Building a brand 3.0
Television, newspaper, billboards, old marketing. Today, users spend 40+ hours a week in front of a computer, many of those hours find themselves filled with web page after web page. So how do you get users attention, stand out from the millions of web sites each vying for 5 seconds attention?
First, you have to be found. news.com is easy to type, on everyone's mind, gets hit thousands of times an hour, and unless you have a few million dollars to spend, a name you will never get your hands on. In fact, every recognizable, easy to remember, simple to type domain name is taken and is either for auction at a higher cost than you SHOULD reasonably pay, or being used by your competitor. But notice, the one key word there. SHOULD. In the 90's, a good name would make or break your new web venture because there was no other way to be found. If you couldn't get pets.com, your pet food franchise was failed before your business model could sabbatoge you. Suddenly, to get started, your new web venture was subject to traditional media television, newspaper, and billboards just to get noticed.
New times ahead. The world has a new name, and that name is Google. The internet was supposed to be the great leveler, but at that it alone failed. And where the internet failed, Google succeeded beyond anyone's wildest imagination. Traditional media marketing was now replaced by "search". Whether is be by MSN, Yahoo or Google, the internet's new friends heralded a new age of marketing, and a new way to build a brand.
The question is: how do you build a brand that target's the great Google algorithm. No longer does psychology and user studies get that attention you deserve. Now its facing off against an algorithm that choses those already most popular. But what does most popular mean? It's the groups that people are talking about -- not just talking about but socially involved with. Of course, you still have to start -- and everything starts with the search engines.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the corner stone of being relevant to yourself. SEO is the process of optimizing the words, links, and design of your page. But this design is different. This design is the technical innards of HTML code, the code that many HTML designers let Frontpage or Dreamweaver automatically spew into the page that they never see. Of course, this is why so many pages have difficulty getting seen on the internet. So suddenly, design has two sides: what your users see, and what their browser sees. And to be relevant, you have to cater to both at the same time.
Of course, old marketing does mean it's useless marketing. In fact, as the web moves mobile, bill boards and newspapers are getting a second chance. Semacode, Q-Codes or whatever marketing name the technology gets, is a new barcode format that allows your cell phone to browse the web based on pictures it takes. <a href='http://techimpact.crgmedia.com/techimpact/entry/cell_phone_bar_codes'>We reviewed semacode last month</a>, but any discourse on Brand 3.0 must consider the impact of this technology to have any semblance of completeness.
So there you go. Web 2.0 was the social web, Web 2.5 was the mobile web, and Brand 3.0 is using all of those to succeed on the ether.