May 2006 Entries

It's been a few days without a post, so I thought I'd get a quick one in tonight before I call it a night. I'm in Montreal for the InfoPresse Search Marketing Event (catch my Search Insider this week for more adventures from Old Montreal) and as luck would have it, happened to see an article from MarketingSherpa about how wired Canadians are. I've been trying to tell people this for years. I read somewhere that Canadians were the best shoppers in the world. We research more before the purchase than anyone else. We also have more broadband penetration than the US. Add this up and it seems like a match made in heaven for search marketing, but Canadian business has been slow to jump on the bandwagon. The big brands are either not present in search at all, or are just toying with it. The good news is that Canadians marketers are beginning to wake up, as was seen by high interest rates at SES Toronto and at today's event in Montreal.

Well, I've got an early flight tomorrow, and it's almost midnight, so I'll cut this short. Just wanted to thank Thomas Gobeil at Infopresse for the invite. The city was amazing and I'd love to come back. Thanks to all who attended the session as well and who bore with me through my acute unilingualism. Also had a chance to meet Mitch Joel from Twistimage and had a spirited discussion about "melt your brain" ideas that keep us both up at night. Check out Mitch's blog. And thanks to Jonathon Markoff from Acquisio for the conversation over dinner. A great visit, all in all!

 

In the past week I've read a number of articles precipitated by Google's move to show video ads across their network. The introduction of video to online seems to be heralded as "the next big thing" by almost everyone, and I admit I've taken a turn on that particular band wagon.

Yet, this weekend, I pondered the nature of our engagement with online video and find it wanting in many respects. Why? The particular event that triggered this train of thinking was my trying to watch the documentary "Loose Change" on my computer. If you haven't seen the video, it's a Michael Moore-ish type investigation of the events of 9/11. Whether you believe it or not, there's little doubt that the subject matter is engrossing. I watched Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 911 on my television and had no problem watching them in one sitting. I was highly engaged and was pretty much oblivious to other distractions, including children.

With Loose Change, I've been trying to watch the documentary for 2 months now, and I'm only half way through it. It's not that it's less interesting. It's that my environment is different.

When we sit at a television, we're used to being passive. I think the past 50 years have conditioned us to expect to relinquish control and be willing sponges for whatever happens to flash on the screen. Recently, remote controls and DVR's have given us some degree of control over the box, but we're just beginning to exercise that control. When we sit down in front of a TV set, we're not expecting to "do" anything with it.

The other place where we tend to watch sights and sounds is the movie theater. Again, we expect to be a passive audience here.

But when we sit in front of a computer, we usually do so to accomplish a task. It's the most useful box in the house, and I believe it's this very usefulness that may be keeping video from being more engaging online.

Look at the videos that tend to be watched online. They're short, they have to be highly stimulating and we usually only watch them because a trusted source has labelled them a "must see". Either a friend has emailed us a link with their recommedation, or word of mouth has spread about the video and it's the latest viral craze. And usually they require no intellectual engagement. The most watched clips on YouTube fit these criteria to a T. #1 is the Evolution of Dance, watching a (undoubtedly talented) comedian morph from one dance to another in 5 minutes. #2 is a lip sync done in a bedroom of two teenagers in an ode to Pokemon. And #3 is the live version of the Simpson's intro. Production values are usually minimal, and there is no intellectual content. There is a kind of counter-culture, anti establishment feel to them, which probably adds to their viral appeal.

If a video meets all these criteria, then it will be watched online.

Now, what do we do with our computer, whether it be a laptop or a Media Center, if we want to watch a show on it in the same manner as we would on TV?We maximize the window, blocking out the other stimuli and making it a TV set.

Let's go back to Loose Change. While arguably this has been a viral success online, it has still been a struggle for me to watch. Why? Well, it's long, at an hour and 20 minutes. It's online resolution forces me to watch it in a window, with other stimuli surrounding it. And I have to think and absorb, it's not mindless.

When I'm watching a video in these circumstances, I find it very difficult not to be distracted by what surrounds it on the page. I feel this innate guiltiness, thinking that there are a hundred other useful things I should be doing rather than watch this video. In fact, we have been conditioned to consider watching a video as a "waste" of time. We can justify it if it's a few short minutes out of our day. It's mindless entertainment. But otherwise, guilt starts eating at us. An inexplicable anxiety starts, with the feeling that there has to be something more useful to do with my computer.

Back to my original point. I think we have to reinvent the paradigm through which we engage with video online. I don't think moving the types of videos we used to watch on TV to our computer screen will work. And my prediction is that advertisers will spend millions of dollars to discover this. Probably the biggest success online has been the Subservient Chicken for Burger King. And the key? It's different, and it's interactive.

With Google's announcement, there will be many who throw video online, in the assumption that it will be more engaging than a simple graphic ad, or even a text based ad. Don't count on it. The rules are different, and they're still being written.

My inbox was inundated today with talk of new partnerships. Obviously, the search engines are rushing to fill up their dance cards (and when was the last time anyone used a dance card? Maybe it's time we put that saying to rest.)

What's interesting about these is the importance of sheer number of users in various online communities. The most travelled intersections of the webs are beginning to look to each other for obvious synergies, trying to stake out a larger slice of online interaction. It's a bit like an online land grab.

Yahoo and eBay

This is a pretty straightforward swap. Yahoo can show it's ads to eBay's 75 million users, and in return, Yahoo will help bolster eBay's defences agains Google Base, which is seen as a major future threat to the auction based marketplace. Me thinks this threat might be a lot more bark than actual bite, as Hitwise's Bill Tancer points out in the linked article.

