Am I more “me” on the web or off the web?
The web is truly another world of its own. “You” on the web are different than you away from the computer screen. This is because the web sucks you in and opens you up to a whole new portal of people and personalities; which allows you to expand your own. So are you more yourself on the web, or off the web?
We can even change (and most of us do without realizing it) who we are on the web. I am quite shy in a crowd, even a bit anxiety ridden, but when I’m on the web, nothing can stop me. I’m quite fierce and outspoken in my own little online world. I tell all fairly freely.
Online social networking websites allow us to interact with each other in ways we never thought possible 5 years ago. Beyond the chat rooms, beyond simple email between friends and family, online social networks give us a way to debate with others, express our opinions, and be more open about our beliefs.
We can even find out more about ourselves by socializing with others like us on the internet. Special interest websites and social networking groups allow us to interact with others that have the same religious beliefs, diseases, health issues, job industry fields, demographic regions, interests, etc. More and more, we interact online with others and find ourselves sucked into this other dimension. We open up to those we hardly know, expressing our most secretive, deepest and darkest self beings.
Online users do this because they feel their information is somehow kept private. Keyboard and screen keep us from feeling tracked or violated in any way. Actually a sense of freedom is felt while browsing around the net.
Not everybody knows that their information is being tracked. And even if they do, they are lightly conditioned to be OK with the fact that our information is out there to be tracked by anyone who wants it. Why? Because we are already open to the thought of web personality, interaction, and search.
Google picks apart your brain.
Again: Since we are so open with each other on the net, this allows search engines to track who we are (demographics, gender, age, interests, etc.).
The search engine that tracks us the most is obviously Google. Beyond our general search (even though the General search statistics are tracked too), if we have set up any type of account with Google, our online search activity is being tracked to properly display SERPs that will pertain to our specific liking. Good ol’ Google helped us find that specialized social network we are now apart of.
Just like with a psychologist, the more they know you, and the more you tell them about yourself, the better they can help diagnose you. Proper therapy or medication (or in our case search results) can be administered.
Many search engine optimization and marketing specialists fear this change, as it will be harder to ‘game’ the search engines to provide them top rankings that result in more traffic. However, by search engines being more in-tune with each individual user, they will be able to display more accurate results, which in turn provide better conversions. These changes will actually make my job a little easier.
For the most part, we wont have to target demographically related keywords. Google will already know its users demographic location, age group, special interest, and past search conversions.
How can this necessarily be a bad thing? The future of Google excites me actually. This means going beyond marketing, beyond user function and click troughs, beyond funneling a user to purchase a service or product.
We are going to need to understand our potential users reason for possibly coming to the website to convert them. I just hope Google makes these statistics readily available in our Analytics. This way we can continue to provide clients with the most accurate analysis (demographics, gender, age, common interests, etc.) for their website.
So go ahead and take over the brains of all us Google guppies, analyze what we’re into, and give us the results we want.
[…] is still getting her feet wet with blogging and social marketing, I found her post today titled, “How social networks feed you to feed Google the goods” to be very well written and worthy of mention on my […]