The Closing Of Market Smart Interactive (Re-Visited)

MarketSmart Interactive has closed it’s doors, kept a handful of staff, and rolled up into MarketSmart Advertising. This is a pretty big story considering MSI was heir to a respected seo/sem legacy from Keyword Rankings/Websourced. But the real story is the conversation going on about this in the b’sphere.

Seems as though MSI has been doomed for a while. Much of the top talent has been leaving the company for some time now. After a broad stroke layoff exercise at MSI this week, many bloggers and former employees (including top search talent like Andy Beal, Garret French, and Adam Shultz) started posting about all the talent that was now jobless.

This whole story is important for a few reasons…

Perfect example of blogging, a brand, business, and a human story coming together organically. This conversation is not a PR or marketing effort, it’s natural and it’s happening right now.

Perfect example of how an out of touch company can lose control of it’s identity. MSI was a titan of an SEO firm with respected talent, but most of the talk about the company got worse as years went on. Why did we only hear bad news for so long? Why was MSI so unusually silent about their problems and criticism?

Perfect example that talented bloggers can be the face of your company (if you have them). I have been reading many blogs of former MSI employees and didn’t even know it until I started tracking this story. I find all these bloggers to be more of an authority on search than the company they all came from.

Perfect example of sales side vs service side antics at a web/tech firm. Just read the comments.

BOTTOM LINE: Pay attention to the blogosphere. We have watched this company go slowly downhill for quite sometime. We have all seen former employees move on to better things (and followed them there). We have watched bloggers try to help laid off talent. We saw all this through the Internet, through blogs, through a virtual conversation. What did MSI see?

LINKS:

My del.icio.us tag roll for this story.

Evan K. Roberts- Why MSI/WEBSOURCED/KR failed