After a few presentation glitches, Stafford immediately started his presentation by saying that marketers should take every opportunity to engage with consumers online.
In a nutshell, he covered the following
- online is supplementary to everything you do in marketing
- online allows you to engage with consumers directly
- online allows you to generate content more easily
- consumers have never been more powerful all because of freely available tools on the net
For Google two things matter most
- Moment of Relevance – it has a search aspect to it – search results at the right time – ads displayed at the right time
- Consumer Generated Content or End-User Generated Content – monetization prospects are huge
One example of User Generated Content is YouTube
- youtube makes up 14% of ZA’s traffic
- youtube makes up 12% of worldwide traffic
- 13 hours of video get published to YouTube every minute of every day
- 4th largest site in the world
End-user generate content is HUGE – over 86% of all internet traffic in the world is people giving content and not taking.
The driver of this is that people want to generate content, want to blog, want to engage, want to share, want to upload pictures, videos, etc and it is not stopping.
Another example of consumer generated content is CNN’s iReport – up to date news as it happens. People submit “home videos” to CNN that are low quality but more relevant, more real, unedited, unfiltered.
Everything that happens offline goes online. iReport is a perfect example of this. Another example is the xenophobia attacks that happened recently. To understand and get more information on this, consumers searched for this in Google – Stafford mentioned that 35 million searches were done in just 3 hours on the search term “xenophobia”.
People want to have information immediately and the quickest way is by turning to the Web. Marketers should capatalize on this by either engaging directly through various channels including video (YouTube), maps, mobile (mobile ads and universal seach results), etc and present relevant content, when required.
For Google, the Moment Of Relevance is essential when delivering results. This should be used on your site or blog and integrated into your marketing initiatives.
Finally, I’ll leave you with 5 key principles that Stafford mentioned that is most inportant for Google.
- Simplicity
- Speed
- Relevance
- Agility
- Verbosity
Further to the above Stafford covered much of what I’ve blogged about on two previous occasions which will give you a lot of information. Please read Stafford Masie Presents Google South Africa’s Hot New Trends and Google’s Stafford Masie presents to Lowe Bull Group



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