Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, as author Robert Pirsig put it, had little to do with Zen Buddhism, and in the early 1970s, when the book was published that might have been true. However, in the nearly four decades that have passed a new definition of Zen emerged. While Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a discussion of what quality means, the sub-text of the book pointed at a non-controlling, and mindful approach to life and the universe where things were allowed to unfold without resistance. This is what makes me think of the title for this post, Zen and the Art of Web Strategy.

In my mind, the egalitarian nature of the Web and Web strategy has always been closely linked to Zen. With the Web, like Zen, anybody can get started any time. The barriers, if any, are few, so everyone has an equal opportunity to become a Zen or Web master. The Web, like Zen, encourages openness, because sharing isn’t a means to an end, it is the end itself, and that’s what has always driven the Web. The Web, like Zen, is allusive; when you think you’ve got it, either the next great business idea or the riddle of the universe, that’s precisely the problem and serves to illustrate that you don’t.

This is an unorthodox perspective when viewed from the traditional business paradigm because it seems as though everything is out of control, and just out of reach. To some extent it is, but that’s what makes the strategy fun, challenging, and quite a bit like a Zen koan.

I’ll use the concept of viral marketing to illustrate this point. Viral marketing is a relatively new spin on a concept that’s surely as old as time itself. Marketing 101 would say that anything that gets passed on by word-of-mouth, through email forwarding, or other comparable means of person-to-person dissemination qualifies as having gone “viral”. Viral marketing, on the other hand, is the attempt by marketers to manufacture this kind of response through the use of a variety of media, media platforms and sometimes unethical means. Sometimes it works, but mostly it’s hard to replicate.

Case in point, with regard to the Grateful Dead; it was unprecedented, and nobody could have ever foreseen that thousands of people would be trading tapes of Grateful Dead shows. In the earliest of times, we’re talking about badly reproduced and noisy recordings that were nothing more than an allusion to the music being played; nevertheless, it took off. Eventually, many live shows were put up for sale and Grateful Dead tape traders have become Web file traders who use the Web rather than the outmoded media of tape, and surely that will evolve into something else, but nobody could have bet on that, nobody!

Another great example is YouTube. One of the things that has gotten YouTube off the ground is the proliferation of clumsy and silly videos, some well-intentioned, some not so much that have made their way around the Web. YouTube has created something special and greatly diminished the barriers for getting video (and yourself) on the Web. With the amount of video that has been posted to YouTube it makes sense that some of these have taken off and gone “viral”, whether it is because of foolishness, incredibility or just because of the hilarity factor; and with 10-65,000 videos per day being posted it only increases the likelihood that something is going to go “viral”. YouTube has grown because of these “viral” videos being passed around. However, YouTube’s growth (and probably existence) would have been doubtful if it wasn’t totally open; YouTube’s parent company, Google, really, really get this.

In the examples above neither could have happened if left to traditional business paradigm means. And, anybody who you have believed that they could would have been laughed out of the room. However, in an open environment that fosters quality, and is willing to be patient, and let things unfold, naturally, anything can happen… frequently nothing happens, but while nothing is happening something is growing out of the stillness… Truly, this is Zen and the art of Web strategy… I’ll be talking about this more…

I wanted to post a response to Simon Dumenco’s Advertising Age, Media Works article The Coming End of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook Socialism (read the article here).

Dumenco posits the question that with the growing costs of Web services like Twitter, You Tube and Facebook and the amount of venture capital that it takes to subsidize them, as non-money-making entities, how can they be anything but doomed. Admittedly, Dumenco has taken up a position that’s quite unpopular in the Web world right now. People want to believe that these services will make money and that they do provide value. I have videos on You Tube, and I have a (somewhat inactive @mattborghi) Twitter account, and for a time I was seduced by Facebook, but I’ve always come back to the value proposition.

I’m an early-adopter in the sense that if there’s something out there that brings value to and/or makes my life easier, I’m the first to get on-board, but if the value doesn’t continue, and/or the novelty wears off, then I’m moving on.

I’ll give some examples, YouTube when they first came online was pretty cool, and I enjoyed it. I also enjoyed that they were the first to make really wide use of the .FLV (Flash Video Compression format). However, after a while the content was just kind of so-so and I lost interest in general, daily usage. On the other hand, when I’ve needed to do home repairs, plumbing, electrical or otherwise, YouTube’s the first place I go, because they have some great tutorials. The service of being able to find home repair tutorials is awesome, but with sites with specific content of this kind like Expert Village, are YouTube’s days numbered? I don’t know. I guess I have a profound faith in Google’s ability to innovate and defy critics.

With Twitter it’s a little more complicated. I think that in certain situations Twitter is a great tool, and one that could also be very valuable. I think of the fact that much of the information that came out of the November 2008 Mumbai siege was done through Twitter, and many of the first reports of Scully’s skillful landing of US Airways 1549 on the Hudson River came from folks sending tweets via their blackberry’s and iPhones as they waited to board life rafts. As well, the Los Angeles Fire Department used Twitter to communicate during the October 2007 wildfires, and Twitter was also used to great success on the campaign trail during the 2008 elections by all parties for community organizing. However, with all of this said, I can’t think of a comparable model where a tool that you don’t pay for is used so freely. I could see Twitter being acquired into a mobile provider, or some kind of usage royalty being appended to a mobile bill, but as a stand-alone application, I just don’t see it yet.

