LAST MONTH I WENT TO my 25th
high school reunion. It's fascinating to me that with very few
exceptions, people don't change a whole lot. The "cool" people
were still cool, and the nerdy ones had pursued a consistent
path as well. And my ultra-cool classmates were still so hip
that they didn't even show up. I have to admit to using my
search prowess to keep tabs on a handful of people that I grew
up with. Unlike decades past, it's fairly easy to track
someone's career online. In addition, tools like Google Images
can be particularly useful in advance of a reunion. The value,
though, is not just to stay abreast of the people that you see
every five years or so, but more importantly, the few you who
you learn are coming that you haven't seen in a decade or two.
The party was fun. Seeing that many
people who knew you when you hardly knew yourself, in such a
concentrated stretch of time, borders on a cosmic experience.
While speaking with my former classmates, the dialogue
transitioned from "Do you remember when" to "who else do you
keep in touch with?" then, lastly, the "what are you up to
now?" discussion.
I remember at my last reunion (2001) that
when the conversation circled around to "what I'm up to," the
typical reaction when I explained that I had a search engine
optimization business was somewhere between curiosity and
puzzlement. It was a totally esoteric concept to most of them,
largely removed from the better established verticals they
were operating in. The lawyers were wrapped up in their
practices, the real estate agents were prepping for the boom,
the doctors were curing people's ills, the actors were focused
on their lines, the stay-at-home moms (and dads) were busy
changing diapers, and the one "dot-commer" was stuck trying to
figure out what went wrong. Search just didn't register in a
quantifiable manner with most of my peers.
My experience a couple of weeks ago was
strikingly different. That's not to say that the concept (SEO
& SEM) was viewed as mainstream, but several people
elaborated on sites that they are involved with, and on more
than one occasion I could see that people understood enough to
be able to verbalize their frustration about a lack of
presence online--or to mention that they had some type of SEO
/SEM initiative in place that was working well.
I further confirmed a greater sense of
identification when the spouse of a classmate offered that he
only clicks on natural results and bypasses the paid ones
altogether. While I politely played devil's advocate in the
discussion that ensued, I was struck by the fact that I was
even having the conversation. Even stranger was the fact that
as we continued talking, others eased their way in and began
sharing their experiences and opinions as well.
The final twist to the story is that I
was contacted by the school a couple of months ago when its
Web coordinator heard about the services we offer. So, after
learning more about the school's state of affairs (no one has
ever attempted to optimize their site), we took on the project
as a pro-bono effort. It will be interesting to see if they
are effective at implementing the recommended changes.
Working in the trenches of the SEO/SEM
industry for the past seven years (or any industry, for that
matter) can make one susceptible to a loss of perspective. The
pace of the industry's growth is sometimes hard to appreciate.
Yet how many other industries have grown more impressively
over the past five years? Sometimes it takes an oddball event
like a high school reunion to help gain a better perspective
on things.
