There's a major shift in the media world which you may not be following closely. It goes like this: the old rulers of media are losing ground to internet media (the new rulers). I know. It may not be so earth shaking. You already know this to be true, right? However, what you may not realize is the extent to which the ground is shifting, and how fast.
Today's stock market report on the Tribune and Los Angeles Times reports more red ink. Just when they thought they were getting a handle on their online ventures (local websites) in stemming a losing tide and repositioning their brands, etc., more bad news comes along: Jobs, Autos, and Housing sectors, which were deemed to be on a gentle upswing, are clearly not showing the expected stabilizing trend.
Now, as a marketer you may be saying, "so what? I wasn't planning to do more newspaper advertising anyway." So be it. It may be incidental to everything else for your company right now. Yet, I think the current media picture is also suggesting a bit more than this.
The web is no longer a playground of experimentation. It's now solidly established as the main thoroughfare of news, personal communications, entertainment, texting, mobile computing and wireless technology, etc. It is now the dominant (if not dominating) media growth trend in the U.S. and the world.
So, here's a question: Have you changed your marketing approach to take advantage of this trend? Or, have you been slowly sticking your toe into the online waters? If you have been pro-active, is your web presence reflecting the new standards of usability and complaince?
If not, do you realize the price you may be paying for the delay in redoing your web presence?
When you click on a search link in Google or Yahoo and proceed to a website... hosted somewhere, anywhere in the world... and find the exact nugget of information, or the product you're looking for (at the right price), you experience the web at its best, as a medium conforming to high usability standards and compliance. Your search was seemless, and the results page satisfied your query with an appropriate ranking of relevant information.
Assuming the site you visited met your needs, for the information you needed, the download that took place, or the product you purchased, it will have been in large part due to the new standards of web development that have taken place in the last few years.
Now, statistically, only a few sites truly perform in this way. A very large majority of the millions of sites created and hosted, in the last five to six years don't satisfy the criteria set forth by the WC3 (World Wide Web Consotium). They do not use XHTML architecture, or CSS style sheets for design. They use bloated code, take a long time to download, and are largely inaccessible to people with disabilities. These sites simply don't fare as well in the search engines. In a CSS driven site the structured markup makes the site more friendly to the search engine spiders.
So what happened to all those other sites? Where were they during your search query?
For the most part, these sites appeared in the anonymous listings that fell below the top ten as ranked by Google, MSN, Ask.com and Yahoo.
Yes, they're still there. Perhaps the site publishers still think of them as a great bargain.
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