If you follow the stock market at all, you know that the ecosystem is quite interconnected with the Federal Reserve System, aka “The Fed”, playing a key role. Naturally since they can control both the money supply and the cost of money, it is something that the investment community is keenly interested in. Just so that all those assumptions that have gone into all of those investment models, don’t all come crumbling down at once, the investment community keeps a constant eye on The Fed.
But when you listen to the talking heads analyze every word and pause on the part of the Fed, trying to make something of it, things just seem to be getting carried away. As an example, CNBC mentioned that The Fed used the word “appropriate” 55 times in their latest minutes, compared to 16 times in the previous minutes. The analysis: The Fed may not know what it is going to do going forward.
What can you say? The Fed’s action have such strong potential to impact everyone’s behavior in the economy, that you could say there is a degree of over analysis that occurs here. But you have to ask yourself, does it make sense to dump your stock because The Fed used the word “appropriate” 55 times. Ok, I am being a bit facetious to make a point.
In the marketing world, there is a parallel to those Fed watchers. They are Google watchers. Where the focus on what and how Google acts is analyzed excessively. The danger is that we become too driven by an influencer’s behavior, rather than the behavior of the actual market constituents.
Going further with the analogy, The Fed evolves its decision making model based on continual and large amounts of data collection, analysis of what that data is telling them, and debate and discussion about what actions are needed to accomplish their continued goals. Not that different from Google, who continually acquires large amounts of data focused entirely on search behavior and patterns. With the strict goal of serving up answers to what individuals are searching for, Google also needs to evolve their model for the search engine results page. Just like The Fed, they don’t know how they are going to evolve their model, until they can decide on what the data is telling them.
Which is why it is important not to get over zealous about Google’s detailed behavior; just like it doesn’t make sense to over analyze every nuance we hear from The Fed. Whether it’s Panda, Penguin, or Hummingbird, those releases would be of keen interest if you were strictly an SEO company. But if you are solving a different set of problems for your customers, your focus must remain on those problems.
What is important is having pertinent data. Like Google and The Fed, your focus needs to be on continually collecting the data that shapes the behavior of your specific market. Experimenting with both questions and analyses than can provide more insight on how to shape not only your marketing strategy, but also your business strategy. This is the prime directive, whose outputs must bring you to a closer coupling with those that you seek to serve. Without you worrying too much about Google, Google will notice you more if you are effectively answering questions which your customers have.