Confusion is when everyone can sense something is happening though no one canmake sense of what is happening. On web, one willfind endless commentariessurrounding and augmenting this confusion. So where doesthe clutter end andmessage emerge. With this “ZMOT Thought‐Paper” I amjuxtaposing the currently visible piecesto give you a broad sense ofthe emergingmarketing landscape with special emphasis on searchmarketing. Whoever needsto be “Firstto Future”will have to startlooking beyond the horizon to anticipate “down the road scenery”. So in this attemptto presage the future, perforce, I will be painting the scenery with broad brush strokes.We willfill in the fine details, with time, asthey becomemore visible

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Introduction
Confusion is when everyone can sense something is happening though no one can make sense of what
is happening.
On web, one will find endless commentaries surrounding and augmenting this confusion. So where
does the clutter end and message emerge.
With this “ZMOT Thought‐Paper” I am juxtaposing the currently visible pieces to give you a broad sense
of the emerging marketing landscape with special emphasis on search marketing. Whoever needs to be
“First to Future”will have to start looking beyond the horizon to anticipate “down the road scenery”.
So in this attempt to presage the future, perforce, I will be painting the scenery with broad brush
strokes. We will fill in the fine details, with time, as they become more visible.
So what the heck is happening?
In marketing world, what we are up to,is what Nicholas Nissam Taleb Calls a Black Swan (BS) event. A
black swan event is a statistician’s nightmare for it is a global event and changes the long term averages
of the attributes, unpredictably. The scenario after the black swan is dramatically different thanthe
circumstances leading to it. A statistician is happy with his world schema of bell curves, mean and
standard deviation and a prediction based on those and then comes an unpredictable massive black
swan, which turns this whole model upside down.
Examples of black swan (BS) events in other domainsare : Asteroid hitting earth 66m years ago (
biological evolution BS), printing press invention in 1439 by Gutenberg (human cultural evolution BS),
New York stock market crash of 1929 ( commercial BS), terrorist attacks of 9/11in New York ( warfare
and homeland security BS) . As you will notice some BS are immediate while some are temporally
stretched.
Marketing World seems to be pregnant with its own Black Swan.
It is anybody’s’ guess how long will the pregnancy last before the BS delivery finally happens. My
guess is that it should take anywhere between 2‐4 years for the entire sequence of events to play
out and the marketing black swan to land.

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So what is this MBS (Marketing Black Swan)?
Lets start talking about the MBS with a small tale. I am a great fan of Mughal King Akbar’s court jester,
Birbal, for his wit and his practical wisdom.
So as the episode goes, this once, Akbar challenged his courtiers, to make a line drawn on ground
smaller, without erasing it. Everybody was stumped. If you have to make a line smaller you obviously
have to temper it. Birbal thought for a while and then simply drew a bigger line next to the smaller one.
So given the context, the existing line became smaller.
I think with search marketing,that bigger line is getting drawn. Search is finding its context in the overall
marketing universe. It is integrating with other marketing activities that a company does.
This convergence will have major implications for both search as well as traditional
advertising/marketing for most companies. Nothing hereafter will exist in silos. It will be one big joint
convergent reality. Search will have to integrate with conventionalmarketing, as traditional marketers
will have to absorb search. The yin will become the yang as yang will flip back to being the yin. What
will emerge out of this elemental convergence is a new reality which marketers have yet not planned
for. That new reality will be the Marketing Black Swan (MBS)
Much like a chemical reaction, where two elements catalyze each other to produce an entirely new
compound (Na +2 Cl = NaCl2) , the new marketing equation looks like (Brand + Search + Sales+ CRM =
Convergent Marketing). This integrated marketing will be a unique beast with elements of all four of its
genetic parents.
To belabor this point, NaCl or common salt is a unique compound (with its unique taste and properties)
and is not separable into its constituents, Na and Cl. Likewise, an individual is a person with unique
attributes and is not reducible into his fathers or mothers genetic code. He is an emergent whole not
separable into his constituent parts. Similarly the newconvergence marketing will not be separable into
search or brand or sales constituents. It will be a unique integrated effort. Lets just call it ZMOT ( zero
moment of truth )Marketing.
So the counter for this MBS of Marketing elemental convergence is ZMOT marketing. I will be putting
out separate white papers on what exactly is ZMOT and the strategies for winning the ZMOT marketing
game from various perspectives, however the thrust of this thought paper is how will search be
effected by the MBS of convergence.

