New media, social media, web 2.0, digital media - whats it all mean and why should you care?

Several new words and phrases have entered our vocabularly in recent times. Over the past decade a stream of innovation has occured in the digital realm forcing an
innovation in the language to describe it. Arguments surrounding the definitions of terms like
'new media', 'social media', 'digital media', abound, which can lead to quite a bit of confusion.

Digital media basically refers to electronic media, as opposed to analog media, i.e. CDs, MP3s etc.
Generally speaking, 'new media' is a reference in opposition to 'old media' - newspapers, radio, tv etc. The new media includes things like podcasts, blogs, websites, although many old media giants are utilising all these new mediums to much profit and advantage. For example, consider the fairfax group, who also publish their newspapers online, some for a subscription, and sell a great deal of advertising, and have integrated with a number of other sites to create a one-stop shop. Yahoo!, mircrsoft and many others also engage in such partnerships.

Social media and web 2.0 (almost used interchangeably), are again difficult terms to define, and are those forms of new media that involve social interation between the participants, user-generated content, and little control by those who facilitate them. Examples include myspace, facebook, wikipedia and youtube.

So, these are all big corporates. What does all of this mean for your business or organisation? People are no longer satisfied with looking at online brochures, which is what many websites are. Customers and consumers want to interact, want to choose what information they receive, want to be able to talk back, and have a conversation about things. The organisations that allow customers to do this, engage with them in meaningful ways and provide useful and interesting content, are the ones who will win market share in the new media scene.

There's only 3 search engines you need to worry about... not thousands!

There are literally MILLIONS of search engines out on the web and it would be impossible to get decent ranking on any number of them. Thankfully however, you don't need to worry about the majority. The search market is dominated by three main players, google, yahoo!, and live (formerly MSN). These sites make up the majority of search traffic globally (with google as the biggest player), so much so, thats its not worth devoting time to any of the others.




A further reason is that many of the other search engines are outsourcing their search to these three big players, i.e. alta vista, the big name in search when I first started using the internet, runs off the yahoo! engine. And apparently, AOL uses google.




In a more personal example, an associate of mine operates a regional information/business directory site. The search function on that site uses google's search technology. This is the case with many sites, and the big players are making it easier and easier to integrate their technology into other sites.




So, if you get an email from a company, or come across a site that offers to submit your site to hundreds or thousands of search engines for $X, you need not be impressed. You can manually submit to each of these major players within a few minutes and it is absolutely free.

To add your URL to google, go to

http://www.google.com/addurl/

To add your URL to Yahoo!, go to

https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

To add your URL to Live, go to

http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

I made a (SEO) mistake...

When it comes to your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) efforts it is REALLY important to keep your site updated with new and relevant information. This is one of the pillars of SEO or SEM - Search Engine Marketing.

And I made a mistake... I went overseas for more than a month for my wedding, visiting family, and having a holiday, and I didn't employ any contingency plan for updating the blog or business site. I had limited internet access during this time, but google's spiders are unforgiving. Luckily my ranking didn't suffer too much for some categories and keyword searches, but everyday that you are not improving your SEO, your competitors are. They are creeping up in the rankings, and before you know it, you have lost that first page rank, to be banished to the oblivion beyond page 1. And if you are not on page one, then you might as well be on page one thousand.

“3 Reasons why pay-per-click ads (PPC) are a waste of time and money”

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has become a huge market within the internet advertising scene. It is estimated that over 8 billion searches are conducted globally each month. Further, 85% of people find pages they are looking for online via search engines.
Hundreds of thousands of businesses are using PPC to advertise on the internet, and there are also thousands of businesses selling their services for something that you can easily do for yourself.
On the surface, it may seem to be a cost effective form of advertising; you choose your keywords, set your budget, and only put as much credit as you can afford. Different keywords will cost different amounts depending on their popularity. However, there are 3 problems with PPC that mean that it is a waste of your time and money:

Pay-per-click Problem number 1 – Competitors
Here’s the most costly problem; your competitors can use up all of your credits without you getting any real leads from all the traffic being generated and directed to your site. Click fraud has two sides to it. Some service providers of PPC advertising will deliberate click on your ads to use up your credit to make more money. Or more maliciously, your competitors, who are bidding on the very same keywords can click away, again and again, and use up all of your budget. Whist they cannot run up a bill for you, your losses will only be limited to your predetermined credit limit. That is, if you are using Google Adwords or a similar service. Some commission based sites not work out so cheap. So, it wastes your time in setting it up, and money for no return.
Companies are working on ways to reduce click fraud, logging IP addresses and so on, however in such a large, expanding and virtually unregulated market, it is impossible to control these things at this stage.

Pay-per-click Problem number 2 – Browsers
Some browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox, have for some time enabled searchers to use software plug-ins to screen out paid advertising on searches, as well as to block banner ads. A searcher using a program with this feature enabled can conduct searches on Google without ever seeing your paid advertisement.
This goes for those thinking of paying for banner ads too. They can be very effective at getting exposure, but a certain segment of your market will never see you ad thanks to plug-ins like ‘adblock’. With innovation occurring at break-neck speed, this sort of software ad-on is sure to become more popular and widely available.

Pay-per-click Problem number 3 – Smart/Biased Searchers
Some savvy internet users will deliberately avoid those links which they identify as sponsored or paid ads. I have had discussions with clients who will not click on those paid ads, and here is why.
The purpose of search engines is to search the internet and rank and categorise the website and information that they find according to relevance to the search term. That is, when you punch your keywords into a search engine, the point is to give you the most relevant result, the most useful information. For those who know this, paid ads are just cheating. They know that the most useful information is more likely to be in those non-sponsored links. Also, the information is more likely to be unbiased.

It is true that a paid search campaign can be useful in some circumstances, if you don’t get all of your credit used up by a malicious competitor. This may work, for example, in the situation of a very specific and non-competitive search term that you may have come across. Also, a certain segment of searchers will not mind that you have paid for your advertising, or that use a simpler web browser. However the most effective long term option is to have relevant, up-to-date content on your site. When people find your site useful, they will link to it, which in for your search engine optimization is like building your reputation. This kind of SEO is the best strategy for promoting your business through search engines.

You can find more articles to assist in your online marketing efforts, or for further information about an integrated web strategy contact us at info@thompsonmarketing.com.au