying to reach your audience and make a lasting impression regarding a topic.
Marketing is changing, as is education, in that we have (because of technology) gained the ability to interact on new levels to reach and make an impression on our audience.
To which, a scathing response to my remark:
Marketing’s goal isn’t to empower consumers. In fact, it’s goal is usually to “dupe” consumers.
I know that it is not my intent to dupe consumers, but I can see that there are those that believe that we (marketers) are focused on a sale rather than a relationship. I have been a marketer for over 10 years now and have been an online marketer for half that time. I love the online space, it gives me the ability to engage and educate the user, I really do enjoy this.
I know that there are many that regard SEO in that same respect, which is something that I (and I am sure you) battle in our online communities around marketing and web development.
Are there many online marketers out there that are not trying to engage their users and build a relationship?
I know that there are a lot of SEOs that do the same. They are usually classified as black hats, but are there any SEOs that consider themselves white hats but are not concerned with building relationships with their users?
Yes. No. I would like to hear from you!
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
This is a very good question. When I first read I thought to myself why would you go through all of the trouble with the White Hat techniques and not bother to build relationships.
Personelly for me that dont work. However when I first started out marketing online, I wanted to do everything right and did not believe in building to quickly or anything that may upset the Big G. (Google)
But then I discovered that SEO takes way too much time and the Search engines change too much anyways. One day your there and the next your gone
So I say do the basics and then write content for the customer and build relationships just like you would with any other business. Treat them well and make them feel like a king. Somehow when you treat someone special that you have never met it seems to pay off in terms of word of mouth.
There is a certain feeling people get when they get treated well from a stranger on the internet. So my main thing for promotion is to build relationships and keep them. I have a new site that caters to Divorced Single Women where we teach about simple home repair etc. I am not even thinking about traffic from the search engines but I am going to focus on a great membership community instead.
Word will travel and at the same time the search engines will pick up on it.
So if I decide to blast an article out to 500 directories (what I see as black hat) at once, it will most likely bring in some fairly instant traffic and maybe a few members but the search engines will hate it.
However if I have focused on building relationships an occasional black hat technique should’nt effect me much at all.
So my whole point is I think if you build strong relationships SEO becomes second instead of first.
Does this make sense to anyone as I do sometimes ramble to much
Dennis
Dennis,
Thanks for you comment and your honesty.
I think that marketing online has changed and will continue to do so as more and more of us become active and incorporate the Internet with our daily lives. As this continues, I think black hat techniques will have a smaller influence on SERPs.
I guess we will see…
Cheers!
You cannot be a successful SEO of any hat without engaging your customers. Actually I find many of my potential clients are seeking me because of a lack of communication with their previous service provider. It would seem that for many SEO’s/Agencies, the easy part is getting the customers in the door. The hard part is keeping them there. That takes customer service and that takes communication.