Author Archives: ghotchkiss

It’s Not about Control – It’s About Connections!

Pete Blackshaw from Nielsen Buzz Metrics wrote an interesting column this week talking about the fact that CMO’s still have control.  He railed against the absolution of responsibility on the part of marketers, using the new buzzwords of consumer empowerment to justify the fact that they can throw more spam at the average user now because, after all, the user is in control.

“First, the overheated rhetoric acts as a deceptive rationalization. Remember the theory of cognitive dissonance, that testy tension emanating from two conflicting thoughts at the same time. I worry all this talk about consumers being in control relieves dissonance. It allows us to absolve ourselves of treating consumers with respect. Hey, if they have control and, hence, the power, what possible harm could our junk mail, spam intrusiveness, and recklessness do?”

Pete touches on a very interesting point that I’ve talked about in the number of columns and post before.  It’s the idea of brand messaging going beyond the carefully manufactured advertising and marketing channels and being baked right into the DNA of the company.  Now, brand messaging is as much about customer experience and customer service as it is about the message we see in the typical 30 second television spot.  It brings up an interesting question about consumer control.  Is it so much about control as it is about the ability to connect with information in a new way?  As Pete rightly points out, marketers still have control over a number of aspects of the relationship.  It’s impossible to have a two-way relationship with one side being in total control.  The fact is that consumers control part of that relationship and marketers control part of that relationship.  The success of the relationship lies in the ability for the two sides to connect in a mutually beneficial way.  It’s not so much the consumers have taken control from marketers as it is that what was typically much more a one-way relationship has evolved into a two-way relationship.

“At the end of the day, we still control the message and the business processes that shape it, but we may need an alterative path to get there. Product quality, customer service, accurate claims, and employee empowerment are all within our control. And these are the input types that really matter, and always have.”

Let’s explore a little bit closer how this has happened.  It really comes down to the number of channels available for messaging to get from the marketer to the consumer.  It used to be that those channels were tightly controlled and there were only a handful of them.  It goes back to the idea of power constructs.  The last hundred years our society has been all about power constructs.  The paths that lead from the manufacturing of products to the consumption of the products were few and were controlled by the powerful.  This was true in virtually any market you could think of.  With consumer packaged goods the ability of those goods to flow from the manufacturer to the consumer is controlled at various points along that channel by a few powerbrokers.  The same has been true in advertising.  The paths from the advertiser to the consumer were generally controlled by a few very powerful corporations.  Look at how the power construct in advertising typically played itself out:

  • At the top we have the advertiser.
  • Below that we have the advertising agency that was responsible for crafting the message.
  • Next you have the media buyer that takes a message created by the advertising agency and determines the channels to reach the target consumer.
  • Below that you have the channels used to reach the consumer, whether they be broadcast TV, newspaper, magazine or radio stations.
  • Finally, at the bottom, you have the consumer themselves.

All the communication in this channel went one way, from the advertiser down through each of the successive layers until it reached the consumer.  There was no corresponding channel to allow communication from the consumer to flow back through all these gates to the advertiser.  In the case where an advertiser did want to get information from an individual consumer, they would employ a market research company to circumvent the entire power structure of communication and go directly to a handful of representative consumers, determine what they were thinking and report back to the advertiser (or perhaps the advertising agency).  Picture a series of locks on a canal, with all the water flowing one way and with each of the gates of the individual locks designed to let water out and not let water back in.  The only way for water to run back was a small pipeline with a pump on it and the switch to that pump was always in the hands of the advertiser.  They chose when they wanted to listen to the consumer and when they chose to ignore the consumer.  The consumer had virtually no power to push their message back to the advertiser.

Now let’s look at what the Internet did.  The Internet took a highly structured, albeit one way, channel and completely blew it apart.  Now water flows freely back and forth between the advertiser and the consumer.  This not so much took control way from the advertiser and gave it to the consumer as it eliminated (or is in the process of eliminating) the existing structure that information flows through.  It democratized connections.  Rather than a man-made channel with restrictive gates and locks that restrict the flow of information from one place to the other, the Internet has turned the landscape into a vast field during a rainstorm.  Water collects in a thousand tiny pools and flows according to the online landscape.  Advertisers can influence where those flows happened as much as consumers can.  The control of flow is now jointly owned by everyone.  Advertisers have not had their power taken away.  They just have to learn how to share it.  They have to live up to the responsibility that goes with a truly two-way relationship.  Because they can no longer control the channel the message goes through, they have to spend more time controlling the very message itself.  They have to make it bulletproof, capable of withstanding the BS test.  And you have to understand that that message can’t be carefully crafted, it has to be lived.  It encompasses everything they do in the day-to-day operation of their business.  It has to include all the touch points that brand has with the outside world.  Because every touch point is a small puddle in that massive field.  If they manage the information correctly it will flow in the desired direction.  If they abdicate their responsibility of meeting the customer halfway in providing a mutually beneficial proposition, then they have to bear the consequences when the flow goes in the direction they don’t want it to.  And if there is enough momentum in the opposite direction, they will get flooded by a tidal wave of consumer dissent.