Google and MSN and MySpace

This one's still in the rumor category. Apparently, MySpace is the single biggest referrer to Google, accounting for 8.7% of its traffic, according to Hitwise (nice job grabbing press mentions Bill!). Apparently, MSN is also sniffing around MySpace, and they probably have things to prove after being beat out with AOL by Google. This one is probably more defensive than strategic for Google, who would hate to lose almost 9% of their traffic to a competitor. On the other side, I would think the motivation is huge for MSN, who have to start turning around their declining marketshare to hang on til the release of Vista. The hope with Vista is that tighter integration of search into apps and OS will immediately bolster marketshare.

Meanwhile, MySpace is booming, with no end in sight. They experienced 1000% growth in users last year, becoming the most visited property online. And it's all about the numbers.

Associated Press and Topix

The last partnership isn't really a partnership. Topix.net is a search engine that will work with Associated Press to try to enhance links to the lead source of a news story. The problem is that when stories go out on the wire, they're picked up by other papers and the news engines don't differentiate between them. The paper that breaks the story wants credit as the original source. Topix will enhance the links to the paper that's been identified as the source.

There's one flaw in this strategy. Who the hell is Topix? Nobody uses them to find news. People use Yahoo...26 million of them. People use CNN, about 24 million. They're the number one and two sources of news (finally, one area where Google isn't number one!). Going down the list, Topix ranks 29th, with 2.7 million visitors. So, all together now, a collective yawn as we say, "Who cares?" Again, the importance of visitors, or lack of them, is painfully apparent.

The so called partnership begins to make more sense when you know that Topix is controlled by three newspaper publishers, Gannett, Knight Ridder and Tribune. So it's not so much a partnership as a directive.

It just shows, popularity is the only currency that matters online. If you have visitors, you matter. 

 

 

I've been meaning to post on this for awhile, but you know how things go.

Anyway, Google Trends is pretty fun to play with. Being in Canada in hockey playoff season, I thought it would be interesting to compare the big 4 sports in North America.

Here's the results:

So...over all Football rules in terms of search volume, with very regular peaks in basketball during playoffs.

On the top graph, hockey doesn't look too impressive, but check out the search volumes in the cities. Hockey rules! Even in Minneapolis, the lone US city to make the list, they're still looking for hockey. To be honest, we consider Minnesotans honourary (notice the Canadian spelling?) Canadians anyway.

Winnipeg is die hard hockey heartland, and they haven't had a NHL team in 10 years (the Jets moved to Phoenix and became the Coyotes).

I'm not sure whether to be proud of our national obsession, or a little embarassed.

And in the interest of being topical, here's how searchers cast their votes in April (the latest month available) for American Idol contestants. Hmm..this was almost a full month before the finals. Could search be the crystal ball for reality TV?

Google will be rolling out user initiated video advertising across it's AdSense network.

Broken record time. I applaud Google's decision to keep engagement with the video in the hands of the user.

But on a more fundamental level, I have to question the whole level of engagement with display advertising on sites. It seems like the harder advertiser's scream, the more determined we are to ignore them. On a recent eye tracking study we did for MarketingSherpa, we were absolutely amazed with the small amount of scanning done in the typical ad positions on a page. Less than 10% of visitors even looked at these sections (top banner, right and left rail) of the page. Now, the purpose of the study wasn't to look at this aspect specifically, but the scan patterns were undeniably clear. Interestly, text based ads that appeared within the flow of the main content had higher scanning levels, even when they appeared well below the fold.

Of course, these numbers are probably not terribly surprising, given the fact that visitors aren't there to look at ads, but it makes you question the whole idea of paying by impression. If you're buying based on a CPM model, realize that for every 1000 impressions, only 60 or 70 people are actually seeing the ad, even for a split second. Suddenly, those low clickthrough rates start to make sense.

ComScore just released their April search market share numbers, and for the first time, they've added MySpace on the list, debuting at a respectable number 6 with 43 million searches and a 0.6 share.

This is an interesting generational development. Kids always need to carve out a space for their own that doesn't seem controlled by adults. Online, this appears to be happening at MySpace. Will this territoriality change the search habits of a new generation? I can admit I'm way past this generation, so I don't "get" MySpace but I'll be watching with interest anyway. 43 million searches is nothing to sneeze at.

Other numbers from the ComScore release.

Google gained market share in the US for the ninth consecutive month, with 43.1 percent. Yahoo came in second with 28 percent and MSN third with 12.9 percent. Yahoo has dropped almost 3 points in the past year, and MSN dropped 3.2 points.

Despite my admiration for Ask's new interface, it appears that not many are sharing my enthusiasm. Their market share has also dropped slightly in the past year, from 6.1 % down to 5.9%. By the way, I can't say I'm a big fan of the Apostolos Gerasoulis commercials that Ask is running. In their attempts to position Ask as an alternative to Google, the message comes off a little desperate. And as cute as Apostolos's son Eli is, I'm thinking this is the kid everybody asks for help with homework, but who probably won't get invited to many parties in high school. (I may or may not have personal experience being this type of kid). Anyway, see what you think.

It does appear that we're searching more than ever, with total search volume up to 6.6 billion queries a month for the US. That's a 4% increase over March.

Overall gist of the numbers? Playing it safe won't beat the Google juggernaut. Time for some bold strategies.

Chris Sherman had an interesting post in Searchenginewatch about a Wired article on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's goal to make every book ever written digital and searchable. While they've been working on it awhile, there's still an immense amount of information to digitize. Chris also talks about the ephemeral nature of the web and wonders if the search indexes could help reconstruct seemingly lost web pages by retrieving crawled versions from their cache.

Almost since the beginning of recorded history, man has dreamed about collecting all the world's knowledge in one place. Perhaps the closest we ever came was the Library of Alexandria. That was over 2000 years ago. It's estimated that the Library held over 500,000 scrolls. Today, Google is scanning about 1,000,000 books a year, and that only represents 5% of all the books in print. Obviously, the task is larger than ever, but we may also be closer to realizing it than ever before!

