In his post, Gab said that Web 2.0 appears to be causing a community-building trend amongst advertisers.  And then he said the following about the application of advertiser-community-building to SEO:

In case you couldn’t tell by the bolded text, that was the gargantuan-question-raising bit of Gab’s blog post.

I was under the impression that SEO was all about the search traffic.  Non-branded search traffic, that is.  So what does reducing my dependancy on search traffic mean when the reason my livelihood exists is due to the tremendous search volume for a specific keyword on, say…Google?  What is this reduced dependency on search traffic?  WHY ME??? (That last question wasn’t so relevant…it just sort of popped out…)

Back to the topic in hand…

I think what I’m getting from Gab (and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong here) is that he believes SEO is no longer SEO.  It is now…wait for it…almost there…online marketing!
Ouch?

The fact is, SEO has been trending in that direction for a good solid while now.  A couple of years ago it was all about the rankings.  The very scientific thought process went as follows:
“If I’m ranking for a keyword that I think is relevant (never mind the actual relevancy or search volume), I must be making money!”

And then the Lord spoke…and by “Lord” I mean your accountant…and he (or she) said as follows:
“By the way, website owner, you’re not making any money.”
And it was not good.

Thus SEO evolved, as do all things that eventually become good.  And then it was about rankings plus ROI - i.e. conversions.  Who CARES if you’re ranking for “induced endothelial dysfunction” - it has a monthly search volume of zero!  Definitively, marketing to an audience of zero is less then worthless - it costs money, which puts you on the negative side of worthless.

Having said all that, I still don’t entirely agree with Gab on his reduced dependency on search traffic theory.  Yes, building an online community that will cultishly have all of their online discussions via your company’s online platform is an ideal brand-building situation and should certainly be integrated as a goal of your online marketing strategy.  However, it should be done in tandem to and not instead of your SEO strategy.  Online marketing is a pretty broadly-defined term - it includes SEO, affiliate marketing, e-commerce…PPC, CPM…blah blah…technical online marketing jargon…

Having a well-rounded online marketing strategy as part of a well-rounded overall marketing strategy isn’t a bad thing - it’s quite the opposite, in fact.  Which just goes back to my point - Gab, I disagree with you.  You don’t want to reduce your dependency on search traffic - dropping that part of your marketing strategy would be a big mistake.  There is a dependency on search traffic because marketing depends on the people who are being marketed to (yes I just ended a sentence with a preposition).  And people in general are searching, which is the basis for SEO in the first place.  Maybe to some extent it depends on your vertical - “induced endothelial dysfunction” vs. “DIY home improvement”, for example.  But overall, wherever there is a topic of general interest, people are Googling it. (Binging it?  Nah…)

So by all means, build a community online - just don’t drop your SEO.  Your dependency on search traffic won’t be reduced - you’ll just lose the search traffic.