All in all, it’s a healthier relationship.  One-way relationships tend not to be sustainable in the long term.  But as with any power shift, there’s a pendulum effect that will likely occur here.  As power finds its natural balancing point, it will likely swing too far in the direction of the consumers before it comes back again.

Scoble Discovers Google’s Secret

Robert Scoble, in a recent blog post, cracked the Google monetization code on the search results page.  In a conversation with an unnamed Googler he found that Google can afford to dial down the presentation of top sponsored ads because they’re just more efficient at monetizing the traffic.  Of course, this shouldn’t come as news to anyone who read our last eye tracking report.  We went into great depth about Google’s ability do more with less when it comes to sponsored advertising on the SERP.

I’m feeling a little blue in the face, but at the risk of repeating myself yet again I’ll make the point.  Relevance at the top of the page is a sacred cow.  The Area of Greatest Promise which occupies a tiny little triangle in the far upper left is the landscape you have to focus on if you want to present the best search user experience.  For an in-depth walk-through of what the Area of Greatest Promise is and how it impacts the user experience, check out last week’s Just Behave column on Searchengineland.  Also check out The Importance of Consideration Sets, the column I wrote the previous week.  If you want to know how Google does more with less, you have to understand the basic fundamentals of user behavior on a search engine.

The fact is, when you look at Google’s ability to monetize the page they are leaps and bounds ahead of both Yahoo and Microsoft in this regard, yet they are by far the least aggressive than presenting sponsored advertising at the top of the page.  The result? They keep scanning highest on this top real estate.  They have higher click through on both first-time visits to the page and repeat visit.  They don’t break user scanner behavior into two distinct paths, but keep it concentrated in the Golden Triangle.  The result is that when they do choose to show sponsored ads in this area, they have much higher levels of engagement and click through over the entire interaction with the search results page, not just the first visit to the page.  If you use the overall user experience as your metric, higher monetization will come as a natural result.  The minute you try to force monetization by hijacking valuable real estate for purely commercial purposes, without consideration for what the user wants, you start eroding your revenue channel.  It’s no great secret. Pony up 149 bucks and you can buy a 200 plus page report showing you exactly how Google does it.

Guy Kawasaki in Kelowna

I had the pleasure of seeing Guy Kawasaki speak in my hometown of Kelowna last week.

Guy2

Photo courtesy of Manoj Jasra

The presentation was one I had seen him give in Vegas at PubCon last fall but the repetition did nothing to reduce the enjoyability of the presentation.  Guy is one of the most engaging speakers I’ve ever had the privilege of seeing.  I was hoping to be able to get to know him a little bit better but unfortunately, he had a pinched nerve from a hockey injury and was unable to sit at our table for dinner.  He was obviously suffering but managed to pull it together and deliver a great presentation.  We had actually bought tickets for a number of our team at Enquiro because we knew it would be inspirational for them. None were disappointed and both Manoj and Jody actually did blog posts the same night of the presentation  when they got home. Considering the  event didn’t  wrap up till 10:30, that shows dedication and passion!If you’re not aware, Guy is a huge hockey fan and he definitely played to the crowd with a number of hockey references.  Guy said he doesn’t often get the chance to use hockey stories but when in Canada, he takes full advantage.  He mentioned that he was actually considering canceling the speaking gig, given the pain that he was in with his injury, but he asked himself,  “What would Mark Messier do?” and then sucked it up and made the trip.  I’m glad he did.  If you ever get the chance to see Guy speak, I would highly recommend going.  I would also recommend becoming a regular reader of his blog, one of the most popular blogs on the web.

