The Perpetual Time, Err, Hype Machine

Sometimes when reading TechCrunch I feel like I am watching the History Channel, and that there is a regularly scheduled show called WWII Wednesdays (or something like that). Ironically there was even a junk TechCrunch post about killing the hype cycle. But they know the truth on manipulation - they wouldn't have a profitable product without it.

So often marketers highlight how *this changes everything*

I just saw an article about how the Facebook like button kills SEO, promoting some white paper.

Perhaps it gets the white paper opened, and pre-qualifies prospective customers as ignorant corporate types who are willing to pay big bucks for misinformation, but it seems online marketing is so saturated that we have to act comical or absurd to pull in attention. And then make revisions a week later stating "my bad."

Promptly followed by "...but this changes everything..."

(or hope that the sea of noise is so loud that people forget yesterday by the time tomorrow happens)

"The most important idea in advertising is new. It creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calomine lotion." - Don Draper

Part of the reason I have decided to post less is that I decided I would rather not participate in that. At some point it helps to believe in what you sell, even if another path is more profitable. :)

I want to make sure we highlight what is new and interesting, but a lot of online marketing is just blocking and tackling ... the basics. A few months back I wrote "its the boring stuff that makes the money" largely because that which is boring has been refined, is predictable, and can scale.

New Twitter might change everything. But then next week Facebook will. And the following week the sun will come up from the west. And everything changes once more!

But the pendulum never swings in 1 direction forever. Blockbuster was once a sure win, today Google is a monopoly, but things will change.

Though those changes will likely be slow and gradual. In aggregate, the impact of Google Instant is not as extreme as many thought (outside of a few edge cases). IE9 also puts some interesting wrinkles in the search space - particularly for domainers. When the address bar becomes a search box with search suggestions in it, how many people will type in undeveloped URLs? Though I suspect that change will also be gradual. After all, Yahoo! is still doing well in spite of all their blunders, brands creating their own media, the tectonic economic decline, and the US being functionally bankrupt.