With Facebook, there are many great aspects, but I just don’t see Facebook ever being monetized as a service. For instance, I like how I can send short message or just “poke” a friend to let them know I’m thinking about them, but don’t have anything to say to them. I like how you can publicize via your status your likes and dislikes. I like the in-window chat and the email functionality, but even with a very significant improvement on the MySpace model complete with Twitter-esque additions (in the redesigned Facebook), I just don’t see it making money. The subscription idea floats around, but I don’t see that ever taking off. There are other iTunes-esque ideas of tagging products and services with purchase options, but the logistic collaboration with more brick and mortar vendors and distributors would be a huge undertaking. Facebook has something, though; they’re different, and they just might be the Google of social networking, but that will remain to be seen.

Getting back to Dumenco’s article, I have to say that some of the best aspects of the Web are free. It’s always been challenging, and sometimes downright impossible, to monetize the Web. On Charlie Rose, a few months ago Marc Andreessen, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and board member for Facebook, said something that stuck with me, and I paraphrase ‘if you can get a million users, you have to be able to do something with them…’ Andreessen might be on to something, but it’s hard to know the future, and it’s even more difficult to know what people are willing to pay for on the Web. With a little luck one of these three organizations might just show us the way…

Alright, so the series seems to be taking off, see my last post here, because this morning, even with all the coffee in the world, I couldn’t shake the idea of talking about keywords.

Back in the pre-Google era SEO was wholly dependent on keywords, specifically, meta tags. Meta tags ruled; you could put them anywhere, but the head tag was where the most scrupulous Web master put them, as they would only be seen by bots, not humans; however, the system game approach was to put them EVERYWHERE… particularly, you would see them in the body of the Web page, dozens and dozens, sometimes hundreds of keywords that attracted the bots of the day to what may have amounted to one paragraph of content, that frequently wasn’t relevant, or had a page full of ads, or a link to an affiliate program or something… The search engine would get you to a page like this, but you would never come back, because it was a bust, a waste of time.

Enter the Google era… keywords still ruled, meta tags didn’t hurt, but wait there’s more! This is where the SEO content writer piece comes in that I talked about in the previous installment. As I said before, in the old days you just wrote and if the writing was good, and the site had a good search ranking over all (probably due to the intersection of keyword placement and keyword-infused content), it would probably get picked up, but Google changed the game; not only did you have to write good content, and have a pretty good ranking, but now a contributor to your ranking was indicated by folks who linked or referenced you, kind of an early form of the wisdom of the crowds, before the term had been established.

Keywords are still very important, but they play a slightly different role, or rather the writer has a slightly different role when it comes to the placement of the keywords in the narrative; I’ve found that there are two basic rules of thumb:

• Write good content
• Infuse good content with keywords

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, there’s no shortcut to getting a good search ranking, but these two rules greatly diminish the time it takes to get picked up. For instance, let’s look at this post. This post has numerous references to the terms: keywords, SEO and Google. These get the post half-way home as far as ranking is concerned, if someone happens to be looking for info on these items, but if people start to link to this page or reference it, Google will say, ‘hey, wait a minute, we need to give this page a higher ranking’… I can’t emphasize the two basic rules of content and keywords enough…

This is part 1 of an on-going, but not particularly linear, series on SEO.

The world of Web is steeped in jargon that leaves many entry-level common folk scratching their head first in wonder, then awe, and then irritation. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is one such term. There’s nothing particularly mysterious about SEO; you want folks to find your site, you need to get listed it in search engines, because that’s where people go to comb through the mass of data that is the Web. However, the problem begins when you get people gaming the system.

Case in point: A few months back I took an interest in doing some freelance music journalism on the Web. I did this in the last couple years of college (1999 – 2002ish). At the time I found that the Web was a burgeoning source of information that generally paid — bonus and bonus. So I decided that I would look into this again to exercise my writing skills and make some cash on the side. I have to tell you I was blown away to see that along with various writing requirements, you had to be versed in SEO content writing. Huh? What’s that? Of course I knew what that meant, but I was a little shocked to see that as a requirement for freelance music writers. I did a little research and found that there was a new breed of Web writer, SEO content writers (click here for a link to a quick Google search where I plugged in “SEO content writers”).

Back in the innocent days of my previous web content sojourn there was just writing, and if the site had a good presence, and the content was good, it would get picked up by search engines… that was also kind of the beginning of the Google search revolution… A different time to be sure, but this illustrated a significant change… Web content had grown up into a real and valuable thing, and this was an eye-opener for me.

So where am I going with this? Basically, in my professional life I can appreciate how one might like to fast-track their Google rankings with slick SEO styled content, but at the end of the day, that will only get people to your site, it won’t make them continue to come back. There’s no shortcut. If you want a site that brings people back time and again, there’s only tried and true way, and that’s to deliver valuable content on a continuous basis. This won’t only get people to your site; it will get people sharing the value that they’ve found on your site, which in turn could make your site more valuable than you ever imagined. More on SEO to come…