Do remember Lady Gaga at last years arrival to the Grammy's? She was birthed from a giant egg!
If you have mentioned Gaga's appearance at least once in delight or in disgust. Gaga wins. And I would bet you have spread the Gaga meme to at least one other person.
And if you have not told anyone your opinion, you at least have had the conversation in your head. Waiting for the right moment to spread the meme.
Very few of us can take a neutral position on Lady Gaga and her antics.
This "positioning" by her is nothing short of brilliant.
Of course she stands on the shoulders of of music and promotion giants such as Iggy Pop, David Bowie, and Madonna.
But while these performers reinvented themselves for every new album release. It seems Gaga reinvents herself for every appearance in the spot light.
In an industry scraping for profits. Gaga is one of the few performers who consistently makes money.
Kim Kardashian, Social Media and Reality TV
Have you ever wondered why Kim Kardashian can even exist in our vocabulary? Or Kendra Wilkinson? Holly's Word? None display any talent whatsoever as far as I can tell other than to titillate us with their "titilators" and more importantly their knack for self promotion. And the dollars are real folks.
Kim Kardashian brand will create by some estimates $1million a month and it all started with a Sex tape and hanging with a few other sex tapers like Paris Hilton.
This has been so dramatic a rise for basically doing nothing, that I have a conspiracy theory that Mrs. Kardashian had the tape incident written in as part of her publicity campaign to launch the family empire. But I digress.
Embrace Your Polarizer
So do I suggest that you go this route?
No no not at all. But in line with some of the stuff I have written in the past about Eddie Bernays, and polarization. Do not be afraid to offend. Because you simply cannot attract without offending.
That is to provide you and I advertising. Not the social media thing and the search engine thing. They are merely vehicles to gather information. Google and Facebook are tracking us so that they can produce better ads. Ironically, all this work, all this web space, and technology is really about building a media empire.
Think about all the stuff Google owns and provides.
Many folks whine and complain that Google has ruined their search engine results. The Google original dictate of providing relevancy is dead. And as such It is blasphemy cry the SEO enthusiasts.
They whine that the home page of a Google search is littered with Ads, Videos (with ads), Photos, News, Blogs, ad nauseum. Most insiders claim that the search from Google is worst than ever.
Check out some of the stuff Google provides to us as Webmasters all for free.
Adwords
Analytics
Webmaster
Profile
Blogging
Split Test Tools
Keyword Research
Google Plus For Business
Adsense (they even let us make money off their ads)
Other productivity tools include a full suite of office programs, Gmail, as well as other neat things like music storage and free books and places to store our family videos and pictures. What nice people those Google people!
With these tools they can track what we buy and our customers buy, what music you are into and what websites you visit. And get this. What you probably will buy, what music you might want next, and what site you might visit next or soon.
The Devil Does What the Devil Does.
I once had a pal who I set up selling mortgage leads. He was desperate for a sale and was not yet able to locate his own buyers. He had great leads but no idea where to find a buyer.
I had heard of a mutual acquaintance of who my pal had thought was of very questionable character, but he needed mortgage leads.
I hooked them up and forgot about it. I found out several months later that all was going well up and until this buyer stopped paying on already delivered leads.
I told my friend that he had done a deal with devil. Sometimes in business, we regrettably do that. But at least be smart enough to build into your pricing the eventuality that the devil will do what he eventually does. He is in no way your advocate and will always not only act as a business should in their own self interest, but will additionally seek advantage over you. Just because it can.
With Google, we are indeed doing a deal with the devil. Our privacy is being eaten up without prejudice on a daily basis. It is even uncool to complain about it. Twenty years ago there would have been an outcry. Today it is just the way things are. To hearken images of Orwell's 1984 simply put us in the camp of not "getting it".
However, if you have been in the business on line for any amount of time you have either sought out Google love or have already got it. Or like some of us veterans you have got it, lost it, and gotten it again over and over again.
Everything the Yellow Pages Wishes it Could Be
But indeed with all these free cool tools Google is taking our behavior and codifying it into a trend. The more data points they have on us the more they can render us not just relevant search results, but more importantly relevant advertisements.
