A Special Breed

Search marketers, like you and me, fancy ourselves as specialized marketers. A unique breed. A breed that’s primarily autodidactic, built on newborn technology and marketing principles. A breed of marketers that at once employs measurable metrics and, to quote Milton, trips the light fantastic around human search behaviors.

Search marketing itself seems capable of taking any degree and is able to incorporate that canon of knowledge into itself. Hell people, I’ve got a MA in Literature and Creative Writing. Nuff’ said, right? All search marketing asks is that you learn it and devote yourself to the knowledge of it.

It seems that universities still don’t quite understand that principle yet.

The Academic Injustice

The marketing students coming out of the universities today are singularly clueless about search marketing as a discipline, and even more clueless about the sub-disciplines that make up SEM. The marketing degrees awarded to kids today continue to hold the limelight on traditional marketing philosophies and strategies. Want an example? Harvard.

Harvard offers an Internet Marketing Strategies course but only as a graduate level course. Here’s more proof; try this query in Google: [site:.edu + undergraduate marketing degree + sem course]. Sure, there’s of plenty results, but there are only a handful of universities that actually provide any kind of search marketing, and mostly as an afterthought. One good ole’ “e-Marketing Fundamentals” course taught by some guy/gal who just surfs the web and steals strategies, ideas, philosophies from our blogs for their curriculum.

It’s About Time for Inclusion

I think it’s about time that someone taught these kids what search marketing is all about. How long do legitimate universities really believe they can keep ignoring this subject? Pretending and insisting the “internet fad” will just go away? A course about “e-Marketing” isn’t going to cut it any longer. Whether they believe it or not, these universities are crippling their students when they finally make it into the “real world”. News flash Bub, traditional marketing tactics need search and online strategies more than ever.

Every traditional agency on the planet is hooking up with a web firm, hiring “search directors”, or building their own (don’t laugh) in-house teams to service the demand and need for search marketing strategies. To shove these kids out the door with absolutely no knowledge about the integration, and dare I say dominance of search in a marketing strategy, is not only damaging to their careers, but brazenly ignorant.

Go Ahead, Turn off the Lights

In fact, you should just keep ignoring search marketing. Because what I’m really asking for is more competition in the market place. Just turn off the lights and sit in a corner with your decrepit, old text books. Why students haven’t filled out their alumni surveys and taken a nice bite out the administration’s butt is beyond me? Believe me, this is a selfish act on my part.

I want the universities to teach these kids about search and online marketing because it’ll help to legitimize and establish what has recently been ousted from the “fringe” of marketing tactics. It’s only been a couple of years since search has been recognized as an essential part of the overall marketing strategy and started eating up companies budgets. Prior to that, it was only something “forward-thinking” companies participated in (and doing it badly as well).

Creating the Found Search Marketing Generation

It’s not exactly as if this is a new marketing strategy. Search folks have been at this for close to 15 years; it’s safe to say it’s not a fad trend any longer. There are conferences, lots of conferences, devoted to search marketing. There are lots of bright, intelligent folks from every discipline of search marketing that could help you build a curriculum. Hire us. We’ll teach you everything you’d need to know.

Heck, some of us would probably even teach a few courses and take office hours. :-) I’m not saying that search marketing has to be a degree on its own, but it does have to be heavily integrated in to a marketing degree.

More than just a class about what e-Commerce is and some high-level theories. As institution preparing kids to contribute to society with a skill set, it’s damn near criminal that search marketing and online marketing tactics and theories are not included as a main staple in university marketing degree curriculum.

The 1980’s have come and gone, marketing is at a new level. Step out of your ivory towers and come play with us down here in the search marketing soup.

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