Seems like all the innovation lately with the search engines has been in rolling out sophisticated ad targeting platforms. Yahoo's the latest to blow their horn about their own back end (and I realize that paints an ugly picture).

I'm a search marketer, and I love the advances that are being made in being able to target geographically, demographically and behaviorally, but I can't help but think, "Who are we targeting?". While the engines try to woo advertisers with better tools, what good is it doing if their market share is dwindling because they're not giving the user a reason to use the engine?

I have not seen a significant improvement to the every day search user experience from any of the big 3 in years. One may argue that if you take advantage of search history or other enhancements that have debuted in beta, it offers more value to the searcher. But that does nothing for the vast majority of searches that happen every day on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Nobody has upped the ante. Ask is the only engine I've seen that made some significant changes on the interface (more about that later today).

As a search marketer, it's all about market share. It takes time to target and strategically plan a campaign, and while the new platforms offer some impressive capabilities, they also add time required to manage them. Am I going to use that time to target 11% of the search market, 23%  or 50%? It just makes sense to use your time where it gets you the biggest return.

A word of advice. Worry about getting the users first, then worry about the tools to target them.

Quick question. Is anybody else getting really strange results out of the Keyword Selector Tool at Yahoo? I just did a search for Los Angeles, and apparently all people are searching for are cars. These were the results I got:

Searches done in April 2006
Count	Search Term
350883	toyota los angeles
333459	honda los angeles
280591	bmw los angeles
279022	chevrolet los angeles
238133	ford los angeles
226776	mercedes benz los angeles
181748	nissan los angeles

Either everyone in Los Angeles is buying a new car, which could be, or the inventory tool needs a complete engine rebuild. Just wondering if anyone can shed a little light on this.

Did a quick check on Google based on keyword popularity and here's what this tool gave me as the top variations:

los angeles, los angeles hotels, los angeles ca, los angeles california

That seems to make more sense

Turning the heat up on the Microsoft-Google showdown is causing speculation that smaller players may get squeezed out. The timing is interesting, because I had a great chat with new Ask CEO Jim Lanzone last week. I'll be posting more about it later this week, but Ask is taking a very down to earth, pragmatic and focused approach to the upcoming search war, and one that resonates with me. Don't count these guys out yet!

(Follow up to my previous short post on Quintura)

I pity the poor new entry in the search engine space. How do you possibly stake out new territory in the hottest online space there is? How do you avoid being swept away in the tidal wave of momentum that is going to the industry leaders, Google, Yahoo and MSN? How do you attract enough users to gain a critical mass? Well, you have to offer something different.

A new desktop search tool, Quintura, is betting that a new user interface based on the concept of semantic mapping is just the ticket they need to win the search lottery. And if semantic mapping sounds familiar, it should. I’ve been talking about semantic mapping for almost 2 years now. It’s a powerful concept in understanding how people search and something we identified in our previous research. But when it comes to building a new user interface around it, I’m not sure Quintura’s implementation will be taken up by the search masses.

A Semantic Map Primer

First of all, if you haven’t heard me speak about the concept previously, or read some of our research on it, let me introduce you to our theory of semantic mapping.

Whenever we use a search engine, we have a concept in mind. The concept is usually fairly complex, consisting of a lot of pre existing relationships we have made mentally. I’ll stick to the example I usually use to illustrate the concept. Let’s assume we’re beginning our research for an upcoming digital camera purchase. In this case, our concept will likely include connections with brands we’re familiar with (Nikon, Kodak, Canon, Olympus, etc), features (zoom, number of megapixels, autofocus) and our intent (finding consumer reviews, reading testimonials, finding side by side feature comparisons). These connections can be expressed by the words that define them. Together, all the words that define our concept make up our semantic map. It could consist of dozens or even hundreds of words.

But when we go to a search engine, we distill the concept down to the broadest possible phrase, both out of a desire to be inclusive in our search, and out of a reluctance to expend too much effort in constructing our search (which is a diplomatic way of saying we’re lazy). So we search for “digital camera”. When the results are presented to us, that original concept and its accompanying semantic map is still in place. It plays a vital role in how we react to the listings. We scan listings, and if we happen to find appearances of the words in our map, that listing registers as being a better match to our intent.

Quintura’s Take on Semantic Maps

When I first heard about Quintura, it was like somebody had built a search tool around the Powerpoint slide I’ve been using for the last year and a half to illustrate the concept. Just like that slide, the query used sits in the middle of an actual word map, surrounded by related words that further define the concept. In Quintura, as you click on words that define the concept, they get added to your query, causing the words in your map to update and restrict the focus of your search, allowing you to quickly and graphically structure very specific queries. The theory is that clicking through a semantic map will allow you to spend less time sifting through irrelevant results.

In theory, this should be a huge step forward in the user experience. But, feeling somewhat traitorous to the concept I helped pioneer, I’m not sure it’s the answer for the next big search interface. Here’s the problem…

When All’s Said and Done, We’re Still Lazy…

You’ve been able to structure advanced search queries for ages. But through it all, less than 5% of all searches have taken advantage of these capabilities. Quintura’s take is just another way to build the query. The real time updating is cool, and may help refine the search when you’re not exactly sure of the query you should be using, but I’m not sure this is enough. I think it will make Quintura an interesting footnote in the search “also ran” category.

There’s reasons why we search the way we do, and not being able to think of the words is generally not one of them. We know the words, in fact, we know too many of them. They reside just under the conscious layer, making themselves known when there’s a match in the result we’re looking for. But this is hardly an articulated process. It happens in split seconds, through subconscious connections. It’s almost transparent to us, as we hardly notice it’s happening. It’s one of those things that when you hear it explained you go, “Yeah, that makes sense. I’m sure I do that,” but you didn’t know you did it.

