Author Archives: ghotchkiss

Social Networking Research Update from KnowledgeStorm

A few posts ago I talked about KnowledgeStorm’s new study on the use of social networking by B2B technology buyers. Apparently, the two facts that were getting reported were a little misleading in the way they were presented. Matt Lohman from KnowledgeStorm clears them up:

“I wanted to thank you for referencing the recent research study from KnowledgeStorm. I thought I would clarify some of the confusion with the respondent percentages: The write up of results that you reference is a bit misleading. I’ll try to explain without getting too off the deep end…

We asked about familiarity with social networks first, for which 35% replied “not familiar at all” while another 42% replied “somewhat familiar” adding up to the 77% figure. As part of further validation, the next question asked “How often do you visit social networking sites?” from which we received 31% stating “Never”. This is very close to the 35% who were “not at all familiar” in the previous question. Good confirmation there. From that point forward in the questioning, we excluded anyone who claimed they “never” visit social networking sites (the 31%). Therefore, when we got to the question that asked “What are your primary reasons for using social networking sites?” the only respondents were those individuals who visit social networking sites at least once a month (69%). Of the individuals using these sites, 70% are doing so for business development networking or development reasons.

I still think your conclusions are valid but also wanted to make sure our research wasn’t getting misconstrued. “

Thanks Matt

This is Not Your Kid’s Social Network: Leveraging LinkedIn

The worlds of social networking and search are beginning to blur more and more. And the number of influencers that are networking is higher than you might think. It’s not all about MySpace, but in many cases, contact networks like LinkedIn. New research from KnowledgeStorm and Universal McCann shows these seemingly contradictory findings:

“Seventy seven percent of B2B technology buyers have little to no familiarity with social networking online. Of the 24% who are very accustomed to social networks, a large majority of the respondents visit these sites at least once a month.

70% of B2B technology buyers use social networking sites for business networking and/or development, though 59% admit to also using these sites for personal reasons.”

So if 77% don’t know what social networking is, but 70% use them, what’s going on? I think it comes from many people not knowing that having a LinkedIn or Plaxo network actually counts as social networking. They’re participating, but they don’t know it. When they think social networking, they’re thinking about teenagers spending hours on MySpace or Second Life.

And at 70% usage, it’s a channel worth paying some attention to. Luckily, Guy Kawasaki recently engaged Kay Luo and Mike Lin at LinkedIn to brush up his profile. Check out the results of Guy’s Profile “Extreme Makeover”.

ChaCha and the Search Tango

There’s a new crop of search interfaces coming out, many spin offs from the big engines themselves, and I’ll be trying to take a look at them from the user’s perspective. Today I took ChaCha for a spin. Here’s some background (and hype) from their About page

“ChaCha stands out as different and better in a landscape cluttered with common search engines because it uses the World’s most powerful technology – The human brain.

ChaCha’s goal is to provide a better search experience by combining results that are hand-picked by our knowledgeable human guides with the best computer-generated search results. In those cases where you can’t find what you need with our instant results, ChaCha will connect you with a live human guide who will find the information for you through an instant messaging-style search session.

Scott Jones and Brad Bostic, two dynamic entrepreneurs who were not satisfied with millions of irrelevant search results provided by first generation search engines, believed a better experience could be created by tapping into human intelligence. Since starting ChaCha, they have been hard at work with the ChaCha team to create:

  • A smart search engine that “learns” by tapping into human intelligence so its results are always improving
  • A place to find exactly what you’re looking for instantly
  • Help from people who are knowledgeable about the very thing you are looking for when instant results don’t have the answer “

Fellow Enquiro blogger Marina Garrison tried out Cha Cha and shared her thoughts. Here are mine. Unfortunately, there’s no good news here for the Cha Cha team.

“A Better Search Experience”

I started out by looking for hotels in Kauai. I used the default, automated search. At the same time, I did a search on Google for the same query. My intent was to compare my options, so I was looking for a link that would show me a number of properties. Google did pretty well, with both official and unofficial accommodation guides rounding out the top algorithmic results returned in the customary fraction of a second. Definitely something here I would click on.

