You can safely say that internet marketing in general is going through an important shift. The rules are being changed, the focus is changing. It seems as if finally marketeers start to understand that they are not just there to spit out messages to as many people as possible, hoping someone will pick it up. They are starting to realise they are working with humans. And Social Media and Search are playing a big role in this shift.

Of course the changes Google (and Bing as well) are currently making to how they work are playing a big role in the mindset of the users. Implementing the authorship markup and connecting social accounts to search results and personalising search as a whole are important elements that make marketers think more personal than they were used to in the past decade.

With this change it becomes more important to know who it actually is you are targeting. Which person is influential in a certain topic and even more important, who is connected to that person. Some online marketing tools act on that as well. Linkdex was the first to implement authorship in their tool. They gave you a nice overview of who writes about what topic, giving you an indication of where your targeting should go. But as Matt Roberts, the brains behind Linkdex, said in Iceland last week: that is just a list. We want to know a lot more. As Roberts puts it: we want to know who to take to lunch. (more…)