My theory, if it takes longer than one second and more than one click to refine your search, you’ve excluded 95% plus of your potential market. Quintura’s approach, although undeniably cool, fails on both counts. I still believe semantic mapping is vitally important, but I think search engines have to get better at creating those maps transparently, through disambiguating our intent by getting to know us better. I believe it’s unrealistic for a search engine to expect the user to go to the trouble of building the map for them.

So what about the other 5%? The power users, or the searchers that don’t know what they’re looking for and need the prompting of related words? Again, it comes back to critical mass. This might be a welcome addition to Google’s advanced features, but it can’t attract enough attention as a stand alone to survive. Then again, perhaps catching Google’s attention isn’t such a bad play.

Sorry Quintura, I feel like I’m disowning one of my children, but unless you’re looking at being gobbled up by one of the big three, I don’t see this as the winning ticket in the great search lottery.

I’ll start with a caveat: I’m PO’d. I spent a night from hell on Tuesday trying to get to Toronto from Chicago. But I hope in the midst of my spouting I get a valid point across.

First, the story of why I’m PO’d. I was flying United on what was supposed to be a one hour hop from Chicago to Toronto. By the way, United asked over $500 for this hop.

I start off by grabbing a sandwich at a little express counter by the gate from a place called Reggio’s To Go. A basic ham and cheese cost me about 8 bucks. This is an airport, so I’m not expecting great things from the 8 dollar sandwich, but even with those low expectations set, I was surprised by how abysmal the sandwich actually was. I had to check twice to make sure it was the sandwich I was eating and not the packaging. It tasted like it had been sitting in the display case since the early Bronze Age. I happened to glance at the sign for Reggio’s, which is obviously a franchise. The brand message is “Fresh and Ready to Go”. “Ready to go” in the garbage seems to be what they meant.

We’re on board by 6:15, the scheduled departure time. The plane is packed, leg room is negligible, and to make matters worse, the person sitting to my immediate right is just coming back from Japan. There’s no room left in overhead, so she tries to jam a roller suitcase, a backpack and a large shopping bag under the seat. None of the 3 fit, so she piles them on the floor between her legs, hoping no one will notice. Nobody does..or at least, nobody mentions anything. This makes the already scarce leg room even more restricted. By this point, I’m resigned to a miserable one hour trip, but then again, it’s an airline, so I didn’t really expect anything more.

The plane is unbelievably hot, but no worries, we should be in the air soon, and hopefully the plane will cool down. We wait, and wait, and wait. After what seems like a century, the pilot comes on and let’s us know they’re having a problem with the fuel gauge. They’re going to try to fix it to know how much fuel we actually have, and then we’ll be on our way. I think it was about this point I passed out from sheer heat exhaustion. After another 20 minutes or so, I woke up, my neck screaming in agony, my legs dead from the waist down, and sweat starting to drip from my forehead. The fuel gauge is still not working, and there’s no progress in sight. After another 30 minutes, it appears that the fuel gauge is thwarting the best efforts of United’s top maintenance crew, so they at least let us off the pressure cooker, 90 minutes past departure time and no closer to Toronto. Somebody insightfully wonders aloud about what they used for a fuel gauge on the flight in?

We get to the gate and are told to stay close for updates. The passengers with connections try to get rebooked. They’re understandably upset. But United’s gate agents seem to think the best approach is to meet rudeness with rudeness. The agents are short tempered and surly, snapping at passengers who have the nerve to see if they can somehow get to Toronto before the clock strikes midnight. “Is your luggage checked? Yes? Sorry then, I can’t do anything for you. Go sit down.” I swear to God, that’s the exact quote I heard.

After another hour and a half at the gate, the recalcitrant fuel gauge gives in and we get back on the plane. We finally get in the air by 10, almost 4 hours after the scheduled departure time. The pilot came on to thank us for our patience and assures us we have 3 of United’s finest flight attendants looking after us. There’s nothing wrong with them, but there’s nothing very right either. There was absolutely no attempt to make it up to us. No gesture of apology. If these are United’s finest, the hiring standards must be pretty low.

As we touch down in Toronto, the pilot comes on again and thanks us for flying the friendly skies. Friendly skies? Frat house initiations are less painful than what I just went through!

And here’s my point. Brand messaging has to be more that a cool line for your ads. It should be a promise. It should drive every aspect of the company. It should embody the unique value you offer. I had the chance to share the keynote spotlight at a recent show with David Neeleman, CEO of JetBlue. David quipped at the beginning that when they started JetBlue, their goal was to raise the bar of the airline industry. Quickly they realized that within the industry, the bar was set so low that you could crawl over it. They soon had to look outside the industry to find examples of best practices that meant something.

The brand relationship should be built at every customer touchpoint. I had a number of touchpoints with the United brand on Tuesday, and the sum total left me feeling like I’d been mugged. If United really believes they offer a friendlier experience, then every employee should embody that attitude. None of the ones I met yesterday seemed to have been let in on the secret. The attitudes ranged from indifferent to downright surly.

United has probably spent billions getting their brand message out through advertising. But do you think they could spring a few hundred bucks to treat us all to a drink, or even a free cookie when it really mattered? Brand is built on the front lines, face to face with a customer. It’s delivering when the chips are down. It’s taking responsibility for a positive customer experience, and doing what it takes to fix it when it’s not. United abdicated this responsibility, so their brand message became nothing more than a brand lie. It’s worthless to me. In fact, it’s worse than that, because United just dug a hole for themselves with me that they may never get out of. I will avoid United like the plague from this point forward.

The same is true, to a lesser extent, with Reggio’s and the world’s worst sandwich (somewhat ironic, because I had one of my best sandwiches in Chicago the day before). If their slogan is to be any more than another brand lie, then they have to deliver edible food. The brand has to mean something. How do they expect it to mean something to the consumer when the company itself doesn’t believe the brand message?

