So much has changed in online marketing over this past year and big things are yet to come. Here are a few of the runner-ups.
Chauncey: Welcome to the Being Found Show. This is the greatest hour of all time for local and small business. I am your fill-in host, Chauncey Haworth and I’m filling in for Joe McKenna who is too busy to help us today. Normally I’m a sidekick, so since I’m filling in for Joe, I got our buddy Jake to fill in for me. You’re the new Chauncey.
Jake: Hey Chauncey how are you doing? Excuse me, hi Joe; I’m Chauncey.
Chauncey: Normally my plan for filling in for Joe would be to answer questions offline and answer phone calls, but given that the year is almost up, I decided to review what has changed in online marketing in 2017 and what we should expect in 2018. There has been quite a few significant changes. We’re here to talk about what is changing in online marketing and what can small businesses do about it? Technology moves so quickly; it’s hard for small businesses to wrap their brains around it. Let’s say I have a small contracting business, what does technology have to do with me and how do these big things in the news affect my business?
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years and it’s named after Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel. Whenever we talk about how technology doubles every two years, this is where it comes from. It’s specifically geared towards transistors, but it’s slowed, but it’s different for all forms of tech. And so tech is just moving incredibly quickly, and it’s hard for small business to realize how tech can affect them. In each of our following segments, we’re going to cover some of the biggest changes that affect small businesses in the upcoming year and what you can do about it. But first, before we get into that, there are of course tons of honorable mentions. These are things that either don’t affect small business just yet or things that maybe were big last year but have not changed but are heavily influential this year and we will go over a couple of those right now before we get to the meat of this.
One of the big things right now is virtual reality and surely you have seen this all over the place, especially for video games. It’s going to be huge this year for consumers. Even at a local bar here, they installed virtual reality, and you can walk in and see a bunch of people drinking beers with headsets strapped on and playing video games up on the wall. I’m not sure how much effect this has on small businesses. Maybe if you’re a bar or a virtual reality company, and there are some here in Redding, but I don’t think it has a huge impact on marketing.
Another one is augmented reality which is going to be huge this year. For those of you that don’t know the difference between virtual and augmented reality, do you know what Augmented Reality Is? It is like when you look at your phone, and you see reality through your camera lens. Something big is happening this coming year to it. You can put on the headset and fight someone in your living room with lightsabers.
Jake: I haven’t seen that. I just had my first experience with virtual reality a couple of weeks ago, and that was my first time. I can tell you it’ll trip your brain out. I was looking off a cliff and I know full well I’m standing in the office, well I’m afraid of heights and had to take it off.
Chauncey: Well it’s kind of amazing, the amount of slight sensory change that can happen to match your visuals. Disneyland Star Tours is a prime example. People go into a box with a screen in front of them.They take the ride but the box is only slightly moving and shaking, but given the match between the visuals and the slight movement of the box that they are in, it feels like so much more is going on. Another one is cognitive A.I. marketing like artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, and machine learning. This is going to be huge in the next year. Marketing companies are going to use data to figure itself out and come up with marketing plans. This is just the top companies such as Amazon and Wal-mart.
Another one from last year that is going to continue is mobile. Well, it officially outdid desktops in usage and search earlier this year. During the Christmas season, it officially outdid desktops for sales and e-commerce. Mobile is the new computer.
Jake: I can say that several of our clients are at the tipping point of 50-60 percent mobile users.
Chauncey: For anyone who is a fan of Star Trek, it isn’t a mobile phone anymore. They shouldn’t even call it a phone, it is a tricorder. Anyways, I was hanging out with friends last night, and we’re talking about old 80’s cartoons, and one of the guys asked about an old one. All I had to look up was a few keywords, and it popped up. It looked terrible of course but was high-quality, engaging content. For those of you who don’t know, SEO was flooded with terrible material. Slowly over the years, Google has found a way to create high-quality content that humans want to read important.
Next is Blockchain and bitcoin. Blockchain mostly but Bitcoin is a good example of what blockchain is. It’s going to be huge of course through the next year.
So in the case of bitcoin, you have a virtual representation of money. In each one of those virtual representations of money carries its ledger or spreadsheet that tracks all the others as well. That’s what blockchain is. It does comparisons between these ledgers, between all these individual pieces of information.
Blogging is back, although I don’t think it ever left but despite everybody saying so.
Jake: On the Internet Live Stats right now, so far today, we have 2 million blogs that were written.
Chauncey: Just today? It’s like 9:13 A.M. Well there’s the proof for you.
The final in our honorable mentions are chatbots. These are automated chat bots to help answer questions, and a prime example would be that Facebook released a chatbot to help people who are running their own small business individually.
We’re coming to the end of this segment. Thanks for listening to the Being Found Show, listen to the full show here: Being Found Show Episode #41
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