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People Are the Brand

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In an interesting case of ‘people as brands’, and employees walking out the door, Danny Sullivan, the founder of Search Engine Watch (SEW), and a pioneer of the search engine news scene, is starting up shop across the road. On December 11th, Danny, along with Chris Sherman (his long time No. 2 man), and Barry Schwartz (another big name in web search), will be starting Search Engine Land.

This site is sure to be a great resource for anyone interested in search engines, or web marketing generally, but the interesting thing to me is how the loss of these three big names will likely crush the SEW brand. If you’re interested in some of the background, Danny’s post announcing his leaving SEW back in August will help. That he’s starting a new blog/business is no surprise. I think most insiders could see that coming. That SEW didn’t offer ‘the world’ to Chris & Barry (or another big name) to pick up the pieces is a bit confusing, and probably bad business.

To bring this back to a legal focus, this trend of ‘people being the brand’ is nothing new for law firms. The gain or loss of prominent practices has always had a huge impact on the business. I have to wonder though, in this ‘attention economy’, how the building of online profiles will effect the direction of marketing efforts & new business initiatives. Quite a few firms are using the web to build up their key people. In some cases, in a fraction of the time it has taken more senior practitioners to do the same. When these people become acquisition targets (and I think they will…), are we going to see seismic power shifts online?

I get the feeling we’ve only seen the start of the attention economy in the legal industry.

Comments

  1. Simon Fodden
    November 17th, 2006 at 2:08 pm

    Those who want more on Danny Sullivan and his recent move can read more in the notes on Sullivan’s recent keynote talk on Search Engine Roundtable.

  2. David Temple
    November 17th, 2006 at 5:43 pm

    Danny Sullivan certainly has don a great job at personal branding. Although I’ve followed Danny since 2000 I really didn’t get his genius until I wrote an article for Andy Beal’s SEM Scholarship contest. My first paragraph says it all and my practical tip encourages everyone to read Search Engine Land.

    Back in the 20th century Danny Sullivan, a guy who seems to get ‘it’ long before most of us know what ‘it’ is, wrote about sem seo certification in an article entitled “Promoters Call For Certification”. In that article he describes an open letter from Beyond Interactive, Mercury Seven, US Web and Web Ignite to the major search engines. These four firms were calling for the establishment of a certification program for optimization professionals from the search engines. After Danny gave his reasons why he believed certification wouldn’t be viable, he added, “Given this, it may make sense for the major search engines to consider experimenting with the GoTo model and accept paid links, especially for competitive terms.”

    Practical tip #1 – Whenever Danny Sullivan speaks, listen, whatever he writes, read.

  3. Connie Crosby
    November 18th, 2006 at 12:33 am

    Great tie-in to the legal market, Steve. Conversely, for those firms that subvert the individuals and sell “The Firm”, is there room for individual voices such as with blogs in the marketing plan?