When it comes to time, planning and productivity our brains are at odds with our drives. The cognitive dissonance generated by our stated desire to make the most of each day and our inability to really do so is demonstrated by the countless articles and studies on procrastination.
As recently as two years ago the question of what exactly it is that a search engine optimizer does would have been greeted with puzzlement. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was a usually outsourced service that was bought into a business. It was assumed that the SEO provider would carry out a technical audit of the website, go through and ‘optimize’ its pages, suggest some changes that would have to be made to the website platform’s code, create a cross-linking strategy for the existing content, source some high-quality outside links, work on the keyword density and presto!
The question of what we did before Social Media often sounds like the one about TV, cars, email and the telephone. Yet this morning, I came across a real-life example that drove the answer home to me in a viscerally powerful way.
You’ve heard all the fuss. You joined the network. You now have a Google Plus profile. The next question has to be, so what? It’s most likely you do not have any of your Facebook friends there, right now, and even if you did what’s the point of interacting with them at Google Plus when you already do so on Facebook.
Next time you point your sniper scope at a target and think that the enemy bullets flying your way feel a little too realistic you may not be wrong. The artificial barriers separating digital verisimilitude from reality, gaming from the real thing, are getting thinner by the day, apparently.
Fiction, Hollywood blockbusters and business have a heck of a lot in common. The journey from ‘here’ to ‘there’ is exactly the same irrespective of whether you’re reading the latest romantic fiction, watching an epic film or getting your startup off the ground from your back room.
If I told you that you could make a million dollars in two weeks, from home, using Google your scam-detection radar would go on overdrive. In most cases you would be right but here’s one scenario where one person, actually did just that.
As I am writing this it’s been 49 years since JFK was assassinated. Millions of words and thousands of hours of filming have been devoted to discovering who was behind his death. What is of greater interest to us, however, is not who, but why.
Situation Analysis: You are the world’s pre-eminent web company dominating every particular vertical that requires search to help navigate it. You have nascent products across every emerging digital frontier from phones to virtual wallets and augmented reality glasses. Unfortunately you are moving faster than your customer base who are all too-easily distracted by the shiny toys of smaller in breadth but equal in depth competitors. What do you do?
Search is synonymous with Google. So much so that Google is a verb meaning “search for it online using a search engine’. With that kind of achievement you’d think they are pretty secure in their core market, especially since their accumulation of data is such that it simply puts them ahead of every other newcomer.
