As the economic crisis spreads, businesses will look for alternative methods of advertising. Some of these businesses have already started contacting Vector. The first one to do so in the financial services sector was Managed Forex Brokers http://managedforexbrokers.com which offers an information service about Forex products. Early into the SEO project, they referred a local business unrelated to their business. Their connection is social, they have known each other for years. The business is http://renzfloors.com/ they offer Carpets and Flooring in San Rafael, CA. They have agreed to refer more business with successful results. Those new referrals will become part of our new and growing network. The question is, what do carpets have to do with Forex? If it s possible to answer a question with a question, then one may ask do Forex investors buy flooring? Of course they do. And carpet customers may purchase Forex products. Then what is the point? Things are changing on a scale so rapid that most cannot keep up. Thomas Kuhn calls it Paradigm Shift i , but this is outdated, conceived before today s reality existed. Tom Hayes best characterizes our modern shift in Jump Point.ii

In computer jargon, when your hard drive becomes overwhelmed with too much information it is said to be fragmented²or ³fragged.´ Today, the rapid and unsettling pace of change has left us all more than a little, well, fragged. We watch 60-second television commercials that have been sped up to fit into 30-second spots, even as we multitask our way through emails, text messages and tweets. We assume that these small time compressions are part of the price of modern living. But it is more profound than that. Changes that used to take generations²economic cycles, cultural shifts, mass migrations, changes in the structures of families and institutions²now unfurl in a span of years. Since 2000, we have experienced three economic bubbles (dot-com, real estate, and credit), three market crashes, a devastating terrorist attack, two wars and a global influenza pandemic. Game-changing consumer products and services (iPod, smart phones, YouTube, Twitter, blogs) that historically might have appeared once every five or more years roll out within months. In what seems like the blink of an eye one giant industry (recorded music) has been utterly transformed, another (the 250-year-old newspaper business) is facing oblivion, and a half-dozen more (magazines, network television, book publishing) are apparently headed to meet one of those two fates.iii

Let s try to understand that while things are changing at a fast pace, they haven t really changed at all. How is this possible? In the current case study, Vector is the hub of the network, or the domain there is nothing stopping these businesses from individually cross promoting each others services. A network needs a hub, network devices do not function without hubs, routers, and switches. So we aren t talking about SEO, we are talking about network access . The internet is the medium. Internet marketing is not much different than Tupperware parties on an electronic scale. Networking. The internet is a network, but society has not changed much socially in the last 50 years. With all our advances, we still write checks and ship products on trucks and go to sporting events.

These 2 businesses represent sufficient cases for compare and contrast. The Forex company markets it s products globally, and in electronic form. A customer may be from Mumbai, London, or San Rafael. Renz Flooring, however, does not have a high probability to sell carpets to customers in New York or London. SEO professionals try to sell the concept that you need to increase your website ranking. Increased ranking equals higher rank in SERPS (Search Engine Results Page) which equals more exposure for your business. The SEO rules that dictate techniques, such as cross linking, are rewarding you for networking and penalizing you for not. In other words, the nature of the SEO rules promotes networking and discourages anti-social behaviors. Social media is simply a network for non-technical people. There is nothing really new about Facebook conceptually, it is an evolution of newsgroups, BBS, HTML, and Blogs (in that order). The internet shifted towards user generated content, hoping to capitalize on providing the platform (network again) where users would communicate. Facebook is simply a large network. They provide the tools (in this case a software application) that allows users to easily post information, play games, etc. Even the concept of social networking is not new. Business networking events, networking groups, networking parties, have existed well before widespread use of the internet. The difference being of course that with the internet you do not need to physically attend the events, making it possible for an almost limitless amount of people to participate. Network Theory describes networks and their behaviors. The internet is simply a medium, what we are really describing with business marketing is society. Society is a complex network. As the internet is simply a medium, we shouldn t look at it any differently than we do society. Google s algorithm is advanced enough that it penalizes cheaters just as society does. If you are thinking about any SEO strategy, do so as you would any marketing plan. Many rely on the internet s free sources of increased traffic, but is it really free? Increasing a site rank, even if you are an SEO expert, takes time, and time is money (literally!). It is true that you can work on SEO in your spare time and have some added benefit from it but is it any different than attending networking events in your spare time? It s not, conceptually at least. Practically, by optimizing SEO methods, we can have a technological advantage. By using tools such as Vector s Skype Contact Explorer, it s possible to maximize your time that is spent. Vector Informatics provides these tools to its clients, but also provides many free SEO tools on our website and blog, Please Blogin.

i http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift iihttp://tombomb.typepad.com/tombomb/ iii http://tombomb.typepad.com/tombomb/

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