Monthly Archives: August 2009

The New Speed of Information

First published August 27, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This summer, we had fires in the town I live in. From the back deck of my house, I could see the smoke and, as darkness descended, the flames that were threatening the homes in the hills above Kelowna. I had friends and co-workers that lived in the neighborhoods that were being evacuated, so I wanted to know what was happening as soon as possible.

I was sitting on the back deck, watching the progress of the fire through binoculars and monitoring Twitter on my laptop. My wife was inside the house, listening on the radio and watching on TV. Because I had an eyewitness perspective, I was able to judge the timeliness of our news channels and gained a new appreciation for the speed of social networks.

News That’s Not So New

If you had tuned in to our local TV station even hours after the fires began, you wouldn’t have known that anything out of the ordinary was happening. There was no mention of the fire for hours after it started. The TV station in Vancouver was better, with real-time coverage a few hours after the fire first started. But their “coverage” consisted of newscasters repeating the same limited information, which was at least 2 hours out of date, and playing the same 30-second video loop over and over. If you needed information, you would not have found it there.

The local news radio station fared a little better, reporting new evacuation areas as soon as they came through the official communication channels. But the real test came at about 8:45 p.m. that night. The original fire started near a sawmill on the west side of Okanagan Lake. Around the aforementioned time, I noticed a wisp of smoke far removed from the main fire. It seemed to me that a new fire had started, and this one was in the hills directly above the subdivision that my business partner lived in. Was this a new fire? Were the homes threatened? I ran in and asked my wife if she had heard anything about a second fire. Nothing was being reported on TV or radio. I checked the local news Web sites. Again, no report.

Turning to Twitter

So I tweeted about it. Within 15 minutes, someone replied that there did seem to be a second fire and fire crews had just gone by their house, on the way up to the location. Soon, there were more tweets with eyewitness accounts and reports of more fire crews. In 30 minutes, the Kelowna Twitter community had communicated the approximate location of the new fire, the official response, potential neighborhoods that might be evacuated and even the possible cause of the fire.

Yes, it was all unvetted and unauthorized, but it was in time to make a difference. It would take TV two more hours to report a possible new fire, and even then, they got most of the details wrong. The local radio station again beat TV to the punch, but (as I found out afterwards) only because a reporter was also monitoring Twitter.

We’ve all heard about the new power of social media, whether it be breaking the news of Michael Jackson’s death or the elections in Iran, but for me, it took an event a little closer to home to help me realize the magnitude of this communication shift. Official channels are being hopelessly outstripped by the efficiency of technology-enabled communications. Communication flows freely, unrestricted by bottlenecks. One might argue that with the freedom in restrictions, one sacrifices veracity. There is no editor to double-check facts. But in the case of the Kelowna fires of 2009, at least, official channels proved to be even more inaccurate. Not everything I read on Twitter was true, but the corrections happened much faster than they did through the supposed “authorized” channels. Twitter had broken the news of Jackson’s death while the official news sources still had him in the hospital with an undisclosed condition. When it came to timely, accurate information, social media beat the massive news machine hands down.

Do we need a two-hour jump on the news we hear? Is it really that important that we know about events as soon as they happen? When a fire is bearing down on your home and every minute gained means you might lose one less precious keepsake or treasured photo, you bet it’s important.

Summer Stories: How I’ve Spent My Summer Vacations

First published August 20, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Robin Williams’ movie “RV” may not have gathered much critical acclaim, but one scene at least hit a comedic home run with me. Williams has to get a presentation back to the home office during a camping trip with his family. After his laptop goes AWOL, he uses his BlackBerry to retype the presentation and then tries to get a signal strong enough to let him email the presentation to his boss. He scales the top of his rented motor home, holding his BlackBerry heavenward trying to get a signal. This is an episode directly out of my life. I did exactly the same thing in a state park in California one summer, trying to get some file (it might have even been a Search Insider column) to someone who was expecting it. Running a business means splitting your time between family vacation activities and keeping the bare essentials going back at the office.Have Column, Will Travel

In the five years I’ve been writing for Search Insider, I’ve usually continued to contribute throughout my vacations. This has meant filing columns from campgrounds up and down the West Coast, from Hawaiian beaches, from London hotel rooms, from a chalet in the French Alps and from a charming little hotel  in Florence, Italy. Each has presented their challenges in finding a connection but it’s always been interesting weaving my experiences into the story line.

