J-P De Clerck Archives - Social Email Marketing

Last Sunday I posted an article about the state of both search engines and search engine marketing, from a personal perspective on my personal blog. It’s a bit provocative but, again, it’s my opinion and so I invite you to add yours. I think search is still in a very premature stage despite recent innovations such as Google Instant. All these tools are very nifty and some might find them cool, that’s OK.

Regarding the impact of them on search engine marketing, the jury is still out. But what matters most to me is that search is not relevant enough in these social media times from a user viewpoint. On top of that, I strongly feel the importance of content and context in search engine optimization and in the way search engines work should be much more prominent.

Fact: social media are good for book publishers. And I’m not talking about social media strategies for book publishers. I’m talking about the tsunami of social media marketing books.

There are so many new books that I don’t even bother looking at them anymore. Of course there are exceptions. But what I notice is that I stick to books from the 40+ generation, like Jim Sterne and his excellent “Social Media Metrics”. And now and then to books of people that I know have something relevant to say.

The overabundance of social media marketing books has nothing to do with the topic as such. If you want to know everything about social media marketing, I can resume it in a list of 5 books, 5 videos, a few papers and a handful of links. From dummy to expert in two weeks.