Search vs. Permission Marketing

There's been a lot of talk about Search, Search as the Command Line, and Vertical Search as the evolution of search.  In the past, permission marketing was the idea of the moment.  Of course, as the title of post implies, I'm setting up a conflict between the two.   Is that real?  Only in terms of share of attention.  My point in this post is that, as much as new ideas are exciting, it's important to understand their context and how they apply to your business.

Here is Fred Wilson's post on why he invested in Indeed.com.  It's long, but Fred highlights an important point for this discussion:

"In our due diligence, we talked to these employers. They don’t really want to list their jobs in newspapers, job boards, or anywhere other than their website because that’s where they want to collect the resumes. What employers want is the ability to buy traffic to their website, and direct it to the jobs they most want to fill. And they want to buy that traffic on a paid for performance basis, not a fixed price basis."

This leaves out a crucial part of the online job business: subscriptions to the resume database.  The resume database is where companies go when they can't find qualified candidates.  Often, HR people will go there directly and not bother to post a job on the job board, because of some of the issues raised by Fred above.  The step up from the resume database, of course, is the all-to-familiar headhunter.  Headhunters have existed for years, and vertical search doesn't seem to be putting them out of business.   So what gives here?

As I see it, many of the vertical markets are splitting into services that broker transactions and services that create transactions.  The brokering, in my parlance, brings active buyers / seekers and active sellers / listers together.  This is Indeed.com and others.  The creating, again, my parlance, takes people who aren't sure they're looking / buying and brings them to sellers / listers.  This is true of personals - I'm not really interested in dating right now, but if you introduced me to someone who I really clicked with, I'd go out with them - to jobs (I've got a good spot right now, but if you can double my salary and give me a better title, let's talk) - to retail (I'm not sure I want to buy anything, but that's just the cutest / coolest _____, and at that price!  I have to get it.)

 

This isn't browse vs. search.  This is permission marketing vs. behavioral targeting.  This is being able to elicit user desires up front, refining your understanding of those desires through usage data, then marketing to those desires over time.  Versus eliciting an explicit query right now and driving the user to the best offer so that a transaction can be completed most efficiently. 

 

Both ideas - permission marketing and behavioral targeting - are valid and important.  It's important to iunderstand where your competition is going in this space, and where your strengths are.  Look at the LinkedIn / SimplyHired deal - an interesting example of how the two different, but inextricably linked, ways of approaching the market can be put together.