The Art of Contradiction

First published March 28, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

From “The Argument Clinic,” Monty Python

Michael Palin: An argument isn’t just contradiction.
John Cleese: It can be.
Michael Palin: No it can’t. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
John Cleese: No it isn’t.
Michael Palin: Yes it is! It’s not just contradiction.
John Cleese: Look, if I argue with you, I must take up a contrary position.
Michael Palin: Yes, but that’s not just saying ‘No it isn’t.’
John Cleese: Yes it is!
Michael Palin: No it isn’t!
John Cleese: Yes it is!
Michael Palin: Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes.
(short pause)
John Cleese: No it isn’t.

I think the world of SEO has spun into a prolonged Monty Python sketch. The flavor of the month seems to be manufactured debate designed to take up polar opposite positions on any given topic. There’s nothing like a little dustup online to get the creative juices going and generate a lot of blog activity, and, if the topic of that debate strikes enough nerves, a corresponding bushel of new links. It seems like no matter what someone says, someone else in the blogosphere automatically takes the contradictory viewpoint, sometimes not so much because he or she disagrees — but just because they want to post a comment on their blog and generate some links.

You Say “Potato,” I Say “Patattah”

There’s nothing new with online debate, but in the past it tended be fueled by real passion. Today I suspect that we’re all scanning the online landscape, looking for a viewpoint that we can be diametrically opposed to, just for the sake of generating some dialogue and some link bait.

And, just so we can be crystal-clear about this at the outset, when it comes to the above practice, I’m guilty as charged. In the past couple of months I’ve engaged in at least three or four of these debates in my own blog. Some I truly felt passionate about and some were simply me jumping on the other side of the question for the sheer purpose of having a little fun and perhaps generating a comment or two. Perhaps the low point of this particular form of online content generation reached its lowest point when both I and fellow SearchInsider David Berkowitz decided to open up the debate in this column on no less worthy a topic then Kevin Federline (just kidding, David, I know this wasn’t just a heartless exercise for you. I’m sure you’re very passionate about K-Fed.).

Dispassionate Debate

But I have to wonder how effective we can be in arguing if we don’t truly believe in the viewpoint that we’re arguing for. Dispassionate debate is supposed to be something we learn at school. We get randomly assigned one side of an argument, and it’s our job to effectively argue that viewpoint whether we believe it or not. The advantage of dispassionate debate is that you tend not to shoot your mouth off too fast. You take the time to do some research, learn the facts, and construct a logical argument without your face turning red, your heartbeat racing and your blood pressure rising through the roof. I’m the first to admit that when someone strikes a chord with me, I tend to take it a little more personally than I should — a situation I’m currently finding myself in with one of my blog debates.

Get The Juices Going!

But the debate that really get the juices going are those things we truly believe in. Just look at how passionate an entire industry got when the very validity of SEO was questioned. Take a browse through some of the hottest threads in either Webmaster World or Threadwatch and see how vitriolic comments can get when the raw nerves are exposed.

Passionate ideological debate is a good thing. It’s what built our society and it’s what’s driven the evolution of our civilization. If we can keep the focus of the debate on the validity of the ideas and not the person making the argument, then debate is a very good thing. It’s healthy, it lets the air in, it exposes ideas and allows us to ruminate on them. And if it happens on an online forum and it happens to help reinforce the structure of the Web by generating new links, then so be it. Again, it’s just one more way to where the Web takes the things we’ve always tended to do and elevates them to a new level.

In one particular debate I was told I should not take it so personally. After 45 years of living with myself, I realize I’m just not wired that way. I do tend to take things personally — and that’s usually what prompts me to post comments, whether they’re in a column like this or on my personal blog. And I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing. Yes, it might ruffle some feathers from time to time. But it’s a sign of passion — and one thing I truly love about this industry is the passion that always bubbles just below the surface. I love the fact that we’re quick to jump to the defense of ideas we hold dear. I love the fact that we’re a very eloquent group and we can make our points so well. In a column that came out last week, Bill McCloskey cried about the lack of passion in the e-mail industry. As Bill points out, I’ve never seen that to be true in search. We’re ready to argue anything, even if we don’t really hold our position to be true deep, deep in our heart.

After all, there’s no such thing as bad press — and perhaps there’s no such thing as bad link bait.