A few years ago, we were taking the family through Europe and spending a lot of time on trains. We were on the high-speed train from Lyon to Paris and I had to get a column filed. I had just received my first mobile Internet device and thought this would be just the ticket for a little “wired” jet setting. It took me the better part of the trip to key the column in with the tiny little keyboard, but finally the column was done and ready to be filed. I hit the send button and marveled at how technology allowed me to stay connected, even on a train whizzing through the French countryside at 200 kilometers an hour. Unfortunately, no one had explained data roaming charges to me. My little flirtation with international mobile computing came with a nasty little $800 surprise when I got back to the office. The technology is amazing, but the ethics of mobile carriers are noticeably less so.

My Wife Said I Could, So There!

Every time I write something while on vacation (by the way, we call it holidays here in Canada, but you’ll notice I’m carefully keeping my column Americanized) I usually get emails or comments saying I should leave the laptop and PDA at home. My wife and I have talked about this and we agreed that the ability to stay connected not only to work but also to family is worth the odd hour or two checking emails. I am much more at ease when I can check in and make sure everything is fine back home. We have amazing support systems, supplied by both family and my co-workers, so a periodic check-in is usually relatively stress-free. Besides, the Internet is a tremendous resource for a little ad-hoc planning while on the road. Last year, when plans suddenly fell through in France for three days of our trip, I was able to book alternate plans at the last minute.

In continuation of the Hotchkiss summer tradition, this column, too, is being penned on vacation. Right now I’m in a hotel room in Florence, but this Florence is in Oregon, not Italy. A friend and I are biking down the Oregon coast (three days and 192 miles behind us, so we’re a little past half way). Our wives and children are following us with a van full of anti-chafing cream and cold beer. It’s been an amazing experience, but I swear I’m going to hunt down every jerk driving a motor home down Highway 101 who doesn’t give cyclists a little extra room when whizzing by at 70 miles per hour and teach them how to dump their holding tanks, Robin Williams-style. That was the other scene in the movie that had me rolling on the floor.

Over and out from the Oregon coast!

Summer Stories: How I Became a Researcher

First published August 13, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

About six years ago, I had one of those life-changing moments that set me on a new path. I’ve always been curious. I’ve always had questions, and up to that point in my life, I was usually able to find an answer, with enough perseverance. But in 2003, I had a question that no one seemed able to answer.  It didn’t seem to be an especially difficult question, and I knew someone had the answer. They just weren’t sharing it.

The Unanswerable Question

The question was this: what percentage of searchers click on the organic results and what percentage click on the sponsored ads? Today, that’s not even a question; it’s common knowledge for search marketers. But in 2003, that wasn’t the case. Sponsored search ads were still in their infancy (Overture had just been acquired by Yahoo, and Google’s AdWords was only a couple years old) and no one at either engine was sharing the clickthrough breakdowns between organic and paid.

I reached out to everyone I knew in the industry, but either they didn’t know, or they weren’t willing to go public with the info. My connections into Google and Yahoo were nonexistent at the time. No one, it seemed, had the answer. My curiosity was stymied. And that’s when my revelation happened. If no one had the answer, perhaps I could provide it.

At the time, research was not something Enquiro did. When we wanted to find out an answer, we combed through the forums, just like everyone else. But there seemed to be a noticeable gap in available information. There was plenty of discussion about technical SEO tactics, but no one seemed to be interested in how people actually used search engines.

To me, this was an unforgiveable oversight. If we were using search as a marketing channel, shouldn’t we have some understanding of how our prospects used search?  Off the top of my head, I jotted down a list of several questions I had about how people actually search; questions that appeared to have no readily available answers. It was at that point that I officially became a researcher.

Discovering “Why”

Our first research project proved to set the path we would go down for much of the follow-up: we just looked at how people used search to do things. Our methodology has become much tighter and we now have added eye-tracking and even neuro-scanning to our arsenal, but from the beginning, our research was more focused on “why” than “what.” The first paper was called “Inside the Mind of the Searcher” and it’s still referenced on a regular basis. Frankly, we were surprised with how quickly it was picked up in the industry. Suddenly, we became the experts on search user behavior, a crown I was uncomfortable with at the beginning. Yes, we were exploring new ground, but I always worried about how representative this was to the real world. Did people really do what we said they did, or was it just a research-created anomaly?

Defining the Golden Triangle

For us, the groundbreaking study was our first eye tracking study, done through Eyetools in San Francisco. I had read the Poynter study about how people interacted with online publications and was fascinated. “What if,” I wondered, “we did this with a search engine?” I found a similarly curious cohort in Kevin Lee from DidIt and together with Eyetools we launched the first study, which discovered the now-famous “Golden Triangle.” I remember sitting with Kevin in a speaker prep room at a show whose name escapes me, looking at the very first results of the data. The pattern jumped off the page:

“Look at that!” I said, “It’s a triangle!”

Kevin, always the search optimizer, said, “We need something catchy to call it, something that we can optimize for. The Magic Triangle?”

