Author Archives: ghotchkiss

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.

Shari Thurow Talking Smack about Eye Tracking

You know, if I didn’t know better I’d say that Shari Thurow had issues with me and eye tracking. I ran across a column a couple of weeks ago where she was talking about the niches that SEO’s are carving out for themselves and she mentioned eye tracking specifically. In fact she devoted a whole section to eye tracking. Now, it’s pretty hard not to take it personally when Enquiro is the only search marketing company I know that does extensive eye tracking. We’re the only ones I’m aware of that have eye tracking equipment in-house. So when Shari singles out eye tracking and warns about using the results in isolation…

That brings me to my favorite group of SEO specialists: search usability professionals. As much as I read and admire their research, they, too, often don’t focus on the big picture.

…I’m not sure who else she might be talking about.

I’ve been meaning to post on this for awhile but I just didn’t get around to it. I’m on the road today and feeling a little cranky so what the heck. It’s time to respond in kind. First, here’s Shari’s take on on eye tracking and SEO.

Eye-tracking data is always fascinating to observe on a wide variety of Web pages, including SERPs (define). As a Web developer, I love eye-tracking data to let me know how well I’m drawing visitors’ attention to the appropriate calls to action for each page type.

Nonetheless, eye-tracking data can be deceiving. Most search marketers understand the SERP’s prime viewing area, which is in the shape of an “F.” Organic or natural search results are viewed far more often than search engine ads are, and (as expected) top, above-the-fold results are viewed more often than the lower, below-the-fold results. Viewing a top listing in a SERP isn’t the same as clicking that link and taking the Web site owner’s desired call to action.

Remember, usability testing isn’t the same as focus groups and eye tracking. Focus groups measure peoples’ opinions about a product or service. Eye-tracking data provide information about where people focus their visual attention. Usability testing is task-oriented. It measures whether participants complete a desired task. If the desired task isn’t completed, the tests often reveal the many roadblocks to task completion.

Eye-tracking tests used in conjunction with usability tests and Web analytics analysis can reveal a plethora of accurate information about search behavior. But eye-tracking tests used in isolation yield limited information, just as Web analytics and Web positioning data yield limited (and often erroneous) information.

Okay Shari, you didn’t mention me or Enquiro by name but again, who else would you be talking about?

Actually, Shari and I agree more than we disagree here. I agree that no single data source or research or testing approach provides all the answers, including eye tracking. However, eye tracking data adds an extraordinarily rich layer of data to common usability testing. When Shari says eye tracking is not the same as usability testing, she’s only half right. As Shari points out, eye tracking combines very well with usability testing but in many cases, can be overkill. Usability testing is task oriented. There’s no reason why eye tracking studies can’t be task oriented as well (most of ours are). The eye tracking equipment we use is very unobtrusive. It virtually like interacting with any computer in a usability lab. In usability testing you put someone in front of the computer with the task and asked them to complete the task. Typically you record the entire interaction with software such as TechSmith’s Morae. After you can replay the session and watch where the cursor goes. Eye tracking can capture all that, plus capture where the eyes went. It’s like taking a two dimensional test and suddenly making it three-dimensional. Everything you do in usability can also be done with eye tracking.

The fact is, the understanding we currently have of interaction with the search results would be impossible to know without eye tracking. I’d like to think that a lot of our current understanding of interaction with search results comes from the extensive eye tracking testing we’ve done on the search results page. The facts that Shari says are common knowledge among search marketers comes, in large part, from our work with eye tracking. And we’re not the only ones. Cornell and Microsoft have done their own eye tracking studies, as has Jakob Nielsen, and findings have been remarkably similar. I’ve actually talked to the groups responsible for these other eye tracking tests and we’ve all learned from each other.

When Enquiro produced our studies we took a deep dive into the data that we collected. I think we did an excellent job at not presenting just the top level findings but really tried to create an understanding of what the interaction with the search results page looks like. Over the course of the last two years I’ve talked to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. I’ve shared the findings of our research and learned a little bit more about the findings of their own internal research. I think, on the whole, we know a lot more about how people interact with search than we did two years ago, thanks in large part to eye tracking technology. The big picture Shari keeps alluding to has broadened and been colored much more extensively thanks to those studies. And Enquiro has tried to share that information as much as possible. I don’t know of anyone else in the search marketing world who’s done more to help marketers understand how people interact with search. When we released our first study, Shari wrote a previous column that basically said, “Duh, who didn’t know this before?” Well, based on my discussions with hundreds, actually, thousands of people, almost everyone, save for a few usability people at each of the main engines.

