How Social Media is changing the online landscape

I had an interesting conversation with a new client yesterday. The conversation was around goals and what we wanted to achieve during our campaign. As the conversation progressed I was struck by how social media is changing how we market online.

If I think back to how this conversation would have gone two years ago I am sure we would have been focused on discussing keywords and how to get onto the first page of Google for them. The complete strategy would have been focused around the web site.

One year ago the conversation would have moved from rankings for keywords to driving targeted traffic to the web site. While everything is still focused on the web site as the primary destination, focusing on traffic was a natural progression from just focusing on rankings, because it doesn’t matter if you ran for something that doesn’t bring visitors to your web site.

Yesterday’s conversation was about making this brand the destination of choice online, regardless of where people are searching, for their targeted keywords. Yes we want to rank highly on the search engines for the main keywords. But we also want to appear when those searches take place on Facebook, Delicious and YouTube. In addition we want to be involved in the conversations that Bloggers are having within our target niche.

Suddenly the web site is no longer the primary destination. We are willing to go out and interact with people regardless of where they are searching online, regardless of where that conversation is taking place.

This is a huge shift in mindset, both from a marketing perspective as well as a marketer perspective. But the companies that understand that social media can help them grow market share, are the ones that are positioned to take advantage of this shift.

For the marketers (and marketing companies) who are still focused on search engine ranking reports, that sound you hear is your market share disappearing.

Article Source: http://social-media-optimization.com/