Because the heat map tends to indicate the most popular areas in a reddish yellow color, the answer was right in front of us. I can’t remember whether it was Kevin or I that first said it, but as soon as we said it, we knew the name would stick: “It’s a gold color… The Golden Triangle?”

Is It Real?

Even with the release of the study and the quick acceptance, I still questioned whether this represented real behavior. It was later that year when I got the confirmation I needed. I had just presented the results during a session at an industry show and was stepping down from the stage. Someone was quietly standing in the corner and came over as I started to head out of the room.

“Hi. I just wanted to let you know. I work with Yahoo on user experience and your heat map looks identical to our internal ones. I actually thought you had somehow got your hands on ours.” The validation was a few years in coming, but very welcome when it finally arrived.

Today, ironically, things have come full circle. I have talked to sales and engineering teams at all the major engines and much of the research they refer to about user behavior comes from Enquiro.

And the answer to my original question has held remarkably consistent in the past 6 years: What percentage of users click on paid ads vs. organic listings? For commercial searches, it’s about 70% organic, 30% paid. Just in case you were curious.

Summer Stories: How I Almost Got Busted by the St. Louis FBI

First published August 6, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This week, the latest in my “fireside chats” (phrase courtesy of Aaron Goldman) about past SEM memories.

In the early days of our search marketing business, our collection of SEO clients ran the gamut from slightly off-white to shades of gray approaching black. Yes, back in the day we too did some stuff that wasn’t smiled upon by the anti-spam gods of the search universe. Of course, it was (and still is) sometimes difficult to determine where the line between white and black could be found.

Desperately Seeking Sublets

One of the more interesting groups we dealt with was a network of apartment-locating services. Prior to working with them, I had no idea that apartment locating was such a hyper-competitive business, but these were voracious adopters of search at the very earliest stages of the industry. The goal was to position all 10 of their various “doorway” domains in the top 10 for the prime keywords, essentially shutting out the competition. And for some reason, Texas was the hotbed of apartment finders. In 2002, if you had searched for apartments in Dallas, Houston or Austin, you’d have seen our clients.

These independent Web-based businesses formed a national association, effectively creating their own link farm. And soon after forming the association, they decided to have a meeting. The location was set to be St. Louis because it was the geographic center of the country,  And, for the first time, my company’s co-founder, Bill Barnes, and myself were asked to fly down and make a live client presentation.

My Laser Focus

As we started to work through the logistics, we realized we had no way to show the presentation slide deck we had put together. We didn’t have a projector, and the hotel meeting room we were to meet the clients in didn’t have one either. I quickly scoured St. Louis and found an AV rental shop that could provide us with a projector for the day. I arranged to have it waiting for us at the hotel when we checked in. At the time, a projector was more than a business essential; it was a cool toy that we could use to project a movie on the hotel wall, giving Bill and I our own big screen experience the night before the meeting. But the projector also came with a laser pointer, the first time I had ever encountered one of these nifty little gadgets. For regular readers, you might remember that I’m still fascinated by them, a personality quirk that came to light at the last Search Insider Summit.

Soon, a fully grown man was running around a hotel room in St. Louis, shining the little red dot at anything he could find. Bill cowered in the corner, covering his eyes for fear of inadvertent laser surgery. Being a scientifically curious type of individual, it became vitally important to me to see just how far the range of my pointer was. I ran to the window to find some targets further afield.

Could it hit the car in the parking lot below? Yes!

Could it hit the opposite wing of the hotel, some 150 feet away? Yes!

Next door to the hotel was a large, featureless office block. I had to see if the laser’s reach extended that far. The little red dot traveled along the wall, hundreds of feet away. In fact, you could see it go right through the window, shining on the interior walls of the offices inside the building. Bill, only half jokingly, said, “For God’s sake, shut that thing off, before someone thinks you’re a sniper.” Reluctantly, I hit the off switch and settled down to watch Julia Roberts in our makeshift hotel cinema.

From the Files of the FBI

The next morning, we had a few hours to kill before the presentation was scheduled. We decided to talk a walk in the bitter St. Louis cold to check out some of the surrounding area. We started walking past the office building next door that had served as my target range the night before. There, at 2222 Market Street, St. Louis, we discovered we were next-door neighbors to the headquarters of the FBI.

To this day, I can imagine the scenario: Two FBI agents, putting in extra hours to finish paper work, heads down in the nearly empty office. Suddenly, one raises his head to grab his coffee cup and is somewhat startled to see a small red laser dot moving along the wall and slowly coming to rest on his partner’s forehead. Somewhat shakily he says, “Ed, I think we may have a situation.”

Nope, not a terrorist.  Just a search marketer.