There are some dangers with eye tracking. Perhaps the biggest danger is that heat maps are so compelling visually. People tend not to go any further. The Golden Triangle image has been displayed hundreds, if not thousands of times, since we first released it. It’s one aggregate snapshot of search activity. And perhaps this is what Shari’s referring to. If so, I agree with her completely. This one snapshot can be deceiving. You need to do a really deep dive into the data to understand all the variations that can take place. But it’s not the methodology of eye tracking that’s at fault here. It’s people’s unwillingness to roll up their sleeves and weed through the amount of data that comes with eye tracking, preferring instead to stop at those colorful heat maps and not go any further. Conclusions on limited data can be dangerous, no matter the methodology behind them. I actually said the same for an eye tracking study Microsoft did that had a few people drawing overly simplified conclusions. The same is true for usability testing, focus groups, quantitative analysis, you name it. I really don’t believe Enquiro is guilty of doing this. That’s why we released reports that are a couple hundred pages in length, trying to do justice to the data we collected.

Look, eye tracking is a tool, a very powerful one. And I don’t think there’s any other tool I’ve run across that can provide more insight into search experience, when it’s used with a well designed study. Personally, if you want to learn more about how people interact with engines, I don’t think there’s any better place to start than our reports. And it’s not just me saying so. I’ve heard as much from hundreds of people who have bought them, including representatives at every major search engine (they all have corporate licenses, as well as a few companies you might have heard of, IBM, HP, Xerox..to name a few). I know the results pages you see at each of the major engines look the way they do in part because of our studies.

Shari says we don’t focus on the big picture. Shari, you should know that you can’t see the big picture until you fill in the individual pieces of the puzzle. That’s what we’ve been trying to do. I only wish more people out there followed our example.

Jimbo Wales and People-Powered Search: A Long Shot

First published March 15, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is placing a fairly large bet that people can trump technology in the search engine game. According to a recent report in Yahoo, he’s putting $4 million (of other people’s money) plus an undisclosed “large amount” from Amazon on the line, betting that he can steal 5% of the total search market away from Google with his new project, Wikia.

Wales has called both Google and Yahoo the “black boxes” of the internet, criticizing them for the secrecy maintained around their ranking algorithms, but details on exactly how Wikia will work have been equally scarce. All we’ve heard so far is that an online community with “a distinct and clear purpose — a moral purpose — that unites people and brings them together to do something useful” will work to make Web search a better experience for us all. The “how” of how Wikia will work has been lacking to this point. But it’s likely to follow a similar path as Wikipedia. The online community will act as an army of human editors, ensuring the quality of the results by collectively agreeing on them in some fashion. The theory here is that there is no better filter for results aimed at humans than those same humans.

Human “Signal Noise”

But the minute you put people into the equation, you introduce “signal noise”: in engineering parlance, you add friction between the end user and the desired content. Automated algorithms are relatively friction-free. Results are ranked with mathematical objectivity, based on universally applicable principles. Queries flow through this channel to connect with the content as determined by the algorithms.

People are smarter and more intuitive than the smartest algorithm, but they’re also political. And the reality is, the very segment that Wikia (and Wikipedia) depends most on are those most prone to politics.

Anytime you depend on people to do things out of the “goodness of their hearts” you attract a certain kind of person. They’re community-minded, true, but it’s very much their definition of community. They can also be elitist, obstinate, territorial and dismissive of those “outside the circle.” These people tend to show up in the same places: condo strata councils, nonprofit organizations, PTAs, church groups, and, online, in forums and on wikis. They have the time to contribute, probably because no one can stand them, so they don’t have an active social life outside their chosen cause.

I’m not saying everyone that contributes falls into this category, but come on, admit it, everyone reading this now has someone firmly in mind that fits the above description. They get possessive about their online community, which is both a good and a bad thing. With possessiveness comes politics, and signal noise.

Good Intentions, Bad Results

If you need more evidence, look at what is currently happening in the best-known communities that depend on online “Good Samaritans.” On Digg, the Bury Brigade has been publicly acknowledged by Digg founder Kevin Rose: Any story that doesn’t meet their criteria for what is interesting gets quickly buried, never to rise to the surface again. That’s censorship, and it’s just some of the signal noise you can expect when you introduce people to the equation.