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So how are the market constituents reacting to this MBS?
Every fact in its infancy is a gossip.
Matt Cuttssays: think of new SEO as search experience optimization. I couldn’t agree more.
What he doesn’t say, given Google’s typical equivocation and poor confession record, is to think of new
SEO as just one of the options (though important) of reaching to your potential customers. He would of
course not openly agree to Google’s monopoly on marketing being challenged by the change in overall
marketing ecology.
Likewise most of the marketers do not yet understand or are under‐estimating, how majorly Search
Marketing and for that matter traditional marketing is shifting. They sense the convergence without
being able to map the pollination process. They are confused and hence totally oblivious to this
unfolding Black Swan.
When the MBS finally lands completely, it will be then that most marketers and marketing companies
will be running to re‐define their presence and procedures. To my mind most of the traditional search
marketing companies as well as PR and brand marketing companies, will face very strong adaptation
pressures. They will be forced to choose between reengineering or death. It is just a matter of time.
The writing is on the wall. People are just not literate yet.
Hey lets take it one step at a time. What is the next turn for
search?
If I was to consult my crystal ball for 2013,.what do I see for search marketing as a part of this
cataclysmic ecological change. I would say that, the eye of the SEO storm, which was kicked up in
2012, is yet to find a landfall.The winds last year were strong but they have still not reached their
climax. Their intensity and impact on how new SEO is to be done will reach its climax somewhere
in mid or late 2013 when Google would have rolled out 2‐3 additional and major updates. It is
then that the true picture of new SEOor its reincarnated Avatar “ZMOT marketing” will emerge. It
is then that the black swan will start to cause maximum adaptation pressure and when people will

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need maximum guidance on the new reality.
Though the big picture of search is being put together in Google/Facebook labs, yet the smaller pieces
are unmistakably there and are revealing clues of signs of times to come.
Now lets talk about some of the specific changes that I see happening in this year. I have categorized
the changes into two parts: the first order changes are those, which have immediate and ready
visibility. The second order changes are diffused and derived. I will be covering the first order changes
in some detail here and will hint at the others for a future coverage.
Search Marketing ( 1st
Order Changes):
1) The overall direction of Google algo shift that is semantic is accelerating. Google is internally
trying to execute schemas around concepts and entities. It is trying to organize its database into
categories and ontologies so that it can answer the queries not on exact word matches but user
intent. In plain English it is trying to move from keyword search to concept search. The algo is
becoming intelligent and not blindly following machine based rules.
An apt analogy for semantic search is how a small child learns language usage properly. Initially
he gets only the literal meaning of the words. When you tell him/her one cannot “close your
eyes” to change, he will think it means physically closing your eyes to a change. Only when he
becomes intelligent about linguistics andsymbolic processing does he realize that closing your
eyes represents a concept. It means not taking stock of the change or being blind to the
change. So as a mark of intelligence he has moved from words to their meaning. Cognitively he
has moved from a keyword match to a concept match.
Google is doing a similar migration. It is trying to map its results to user meanings and not to
their used keywords. Though it does not have a full schema (they call it the knowledge graph)
to map all words to their meanings however they have it in some domains (details of existing
schema categories with Google are available on www.freebase.com ). However a full semantic
search looks like to be about 5 years away.
2) Google algorithm is getting increasingly fragmented. There are clearly multiple algorithms
handling multiple categories of search queries. Where they can, they are using schema or
semantic search (intelligent algo), otherwise they are doing global search (based on site
authority) or local search ( based on geographical relevance)
3) The 200+ ranking variables are getting redefined to include social, sales and brand signals apart
from the traditional content and citation signals. Overall the 200+ signals are getting broad
based to cover your entire sales funnel. A tentative breakup of the signals might look like:
30 variables from your branding efforts.
50 variables from your social engagement efforts and CRMexperience of people.