Up to now, companies could get away with this. You could screw over the consumer and their circle of influence was limited. Sure, they’d complain, but as long as you kept bumping millions into slick TV ads painting idyllic pictures of brand nirvana, you could keep the ruse going. It was the “sucker born every minute” approach to advertising. But those days are coming to an end. Now, when I call bullshit on a brand message, I have an expanded reach through the internet. Some call it consumer generated media. I call it Bitching 2.0.

There’s a new ecosystem developing online. Marketing theorists have long known of mavens. Mavens are a key component in social epidemics, as Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in the Tipping Point. Traditionally, they’re the ones that have been entrusted to keep brands honest. They are the uber-consumers that the rest of us look for guidance to. They tell us what’s good, and what’s not. Traditionally, they needed social connectors to spread the word.

But what happens when you give a maven a blog? Suddenly, connectors are built into the infrastructure of the web. I would argue that the new mavens are the ones with the most read blogs. They’re thoughtful, they’re well informed, and many of us have them pegged in our feed readers. Suddenly, the scope of their influence expands exponentially. As an example, my blog is only a few weeks old, but most of my posts are read by hundreds of people. If I get a link in another blog, the viral impact starts to take over. My rant against a bogus brand message could reach thousands. And there were at least a hundred other passengers on that United flight, just as PO’d as me, any of which could be a blogging maven. The web puts the spread of word of mouth on a dramatically expanded scale, on a compressed timeline. Also, it makes word of mouth, traditionally a fleeting thing, into a permanent fixture online. This blog post will live in perpetuity on the web, searchable by any search engine. Suddenly, the big brands can’t take the reach of a single consumer for granted.

To me, this shift of power to the consumer is one of the most exciting aspects of the web, and it’s long overdue. Now, we have the power to force corporations to keep their brand promise, or perish.

And to the staff of United Flight 1110, let me pass this along. The definition of “friendly” is:

1. Of, relating to, or befitting a friend
2. Favorably disposed; not antagonistic
3. Warm; comforting.

Please pass it along to every United staff member you know.

This just in: Tivo is going to let viewers search for the advertising content they're interested in!

Brilliant! Imagine, letting consumers chose to look for product information when they're actually interested in it. I think this has far reaching implications. Imagine if we could do something similar with websites..some sort of thing where we could search through all the content on the web so if there was a product we were interested in, we could find the right site. We could call it a...search engine!

But seriously, there is one quote from the story that reinforces everything I've been saying about search:

Users will be able to search through ad and product information spots ranging in length from 1 to 60 minutes from five different ad categories like finance, travel, and lifestyle.

See the word "search"? That's the key. Consumer control absolutely requires search. Whether video search is done through Tivo or a search engine (and search engines will win this battle) the act of searching is the important thing. It's that simple, fundamental concept that will power the entire future of marketing. It's the connection that makes everything else possible.

Another interesting tidbit was the major brands jumping on this "brand"wagon. It was probably an easy sell, unlike search branding has been. But then, search isn't nearly as sexy as being able to tap into a new generation of ad zappers.

I'm beginning to feel like the walls have ears. Just after saying that Ask.com seemed like they were listening to us when we were out preaching usability in search, I happened to see a post for Quintura on John Battelle's blog today. In it, John talked about creating a "complex query using a map of related words."

My God, that sounds just like the semantic mapping theory I've been droning on about at industry shows for the last year and a half! I had to check this out.

Sure enough, Quintura builds an actual semantic map of related terms graphically for you that tries to better define your concept. As you click on words you add them to your main concept, refining it and the map further updates itself, narrowing the focus on what you were looking for.

I'm going to dig into this more when I have some time and will probably make it the subject for this weeks Search Insider, but it's an interesting twist. For me, the red flag is that Quintura seems to break the Golden Rule of search usability, if it takes more than a click and a second, it's too much work for us. But that all depends on if they're aiming to be a niche or mainstream player. 3 to 4% of the search market is willing to spend the time to refine the query, but for the rest of us, there just isn't a big enough payoff to justify the time.

My session is over at ACCM and the crowd was pretty search savvy. The show is the Annual Catalog Conference and the search sessions were slipped in before the main show started. Also, the search track was relegated to a room that was pretty much in the back alley of the McCormick Center. Seems like search is still having difficulty gaining respect. You'd find it hard to believe based on the profile at this show that this one channel is driving the majority of online spending of the attendees. Still, great to see some old friends, including Detlev Johnson, Matt Bailley, Bill Hunt and Mike Moran, the incredibly perky Heather Lloyd-Martin and the ever thoughtful Amanda Watlington. Kevin Lee also kept us on the edge of our seats right to the last minute as he got held up at the airport. Kevin is obviously still adjusting to "Dad Time", where it seems you're perpetually late for everything. Still, Kevin's got a great reason to be late.

By the way, if you're in Chicago, try out Potbelly Sandwich Works on State. Slipped in for a quick Italian sub yesterday and it was awesome.

The Traffic Power guys are really too much. I had told you about the complaint that came my way from them. Seems these guys are also implying to prospective customers they have an "in" at Google because of a friendship with certain head engineers. Which engineers you ask? Well, the name Matt Cutts seems to be bandied about.

Hmmm..I know Matt. Wonder if he knows certain SEO's are using his name in this manner? I just happened to have an email from a Traffic Power rep forwarded to me from a client that hinted at this special relationship. And I may have accidentally forwarded this to Matt. Ooops.