Wikipedia has come under frequent criticism for the same issue, a handful of community elite (with a decidedly left-wing bent) dictating what should and shouldn’t be included as entries.

A Growth Bottleneck

But perhaps the biggest challenge for Wikia is scalability. If you put your faith in people as your competitive advantage, you have to be prepared to accept the restrictions that come with that. If Wales is counting on people to help compile the index and rank it, that introduces a potentially significant bottleneck.

Search engines are different than encyclopedias. Encyclopedias are much less dynamic, even when you have an encyclopedia as fluid and ever-growing as Wikipedia. Search engines have to be much more sensitive to new content. A lower-traffic entry on Wikipedia could probably go untouched for months at a time and it wouldn’t significantly impact the value of that entry. But users of a search engine expect even long-tail queries to bring back fresh and timely results. Given this factor, it would be likely that Wikia would have to have a two-stage approach to including new content. They would need an automated spider and simple index, to be later augmented and edited by humans. This would create a significant divide in the quality of the results, between the edited and unedited entries, especially in newer, less popular segments of the index. And, as Wales himself admits, if the algorithms that power the automated portion are open source, the door is wide open to spammers.

What’s In It For Me?

Finally, we have to look at the motivation on why people contribute to Wikipedia, and ask ourselves if this would translate to a search engine. When you contribute to Wikipedia, you’ve staked your claim in online intellectual territory. You’ve left a mark, speaking to your expertise in a particular area, on a place on the Web where you can point and say, “See, that’s me. I did that!” It may not have your name on it, but it’s visible.

In a search engine, your contribution would be lost in a background process that would leave virtually no trace that you ever trod there. There are no bragging rights. And that’s essential to appeal to the segment of the online community that Wikia needs to survive. If we’re going to take even a few seconds out of our busy days to tag, vote, nominate or whatever else Wales needs us to do, there’d better be something in it for us, or it just won’t fly.

I applaud Jimmy Wales’s ideal of open access to technology and unlocking the “black box” for the masses, but I just can’t see how it will work for search. Much as I love humans, having been one on occasion, I’m not sure they’re the competitive advantage a search engine needs.

User-centricity is More than Just a Word

Ever since Time Magazine made you and I the person of the year, user experience has been the two words on the tip of everyone’s tongue. We’re all saying that the user is king and that we’re building everything around them. But I fear that user-centricity is quickly becoming one of those corporate clichés that’s easy to say, but much, much harder to do. All too often I see internal fighting in a lot of companies between those that truly get user centricity and have become the internal user champions and those that are continuing to push the corporate agenda, at the expense of the user experience. The tough part of user centricity is seeing things through the users eyes. We can do user testing but if we truly put the user first, it requires tremendous courage and fortitude to make the user the primary stakeholder. All too often, I see user considerations being one of several factors that are being balanced in the overall design. And often, it takes a backseat to other considerations, such as monetization. This is the trap that Yahoo currently finds themselves in. They talk about user experience all the time. But the fact is, over the last two years it’s really been the advertiser whose’s owned their search results page. I’ve recently seen signs of the balance tipping more towards the user’s favor with the rollout of Panama and a more judicious presentation of top sponsored ads. But I’m still not sure the user is winning the battle at Yahoo!

It’s not easy to step inside your user’s head when it comes to designing interfaces. It’s very tought to toggle the user perspective on and off when you’re going through a design cycle. The feedback we get from usability testing tends to be too far removed from the actual implementation of the design. By that time the meat of the findings has been watered down and diluted to the point where the user’s voice is barely heard. That’s why I like personas as a design vehicle. A well formulated persona keeps you on track. It keeps you in the mindset of the user. It gives you a mental framework you can step into quickly and readjust your perspective to that of the user, not the designer.

If you’re truly going to be user centric, be prepared to take a lot of flack from a lot of people. This is not a promise to be made lightly. You have to commit to it and not let anything dissuade you from delivering the best possible end-user experience, defined in the user’s own terms. This can’t be a corporate feel good thing. It has to be a corporate commitment that requires balls the size of Texas. And if you’re going to make a commitment, you better be damn sure that the entire company is also willing to make the same commitment. The user experience group can’t be a lone bastion for the user, fighting a huge sea of corporate momentum going in the opposite direction. This isn’t about balancing the user in the grand scheme of things, it’s about committing wholeheartedly to them and getting everyone else in the organization to make the same commitment. If you can do so, I think the potential wins are huge. There’s a lot of people talking about user centricity but there’s not a lot of people delivering on it consistently and wholeheartedly.

