As this guy (whom I’ve never met) points out, the majority of my online marketing efforts are decidedly white hat. Our SEO (search engine optimization) efforts revolve around semantic markup, directed content, and natural growth of quality incoming links. I don’t pretend to be an SEM (search engine marketing) guy.
The thinly veiled truth behind SEM is that, to truly be good at it, you have to be comfortable with black hat tactics. Manufacturing inbound links, for instance, is widely held as a sketchy practice. But link building campaigns are very effective. The same can be said of many common lead gen tactics.
So, who’s to say the guys with the black hats are wrong? Maybe the guys with the white hats are naive?
A trip to NYC for ad:tech is all it took to put the question in my head. It didn’t take long to notice that the successful [performance] marketers were those wearing hats in varying shades of gray. List builders, contextual marketers, data miners, emailers, content aggregators, affiliate network(ers,) etc. all generate massive amounts of traffic utilizing aggressive tactics.
So while we recommend and practice one flavor of online marketing, it’s becoming difficult to completely disregard the other. Maybe I should start sending wide-scale, borderline spam campaigns advertising charisma18. I can call it an experiment. Let me know if you want to be on my list.
Oh, and by the way Griffin, we’d love to see you come up for next year’s summit. I’m all ears when it comes to SEM. For the record, I was a lowly fill-in for the first panel you attended – the first-string participant got delayed coming back from this year’s ad:tech coincidentally. I did select both the topics and panelists for both discussions, though, and neither were intended to be high-level. Maybe the audience is ready to dive further in next year.
4 Responses to “Hats in varying shades of gray”
There’s a lot of truth here. I’ve always found that black- or grey-ish SEO is fleeting. Good content, quality mark-up, and genuine inbound links are the really enduring keys to success in SEO.
Related to this –
I read something about Studs Terkel the other day, which of course led me to his Wikipedia page, where I read he suffered from Ommatophobia, or “fear of eyes.”
This seemed odd, so I Googled and the first page was seemingly all about Ommatophobia. I was reading, and reading…but then I got a little suspicious. Nothing on the page was that specific about the disorder. More reading lead me to believe that this was a canned page.
Take this sentence:
“Like all fears and phobias, ommatophobia is created by the unconscious mind as a protective mechanism. At some point in your past, there was likely an event linking eyes and emotional trauma.”
I then Googled for Ailurophobia, or “fear of cats.” The fourth or fifth result contained this:
“Like all fears and phobias, ailurophobia is created by the unconscious mind as a protective mechanism. At some point in your past, there was probably an event linking cats and emotional trauma.”
Nice. And I almost fell for this, which embarrasses the crap out of me. Is this black hat? Well, no? But it ain’t white either.
I was at your first session and thought the discussion was a great fit for the audience in attendance. The guy sitting beside me had never heard of AdSense and didn’t know AdWords by name. Most of these people were just trying to find out how to get a site online (if I remember right, you guys covered pay per click to… what was the omaha guy looking for?)
Ryan: I think we named pay per click, but we didn’t talk much on the topic. Darin Namken is actually someone who could have talked for days on the topic of SEM (of which pay-per-click is a small part,) but most of the room was asking for entry ideas. SEM is a pretty intriguing topic (to me) and I think we probably play in the field a bit more than he realizes – we have clients that require it.
Deane: I’m always impressed (scared) by people’s ability to create value out of air. It seems that monetizing content no longer requires content.