Findability use to be a term narrowly associated with SEO. But now findability is the charge of all marketers, as our primary job is to enhance the probability that our content and experts will get found and be shared.
Put simply, findability is the degree to which companies, content, and experts are easily located using search terms and through the process of sharing with networks.
Findability on the internet is not a new concept. It is about as old as the West Coast offense; Peter Morville wrote the book on it in 2005. But it has been generally confined to the studios of web designers and offices of e-marketing professionals. That’s because, until now, we could effectively get the word out about our whitepapers, studies and announcements through calling, mailing and emailing people.
But today when you pick up that phone, stick on the stamp or press the send button, you do so knowing there are fewer people on the other end and those that are still there are probably ignoring you. Against this backdrop of outbound marketing getting less effective, findability has become the primary concern of the entire marketing department - business unit marketing, content marketing, public relations, search engine optimization.
Take public relations for example. According to an analysis by BusinessWeek , there are approximately 19 percent fewer journalists in 2009 than there were in 2008. The same article concludes there are 11 percent more public relations professionals. That is a 30 percent swing in the ratio of people pitching to people listening and covering. Oy.
And for the nearly 80,000 journalists left in the country, they don’t need to pick up the phone. They can decide what to cover through an ambient awareness the news through RSS feeds, Twitter, Google and online news rooms. Just as Facebook allows us to have an awareness of what our friends are up to (without talking to them), the larger social web allows journalists to have an awareness of what news is happening (without talking to PR).
So go forth and find. Focus your marketing on making your content more relevant and more extraordinary. Make it easily shareable. Use it as a response to the content of competitors. Yes, actually talk openly about how your conclusions compare to that of others. Take the time to Google your experts and see if their digital footprint matches up with their point of views. Are they easily found? Are they easily connected with?
Put the phone down (no one is picking up) and find out how findable your company and its points of views are.
Picture Credit: Niznoz
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