A Lesson Learned from the Pasternack SEO Contest

First published March 8, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Why is search engine marketing defined by diametric opposition?  It seems like for every question there are two extreme answers.  And these polar opposite viewpoints are held with a tremendous amount of passion.  The smallest questioning of our position can unleash a firestorm of retribution.  Blogs kick themselves into high gear as aspersions are cast without a second thought.  We rise passionately to defend our position, questioning the pedigrees and mental capacities of our opponents. How could someone be so incredibly dense as to not see it our way?

Tempest in a Teapot

In the past few months, little has raised such a passion of opposing viewpoints as the questioning of the value of organic optimization.  The verbal feud that took place in the blogosphere is well-known to most of us within the industry.  If you’ve been one of the few that has remained blissfully ignorant of the David Pasternack (co-founder of Did-It) “Is SEO rocket science” debate, count yourself fortunate.  It’s not so much the debate I want to focus on, but the fallout of that debate because I think there’s a valuable lesson that we can all learn from it.  As the organic community rose to defend its collective value, Threadwatch.org had the idea of launching an SEO contest.  The premise of the contest was simple.  Whoever ranked highest for the phrase David Pasternack by noon on March 1 was the winner.  A Who’s Who of SEOs rose to take the challenge, using every trick in the book to try to propel their page to No. 1 in the Google data centers.

One Set of Results, Two Interpretations

Predictably, the tactics ranged from the white to the dark gray.  The winner, when all was said and done, was the page that had been ranking previously for a chef in New York also called, coincidently, David Pasternack.  There was a post on Dave Pasternack’s Did-It corporate blog that said, with a decidedly sarcastic tongue-in-cheek approach, “See? We told you so! SEO isn’t rocket science and after you guys threw the best you could at the algorithms, the page that was there before the contest was still the one ranking number one on Google.”  That’s one viewpoint.

Ironically, when you look at that same page of search results, the opposing side also claims victory.  Their contention? They dramatically changed the appearance of a search results page, which shows that SEO does have tremendous value and that it’s not a “set and forget,” one-time endeavor.  Search results pages are dynamic environments and if you hope to do well on them, you have to be prepared to take a long-term view. That’s the other viewpoint.

See?  The same set of search results — but two dramatically different opinions of what happened in the contest.  And both sides swear they’re right.  In my opinion, they’re both right — or, at least a little bit of each argument rings true.  The fact is, the page for David Pasternack, (the chef, not the cofounder of Did-It), has been around a long time and this Pasternack is a well-known guy.  Google is doing what it should be doing; putting the site first that most people would be expecting to find at the top of the listings.

The SEO side is also correct.  They did dramatically change the look of the page.  Other than the top0ranking page, the rest of the results looked decidedly different than they did a few weeks before, prior to the contest.  So rather than quibble about who’s right and who’s wrong in this debate, let’s look at the takeaways and see what we can learn.

The (Web) Guerilla Approach

One of the most interesting entries was a late one by Greg Boser.  Greg’s approach leveraged the existing notoriety of David Pasternack, the chef.  Greg’s approach was not so much based on technical tricks (although they did play a role), but rather a very clever strategy that was aligned with the inherent nature of people who frequent the Web.  Greg didn’t win the contest, but he came within a whisker’s width of doing so.  The fact was, Greg reluctantly entered the contest late (more irony, both Greg and Dave Pasternack called SEO contests stupid, but both entered) and  he wanted to time his entry so that it climbed the search engine ranks and claimed the top spot within 12 hours of the closing of a contest.  He wanted to show that not only could you control your organic visibility, but you could do it with a fair amount of predictability.  His timing was a little bit off, due more than anything to variations in the various Google data centers, but he definitely showed that with the right approach, you can influence search results.

To me, the interesting thing in this was not the technique Greg used but the approach he decided to follow.  He played the innocent bystander card.  He appealed to human nature and understood how people would react.  The genius of Greg’s approach was not in how he used redirects or turned on the “link juice.”  Those were all techniques that were part of the execution and yes, they had to be done right, but they only mattered because they were aligned to a strategy that was very clever.  He outthought his competition, rather than hammered them to death with a bag of black-hat tricks.  He knew that if he drew attention to the real Dave Pasternack, the one that was having his rightful visibility usurped by a temporary blip on the online “buzz” horizon, he would have a better chance of gaining support because he was appealing to an inherent human value that we all generally share.