The Great K-Fed Debate

federlinesearchMy SearchInsider column last week took exception with K-Fed launching his own search engine. Actually, I take exception with the entire concept of K-Fed that but that’s another point. In today’s SearchInsider, David Berkowitz retorts, rebukes and refutes my negativity around all things Federline, saying that the K-Fed engine shows that search is ubiquitous, search is evolving and search shouldn’t be always all business, no fun. Ultimately he says let the market decide whether a Kevin Federline engine is a good idea or not. Hard to refute that point.

Anyway, knowing David, he had a lot of fun writing the column and I certainly had fun writing the original column. The thing that amazes me is that in the past week, 40% of the total ink (or whatever the virtual variation of ink is) on SearchInsider has been devoted to the topic of Kevin Federline. Perhaps someday soon you’ll be able to pick up your local copy of SearchInsider at the grocery checkout and we’ll have great juicy articles about Britney’s rehab and the latest alien that professes to be Elvis, living in Minot, North Dakota.

One last point though David. You quoted me as saying that I would rather wear Fiberglas underwear than use the Kevin Federline search engine. That’s not actually true, I would rather wear Fiberglas underwear than attend K-Fed’s birthday party. And you asked where the phrase comes from. For the life of me I can’t remember where I first heard it, but I’m pretty sure it’s not a Canadian thing. I tried to look it up and couldn’t find any references so what the hell, let’s say that I originated the saying.

Does Online Video Give Us a New User Interface?

In Wednesday’s SearchInsider, Aaron Goldman looked at video search and what’s going to be required for it to truly become an interesting advertising vehicle.  Some of the speculation comes from Aaron’s musing about what might happen if Google purchased Blinkx.

To me, video search is one of the more interesting growth areas for search in the future.  Currently, there are some restrictions on video search that are imposed by the current state of technology.  Our ability to index video is restricted to the addition of metadata.  For each video clip, someone must take the time to include the tags indicating what the video is about.  As long as video search relies on this, the opportunities for advancement are extremely limited.  But right now we’re advancing on several technical fronts to be able to index content and not rely on metadata.  Several organizations, including Microsoft, are working on visual recognition algorithms that allow for true indexing of video content.  Advancements in computing horsepower will soon give us the sheer muscle required for the gargantuan indexing task.  Once we remove humans from the equation, allowing for automated indexing video content, the world of video search suddenly becomes much more promising.

When this happens, we move accessing information in a video from being a linear experience to being a nonlinear experience.  Suddenly we have random-access to information embedded within the video.  As mentioned, the technology is being developed to enable this, but the question is, will we as viewers be able to adapt to this paradigm shift?  The evolution of video has been one that is coming from a linear, storytelling experience.  Every video is generally a self-contained story with a distinct beginning, middle and end.  This is how we’re used to looking at video.

But when video search makes it possible to access information at any point in the video, how will that impact our engagement with that video?  In the last 10 years, we’ve seen some fairly dramatic shifts in how we assimilate written information.  We have moved from our past experience, where information was presented in very much a linear fashion in novels or books, to the way we currently assimilate information on websites.  When we interact with websites, we “berry pick”, hunting in various places on the page for information cues that seemed to offer what we are looking for.  Assimilation of the written word is much more erratic experience right now.  We move in a nonlinear fashion through websites, picking up information and navigating based solely on our intent and the paths we choose for ourselves.  One of the greatest revelations in website design was that we can not restrict users to a linear progression through our site, much as we might want to control their experience.

This adaptation has happened fairly quickly on websites, but will it happen as quickly with video?  When we can search for and access information anywhere in the video, what does that do for the nature of our engagement with that video?  Certainly it opens the door to some very interesting marketing opportunities, with what I’ve previously described as “product placement on steroids”.  The ability to click on any item in a video and instantly be connected to more information about that item creates a tremendous opportunity for advertisers.  But it also opens the potential for multiple paths through a video.  Does watching a video become more like playing a video game, where we can pursue different paths and have different experiences depending on the path we choose?  Does a travel video on Prague become an interactive virtual tour, where we choose our own path through Prague?  And is that interactive virtual tour assembled on-the-fly from dozens of different video clips? do we assemble content based on our intent with the help of our video search tool?  Do video producers take a dramatically more granular approach to producing content, leaving you to assemble the storyline from these individual bits of content, based on what you want to see?