Matt's words, "Extremely uncool". Yeah..I'd echo that one. Come on, our industry has enough challenges without this. If an SEO tells you he's friends with Matt Cutts, or any other person at any of the search engines, that's one thing. It's a small biz and we're all pretty friendly. But if anyone hints that the keys to the church are for sale, based on a personal relationship with Matt or anyone esle, don't believe them. Matt's helped us out on occassion in understanding how Google indexes a site, just like he's helped thousands of webmasters. That's his job. But when it comes to influencing search results, there's a church/state divide that just won't be breached. Nuff said.

 

 

 

Next week, I'm in the windy city for the Annual Catalog Conference. Fair amount of search on the agenda. I did the show last year in Orlando and found a real mix of expertise, but I'm constantly amazed at the difference a year can make in the "savvy index" at these non-Search focused shows. I'll try to get a post or two in between the Giordano's pizza.

Speaking of shows, just traded emails with Jakob Nielsen who's busily getting ready for his Usability Week Summit Series. Jakob and his team are wrapping up a pretty extensive eye tracking study. I'm hoping to catch up with him at the San Francisco show to compare notes. The agenda looks amazing, so if usability is your thing (and it should be) you might want to check this out. We're sending Cory Bates, our usability consultant and eye tracking go-to guy to soak up some wisdom.

Finally, a weekend wrap up note from SEO PR's Greg ("have I mentioned I'm a Democrat?") Jarboe. Upon learning that I finally started blogging, Greg gave me the following stat:

According to Technorati, there's a new blog created every second -- and 55% of new bloggers are still posting three months later. So, the trick isn't becoming a blogger. It's finding something new to say 13 weeks down the road.

I'm not at 13 weeks yet, but I'm a week and a half in and this is post 13, so so far, so good!

 

Read this morning that JupiterResearch calculates that as much as $8 B in TV revenue could be lost through ad skipping. That's a little over 10% of the current TV spend. Apparently, 53% of DVR users skip ads, and if they skip 100% of the time, that accounts for the loss. Actually, I'm surprised only 53% skip. I know I do it all the time.

Forecasts of DVR penetration vary, but one report predicts that integrated DVR (incorporated into TV's and satellite and cable boxes) sales will grow to 27 million by 2008. Currently, it seems that DVR penetration is around 8% of the market, but all agree that it will grow rapidly. Let us remember that any version of Vista with integrated Windows Media Center turns your PC into a DVR. So let's say that between integrated DVR, stand alone sets and PC based DVR's, 50% of the homes have DVR's by 2010. Of those, 53% skip. That's the erosion of a lot of advertising revenue.

Ironically, I also received a research brief that shows clicks on sponsored search ads continue to climb. Google say a 50% increase in the number of searches that included sponsored advertising and Yahoo had a 30% increase. What's even more interesting is that across all searches, on Google, almost 12% of the clicks were on sponsored ads, and on Yahoo, it was 11.4%. Remember, those percentages are for all searches, including the ones where sponsored ads don't show. In our studies, we see between 20 and 35% click through rates on SERPs were sponsored ads show. A recent study saw 30% click throughs on the top sponsored ads alone, not even including the side sponsored ones.

So, a little comparison here. When we're watching TV, given the choice, over half of us would not ever want to see a commercial, let alone react to one. But when people are using search for commercial purchases, almost 3 out of 4 of us spend some time looking at the ads (by our choice) and 1 in 3 of us are actually clicking on them. That's the power of consumer controlled engagement. Yet TV is a $80 B market, and search is a $5.5 B market.

Here's a thought. Take the $8 B you're spending on ads that people are spraining their thumb trying to skip by, and invest that money in advertising messages that people are actually looking for!

Let me quote some rather startling numbers to you from a recent eye tracking study we did. In the study, we looked at where people first looked on a search results page, where they first scanned a listing, and where they eventually clicked.

First of all, we gave participants a number of different scenarios that involved looking to a search engine to help them make a purchase. We used Google, Yahoo and MSN in the study. In all cases, on all 3 engines, the vast majority of people first glanced at the top sponsored listings. In eye tracking parlance, we call this a fixation, or a momentary pause of the eye. On Yahoo, 84% of the first fixations were on the top sponsored when they appeared, on Google it was 81%, and on MSN it was 87%. So, almost 9 out of every 10 people start looking at the search results page by at least glancing at the top sponsored.

The next thing we measured was active scanning. This is where participant’s started reading a listing. On Google and Yahoo, there was strong correlation with the first fixation point, with 79% of the first reading activity on top sponsored for Yahoo, and 71% for Google. MSN was another story. While 87% of participants first glanced at the top sponsored ads, only 55% started reading there. Almost 32%  of our participants immediately relocated past the sponsored ads.

Finally, we recorded where the eventual clicks happened. In Google’s case, 26% of the clicks happened in the top sponsored ads, with Yahoo it was 30%, and MSN came in with 17% click through on top sponsored.

Here’s what we took from the numbers. On Google, although over 80% of searchers started in the top sponsored, only 26% found something relevant and compelling enough to click on, and remember, these were commercial, product oriented searches. On Yahoo, 84% started in top sponsored, but in Yahoo’s case, about 30% stuck around and clicked an ad. And with MSN, something entirely different was going on. It seems that MSN users have a bad case of banner blindness when it comes to top sponsored ads.

Scanning Follows Relevancy

The reason top sponsored ads are effective is because they’re placed in the highest traffic portion of the page. We orient ourselves in the page on the upper left. Our destination is the top organic ad. Top sponsored ads are placed in the middle of the most popular real estate on the SERP. This is shown by the high percentage of fixations that happen in this section.

But our interactions with the SERP are not all about position. We can, very quickly, determine if what’s there is relevant to what we’re looking for. We quickly scan titles to see if the ads presented match our intent. And when I say quickly, I’m talking fractions of a second. We start picking up relevancy without even having to read the listings by determining scent. If the listing has “scent” and it’s a good match, we’ll not only hang around and start scanning the listing, we may even click on it. Otherwise, we do what we intended to do in the first place and skip down to the organic listings. That’s what’s happening on Google and Yahoo. MSN is another story.

