Montreal Tech Watch

Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Optimization, aka SEO and SMO, are relatively new fields in marketing, and as such, are often overlooked by most people when launching a new service or a new product. I also know quite a handful of web people in Montreal who don’t understand SEO and see them as gimmicks designed to “fool” Google and other search engines, and as a consequence, are completely unnecessary if you have a good website.

Needless to say that these words come from engineers who believe in the motto “build it, and they will come”. For me, experience shows this motto is true but what’s also true is that this happens after a very long period of time. Marketing is then necessary to speed up adoption of your product or service, and also reach out more efficiently to potential users.

In Montreal, there seems to be now a very active community of people working in Internet marketing and “pushing the boundaries”. This is a topic I am interested in, however, this is not a topic I am looking into covering in MontrealTechWatch, due mainly to lack of time. If you want to keep track of this though, Nicolas Cossette runs a very good blog named Montreal Social Media. He covers this week the Third Tuesdays meetup, a gathering of social media practitionners. I also find interesting his monthly tracking of companies doing Internet Marketing in Montreal.

I find those reports excellent, and hopes he continues — I am looking for instance into more reports about blog and social media adoption in Quebec and in Canada.