Cha Cha’s automated results were far less satisfying.

  chachaorigsm

First, there was a sponsored link at the top, but no advertiser. That’s okay, it’s a beta, so I didn’t really expect one. But all the other results have a “sponsored by” line at the bottom. I’m confused. Are they sponsored links or not? Confusion is not good in a user experience. The results were mostly for individual properties, not very descriptive, and the same site showed twice in the top 4 results. The only guide I saw was well down on the top 10, and it wasn’t an official guide. The results weren’t really matched to my intent. Strike Two.  Once again, what was it that Cha Cha was offering?

“ChaCha’s goal is to provide a better search experience by combining results that are hand-picked by our knowledgeable human guides with the best computer-generated search results.”

Oh..right. Okay, maybe I’ll try the “knowledgeable human guide” because after all, “it uses the World’s most powerful technology – The human brain”

I hit the search with guide button

The interface changed and opened up a pane on the left. There was a pause of at least 10 seconds while I waited to connect with a guide. In 10 seconds on Google, I’d have clicked off the page by now, but I’ll be patient. Finally I’m connected to DelaineL, who greeted me with a “Good Afternoon”. This despite I did this at 10 am local time. Hmmm..mental note for Scott and Brad, our “dynamic entrepreneuers”…you’ll have to work out that time change thing.

Now, I wasn’t sure what to do. Do they just pick up from the last query I did? There were no instructions I could see. I waited. Finally DelaineL sent me a “Hi!”. I guess I have to reenter my query in the message box. We’re approaching a minute now. I told Delaine (not sure whether this is a male or female Delaine) I was looking to compare hotels in Kauai. I wanted to be fair, giving my human guide a chance to give me the types of results I was looking for.

“Find exactly what you’re looking for instantly “

I was expecting a page of 10 results to pop right up. Instead, after many more seconds, I got one.

chacha1sm

And it was for the same site that showed up twice in the top 4 organic results. This was the best that the “world’s most powerful technology” can do?  Also, the page they sent me was actually a landing page built for a Google Adwords campaign. Not really what I was looking for. So, was this the only result I was going to get? I asked my guide. I was told the second result was loading. When it came up, it was an Expedia search results page, along with an apology for the delay and the assurance that Delaine was looking for the most relevant results. The response sounded suspiciously canned though.

chacha2sm

I guess that’s what took the time, the guide went to Expedia and launched the search for me. I guess that’s good.

“People who are knowledgeable about the very thing you are looking for “

Okay, I’m sure Delaine is an excellent person, kind to kids and animals, and is probably an expert in many areas, but what makes him/her an expert on Kauai? How does Delaine know what I was searching for? Does ChaCha have a room full of people monitoring my initial search activity, and when I click on the guide button, a red light starts flashing and an announcement rings out at Cha Cha Headquarters, “Attention, we need a Kauai Expert on seach 1045..Stat!!” ? I somehow doubt it. Lets put the “knowledgeable” line down to more marketing spin.

Also, do we really want a human somewhere knowing what we’re searching for? I don’t think so. Most of us prefer to search anonymously, or at least what we think is anonymously (ignorance is bliss in this case, until we’re rudely awoken by a AOL debacle). I suppose if someone were really stuck, they would try their luck with a search guide, but based on my experience, it wouldn’t be something I would ever do again.

By this point, I had spent a good 2 or 3 minutes doing something that would take a few seconds on Google, and I didn’t get results any better than I would have received there. Sorry ChaCha, but you hit a sour note with me.

And now I go on my user experience diatribe. There’s obviously a lot of infrastructure behind Cha Cha. I have no idea how many human guides they have but to make this scalable (they say thousands), but it appears that they’re paid by the search. This is not a cheap start up. But this will undoubtedly fail. It offers no compelling reason to use it. It’s far inferior to other options that have established themselves with users. A little bit of research should have shown this. I’ve talked to a few people who have used it. None of them will ever use it again. I’m sure the people at ChaCha will say they had tremendous response from their initial tests. BS. If thats the response they got, they weren’t doing the tests correctly. This will be a waste of a lot of people’s time and some significant investment on somebody’s (apparently Jeff Bezos) part. And it could have been avoided with proper usability testing. There’s a lot wrong with ChaCha, and not much right. The interface is junky and clunky. It’s like a flashback to the dot com bubble.

