Happening in NYC: Open-Architecture for Intellectual Capital.

The beauty of a level playing field.

“Open Architecture” is known in tech circles as a computer / software architecture that is designed to make adding, upgrading and swapping out components easy. The terms became popular back in the 1980s mainly used to describe systems based on UNIX - versus more entrenched mainframes and minicomputers that were popular back then.

Unlike older “legacy systems” this new generation of UNIX systems featured standardized programming interfaces and

Historic IBM view on computer operating systems.

peripheral interconnects, and third party development of hardware and software flourished as a result. This was the genesis of the technology boom to a large degree. Large firms like IBM resisted this trend for decades – insisting customers “be careful about getting locked into open systems.” They later changed their stance on the issue.

The same “closed” approach to overall business practices has been around NYC for decades. If you wanted knowledge or expertise in most business disciplines from marketing or financial services to law or technology one needed to be prepared to pay handsomely for it.

But there is a trend underway in NYC sparked to a large degree by the “Silicon Alley” tech sector – and that is an “open” approach to sharing experience and intellectual capital for free, exemplified by the growing popularity of “Meet-Up” groups such as Matt Turck's amazing "Hardwired NYC" and the ‘’NY Tech Meet-up” where all sorts of people share what they’ve learned in business and engage in lively discussions with the audience. Free food and drinks are usually thrown in for good measure.

Global PR giant WeberShadwick has boldly broken the “closed model” mold of charging for sharing intellectual capital with its new “Data Salon” monthly event series. It started the salons earlier this year in conjunction with NYC based Data Consultancy Blue Water Labs. Each month they invite leaders from various areas of digital marketing and data to speak, start conversations and share ideas in an open forum.

Visual representation of the traffic impact of a new Google Algorithm update.

This week’s event featured Glenn Gabe – President of G-Squared Interactive LLC based in Princeton, NJ. Glenn’s business is focused on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Paid Search, Social Advertising, and Web Analytics – now a multi-million dollar business arena.

The presentation focused on the pitched battle going on in “organic search” every day – pitting Google against SEO agencies and marketers who are trying to “game the system” and outsmart Google’s algorithms to boost organic search results.

Glenn Gabe of G-Squared.

Glenn gave a fascinating overview of Google’s algorithm updates such as Panda and Penguin, their “manual actions” and review process for firms acting as “black hats” using web-spam to artificially boost search generated web traffic and the resulting e commerce. Many of his insights are shared weekly on his blog The Interactive Marketing Driver - a great read.

His message got the audience thinking about website content quality, webspam, unnatural links, and webmaster guidelines now before any risky tactics might be employed that can get a firm in trouble. Getting in hot water with Google can kill off a website’s organic search web traffic in no time flat. He provided some scary examples of this happening to unsuspecting web marketers when Google “lowered the boom” on them for unsavory SEO practices.

He shared his experiences of talking to hundreds of firms that have been blind-sided by Google’s algorithm updates or manual actions simply because they never thought about the repercussion of their tactics, didn’t understand Google’s stance on webspam or the various algorithm updates it was creating.

Glenn strongly recommended sticking to the basics of having a sound brand value proposition and consistently creating / placing high quality content as the best way to foster healthy organic search traffic vs. trying to “game the system” in any way.

While lots of what he talked about was frankly over my head from a tech / SEO standpoint – the evening was amazingly enlightening. This event was a good example of an established communications company taking a page from the new tech-driven “open” business approach to sharing intellectual capital - and running with it quite successfully.