Know-How Exchange : SEO/SEM

The basic idea sounds appealing, though I'm probably not your primary target audience.

Of course everything depends on the positioning and marketing strategy. Who? Where? How? Price? Positioning promise?

A lot of your target audience may not even know what they need to know, or recognize their own needs. You'll need to start with a missionary sale to these folks, and they may be reluctant to lay out any real cash to try it. That's why I'd start with a very rudimentary business/marketing plan ... just to see if it all hangs together. If it does, you can develop the prototype and see if anyone (in the target audience) finds the tool promising.

I know you know this, but sometime when we're in the middle of the forest it's hard to see the trees ... especially when we're instinctively subjective and thinking about what WE have to offer.

thanks very much, wonderful to have your expert opinions! They also made us realize the initial question was way too vague, so allow us to elaborate (a lot :-) :

From everything we saw, we believe that current services are only collecting snippets and clippings from online conversations helping marketers to understand in which context their brands and products are mentioned and discussed. In addition services like Google analytics and other services help understanding which keywords and search words drive online visits on a page. However, google analytics is only a performance evaluation of chosen keywords. Maybe you missed better keywords or consumers are attributing your product with other better performing words you had not in mind yet.

In these cases, determining the right keywords is based on the subjective assumptions and evaluation of marketers. Keywords and hashtags are determined based on experience and what marketers personally believe to drive traffic or based on what they currently see in the analytics.

Our approach is slightly different. We propose to track social media chatter from various sites (such as e.g. facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc.). Our algorithm will then identify words that frequently co-occur with your brand in online conversations. Such keyword identification algorithms have initially been developed for scientific purposes to help researchers determining the right keywords for their work to increase visibility and circulation. Instead of a priori determining key words and then observe performance, we propose to use online chatter, as provided by the companies you mentioned above, or from other context driven sources (like facebook groups) to identify suitable keywords which are linked in consumer's mindset with your brand or your product category.

Using such an objective approach would in our opinion have several benefits.

First, the algorithm would identify unique and idiosyncratic keywords for your brand that are anchored in the opinions of your customers.
Second, an objective, occurrence based approach would allow you to find keywords, you would otherwise not have in your own mind. Such keywords bring the large advantage that they are less prominent in marketing and have therefore less competition hence coming for a lower price, while being prominently placed in consumer's mind.

In addition, we believe that such a tool would not only help determining new keywords, but also to help understanding wish hashtags one should use on twitter, instagram and facebook when launching a campaign to ensure largest possible spread.

What do you think?

Hi Everyone,

I am closing this question since there hasn't been much recent activity.

Thanks for participating!

Shelley