The Illusion of Communication

Although I never got a chance to actually meet her at the conference, a big shout out to Megan in the Pink, who was nice enough to take notes during the SEM for SMB conference. Here’s one of the bits she recorded:

Q: Ideas on how to leverage SEM techniques for product research?
A1: Not a great tool for innovating products.
A2: You can look at Google Trends, etc, but that’s based on today. At an extreme, you can build a website about a potential product, get PPC info and look at the data
A3: Look into the social world - what’s happening in the blogosphere? What are people talking about/looking forward to?
A4: SEO not so much, look at social media and PPC.
Moderator: If Ford asked his audience what they wanted, he’d say “a faster horse”.

I disagree with the answers here (strongly with most of them, but A2 and the Moderator are almost on the right track). Here’s a little clip from my session at the conference, which was on keyword research. My belief is, if you can structure your keyword research properly, it can be a really powerful way to evaluate your business, your customers, your prospects, and whether or not what you are trying to offer the marketplace is at all compatible with what people are really searching for.

Granted, if you are looking at things at face value, then it’s only really good (as A2 mentions) for historical information. However, if you look at it too literally, then you will likely be in danger of delivering the exact value the marketplace is looking for … e.g., making faster horses (as the moderator and Henry Ford point out).

I hope to put something more substantial around this … I may even make the keyword presentation more robust to support this stance. Check out the clip below and let me know what you think. And I’ll let you all know when I get this session put together.

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Posted by Matthew under Business Strategy & Innovation & Internet Marketing & Marketing Strategy & SEM |