If you’re going to Cha Cha, try not to step on your partner’s toes. I’m still limping.

Postscript

After the post, I ran across Rob Garner’s SearchInsider column from yesterday (obviously have to clean out my folders more often) on his experience with ChaCha. While not ideal, it seems Rob is more optimistic than I am:

“I would bet that they find a niche in the market with a loyal user base, and that we may see more innovation from them to come in the form of user interface, and/or behavioral research. “

I guess one thing ChaCha has going for it is the ability to get live user feedback, real time. I hope they listen.

SEM’s Seven Year Itch, Part Two

First published January 18, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

There’s another controversy stirring in the SEM blogosphere, and this one is revolving around the very future of organic optimization, the yin to the paid yang of search. While this debate rears its head with predictable regularity every few years, there’s a different flavor to this one. This time, rather than an inter-industry turf war, it’s the search user that will ultimately decide the fate of SEO. And that opens up part two of SEM’s seven-year itch: what life will be like on the agency side.

A (Very) Quick History of SEM

First, a little back story. The search marketing industry has gone through one significant evolution since it began in 1996. Back then, it was a grassroots movement that started on the back of the popular search engines. More than a few have called that relationship parasitic. We worked to game the algorithmic results of Infoseek, Altavista, Lycos and Excite. We did it because there was no choice. At the time, the only way we could buy results page real estate was with terribly ineffective banners. Everybody knew that it was only the results that people looked at, and they were generating huge amounts of traffic. The higher the position, the more traffic we could expect. The organic optimization side of search has actually changed very little in the past decade. The techniques have become more sophisticated, on both sides, but it’s still all about driving listings higher for selected key phrases.

In 1998, the first reinvention of search marketing took place. Bill Gross introduced paid search through Goto, later Overture, and now Yahoo. Google followed suit in 2000. Suddenly, a whole new dimension opened up. Many moved to the paid side of search. Some remained resolutely on the organic side. And, over time, many search shops embraced both.

The introduction of paid search has been the most significant change in our industry. It has largely propelled search to where it is today. From the agency side, it demanded a whole new skill set, as we pioneered the fundamentals of bid management and, more recently, market segmentation, conversion tracking and robust testing. But one thing remained the same. Fundamentally, whether paid or free, it was still all about gaining the best real estate on the search results page.

Our Day will Come (We Hope)

Whatever side of the search marketing street we hung our shingle on, many things remained in common. We started small. We remained dedicated to search. We worked our butts off. We loved what we did. And very few of us got rich. But, we consoled ourselves, we’re part of the fastest-growing sector in marketing, and there’s got to be a payoff. We know search. Everybody searches. That’s got to be worth something. Now, many years later, we’re beginning to wonder.

The paths SEM shops chose to take have diverged over the past seven or eight years. Some have remained small, largely built around one or two skilled practitioners. Some have pursued growth and built scalable infrastructures, often fueled by eager venture capital investment trying to grab a piece of the search tidal wave. In the later case, positioning themselves for an acquisition was a common exit strategy. In a few cases this has worked, the iProspect/Isobar deal being the most notable example. In some, the inevitable stress, change of culture and diversion of focus ended up knocking the legs out from under the company. At one point, Websourced was one of the largest SEM firms in the industry. A few weeks ago, it effectively closed its doors, being absorbed into its parent, MarketSmart Interactive.

Pondering Our Future

Whatever path we chose, we’re all coming to the same crossroads. We’ve put in a lot of sweat equity, often at the expense of huge portions of our non-search lives. Unlike the early employees of the search engines (see last week’s column), we don’t have any stock options sitting in a drawer somewhere–or even the security of a regular paycheck. We’ve invested everything we have, both personally and financially, in nurturing our individual companies along, hoping that at some point, in some way, we could cash in that asset to finance the next phase of our lives, whatever that might be. Up to now, the ride has been so fun that we weren’t too concerned about getting off. But soon, we may have no choice.

