"Inbound Marketing will destroy SEO".

If, like me a few months ago, the sentence above might as well be written in Swahili, then it's worth spending some time thinking about what new media is doing to marketing. SEO, or search engine optimisation is dead?! Many marketers don't even realise it's alive! In the companies I've worked in, thinking about the mechanics of how to get found on the internet was at best someone else's job, and at worst not done at all. I'd always thought that skipping a generation of a technology happened mostly where rolling out an obsolete, expensive infrastructure didn't make sense - think mobile phones vs landlines in Africa for example. Now I find myself contemplating skipping a generation of marketing!

"Outbound marketing" is the company talking to, or even at, the customer; telling them about you, your products, your channels. Pretty much everything that I was taught a few years ago made up marketing goes in this pot - PR, advertising, direct mail, email etc. "Inbound marketing" is "a set of marketing strategies and techniques focused on pulling relevant prospects and customers towards a business and its products" (Hubspot). That doesn't tell you much, but if you check out the Hubspot blog you'll find out a lot more http://blog.hubspot.com/.

I've caused some hilarity today by bragging my fantasy baseball results on Facebook (company I'm working for at the moment has online fantasy sports products), but it all our users were doing this, it would definitely have a great effect in getting known. And if your product is an engaging social game, then being able to brag is excellent for the customer experience! The customer wants to shout about their success to the world, at the same time publicising your product. Key to this is the social bit, so what if you're selling drill bits? How do you get your customers blogging about your new bit that can drill square holes? How do you get your customers to tweet about the amazing demo that your staff gave of drilling through the yellow pages? And who on earth is blogging about drill bits anyway?

Are you an in(bound), or an out(bound) marketer? And can you do both?