Feb 10th, 2009 |
I just ran across a great interview with Stephan Spencer over at TechCrunchIT. Stephan is one of our most popular speakers (and one of the nicest!); his session last year got rave reviews and attendees keep coming back, since one of Stephan’s super powers is being up-to-the-moment in this fast-changing and sometimes ethically confusing field. Jeff Widman gets some good insights out of Stephan by asking specifically about the clash between typical enterprise culture and the demands of SEO.
Enterprise and SEO is like cognitive dissonance–SEO is nimble, experimental, dynamic, continuously iterating, never-ending process. A complete anathema to enterprise IT which is project focused, do it and forget it.
There’s also an internal disconnect because SEO crosses IT and marketing. Example: changing from horrible URL’s–super long, no keywords in the URL–to cleaner, shorter URLs is a marketing driven initiative but entirely reliant on IT execution.
This speaks to one of those structural barriers to improvement that is so easy to see (at least from the outside) and yet so hard to fix. I’m often asked how the tracks work at Web 2.0 Expo: do attendees pretty much stay in the track closest to their job function? My answer is the smart ones don’t; getting the most out of the conference usually involves attending around half the sessions outside your obvious home, if only to try on a different way of seeing things for an hour. Early stage start-ups are often forced to cross-train because everyone pitches in; even when they get to the phase where the developers aren’t doing customer support and the designers aren’t ordering the office chairs, there’s so little distance between the various roles that perspectives are easily shared. In contrast, at the enterprise level, success on the Web requires an active dissolution of the boundaries of many functions. I’m reminded of another workshop we’ll be running in April, this one by Alistair Croll and Sean Power, called Watching Websites:
Until recently, no one person in a company knew what the web was up to. Different people watched different parts of the online world: Operators tested its uptime and responsiveness; marketers counted visitors; UI designers worried about how test subjects navigated pages; and market researchers conducted surveys to understand buyer intentions. Today, these once-separate roles are being forced together. Each role has things to teach the others.
When Alistair and Sean proposed this session, we had a lot of trouble sorting out whether it belonged in web operations or marketing. Ultimately, it’ll be held in the room where the other webops talks are happening, but we’re cross listing it with marketing. We hope a bunch of marketers show up.
What other disciplines are ripe for cross-training? Leave a comment and we’ll take it up in a future post.
Thats something we discuss here (Germany) for a while too. It’s important and obvious to cross-train IT and Marketing but nevertheless extremly difficult to bring those two sides together. In the web it is one thing, but in the world it is two worlds that hardly fit.
From my experiance i see that a new kind of people come up who fit the picture, who simple understand from itself this connected world. People that would never ask if such a session is for Marketing or IT. “It’s the web, stupid”
Maybe we have to wait for more of those.
There are some amateur internet marketers that think about renting domain names for promoting their sites. Well honestly it’s a bad plan but it also can be a good business idea.
Where I come from girls are considered to know nothing about IT, but my girls and I started a blog and promoted it to receive some visits. It’s a start but we will not back down from this challenge.