This promises an extraordinarily rich user experience.  Consider how this might play out for an individual user.  We go to Google video search tool and search for the Loreta, one of the top tourist attractions in Prague.  We find a clip that takes us on a quick virtual tour and within the clip we could click on other things of interest.  For instance, we could climb to the top of the bell tower and take a look over Prague.  We could click on any building and if there was a video available we would be instantly transported to that building.  Or, if we choose, we could search for the nearest hotel and find the corresponding video clip.  The entire video has been indexed so no matter what we click on, our video search engine can use that to initiate a query and bring us back the resulting clips.  The clips are assembled into a virtual montage that we can navigate through depending on our interest areas.  We create a virtual version of Prague, assembled from all the video content that’s available, and we can access just what we’re interested in and search for any content that might be embedded into any of those individual video files.  Underneath this layer of video content there could be additional layers of functionality.  For instance you could tie it in with mapping functionality, à la Google Earth.  You could tie in Web search functionality so that you could easily click through to the relevant websites.  This could also provide access to booking engines and a number of other potential actions that we could take.

Such an experience is not that great a stretch from where we are currently at.  To see how it might play out take a look at Microsoft’s PhotoSynth.

photosynth

PhotoSynth View of Piazza San Marco in Venice

It does just what I’m describing with video, only with pictures.  It creates a 3-D world from the thousands of pictures that have been publicly shared.  I highly recommend taking it for a spin, as it provides a fascinating look at what human computer interfaces can be.

As we start considering the possibilities for video, the problem is we’re still stuck in our current paradigm of how we interact with video.  My feeling is once indexing technology allows us to truly index the content of the video, the nature of our interaction with video will completely change.  We’ll take the sensory input we expect from video and extend that into our typical user experience with more types of content.  Our interfaces will be more satisfying because they will become more like real life.  They will engage more of our senses and put us into a deeper and richer virtual world.  More and more, as technology progresses, our interface with technology will start to look more like our experience with the physical world.  As this happens, we will have the ability to step from a interface that engages our senses of sight and sound into a more abstract world where we interact with written text.  The transition between these two interfaces will be seamless and we can step back and forth as we wish.

The promise of video lies not so much in taking video as we know it and bringing it online.  The promise of video is that it provides a distinctly different user experience which could prove to be the new interface to technology.  But to make this happen we have to be able to index and search for the content that lies embedded within video.  We have to be able to take that video content and manipulate and mold it into a virtual world that we can interact with.  And that is the promise that lies within the next-generation video search.

K-Fed Up with Celebrity Skinned Search

First published March 22, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’ve got a question for you: Would you want to do anything with Kevin Federline? Personally, the more Federline-free my world is, the better. But apparently other people don’t see it that way. You may have noticed earlier this week that K-Fed is actually launching his own search engine. Well, to be more accurate, he’s slapping his face on an existing back end, so to speak. I won’t go into the details of the K-Fed engine, except to say that it’s powered by Yahoo and it’s offered by Prodege.com.

Par-Tee with Britney’s Ex!

Apparently, making this your primary search engine could open the door to a chance to win tickets to Kevin’s private birthday party (I would rather wear fiberglass underwear), T-shirts and other paraphernalia all related to the somewhat questionable K-Fed brand. Apparently, an invite to K-Fed’s birthday party is “a once in a lifetime opportunity.” This has the ring of truth, as I might consider killing myself if I actually won.

This got me thinking. If we’re in the era of consumer-generated media, are we also in the area of consumer-generated celebrities? Does the increasing fragmentation of our society through an explosion of online channels means that even marginal celebs like Kevin Federline get their own small sliver of fame? If we have enough Kevin Federline fans somewhere and the Web has empowered them to have a voice unlike anything they may have been able to have before, is there a place for a Kevin Federline search engine? And, if so, does the future hold the promise of a profusion of celebrity skinned search sites?

Google Dresses Up Your Home Page

Ironically, Google also made an announcement this week releasing six themes for their personalized homepage. In this case, Google went out of its way to make sure that the themes are not commercial in any way. In Google’s words, these themes are all about “art and personality.” The new Google themes are clever, in that they are location-sensitive and have some cool little twists designed to “delight” users. For example, some of the scenes are outdoors, and the sun rises and sets in sync with where you happen to be located. With a Google theme installed, you may never have to look out your window again. But in a conversation with Google folks, they made a point of saying that they’re hesitant to open up an API to Google themes, for fear that it would cause a rush of commercialized skins, which could encroach on the user experience.

