Every one of us these days is talking about content development and
content marketing. Some of us do lots of analysis and experiment based on the
raw data w/wo proper understanding of it. A few of us even talk vaguely –‘Give what people want’. To me, we are all
talking monkeys on an organic spaceship, and flying through the web with mass production
of content to game the system. Most of us are hell-bent on winning the game
with a large volume of content production by setting up a ‘content factory’ as
if this is going to be a one stop solution or a magic wand for Google. I don’t say
–don’t produce it. Produce it for your audience as per their consumption capacity,
not for the search engine that may consume and then puke.
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Content Factory Image Courtesy: Wired.com
One of the obvious questions if someone asks – how to identify a unique,
great, or just satisfactory content? All hell breaks loose, and many of us
switch on to analytics to statistically validate our finding in identifying the
popularity of content. All we see are a few standard metrics- ‘bounce rate’, ‘time
spent’, or ‘top landing pages’ to arrive at some conclusions. I personally
believe sometimes the answer is highly subjective because the metrics we rely
on give us ‘something’ but hide the ‘essentials’.
It’s so unfortunate that most of
us follow Google (organic results) for acquiring a low cost customer base, and
these days we are full on with mass content production. We have been chasing
Google for more than a decade. We are still doing this more than looking for and
building our real business data about our customers, and understanding our
business’ vision and mission.
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Don't Chase Me |
Every one of us gets optimistic and pessimistic about the frequent change
in Google algorithm. With every algorithm update, we talk more about Google,
get apprehensive about its next move, write a thesis of alternatives to crack ‘short
cuts’, debate on G+ circles, post on Facebook, and twitter. What is more
frustrating when speculations, gossips, debate, cynicism, rumors, etc. spread
across the web within a second! Thanks to social media for releasing virus that
spreads fast to infect all of us. Blame our industry for creating such a ‘mess’
culture. Ironically, we are cultivating this field in a hope to get better
crops. Holy crap!
Google’s frequent
algorithm update is basically to help users get a perfect answer to their
search query. The search engine, thus, focuses on historic and real data it has
built over more than a decade and upgrades its algorithm to help users get the best
and reliable information or answer they are looking for. That’s why Google is becoming
more semantic because its algorithm is becoming more data driven.
I completely agree with +David Amerland, “Semantic search at its
core is a Big Data problem that’s driven by volume, velocity, variety, and
veracity.”
To my understanding,
such changes will keep happening unless data driven algorithm becomes ‘datalogic’. The launch of G+ is one of the most dexterous moves by Google that could
possibly help the search engine rationalize the datalogic more efficiently. As the
days go by, we would see a phenomenal growth of Google’s IQ with datalogic!
Google in early phase relied on its users and its logical algorithm at
the same time. And, we have seen a spontaneous growth of web spams afloat
thereof. This search engine has then slowly altered its business to consider a
data driven logical approach (datalogic) than solely relying on its programmatic
logic, and users/people.
Any business focusing on logic and rely on people, I believe, such business
is more likely to suffer a shock, not because this approach is wrong but
because people know the loopholes to cheat on for their profitability. A business
that focuses on algorithms and data to help customers find a perfect product/solution
may probably perform better over a period of time than the ones that rely more on
business logic and people.
Instead of chasing Google every second and minute, and chase your
customers. If you don’t have sufficiently large customer data base, build them
first with some rock-solid marketing programs, but get away from overdoing it on
Google.
Once a business thinks it has sufficiently large data, feed an algorithm
in a system that could possibly recommend a solution to an individual customer
based on his/her personal needs. A business must focus more on identifying its
customers’ needs, behavior, profile, etc., basically to collect as much
information as possible –using online or offline. Deploy a mechanism to build
such algorithm that delivers a personalized solution. See how Google has built
it. Why can’t you build for your own business?
It’s so unfortunate that businesses are not learning a lesson from
Google despite following it over more than a decade either because they want
short cuts but how far you go? Chase Google as far as you can, you’d be still
left behind.
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