Swedish search marketing….hm…
I did a presentation today at Internet World’s “webbdagarna” as the chairperson of SEMPO Scandinavia. It was an interesting morning with some high-quality presentations and a good audience, however the “Jante law” always kicks in; so again not a lot of questions were asked by the audience. If anyone has any good and tested ideas on how to improve this please let me know. For those readers that don’t know about Jante’s old school law that many people tend to live after in this region - read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jante_Law
As I was doing my presentation summarising status of Sweden in the search field, it struck me (again) how far behind we are in realising the value of search and the potential it has. I am grateful to see my clients moving this direction and honoured to work with managers that DO understand, but sad to see that the market in general still has a long way to go. So, who’s fault is that then..? Well, it is the professional search industry that needs to pull efforts together. As mentioned previously we need to join forces and educate the market. We need more educated marketing managers and we need a market that grows strategically to meet the fast moving search consultancy competitors of emerging markets.
At the conference there was a discussion about result driven search and I deeply agree that search needs to be result driven but we need to focus on the bottom line sales or whatever the decided action, target or goal is. I don’t see why some search consultants still just talk about driving traffic to the site and price themselves based on this.
At the same time, I smile because this means that this opening creates great opportunities for long term search marketers with an overall integration perspective

April 28th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Interesting comment about “Jante Law”, I find this quote from Wikipedia of special interest:
Don’t you think we know something about you?
Have you heard the Spanish expression”hacer el sueco” (do a Swedish)? It’s an expression when one pretend not to understand or ignore someone. Then you act, according to the Spanish expression, in a Swedish way.