Blatant Commercialism is Skin Deep

Commercially oriented skins are nothing new, of course. Movies have released custom skins for MP3 players and other online apps that bury functionality under a sea of advertising spin. There are hundreds and thousands of desktop themes, wallpaper and screen savers with a commercial bent. But up to this point, search has been relatively “spin-free,” save of course for the advertising on the actual results page. But at least I don’t have to look at Kevin Federline when I’m searching for the symptoms of gout or trying to find an update patch for my latest Windows problems.

Just Give Me My Results, Dammit!

Based on a few new entries in the search space, it suddenly seems like we need personality mixed in with our search functionality. Search innovator K-Fed is not the only one pointing us in this direction. Microsoft has been playing around with Ms. Dewey (again an unfortunate choice of words), with the assumption that an undeniably attractive but distinctively bitchy female guide standing in front of a Blade Runner-esque streetscape will somehow make our search experience more complete. Perhaps Ms. Dewey could be K-Fed’s rebound after his split with Britney. Or perhaps both of them should have a cup of tea with Jeeves and see how being a search mascot worked out for him.

My feeling is that we want search to be a pristine experience. We’d like it to be minimalist, and we want to start from a neutral palette. We are so focused on intent and the task at hand when we interact with search that anything that gets in the way is simply a distraction. It adds nothing to the user experience. Search is very utilitarian task. We get in, find what we’re looking for and get out. However, with the lion’s share of the search market tied up in the hands of so few players, perhaps any tactic is worth a try to see if they can wrest even a small sliver of those searches away from the Googles and Yahoos of the world.

Where Are They Now?

By the way, the other celebrities that have their own search engines with Prodege.com? Meatloaf, Andrew Dice Clay, and Wynonna Judd. So the progressive degrees of “washed up” seems to be: having your own reality show, appearing on “Dancing with the Stars,” then having your own search engine. Now, I ask you, if Paris doesn’t have her face (or other assorted body parts) plastered on a search engine somewhere, how hot can this trend really be?

The Bleeding Obvious File: Advertising Leads to Increased Search Volumes

Holy crap, it’s official! There is a link between advertising and the volume of searches. We now have research to prove it. A recent analysis for the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association found a direct link between consumers exposure to advertising and their likelihood to begin an online search.

Consumers said they were most motivated to begin an online search after viewing:

  • Advertising in magazines (47.2%)
  • Newspapers (42.3%)
  • Ads on TV (42.8%)
  • From reading articles (43.7%)

In a particularly insightful quote, Mike Gatti, Executive Director of RAMA, said, “… while search engine marketing continues to be a popular strategy, retailers should not lose sight of traditional advertising channels to promote products and services.”

Huh? We’re now worried about search taking too much of the advertising budget away from TV, magazines and newspaper? Has Mr. Gatti seen how that particular pie is sliced up lately? If anything, we should flip this and tell all those advertisers dumping millions on television that they should back up those campaigns with a few bucks spent on relevant search terms. Here’s just one example. In 2006, Ford spent mega bucks to promote their new Green line of Hybrid Ford Escapes on the Super Bowl in television ads. They had Kermit the Frog as their spokesperson..er…spokesfrog. But what Ford didn’t remember is that all that media attention would probably drive a resulting spike in search activity. And sure enough, as we can see from the Google trends graph below, there was a spike:

ford campaign

Unfortunately, Ford forgot to bolster their keyword buy by including all related phrases, leaving the door open for General Motors to bid higher for a number of generic relevant phrases, including Ford’s own spokesperson, Kermit the Frog, and intercept search users with pinpointed messaging. The total cost for Ford to close the loop on this particular campaign? Probably less than the cost of Kermit’s personal assistant during the filming of the ad.

Google Home Page gets Skinned – and One Change of Note for SEOs

I just had the official walk-through of Google’s recent announcement for personalized home pages. In a nutshell, they are allowing users the opportunity to skin their home page with one of six different themes. The goal, and I quote, is to “delight users”. And they don’t just want to delight them in the short term. They want this to be a long-lasting love affair with the Google home page.