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20 variables from your geography and other local efforts.
50 variables from your content authority.
25 variables from your dissemination authority
25 variables from your site analytics and technical features.
This is Google’s’ algorithmic version of the oncoming convergence or the marketing black swan.
Lets pause to examine some of the implications of this for businesses who employ search
marketing:
You will not be good in search marketing if you are not good in your, brand
engagement efforts (positioning, brand loyalty) for you are un‐optimized on 30
variables.
You will be un‐optimized for 50 variables if your social media marketing does not
engage or attract, reviews, likes, followers.
You will not rank for non‐branded keywords if you are not good with your overall sales.
They are factoring in the site bounce rate, shopping cart abandonment, as some of the
ranking signals as your 25 variables based on site analytics. These are clearly down‐line
sales funnel signals and suggest entire online sales funnel integration into the ranking
metric.
4) Apart from getting a wider footprint, with the 200+ ranking variables, these variables are also
getting interlinked (Correlated) in new ways. This new inter‐relations will make them
qualitatively better as ranking signals and hence difficult to spam.What this means is that these
variables are no longer stand alone variables but will exist in sets. You cannot optimize them
individually but you will have to optimize the entire set.
For example one set might have five signals from one algo category(content), two from another
algo category(citation), seven from another algo category( social media). Now there are
hundreds of ways of defining these sets and also there can be hundreds of sets. Think 200 C n (
as was taught in college probability class) as a possibility.
These sets are not static but will be generated on the fly. The particular dynamic set
permutations that will be runwill depend on which part of fragmented algo is running for which
query. A semantic algo will create different settopology from these 200+ variables than the set
selection of a local search query. So the same data of 200+variables will be analyzed in different
ways depending on the context.
Some of the new emerging co‐relates in this scenario are:
Content quality is being linked to author reputation.
Citation score (off page) is getting co‐related between link pop and buzz pop.
Keyword focus (in url, anchor, navigation) is being linked to spam.
So points 3& 4 put together suggest that overall, the 200+ ranking variables are getting re‐

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jigged both for their wider coverage and for their deeper inter‐relation.
Global Marketing Convergence( 2nd
Order)
Impact on Buyers and Consumers:
5) Globally user behavior is shifting. People are ZMOTing more before buying. I see this trend to
continue and escalate with mobile devices becoming the preferred means of web access.
6) People are increasingly able to do what they do in real world. Ask other people. So they are
relying on that (Social) than just asking a machine algorithm (Google) about their needs.
Facebook had to come up with a social search to congeal this trend. It has.
Impact On Traditional Marketers:
7) Offline Brands will need to create similar brand experience for users online if they are to survive
in the physical world. Physical world and web world are converging for brand marketers.
8) Search Is getting a ZMOT fitment. Its importance is getting redefined in the overall marketing
portfolio. It is becoming 1 of the resources being referenced in the 10 resource reference of
ZMOT cycle.
9) Point of sales marketers will have to contend with ZMOT impact as ZMOT and FMOT are
converging.
10) A business’ CRMs is also becoming a part of its marketing portfolio. So the SMOT is also
converging with the ZMOT. This convergence means that anything that the company does in
the entire brand lifecycle will be a part of the ZMOT.

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In Conclusion
All this means that the divide between search companies and traditional marketing companies will
disappear in future and their activities will converge. Every marketing company will have to make a play
for the ZMOT. The early bird prize for ZMOT marketing is however still available. In ZMOT marketing,
unlike social get togethers, you would actually want to be the first person who reaches the party.
As for the business and their marketers, the black swan of convergence means, that each marketing
piece of their business, be it brand, search, social, POS, CRM is getting tied up with one string and will
get subsumed into one emergent reality at the ZMOT. That’s their defining moment of truth.
How to win the ZMOT is a billion dollar question for businesses and marketers. Only, openness to
learning, crafting smart strategiesand timewill answer that for us.
About Media Mosaic
Media Mosaic(2M) is an Integrated ZMOT ( Zero Moment Of Truth) agency, specializing in creating
unique campaigns, to help you WIN@ZMOT.
When you hire us as your online marketing agency, we bring an extensive knowledge of buyer
demographics and their buying behaviors. This helps us to strategize your online marketing campaign
for maximal ROI. We achieve the defined objectives, by mounting research based and interlocking,
Branding, Content, Search and Social Media marketing activities. Contact us for a free “WIN@ZMOT
with 2M” campaign consultation today.