Recently, we saw a study from WPP/TNS on how misguided a number of digital strategies have been, in effect creating "huge volumes of noise, which is polluting the digital world and making it harder for brands to be heard--presenting a major challenge for businesses trying to enter into dialogue with consumers online." Our conversations with customers had long indicated that the digital pollution has indeed been created with, among other things, an increasing attempt to "align" content with perceived rankings on the search engines.
We ran a Gedanken experiment ("thought experiment" in German) on how the digital world would have looked if we had a Twitter-like service that was more popular than Google, or, perhaps, had been "invented" before Google. The answers led to a world where content could have been more relevant, "publisher friendly", timely and potentially, less "spammy".
Additionally, Salorix confirmed
- We would likely have significantly less (in volume), and implicitly more relevant content. A vast amount of content today is generated by publishers trying to game the system through SEO. Most of it would not be here if Google's ranking scheme was not so predominant.
- Two corollaries to the above are, (i) publishers would likely have had higher CPMs and (ii) lower overall cost of content productions, resulting in likely higher profit margins.
- Content would have been more "timely", as, at least some of the start-ups would have developed technology to align content to the topics currently traversing the Twittersphere (or its equivalent). Indexing functions would reflect relevance and freshness based on social activities, rather than structural linking relationships between webpages. Isn't Google trying to do that today as indicated by its latest inclusion of social criteria in its results and rankings?
- Display advertising would likely have been less "spammy", and again with better targeting and higher CTR. While we do not know of any tests being run today, we would not be surprised to hear that Twitter's advertising platform "performing" significantly better than display, at least in the context of timely brand conversations on the internet
Twitter, although small compared to Google, has a significant opportunity to build a "publisher" friendly world. While it is focused on brand advertising, in the current market conditions, publishers would likely love a system that makes their contents more valuable.
I would love to hear what others think.