Actually, in the call, we got sidetracked a little bit with something that, to me, was far more interesting. I’ll get to that in a second but first of all let’s look at the noteworthy aspects of Google’s announcement. The theory here is that the more you can personalize your home page, the more likely you are to interact with it on an ongoing basis. And if there’s a certain amount of cool involved, it will hopefully keep you coming back. Of course, Google wants this implementation to be technically clean so they’ve approached it with their typical engineering anal-retentiveness.

googlephpex(1)

The application of the theme is restricted to the top of your personalized home page. Google was very careful to make sure that the graphics didn’t impair either the performance of the page or your ability to get to the information on the page. They’ve taken some fairly ingenious workarounds to this. The themes are launched with a CSS framework and the foreground images are transparent gifs, layered over a tiled background that allows resizing of the browser without impairing the look and functionality of the page.

Google also, and again I quote, wanted this to be about “art and personality”, not about a thinly “skinned” (if you’ll pardon the pun) advertising pitches. They’ve only released six themes in this first round because they wanted to set the bar high. They indicated that they would likely be releasing more over time. And they also indicated that they are considering opening up a skinning API in the future, but they would rather not have highly commercially oriented skins, i.e. promoting the launch of a new movie, suddenly intruding on the personalized home page user experience.

One feature that is pretty cool about the new themes is that they are location sensitive. When you load a new theme the first thing you’ll be asked to do is enter your zip code (right now this release is only aimed at the US, but a release for Google’s other localization areas should come in the near future. I did add one in Canada, but I’m not sure if it’s updating itself). After that, you’ll find your seeing updates itself reflect the time of day and, in some cases, the season and your local weather.

Here are some examples. In Bus Stop, the weather impacting the bystanders changes based on what you might be seeing your window.

busstopresized

In Beach, the time of day will change your view over the seascape. When the sun sets out side, it should also be setting on your monitor.

googlebeach

And, in the seasonal theme, you’ll not only see the theme change based time of day, you’ll also see the changes of the seasons.

googleseasonal(1)

Google also promises some Easter eggs, hidden in amongst the themes.

All in all, it’s a cool add-on to the Google personalized homepage. Of course the rationale behind this announcement is fairly transparent. Google is pushing hard to gain more face time with the average user, and this gives them a front to attack on. The more time you spend the Google home page, the more chance you will have to interact the other Google properties. Apparently, Google is seeing some very strong growth trends through 2006 with personalized homepage usage. They’re also seeing a huge ramp-up of content delivered for the home page through their Gadgets API.

The SEM Easter Egg

But what about the search marketing implications? There’s nothing about this particular announcement that should impact how the personalized home page could be used for personalized search, other than Google’s hope that the addition of a personalized theme would lead to more interaction with your homepage. But there was a functional roll out recently by Google that could have implications for the search marketing community. This is something that I wasn’t aware of and was lucky enough to get a quick walk-through.

Googleaddatab

When you sign in to your personalized homepage, you’ll now see a small “add a tab” link beside the tab at the top of your home page. When you click on this you’re asked to name your tab and if you leave the Feeling Lucky check box checked, Google will go out and find the content to put on your new page.

Addatabdialogue

For example, I added a tab called SEO and Google automatically populated it with the latest headlines from SEOmoz, SEO News, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch and a number of other SEO sites.

Googletabseo

I asked Google how it was determined what sites would be included in this set of default content. Apparently, it’s decided by the most common choices of other people who have added a similarly named tab. In other words, these represent the aggregate choices of an ad hoc community, defined by the people who are interested in SEO and have decided to add these sites as content to their home page. And the set of default choices will constantly be refined, based on the most popular choices of people who add that tab. However, once you’ve added the tab to your own home page, your default content set remains static.

Okay, that’s interesting. But let’s factor in Google’s other recent announcement, the fact that they now have an integrated personal suite that shares user data from search history and what you have on your personalized home page. It’s not clear right now how much of an impact the content you’ve chosen to include on your personalized home page has on your personalized search results, but Google has said they wouldn’t “preclude” the use of this information in the personalized results algorithm.

Let’s further explore the implications. In these areas of interest, what gets included in the default content set under a possible “add a tab” category might have a significant advantage for any searches that fall within that content area. The more people who leave the Feeling Lucky? check box checked, the more people that will have these default content providers represented on the homepage, which will in turn likely impact their personalized search results. As we start exploring personalized search more and more, we’re starting to see the possible tactics that are emerging for gaining visibility on a personalized search page.

So what’s the bottom line here? Google’s new themes are cute and will likely lead to a higher degree of usage, but they have little impact on the world of search marketing. However, the “Add a Tab” functionality could potentially have a lot more impact.