The fact is, search marketing is on the cusp of reinventing itself again, and if the introduction of paid search in 1998 split the industry in half, this new incarnation will fragment it in a million pieces.

Next week, I’ll continue by exploring the next reinvention of search–and where that leaves SEM agencies.

Why No “Golden Triangle” in the Microsoft Eye Tracking Study

Over at Searchengineland, Danny Sullivan did a deeper dive into the Microsoft Eye Tracking Study that I posted about last Friday. In it, Danny said:

“Interesting, the pattern is different that the “golden triangle” that Enquiro has long talked about in its eye tracking studies, where you see all the red along the horizontal line of the top listing (indicating a lot of reading there), then less on the second listing, then less still as you move down. “

I just want to draw a few distinctions between the studies. In our study, we wanted to replicate typical search behavior as much as possible, so let people interact with actual results pages. In the Microsoft study, they were testing what would happen when the most relevant result was moved down the page and how searchers responded to different snippet lengths. The results, while actual results, were intercepted and were restructured in a way (i.e., stripping out sponsored ads) to let the researchers test different variables. We have said repeatedly that the Golden Triangle is not a constant, as is shown in our second study, but follows intent and the presentation of the search results.

In fact, the Microsoft study does confirm many of our findings, in the linear scanning of results, the scanning of groups of results and the importance of being in the top 5.

Another potential misconception that could be drawn from Danny’s interpretation of results is hard and fast rules about how many results searchers scan. He settled on the number five. When looking at eye tracking results, it’s vital to remember that there is no typical activity. Please don’t take an average and apply it as a rule of thumb. Averages, or aggregate heat maps, are just that. They’re what happens when you take a lot of different sessions, varying greatly, and mash them together. Scanning activity is highly dependent on the intent of the user and what appears on the search results page. A particularly relevant result in top sponsored, matched to the intent of the majority of users, would probably mean little scanning beyond the first or second organic result. On the other hand, if the query is more ambiguous, you could see scanning a lot deeper on the page. The Microsoft study used two tasks that would generate a limited number of queries, and recorded interactions based on this limited scope. Our studies, while using more tasks, still out of necessity represented the tiniest slice of possible interactions.

After looking at over a thousand sessions in the past 2 years, I’ve learned first hand that there are a lot of variables in scanning patterns and interactions with the search page. An eye tracking study provides clues, but no real answers. You have to take the results and try to extrapolate them beyond the scope of the study. We spent a lot of time doing this when writing up both our reports. You try to find universal behaviors and commonalities, but you have to be very careful not to accept the results at face value. Drawing conclusions such as snippet lengths should be longer or that official site tags should become standard are dangerous, because it’s not true for every search. The study actually found that ideal snippet length is highly dependent on the task and intent of the user.

If anything, what eye tracking has shown me is the need for more flexible search results, personalized to me and my intent at the time.

Digital Voyeurism: The New Reality

I remember the first time I went to my local gym and saw a new sign, hastily hand drawn and posted, announcing that cell phones were no longer allowed in the change rooms. It took me a minute or two to get it, but I finally figured it out. Ahh..they come with cameras now.

There are two dimensions to this that I wanted to briefly explore. First of all, with digital cameras everywhere, businesses have to be more careful about the face they show to the public, because it’s likely that if their bad side is showing, there’ll be someone there to snap a picture. Consider the example of one Kohl’s store in Dallas.

kohls5_2A shopper visited the store in the post Christmas season, found a store that looked like a tornado just ripped through it and just happened to have a cell phone with a camera and a fairly well read blog. It gets worse. His post happened to catch the eye of Seth Godin, who has one of the most read blogs on the Web. The result? A PR nightmare for Kohl’s. And this can happen anywhere. The next time a character at Disneyworld alledgedly sucker punches a guest, you can count on a camera being nearby. It’s enough to make your average PR Director retire to a remote Caribbean isle, one without internet connections.

