One - On - One with gillian muessig, president of seomoz

Welcome back to online marketing TV, we are here with Gillian Muessig. Gillian, welcome. Welcome, thanks. So, talk to us, who is this woman Jillian, SEO mom? What's the background? Give us the quick Jillian story, if you will. I am literally and figuratively SEO mom. I'm Rand Fishkin's mother. I'm also Evan Fishkin's mom. He's the head of R&D now at Slingshot SEO, so he's a practitioner at SEOmoz, is the now world's largest manufacture of search marketing software. Very cool. So what's the story? How did you and your son get into this whole business of SEO? I opened up a company in 1981, because I was glorified unemployed. I was a consultant. But by the time you're saying bye-bye on the telephone, you need to talk to something that's more than 2 years old Right. So I opened a company, and I also figured if I had these kids, well, the heck with it, you might as well be with them. So I packed those kids with me, and I raised them under my desk ask. The youngest will tell you the color of the blanket he slept on, so I'm talking literally. Rand joined the company in 1997. As the kids grew, the company grew a bit but it was a traditional marketing company, so a lot of print media, very small company, don't do a lot of tv or radio when you do that. Yeah. And I was fortunate to become involved with Market Link International. It was the first international commerce center on the World Wide Web in 1993. Wow, way back then. We were so full of ourselves. We scanned business cards in full color, and we bought there on that fresh new web. It was a lot of fun. I spent a lot of money, I didn't make any money on that one, but I got involved early, and that was great and I was really smitten by the web, so I stayed there. Love it. Goes to show, just a little side point, is that you make mistakes early and fast, and then you get to the success. You don't always make money just you spend money. I love it. That's right. I spent an awful lot before I made any money. Happens to all of us, right? But I know lots of mistakes, and some of those mistakes perhaps because it was family where I hadfaith in the kid, and I didn't want to shut him down, and I knew sooner or later he'd have a really good idea. That's good. So that's okay too. In '97 he joined the company started by making websites, it was kind of the old book game. Why do you want to buy a book. Well, why do you want to buy a website, why do you want to buy a better one? We've got Flash now and then it was needed. Well, the search engine showed up, and it became evident that that's the way the pages of the web would be put together. So now, everybody wanted to buy a different website because Flash doesn't get read So we went through all of that. But in 2001 when the dot com bust happened basically, nobody wanted to buy a website for a lot of money. Yeah, that's true. So we looked at e-commerce work and people said I don't have capital expenditure, I have operating budget. You bring me a dollar, I'll bring you a quarter off the dollar. There you go. That meant that we designed, authored, developed, marketed, managed, maintained and deployed these websites for nothing. If they made a buck, we would make a dollar, right? We could take a corner off that dollar. That's fine, but it had to be found on the web. That wasn't work that we did, so no problem you pull out the credit card with money you don't have and you farm that out again. companies that could not do it. And that's what caused Rand to finally learn it. And he learned it extremely well, as you know. Obviously, right. We became very well known consultants actually, and it was difficult to shut down the consulting, because that had become quite lucrative. But it was evident that software was the way to go. We wanted to build a smaller company with a recurring revenue stream, rather than expanding through people. And if you're a consultant, you must only expand through people. Yep. Turn to that, shut down consulting, we haven't done that for about five years now. Now that, now you are the premeir software. A vendor in SEO That's right. Brand is the technologist, he is the CEO and I'm, you know, put out the past. My job is corporate evangelism. My job is to make sure the right thing is destitution instead of flt. But you're definitely going to pass the torch to one of your own children right? That's true. I always say best tip in business, you raise your CEO first. You know the mettle of what you have. And the legacy continues and it's great and I think the story is so great from so many angles. From you guys listening to the market, following the market, not trying to create a market and determine what the market needs, and build products and service around that. And then just allowing some of the entrepreneur spirit to ingrain in how you made money. For all those people who have their own consultancies or small agencies, I think just it's such a smart thing to say hey, let's not force feed what we think we are today but let's execute on what we know and keep learning what our customers want and allow us to evolve. Because I think so many changes even now, from social, to mobile, to geolocal and everything else; much more room to grow into for every one of those folks out there. This is a very new industry. Remember it didn't exist before the search engines existed, so that's really what, less than 20 years ago, as a result, we're still building an industry, we're not building companies that are competitive landscapes yet. It's an extraordinary place to be. We're very fortunate to be here, all of us, in search. Search is becoming much more than just a CO, as you know. Many of your other talked about that. Inbound Marketing is a new name for it, or Earned Media Marketing. Yeah. All of these language pieces around it it's a larger landscape, and as it becomes larger, even more companies have a space to play. Yeah. So I would agree with you on that. I know that there are visionaries in this world Like Steve Jobs for example, who would never think about looking at the marketplace and saying where do we go next. He did not listen to the marketplace, he told the marketplace. Yeah. what it wanted and what it couldn't live without, right? Right. And so we all stand online for things like iPhones and so on. I mean, extraordinary stuff, right? But he knew. There are very few such who really know in advance of what the world, you know, knows what it wants and so on. So I would suggest you're right, that most of us should be looking at the marketplace, finding those holes and niches right now, and if we can't see quite so deeply into the veil as somebody like Steve Jobs could, surely there's a huge amount of stuff that we can fill today. So, innovation is the way to go. expansion is the way to go. Leveraging into new countries and into new languages is a great way to go. And of course all these new tools and toys. What's market. We're kind of in that big *** space where it's not a matter of finite market share because it's growing so fast. That's right. And if everybody can just keep playing in that game I think there's a lot more to be done there. Talk be about what you see as to be some of the game-changing tactics that are really separating those that are doing SCO, for example, well, versus those that are just doing it okay, kind of the Jim Collins good to great. What are some of the great things that people are leveraging to take that competitive edge to the next level? Okay. I would say that I think the focus is on a broader discussion, a deeper discussion about what it is that drives marketing itself. And I covered some of that today in this concept of brand communities. When the personal values meet the corporate marketplace and there is no schism between the two you build communities around that brand that goes beyond liking Coca-Cola or enjoying that product. It's a community that speaks among themselves about you. So communities are not very interesting or social media groups are not very interesting if you speak to them. It's also not very interesting if they're speaking back to you. When they start talking to eachother not just about you, about life itself. Right. Right. Then you have a community that is just unstoppable. There you go. The secret, I hear you say, is when you can facilitate the conversation amongst people, not between the organization and those people you've really got a community of which you can capture so much more gain in market share. That's right. When you become the platform on which the conversation happens, that's when you win. Ala Facebook and some of what you guys are doing on Seomoz for sure, right? Absolutely, regardless of the platform that you're using, whether it was LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, your own websites and so on. It's your brand that is essentially hosting the conversation. Got it. When people come towards you in order to make that conversation happen, that's when you win. Cool. Great piece of advice. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. We'll hopefully have you back soon. All right.