Improving the Odds of Connecting with Your Target Market

Kim Krause Berg had a interesting additional thought to my post about eye tracking. Her question, “What happens when your target market gets up on the wrong side of the bed?”.

This got me to thinking about the validity of market research and understanding more about your target customer. Kim’s point, which she makes quite clearly, is that people are people and all the research in the world won’t be able to tell you if your target customers having a bad day, or for that matter, an extraordinarily good day, when they are interacting with your site. How much of a role does emotion play with predicted behavior?

In marketing and user centered design circles, we often talk about our targeted users and customers. Companies with money to blow will run studies on who their target consumers are, or run focus groups on what people love and hate about their products. The human factors industry studies human-computer behavior. Usability companies try to understand what ticks off end users. Conversions experts look for all the reasons behind failed sales. Search engine marketers dig deep for keywords used by the perfect end user who knows exactly what they’re looking for.

Once all this data is gathered, white papers are written, case studies are published and articles are run that inform us about what our site visitors and product users want, what they like, how they make choices and why. We may think we’re very cool and savvy to have found the holy grail of ROI.

What if your product, service, internet application or website is humming along, primed for the perfect targeted end user and that person is suddenly different?

Perhaps they are emotionally upset. PMS. Menopausal. Facing surgery. Sleepless parents. Overworked wage earners. Out of work. On medication. Depressed. Drunk. Suffers a sudden loss of eyesight or use of their hands. There are a zillion reasons why someone has an “off” day, is feeling emotionally or mentally out of whack or drastically changes in some way. This can last for a day, or longer.

Either way, what they are dealing with, at the moment they are accessing your website, service, product or application, may have an impact on how successful they are at completing a task.

Marketing is a game of percentages. It’s all about increasing your odds of hitting that perfect combination: putting the right message in front of the right person at the right time. Will you get it right 100% of the time? Of course not. But then again, if you can improve your odds of success from 50% to 60 or 70% you’ve just scored a huge marketing coup.

When you reduce marketing to one to one communication, you’re completely dependent on the receptiveness of your intended target. Unless you’re in front of the person when you communicate with them, there’s no way for you to pick up their mood or emotion. You can’t alter your message accordingly to the signals that you’re picking up. But the interesting thing is, as variable as people are on an individual basis, if you put enough of them together they start reacting in predictable patterns. While it might be impossible to predict the success of your message on an individual basis, the greater the size of the group, the more confident you are in predicting what the aggregate patterns will look like. And that’s where understanding more about your target market can dramatically improve your odds. If Kim is in my target market, I might not know what her mood might be on any given day. If I have 10,000 Kim’s in my target market, I can be fairly sure that on any given day a certain percentage of them will be in a good mood, a certain percentage will be in a bad mood, and a certain percentage will be relatively ambivalent. I don’t have to be precise on a one-to-one level, because the law of averages works in my favor. I’ll get more right than wrong. What is important, however, is that you have a good understanding of what all those Kim’s generally like, what motivates them, and what their intent is when they interact with my brand.

There’s a lot of talk about personas as a tool to help you understand your target market better. One of the reasons people hesitate to use personas is that it feels odd, when your target market could be made up of thousands or millions of individuals, to build a conceptual framework represents just one individual. Again, it seems like you’re oversimplifying the collective needs and wants of your segment. But the power of a persona is the way it forces you to shift your paradigm, the way it forces you to look at things from a customer’s point of view and interact with your brand through their eyes, not yours. It’s this fundamental shift in thinking that has to happen to be able to effectively close communication. Once you build your persona framework, you can start dropping in the individual pieces of research intelligence you might have on your target market. It helps to create a profile, complete with a much greater understanding of what motivates that target, relative to your offering. It’s very difficult start a conversation with someone when you have no idea who you’re talking to.

The whole point of communication is to effectively connect and transfer information back and forth. The greater the understanding, the greater the odds of making that connection. Ideally, we should all be able to sit in front of each individual we’re communicating with and be able to read their body language, be able to pick up their signals, be able to interpret their moods and emotions. This being impossible (my track record with my wife is pretty abysmal and I live with her every day) the next best thing is to understand more about the group as a whole and what motivates them, and then to be able to craft your messaging in a way that resonates with them. Again, it’s all about improving your odds for success. If Kim gets up on the wrong side of the bed today, I might totally blow my chances of getting the right message to her, simply because she’s not in the mood to receive it. But for every one I get wrong, there will be several more that I get right.