The second implication has to do with personal privacy. If there are pictures snapped of us, and they get posted to the web without our knowing, or our permission, what will the fall out be? They’re there for the whole world to see, through any one of a number of image search engines. Fellow SearchInsider David Berkowitz explores that in his column today:

“The overarching issue, the one that’s most likely to keep me up at night, is, “Do we have to entirely relinquish our right to privacy?” If the answer is yes, then it simplifies the issue. We press forward with every technological innovation, privacy be damned. We accept that everything we say can be recorded, and it’s not just to improve customer service.”

Smile..you’re on Candid Camera!

BusinessWeek Dissing Paid Search (Again)

Okay, BusinessWeek is beginning to get a little obvious in its campaign against paid search. In my books, they just received their third strike.

Strike One

An “expose” on the SEM Sweat Shop floor that showed a remarkable ignorance for the diversity of the industry. I responded to this little journalistic gem in a SearchInsider column last May. In it, search marketers were called “digital bricklayers”. Here was one quote:

“The work ranges from the slightly creative, such as … crafting sentences for ads to snag search traffic, to the rote — typing in descriptions of hamburgers for online menus.”

It was not wrong so much as one dimensional. BusinessWeek shows a tendency to paint the entire industry with a single brush.

Strike Two

This time BusinessWeek took on click fraud, with a similarly one sided perspective. They approached it focusing on the most egregious cases of click fraud, with examples of both perpetrators and victims. This is fine to draw attention, but they should also provide an accurate assessment of the overall problem. They used numbers that came from faulty research, like Outsell’s much quoted study and passed it off as an accurate assessment of the scope of click fraud with the slippery qualifier, “most experts believe”. They virtually ignored the balancing viewpoint of the engines themselves. Again, I dealt with this in another SearchInsider column and a follow up post. This is just one of many articles from BusinessWeek pumping up concern about click fraud. And most imply that the majority of the problem lies with Google and Yahoo.

Strike Three

The latest one indicates that advertisers are souring on search ads because of rising click costs and decreasing ROI. Again, they’ve taken a few cases and given the impression that it represents the entire industry. So, let me dive in again. Yes, PPC costs are rising. And yes, if you’re not tweaking your campaigns, you could find your ROI dropping. But here’s the thing. The advertisers finding this are the direct marketers. And as I’ve said over and over, there’s an inherent disconnect here. Direct marketers are looking at selling something..now. And their ads say as much. One of the advertisers quoted as complaining about the ineffectiveness of paid search in the articles was eBags.com

Okay, let’s say I search for “best luggage” on Yahoo. Here are the ads that come up:

luggageexample

Hmm..apparently eBags isn’t that turned off sponsored. But let’s get to the disconnect. What are the chances that if I search for “best luggage”, I’m looking to buy right now? How interested am I in saving 60%? I’ll tell you, based on past research. Less than 1 in 10.  In fact, it’s probably less than 1 in 20. I’m looking to see what the best luggage is. I’m researching. And where will I click? Well, let me show you the number one organic result for the same search in Yahoo.

luggageorganic

This is where I’m going to click, because it’s a much better match to my intent.

So, for those advertisers hell bent on jamming a purchase down a consumer’s throat, I have three pieces of advice:

  • Get to know how search works better
  • Get to know your consumers better
  • Get to know how your consumers use search better

If you do those 3 things, you’ll get a much better return than you will from desperately steering budget into different channels without putting some solid strategy and understanding behind your campaigns. The problem is not that search is getting less effective, it’s that marketers using it aren’t getting any smarter.

From the “Living in Glass Houses” Category

And finally, when I went to try to read this article on BusinessWeek, I had to click through an interstitial. When the hell will online publishers learn that these are incredibly annoying and detract significantly from the user experience? Give me a bushel of paid search ads, aligned with my intent, any day over one interstitial.

