It has been a while since there the requisite “SEO is dead” conversation.  But I’ve been thinking a lot about the longevity of search.  Let’s face it, my career revolves around the product offerings from roughly three main companies (and one of those companies controls a 70%+ market-share).

While Google is nowhere near going out of business, the search industry is seeing a significant challenger in social media.  Numerous start-ups have sought to capture the social web.  A few have already seen significant traction, a la Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter.  Social sites are now starting to drive more referral traffic to some major sites than traditional search engines.  Crowdsourced traffic is surpassing algorithmic traffic (in a few select cases).

So what does this mean for search marketers, particularly SEOs?  First, I think it means that the search engines will have more external factors to consider when ranking pages.  Many of the SEO bloggers who acknowledge this point refer to it as the catalyst for the demise of SEO.  But we have seen this before.  In the past few years, external linking has increase in importance to drive traffic and rankings.  But SEOs have been able to adapt and find ways to gain quality links.

Still, I feel as though keyword targeting will eventually become less and less important, as SEOs will have less and less control over targeting specific keywords.  Search marketers will need to take a more holistic view of their campaigns, as they realize that they have less and less direct control over the factors that are used to rank sites in the search engines.

With this, content and architecture will increase in importance.  Yes, these factors are important already, as SEOs know.  But big companies still do not embrace best practices, opting instead for Flashy, easy to manage sites that present significant issues for search.

As external ranking factors become more important, specifically pertaining to social media, companies will need to make it as easy as possible for lay users to share sites with friends, family, coworkers, etc.  Strategically, search marketers who can harness social media to direct traffic to landing pages where users can perform a desired action will find success.

While marketers grasp with the decreasing ability to control keyword rankings, content will become more important.  Latent semantic indexing (LSI) will gain prominence as search engines try to develop more information about the domain and what the domain’s content is about on an aggregate level.

Social media will change search, but it will not not be the demise of search.  The fundamentals will still be to create great content  with site architecture that allows content to be easy to find, easy to share.

“We know what we are, but know not what we may be.”

–William Shakespeare

It is most certainly true that the only thing that remains constant in this life is that change is inevitable.  To change is to grow, and to learn, and to embrace different opportunities.  Everyday we have to make decisions, and this week I have made the very difficult decision to leave Rise Interactive to begin work as an SEO manager at SMG Search.

This was, to be sure, a very difficult decision.  I have greatly enjoyed working at Rise.  I was fortunate to work with many hard-working and very intelligent individuals.  I loved the excitement of landing the big fish, and the opportunity to work with so many fantastic clients.

At the same time, I am completely excited to get started at SMG Search.  This is a move that, on a personal level, makes a lot of sense.  It is a chance to work exclusively on what I love, and that is SEO.  I am also excited to join a new team of SEO gurus, where I can continue to learn and at the same time share the knowledge that I have.  Of course the opportunity to work with larger clients is something I am looking forward to.

I am also looking forward to the completely new experience for me of working for a large organization.  My first job out of college, NCSA, was a small company of about 20 employees that scaled up to around 100 by the time I left.  Rise was also a small company atmosphere.  Starcom will be much larger, and I am excited to experience the differences of a larger organization.

I am going to miss everyone that I worked with at Rise, and I encourage everyone to stay in touch with me, whether through Twitter, my LinkedIn profile, or just right here on the blog.

I just saw this post from Signal vs. Noise, where it references an apology letter from Hulu regarding the removal of some episodes of  “It’s Always Sunny in Philidelphia”.

It just strikes me how rarely companies openly acknowledge mistakes.  I have to say that more often than not, companies appear to view reputation managment a way to “cover up” their misdeeds and mistakes, rather than manage the repair of their reputation by engaging with their communities and stakeholders.  They approach the term reputation management as though it’s a one-sided affair, that all it takes is a good PR team to spin their problems away.

Yet in this age of brand building and hyperbole (the brand is bigger than the sum of it’s parts, and that’s not a good thing), the companies that are acknowledging that they have a human side are resonating with consumers.  What, you weren’t aware that brands actually had human beings working within their four walls?  It is true my friends.

Three examples from Twitter are readily available.  The pioneer is @ComcastCares.  That’s right, Comcast, the bain of just about everyone’s cable and Internet providers existence, has a representative (his name is Frank Eliason)  directly answering questions and working to solve customer complains via Twitter.

The second example is from 1-800-Flowers.  I had posted a (somewhat smarmy) tweet asking why the founder of 1-800-Flowers had his picture on all of his advertisements in the city.  I didn’t expect a response, I simply wanted to make an observation, a sort of localized rhetorical question if you will.  A few days later, I received a reply from @1800flowers, letting me know that the founder Jim was a florist originally and that for him, 1-800-Flowers is a family business.  Now, I still may not agree about putting his face on all of the ads, but because someone reached out to me to provide an explanation, I have a very favorable perception of 1-800-Flowers.

The third example is one I just heard of this weekend, that Bank of America has a Twitter account @BofA_help.  That’s right, a major bank with a name and, oh my God, a face!

The point is, companies are by definition fictitous entities.  They’re not real, at least not in the way that people are real.  Companies have spent so much time brand building that they have become entirely impersonnal.  And then they wonder why they cannot connect with their consumers.

You don’t have to be small and human all of the time.  But when it comes to things like customer service and support, smaller and human is better.

I know a lot of people are critical of Twitter and think it has no purpose. There are probably even more marketing people who keep reciting this mantra that “Twitter is the future of marketing.” I tend to fall in the middle of this spectrum.

First of all, I don’t think Twitter is the future of marketing. Corporations want to Twitter, and that’s fine with me. Even Comcast has a Twitter, and I really think this is a very cool idea. But while Twitter may work for a lot of companies, there are probably even more companies that it just doesn’t make sense for.

From a public relations angle, Twitter could be a very useful tool. But since the Twitter community is so small right now (comparatively to the likes of the Facebook/MySpace behemoths), do companies really want to dedicate bandwidth to updating Twitter every so often? If Twitter was to become a mainstream tool, then sure, perhaps there are enough followers to justify a dedicated resource. But even though I like the ComcastCares Twitter idea, I don’t follow it’s Twitter stream.

Twitter is not devoid of value, however. What I love about Twitter is that it plugs me directly in to the SEO community. Mainstream individuals get may their news from CNN. The mavens get their news from Digg. But those at the bleeding edge of their community get their news from Twitter, straight from the source.

If someone in the SEO community publishes a new blog post, I’m getting notified of the post almost immediately (via TwitterFox or TweetDeck). We live in an information society, so when I get to tell other people of something new in the industry, this reflects well on me, increasing my social capital and the perception that I am knowledgeable in the field. This is important at work and in the community. And in a community that moves as fast as SEO, the dividing line between building your social capital and losing it to someone else is mere minutes.

Would I love more people to be on Twitter? Absolutely. But not everyone’s niche has a built out community on Twitter yet. It makes sense that the SEO community would have a robust conversion going on pretty much at all times on Twitter. Bird watchers, however, probably don’t have that same robust community. And therein lies the paradox. It takes more people signing up to create the community, yet what is the value of signing up if the community doesn’t already exist?

All those interested can find me at my Twitter account, EricPender. Of course, if you want to take part in the conversion, you’re going to have to sign up.