Many businesses are still trying to get up to speed on, what they believe, is the current state of the Internet and how to play in that arena. Problem one is that what they think is the ‘current state’ is actually yesterday’s. The current state is not owned by the Google search engine as we are familiar with it, it’s owned by Alexa (Still Google) & Siri. We’re not on the verge of a marketing disruption, it’s underway.
Got a question? Ask Siri. Do you get pages of answers? No. You get one. One. Consumer choice is being reduced, and perhaps eventually, eliminated. What is the strategy going to be, or really should be now, for a business to get to the top of the listings when there isn’t going to be a ‘listing’? Even a browser search’s top listings today are owned by the likes of Google themselves, Wikipedia or Amazon. It appears that the answer to this is going to be the demise of ‘free’ site boosting techniques – think SEO – and more ‘pay-to-play’ techniques. Who has the money to compete against Amazon?
We can think about the coming problem as being similar to what accommodations businesses face having to compete for top Internet search listings against TripAdvisor and Trivago only this won’t be industry-specific, it’ll be universal. The real stick-in-the-mud is that we did this. We, as consumers, have made Google as powerful as it is, and is going to be, just by using it.
Oops.