We like to protect people, especially if they’ve been rightfully wronged in some way.  Our best instincts rise to the surface and we want to rush to the aid of the victim.  In this particular instance, the way to do that was by sending a little “link love” Greg threw out some irresistible link bait. And what was particularly impressive about his entry was the way he almost timed it down to the hour, letting the momentum of his entry roll right up to the final moment and coming within one datacenter of actually winning the contest.  Did he usurp the original Dave Pasternack page?  No, but he really shouldn’t have.  That page had already earned its link love and should have been right where it was, on top of the listings.

The Value of People Smarts

Recently, I wrote a column about the future of SEO and SEM agencies.  And I said that the time may soon be coming when the technical wizardry that SEOs tend to rely on may have limited value.  One thing, however, that will never have limited value is the ability to understand how people think and work — and then to be able to translate that into an online reality.

That’s what Greg Boser showed in this contest.  He understood what makes people tick and then anticipated how that might play out online.  That type of approach will always have value in the online world.  Over time it may translate itself from gaining results on a search engine to building buzz on Digg, creating more presence on blogs, or any one of the other 1,001 places where we would like to gain visibility online.  But the ability to take an understanding of human nature and then to be able to translate that into anticipated online behavior is an incredibly valuable commodity.

Greg, there are many things that we might not agree on, but in this particular contest, you showed that SEO may not be rocket science, but it can certainly be a social science.

 

Post Mortem on Ten and Half Months of Posts

Well, my interview with Matt Cutts certainly seems to be causing ripples in the SEO world. At this point, it’s well on its way to becoming the most read blog posts I’ve ever made. The fact is, I have to thank Matt for my two highest traffic days ever. The first came when I launched my blog and Matt “Matt-dotted” it. That has been the record up until now, when my interview with Matt drove more daily visits and page views on Monday.

In a more analytical bent, it was interesting to see how the traffic ramped up. On Friday, when the interview was posted, the majority of traffic was coming from the predictable sources. There was a link from Search engine land and Search Engine Watch and Web Pro News also picked up the post and ran it in a couple of stories. This drove the majority of the traffic over the weekend. But as time went on (through Monday and today), the long tail kicked in and links to the post showed up in a number of blogs and forums, both here and overseas. While my referral base broadened out dramatically, the traffic kept rolling. Obviously, the long tail phenomenon occurs everywhere. In the last 24 hours, it’s been these widely dispersed links that have driven the majority of the traffic.

It’s also interesting to note the contrast in the pickup between Matt’s interview and the previous interview with Marissa Mayer. While Marissa’s interview actually contained more hard data on how personalization works on Google, Matt speculated on what personalization might do for the future of SEO. That was obviously a hot button and generated a number of pickups. Something about putting the name Matt Cutts and the letters SEO in the same title almost guarantees that you’re going to capture attention in this industry.

I always find it fascinating to see which blog posts pickup steam and which once seem to linger forever with hardly anyone reading them. In many cases, the posts I’m most proud of are the ones that seem to limp along, capturing a handful of page views every so often. Anything that touches on controversy seems to strike a chord.

Looking back at my blog records, my most read posts to date are:

Usability and Asinine Comments from the Bay

Controversy stirred up at a Jakob Nielsen Usability Summit in San Francisco where I discussed brand experience online and the use of graphics on websites

Relevancy Rules in Top Sponsored

A sneak preview of our eye tracking study that showed how importance relevance in those top sponsored ads were for attracting attention and clicks

The Matt Cutts Interview

Matt talks about personalization and its impact on Seo

The Personalized Results are Coming, The Personalized Results are Coming

My follow-up post when Google made its announcement early in February that was pushing more people toward signing up for personalized results

The Marissa Mayer Interview

Chatting with Marissa about personalization and its impact on user experience

For interest sake, I also looked back at my main referrer sources. Google by the bigger referrer source, driving about 14% of my traffic, with Matt’s blog second (a testament to it’s popularity, considering he’s only linked to my blog a couple of times) at 12.5%. After that it’s MediaPost, Search engine Land and Search Engine Guide.

