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

Search should never be considered as only a traffic generating marketing channel. It is your window to meet your target audience. It is more about how you wish to communicate with them in that space and how you make sure you are the perfect match for than rather than your key competitors.. It is hence a window of opportunity for every marketer but also a moving forever changing list where you fight for space in a crowd that gets more and more creative. At the same time you also need to be aware that your customers are a moving crowd that will constantly evaluate you and compare you to meet their needs.

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