The MSN Two Step

During the study period, MSN was in experimentation mode. They were in the process of dropping Yahoo ads from the top listing and substituting their own advertising, which in most cases wasn’t keyword driven to the same extent that the Yahoo ads were. This usually meant that the “scent” or relevancy match wasn’t as great. When this happened, we saw almost immediate relocation down to organic results. Users could determine the existence, or in this case, absence of scent in a fraction of a second and relocated down. In effect, it was an example of banner blindness, where they were determining that the top sponsored results weren’t relevant.

The lesson from this for the search engines is that you can’t take position for granted. You have to deliver with relevancy and the greater the relevancy, or at least, the perceived relevancy, the better those top sponsored ads will perform.

Yahoo’s Relevancy Capitulation

Yahoo has learned this over time. In the beginning days of GoTo/Overture/Yahoo, position was determined solely by bidding. When Google came on the scene, they offered a blended approach, where click through rates also helped determine position. The theory was, the higher the click through rate, the greater the relevancy.

Yahoo has recently announced integrating click through rates and relevancy into the sponsored positioning algorithm as well. This is the beginning. Soon, message and landing page relevancy will also be factored into the position equation.

When it comes to capturing a searcher’s click, you have to deliver relevancy. It’s not all about position, and that will become more true in the future, not less.

There's not a great track record for search engines running TV ads to increase market share. Let's see, some of the ones who have tried it include Snap.com (when they were NBC), Go.com (courtesy ABC and Disney), Altavista and most recently, MSN. It's yet to be successful. In Microsoft's case, market share actually shrunk by 3 points, while Google, sans ads, increased their market share in the same time period by over 6 points.

Ask.com is unveiling a new campaign in the U.S. Pundits (what makes a pundit a pundit anyway?) are already casting aspersions on the strategy. But I think there's one key difference that should be noted. The purpose of the campaign is to get people to try the search engine..once. After that, it's up to the search engine to keep them coming back. In every previous case, the advertised search engine just wasn't very good. And nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising.

Ask is different. It's pretty good. Some might say it's damned good. At least, it's good enough that it has a fair shot at getting people back.

Ask's problem is that it isn't a huge leap forward. I tried it right after the butler was whacked. I liked it. But it wasn't a earth shaking experience.It didn't register strongly enough with me to shake my Google habit. And a lot of us have a Google habit. It's just what we do. As I write this, I can offer no better reason why I haven't used Ask more than the fact that I just didn't think of it.

If this campaign doesn't work, it won't be the fact that Ask is running TV ads that will be the downfall, it will be that Ask didn't up the user experience ante enough. Time will tell.

Yesterday I decided to be a good Samaritan, and almost got taken. Let me tell you the story.

Yesterday morning when I got to my desk I had a voicemail message. There was an upset person who claimed they had been taken by an SEO company. A representative from the company in question had put a link to our eye tracking research at the bottom of his email signature, so this "victim" was seeing if we were connected in some way. I returned the call and found out that this guy had paid $2000 for a doorway domain but wasn't receiving any traffic. Like most people, I automatically assumed the SEO company was the culprit. Wanting to restore this guy's faith in our industry, I offered to take a look at the site and maybe offer a little free advice. He sent me the link.

White Hats, Black Hats and Dunce Caps

And now, I must digress for a minute. When I first met Matt Cutts at a Webmaster World he did an impromptu site clinic and when somebody called up a particularly egregious example of spam he said, "That's worse than spam, that's stupid spam". The site that this SEO firm put up definitely falls into the category of stupid spam.

In the SEO ecosystem, there is a place for black hats and white hats. I happen to be a white hat and we provide a service to our clients, who for various reasons have chosen not to employ black hat tactics. That's cool. There are also clients in ultra competitive categories that can't rely on white hat tactics alone. These are clients who are willing to risk domain banning in return for higher rankings, and black hat tactics are the only way they're going to get them. These clients go in knowing what they're looking for, and there are black hats willing to provide the service. While possibly not the same degree of cool (in that spam degrades the search user's experience) at least everybody is going in with eyes wide open. But it's stupid spam that really bugs me.

The site I saw had tons of crappy text, inelegantly jammed with irrelevant keywords, was embedded in a clumsy link farm, and the link through to the client's site was an ugly and totally useless Flash banner. The best black hats are at least elegant in their spam. This was ugly, pointless and stupid. And that pisses me off.

Good Samaritan Gone Wrong

So, I thought I'd bring these guys to light (and I will, bear with me) and offer to go to bat for the guy. I fired off an email seeing if he was okay with letting his name stand. He jumped at the chance. But something was niggling at me. The text on the page was at least partially relevant to his business, and it was written in first person. Where did the text come from?

I got him on the phone and asked him the question. The text came from him. Hmmm...my innocent victim doth protest too much. He had picked the keywords, which were ultra competitive and either marginally relevant or not relevant at all. And in the conversation, he exhibited more than a passing knowledge of SEO. The minute the site went live, he knew it was spam. He only got mad when after 3 months, the spam wasn't working for him.

Then, he started working me. If I was either going to blog or write a column about it, he wanted to make sure he got a link to his main site. He went on to tell me that he could generate some "real business" from this exposure and how guys he knew in the same biz were pulling in $800,000 to a mil from their websites. I pointed out that the reason I was doing this wasn't to make him rich.

At this point, I'm thinking that I was really hoping I'd find an innocent victim, but instead I found an accomplice. He was looking for an angle when he retained these guys, and it wasn't the fact that it was spam that he objected to, it was the fact that it was spam that didn't work. He is now pursuing legal action as well as filing a complaint with the BBB.  He's spending a lot of time and energy tracking them down. Perhaps he should have shown this diligence before hiring them in the first place.

