John Battelle at PubCon 2006 in Vegas
Wednesday morning started with a lecture from John Battelle. He wrote a book called “The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture” which I have not read yet. It is a bit of a history lesson of Google and search in general. He is the owner of a company of Federated Media.
He started out by explaining that regular DOS was the original interface for using computers. Then came Windows. Now Search (Google) is basically our interface for using computers. You type something into a search engine. The major leap here is that search engines use actual human language.
He feels search is like a steering wheel. He presented an interesting scenario of someday going to a store to pick out a bottle of wine. Someday you will scan the UPC code with your cell phone and get back information about that bottle, such as average price in your neighborhood, reviews, company history, etc.
Marketing in general has been content driven. You put advertising next to what people are doing, such as watching Oprah, reading the Oprah magazine. Search Marketing is now intent driven. You put your advertising where people are looking for what you offer. It is not interruption marketing, it is conversation or permission marketing. It is conversation over dictation.
It is important to involve your customer in dialog. The best businesses on the web allow their customers to build their businesses. For example, Amazon users build reviews.
For example, Microsoft was running the ads that have dinosaurs using Office. They were running them on blogs and other places. One heavy blogger asked to have different ads and gave some input on what would work. When testing the two ads, the one that the blogger recommended that was customized to this particular blog ran 60% better.
He also showed us some amazing things about his company, Federated Media. They work with bloggers and advertisers on a high level.
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