For those of us always looking to build buzz on our blogs, it’s helpful to take a look back to see what our hits and misses were. For myself, I want to keep a balance between getting the posts out that I think are important, whether or not they attract a ton of links, and obviously giving my readers what they want. It looks like more sneak previews of our internal research and more interviews with the people that are shaping the search experience at Yahoo, Google and Microsoft are where I have to look in the future.

Debating with Myself about whether or not Google can Change Advertising

Ari Rosenberg, a media buying consultant, had an interesting column last week about Google’s plans to enter the cable TV market, just the same as they’ve made inroads in the radio and print markets. Google’s approach in all these markets is consistent. They will apply technology to open up the marketplace, removing the middleman and basically automating the purchase of media. Ari argues that while Google may understand technology, they have a lot to learn about how advertising works. This is a huge, complex question and there are a lot of different shades of gray to the argument. It’s not a simple yes or no argument. But there are some very interesting aspects, both pro and con, there he touches on in his column. So I’d like to present to differing viewpoints, both pro and con, about why or why not Google may actually change how advertising is done.

The Pro Side: Making the Marketplace More Efficient

There is no doubt that there’s a lot of room for efficiency in most media buying markets. There is a layer upon layer of friction in the marketplace, caused by entrenched consultants, reps and buyers and other “filler” between the ultimate buyer and seller. This is where Google can excel. Their theory is that they can remove the friction by using their technology to enable marketplaces where buyers and sellers can connect directly. More than this, they introduce the notion of relevancy. Ultimately, Google wants to achieve their end marketing goal of always showing the right ad to the right person at the right time. They would take the idea of keyword relevancy, pioneered so effectively on the Web, and apply it to other channels. Of course this depends on a more interactive version of print, radio, or cable than we currently see. But as all media converge, Google’s initial inroads into each of these channels will secure them a foothold at the time when relevancy starts to matter.

In this regard, Google is definitely dealing from two areas of strength. They understand technology and have been successful in developing clean, efficient interfaces to help streamline the flow of commerce. There is definitely a change that is needed in the media buying marketplace and Google has the engineering chops to clean it up dramatically. Also, they have a clear and deep understanding of consumer intent, expressed in the consumer’s own terms. And as it begins to matter more in advertising, Google is well-placed to make those consumer initiated connections happen.

The Con Side: Understanding Marketing

In last few years, I’ve had enough interaction with Google to understand that for them, marketing is considered a necessary evil. There’s a lot of “soft”, undefinable aspects to marketing, that can’t be distilled into a simple, clean algorithm. This is thinking that is largely foreign to the Google frame of mind. Google loves mathematical simplicity and definition. Two plus two should always equal four. The question shouldn’t be up for debate. But marketing is not that simple, not that clean, not that black-and-white. There’s a lot of gray in marketing.

Ari makes the point that Google doesn’t understand advertising. This is largely right. Google is an engineering company. It exists to apply technology to solve problems. If you look at the makeup of the Google organization, their own marketing department is a small, under resourced afterthought. Because they didn’t need to use advertising, the philosophy is that really is not necessary for anyone. As Google steps into advertising, think of them as Mr. Spock, reluctantly doing a stint as a Madison Avenue ad exec (now that’s an idea for a sitcom).

The Wild Card: the Consumer

Ultimately, it’s not Google or Madison Avenue that will have the last word in this debate. It’s you and me and 6 billion (and counting) other consumers. There is an old world and the new world in marketing. And the former is rapidly giving way to the latter. The wild card in all this is the changing game of marketing. Sure, Google may not understand the “warm fuzzies” of marketing, those undefinable aspects of brand engagement, but what Google does understand is connecting users with what they’re looking for. And do we really need advertising that hits us at a visceral and an emotional level, when it’s exactly the advertising we’re looking for anyway? It doesn’t have to hammer us over the head with its message, because we’re openly receptive to that message, we’re seeking it. As Google moves into print, cable, and radio it may not be that their lack of understanding of the current reality of marketing that will hold them back for making it successful. It may be the fact that those channels just don’t lend themselves very well to this new idea of consumer empowerment. Consumer empowerment is expressed much more easily over the interactive platform of the Internet. The Internet is the next evolution of marketing. The question will be more if Google can make a significant inroad into these more traditional channels before the channels become integrated within interactive, Web driven platform. Or will there be just too much friction to overcome?