You'll be astonished how irrelevant, costly and time consuming each of these channels can be.

 

If you look at the above stats through the same lens that AdFor considers fundamentally,  it may become even more clear that these merchants we are looking for have it much worse than most of us realize.

 

In fact, the merchants we are seeking are desperately seeking us, so that they might inform us of their products and services.  But as it stands now, merchants are burdened to advertise each product wherever we may be roaming- on each social network, and within or around various blogs, articles, whitepapers, classifieds, affiliates, on group deal/ rebate sites and a multitude of numerous and various other channels.  It's exhaustive work trying to be everywhere we are.

 

I won't even speculate on how much time, effort and money it takes these merchants to create content and get these advertisements up and maintain them. But you better believe that the cost of all this advertising in all these various places is trickling down to the products we are buying.  We are all caught up in this chaotic & costly matrix of mayhem that is so cleverly disguised that absolutely no one can fully grasp the whole malevolent picture. 

 

Take for instance where 90% of us go first- Google, Bing, Yahoo & the other traditional search engines that conceptually provide a gateway for some of us to connect with just a select few merchants.  (And typically they are the ones who have paid significant premiums.)  The Search ecosystem is dependent primarily on the publishers inventory of advertisements, as these ads pay for the whole sha bang.  The maximum potential Search Engines can provide becomes an extremely difficult calculation for merchants to discern the value to reach each of us who are presumed to be searching or in need of that merchant.  Worse, this flawed design makes us searchers the target, which in turn, effectuates all sorts of Mayhem Marketing including privacy invasion, unnecessary security risks and posses as a breeding ground for fraud, theft and other ominous practices. 

 

Search Engines can be useful for merchants who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new to announce to patrons searching static or unchanging information, but only as long as these merchants continually pay premiums. 

 

Search Engines can seem useful for us consumers researching items before we buy, but typically the results we see are from franchisers and affiliates all over the country, or news feeds published - weeks, months or even years ago.

 

Instead of fixing their algorithm to display more relevant advertisements, yearly optimizations accommodate a more robust distribution of their inventory of fragmented advertisements.  Instead of showing us real time results, these Publishers are particularly proud of the fact that they've created a real time bidding system whose platform forces merchants into a highest bidder scenarios to advertise to us, which actually slows the speed at which our pages load.  The other significant real time ability that search engines brag about is a real time suggestion feature.   When we type something into the search bar, suggestions dropdown to shortcut our typing-- Admittedly this does speed my surfing up a bit because I am a horrendous typist-- but I can't help wonder if these 'suggestions' come straight from a collection of the most costly keywords for merchants. Neither of their so called 'real- time' marvels provide us with real world information. I mean, where does it end?   (we show you where it beginshere)

 

With real time & real relevance there is empowerment to anyone looking- a virtual window into the merchants activities.  This is just like your standing in front of their store every part of every day. If something comes up, we'll know about it.  We may even gain some insight from legitimate patrons while reviewing thoughts, opinions and comments made- to the merchant- about the merchants brand.  Take a glimpse at Social Media for instance.

 

There are a slew of social networks, blogs, classifieds, news sites, video sites that enable their users to easily post updates and information in a real time fashion and we are able to gain some very valuable right this moment insight from these posts.  Specifically from the 20 million business merchants on Facebook and the 4.5 million on Twitter.   77% of Fortune 500 companies have Facebook pages, which is great- BUT- less than  5% of them are updated on a monthly basis, despite being very easy to update-  technology wise at least.  But if you are a merchant making a post, you'd want to make darn sure the post represented your company correctly. 

 

Posts became expensive designed and orchestrated marketing endeavors spurring a whole division of Social Media Managers and software companies offering 'convenient' solutions to create, read, analyze and focus the data on these Social Media Platforms.  Companies that scour these networks for trends. Companies that scavenge these networks to somehow improve and make their own websites somehow more 'convenient'. Companies that post for other companies on multiple networks, but not all of them of course.  Companies that explicitly create content.  Companies that help you create content for yourself.  Companies that focus these networks and act like Social Search Engines so we can see what others are saying.  And on, and on, and on.  Where does it end?  (we show you where it begins here)

 

A major issue with these engines is that they are typically built by external sources and were not a part of the original Social platforms conception, so all of them have fallen short of providing results that are contrived specially to the needs of both the user and the merchant.  Where they fail, aside from the absenteeism of an immutable pipeline integration, is that they follow the guise of Search Engines and in many ways must be vetted through search engines to gain any momentum. There have been numerous and various attempts to combine the intricacies of social media with search.  These engines are designed to scour all of this data to see what’s being said right now, so most of today’s updates won’t necessarily be relevant tomorrow- at least to these engines. 

 

In November of 2012 Googles pipeline with Twitter ceased to exist after the contract between them just never got renewed.  The pipeline allowed Twitter posts to be displayed on the Google Search Engine Results Page.   In particular posts about celebrities and persons of interest, but there was a specific absence of merchants posts. 

 

For years, new search engines launched attempting to take away market share from traditional search engines. However, these search engines failed to do something different and unique, or to match the performance characteristics of search. And a lot of them went belly up.

 

A seemingly endless string has catapulted into the limelight with the specific intention of bridging the local digital divide.   

Numerous and various attempts Have Been and Are Being made to bridge the gap caused by the segmentation created by highesst bidder advertising.  Most notorious was FatDoor, which pivoted to became Center’d.  Center’d organized itself around three major areas: People, Places and Plans and  then later became, The DealMap and then sold to Google  where it was then was further dissolved.  Perhaps into one of the many attempts by Google itself.  Google has been working vigilantly starting  with 'Froggle', and then 'Google Products, and then 'Google Places', and then 'Google Shopping', and then 'Google Local, which is currently 'Google Offers' presumably combined with Googles social platform- 'G+'.  All of which have unsuccessfully been able to bridge the divide, arguably because of the confusion created by Publishers that segment their audiences to sell advertising space are dividing their users, both merchants and consumers alike- poisoning the fruit of their own vine.

 

In summation, they can't work in the local environment as long as the system is setup to allow well financed, non- local conglomerates to engineer campaigns that overshadow small businesses attempts to overcome barriers to entry, specifically highest bids- there will never be enough local content.