My point? We are all quick to point the finger at the SEO's, but let's remember that it's clients like this that allows these companies to flourish. A quick investigation of the link farm showed hundreds, if not thousands, of clients that seem to think this is the way to use search. That too pisses me off.

Finally, a quick shout out to Matt and the Google spam squad. A few searches showed the bogus site had been already tossed from the Google index. It was the fact that the Google spider no longer came knocking that prompted our "victim" to start complaining. However, this site is actually ranking for some of the terms on MSN. Just one more example of how the gang at Redmond really has to get their act together if they want to compete head to head in the search space.

So, who is the SEO in question?

They go by various names, but some are 1p.com, and 1stinternetadvertising.com

Want to see an example of their work? Check out http://www.my1sthomebizsite.com/ (and no, this isn't the person who complained. This is another site in their network.)

And to 1p, or 1stinternetadvertising, or whatever your name is, please stop using a link to our research in your email signature!

Addendum

Since the first post, I've discovered that 1p.com is actually Traffic Power. Of course they are! Thanks to Graywolf and MC for the info.

 

Bill Gates said it, so it has to be true. Microsoft and Google are going to war.

When you read the NY Times article, Saul Hansell and Steve Lohr mention the difference in business models, required server farms, browser default settings and a lot of other tactical considerations. There's one thing missing: the User Experience.

If Microsoft wants to win the search engine wars, they have to come out with a search engine that people want to use. In the usability tests we've conducted with MSN Search, it has failed miserably when going head to head with Google, EVEN WITH MSN USERS! Give a better user experience, and you'll win. Screw it up, and even locking IE on MSN Search won't help you.

There's a fundamental issue that everyone seems to be missing here. The user is in control. We keep seeing stories of how big companies are trying to remove or at least subvert customer control by reducing choices or applying technology.

The Internet creates a fluid market. It can shift alliances almost instantly. It can follow the most desired path in the blink of an eye, and word of new paths can spread virally in an incredibly short time period. Look what happened with illegal downloading of music. The music industry kept trying to plug technological holes and new ones kept appearing. It's like using duct tape to keep a crumbling dam together. Accept the fact that it's gone and get your butt to higher ground! Throw around legal threats and awareness ads about piracy all you want. Ultimately the only way the music industry will win is to accept the fact that the days of obscene profits and centralized power are gone and embrace the digital distribution paradigm. Use its efficiencies to give us the music we want at a price that we want to pay. We're inching towards that, but we're not there yet.

I know that Microsoft is starting to pay a lot of attention to the search experience, but they should have done more out of the gate. The first versions of MSN search have suffered from fundamental design flaws, lack of relevancy in sponsored search results and some other glaring mistakes. I expected more from the Redmond gang.

Speaking of paying attention to the user experience, I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Ferguson from Ask's usability team at SES Toronto. For those of you that have heard me speak before you know I've taken some pretty big swipes at Ask Jeeves in the past, mainly for the blatent bloating of sponsored ads at the top of the organic results. Like I mentioned to Michael, it's like somebody was listening at Ask. The new version seems to have taken into account a lot of the things we've been saying for awhile, including the practice of Semantic Mapping (Ask's "Narrow" and "Broaden Your Search" options) and use of the anemic right rail real estate to add some true functionality. Ask is paying attention to the user experience, and I'm guessing it's going to pay off for them in increased market share. They don't have it all right yet, but at least they're listening to the right people: the users.

By the way, this blast isn't all for MSN. I've reserved a little bile for Google. In their rush to create multiple fronts on which to attack Microsoft, they may be overlooking where the battle will ultimately be won. In Danny Sullivan's own rant, 25 Things I Hate about Google, the underlying theme was, get search right first, then worry about conquering the world. Google is a pretty good search experience, but we're still talking version 1.0 of search. There's a lot of work to be done, and so far, I haven't seen world beater innovation coming out of Google labs.

To me, Google Search is a little like the reliable piece of production equipment that's been doing a good job for a long time, but it's long overdue for an overhaul. The problem is, you can't shut it down because you need to keep production up. I've said for some time that Google is a victim of its own success, a common malady for many hot start ups. Before you're on the radar you can be bold and come out with a new product that blows everybody's socks off. It becomes wildly successful and generates your main revenue stream. You become a public company. Suddenly, that revenue stream becomes a sacred cow. You can't follow up on the first act, because the first act guarantees your survival as a company.

Google has a dilemma. It can't survive in the long term unless it comes out with the next big innovation in search in a very bold way. It has to knock our socks off again. But it can't survive in the short term, especially with the eyes of every financial analyst in the world on them, if it jeopardizes its current revenue channel by messing around with it. An unenviable position to be in, even if Sergey and Larry have enough money to buy everyone in the world a Segway.

This puts Microsoft and Ask in an interesting position. They aren't solely dependant on their search revenues. They have relatively deep pockets. And they can afford to be bold.

So be bold, but base innovation on an incredibly deep understanding of what we want in a search experience.

I always find it amusing (and a little frightening) when reality imitates parody. Does anybody remember a SNL skit about wearing a VR helmet and reading a virtual book, which was Moby Dick? In effect, somebody sat in a chair, donned this huge awkward helmet, which gave the experience of sitting in a chair, and reading a book.

Now, Microsoft and the NY Times have come perilously close to this with their new on screen News Reader.

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8H9AJC8B.htm?campaign_id=alerts

The idea is to simulate the experience of reading a newspaper online, to more fully engage the reader. There is a cost. Apparently, the reader costs more than a year's subscription to the Times.

Is it just me, or is this really dumb? We choose to read our news online because the online format gives us a different experience and more functionality. We are rapidly adapting to a new online way of assimilating information, and this includes news. To me, this is kind of like buying a car, but then getting a horse to pull it.