This is everything the Yellow Pages wishes they could have been.
A big money block is in local for Google and we all do things locally. So think about why would Google hassle with the maps and taking photos of every house and business in America? I mean what a pain right?
Because as the funny car snapped the photo of your house, they grabbed and recorded your ip address and no doubt have cross referenced that with freely available ownership information (Are you a renter or owner). Minimally.
As you set up your Android cell phone, you quite possibly used your Gmail account. That Gmail account cross correlates with your home information and all your behavior there. So as you search for spots on your phone or use gps on the maps, I can see a day when Google most likely will serve you relevant advertising that matches to your current location and what you have searched for in the past on your phone and other computers.
Show Me the Money Google
This is the direction Google and Facebook wants to go . The question you need to ask is "how can I take advantage of this?"
The simple answer is you must know the players in the game, the rules of the game, and how to play it.
Google respects two things. No scratch that. Google craves content and references to that content (links and citations).
With content you can syndicate and get into lots of web places. Text, video, pictures, various documents are all indexed by Google.
The opportunities are not only getting your own pages indexed in as many ways as creatively possible. But also the other pages where your content is syndicated like videos and pictures.
Your business can also show up in many local directories and Google Places.
Give us a call or email and find out how you can make this giant task much more manageable and scalable for your business to produce more leads. 310 - 533 -9145
I announced the war with Google and Facebook over a year ago. Did SEO Just Die
Since then many have said that yes SEO is dead. As Google has changed time and time again. Over the next few weeks I will be chronicling some of these deep changes that are effecting your website and your social graph right now.
»
Its a Social World In a nutshell Google blinked. And much of that has do with the velocity of content being created in the social media. Facebook, Twitter and more. And now the new kid on the block Pinterest is digging into the Facebook Traffic.
»
Its about the data. Google's and Facebook's business is not search and Social. It is datamining. While Google has been changing many have complained that Google is no longer relevant. That is the point of search relevancy isn't it?
Google's job is guessing at your and my behavior such that they can serve us relevant advertising.
Google grabs that data through all the data it gets from your cookied searches, visits to websites with adsense, analytics etc, your signed-in behavior, and your Google Plus behavior and your Android phone locations and behavior.
The world just got smaller. Do a search in New York and chances are real good that Google will serve you local results having to do with services in New York. Google Places dominates the local searches with at least 4 results. Often times number 1 of yesterday, is now possibly 8.
Littered within that search will often be images and videos. We ran a post years ago that some day Google will be the new Yellow Pages. That day has come.
»
Disinformation. Google has succeeded largely from incredible public relations to compliment their just good enough search engine. With their online personalities, they have been able to spread vast and complicated concepts to misinform what is/was actually going on.
The more things change the more they stay the same. Google has always been about links, then the title tag and matching h tags. This concept has not changed. Its just that there is less of the same coveted prize called organic search results for you to grab.
Less competitive terms are easy as they have always been and the super competitive keywords will continue to be difficult to get.
Links have expanded in their definition. Links are 80% of the game. But now you have likes, Google pluses, and other social markers that Google desperately is trying to track. I call these social noise makers.
One reason Google has moved forward with Google Plus as an answer to Facebook, and recently adding SearchPlus Your World is that they were being blocked out of tracking social graphsof the biggies Twitter and Facebook.
Additionally local citations, or your business name, address, city, zip and phone weigh heavily for your Google Places (local) ranking. They serve the equivalence of links in local search.
»
To make things more crazy. Your website will need to adjust for mobile phonessome day soon as more and more searchers are using mobile phones to search the web. Soon to out number desktop searchers.
The long term answer is to get strategic and hire a firm like Spider Juice Technologies who can help you get your arms around the changes, while not getting swallowed up by all the marketing hype.
Step 1 is to embrace the fact that you must become a publisher of your own unique content, ghost written content, curated content, and collaborated content if you are to survive in this ever changing online environment.
Because the fact is. Google simply doesn't need you anymore.
Recent Comments