New Microsoft Eye Tracking Study

Microsoft has just released the results of an internal eye tracking study that looked at the impact of snippet length. For more detail, visit Marina Garrison’s blog where she looks at the notable findings.

msheatmapm

A few quick ones and some comments:

Snippet length doesn’t seem to impact people’s search strategies.

This makes sense to us. We found scanning for word patterns rather than actual reading. In fact, a longer snippet may actually detract from the user experience in certain scenarios, such as navigational search. It makes it more difficult to pick up information scent quickly. Remember, we’re on and off the search page as quickly as possible.

People scan 4 listings regardless

This is definitely aligned with the Rule of 3 (or 4) we found in our eye tracking study. We found, however, that this isn’t a hard and fast rule, but rather a pretty common tendency. It changes depending on whether top sponsored ads appeared, how closely aligned the top result was to intent and other factors. But in general, we would agree that most people tend to scan 3 or 4 listings before clicking on one.

Scenario Success Rates Dropped Dramatically as the “Best” Listing Moved Down the Page

No big surprise here. This was referred to in our first study as the “Google” Effect, and it comes from our being trained that best result should show up on top. I actually co-authored a paper with Dr. Bajaj and Dr. Wood at the University of Tulsa about this very topic. By the way, it was Dr. Bajaj that called it the “Google” Effect, not me, so please Yahoo and Microsoft, don’t beat me up on this one.

The report is available for download.

Privacy Vs a Better Online Experience

A couple months ago I wrote a column about a potential showdown between privacy advocates and Web 2.0 supporters. I identified a crisis point being reached as behavioral targeting became more common and began influencing our search results. Of course, a large part of the functionality touted in Web 2.0 plans depends on the surrender of a certain degree of privacy.

My prediction was that it would case a temporary fuss, which would be picked up by some, but that for the vast majority of us, we would put aside our concerns when we realized the benefits of a better online experience:

“More and more consumer groups will launch protests. Politicians will sense opportunity and jump on their soapboxes. There will be a very vocal minority that will rail against this “Big Brotherism.” There will also be a group of advertisers that will continue to step way beyond the acceptable, using targeting to subvert the user experience, rather than enhance it, hijacking the user and taking them to places they never intended. This will add fuel to the fire. And because they’re the most visible target, the search engines will bear the brunt of the attack.

In the end, we’ll realize there’s much more pro than con here. Effective targeting will generally add to our experience, not take away from it. We’ll toy with trying to use a third-party privacy filter, but in the end, most of us won’t be willing to give up the additional functionality in return for maintaining an illusion of anonymity online. Much of the usefulness of Web 2.0 (I know, I hate the term too, but at least it’s commonly understood) will be dependent on capturing personal and click-stream data. We’ll give in, and the storm will gradually fade away on the horizon.”

Indeed, it seems that while the danger is certainly in the minds of privacy advocates and some legislators, most consumers don’t really care, despite the occassional horror story like the recent AOL debacle. Privacy Advocate Mike Valentine posted this comment after the column ran:

“I’ve been predicting the same approaching privacy storm for about 5 years now. After each breach of data in hack attacks, after ChoicePoint sold data to bad guys posing as customers (hmmm), after VA laptops are lost exposing veterans to identity theft, after AOL exposed private users search queries, and on and on and on. The storms never come, the public doesn’t care, the media reports the hacks, breaches, thefts, criminal activity and identity thefts and moves on because consumers simply don’t care until identity theft or public embarassment happens to them.”

Now, a new study from Choicestream seems to indicate I was on the right track. The number of respondents willing to share some information in return for a better experience rose fairly dramatically, from 46% last year to 57% this year.

graph1privacy

The number willing to let a website track their clicks and purchases in return for personalized content climbed from 32% to 43%.

graph2privacy

What’s interesting about this is that these numbers returned to the levels seen in the 2004 survey. 2005 definitely saw a heightened awareness to privacy issues that seems to be abating somewhat. But although consumers seem to be willing to trade off privacy, they do so grudgingly and with some concern. 63% of them are still worried about the security of their personal data.

I believe it’s a combination of convenience and blissful ignorance that’s keeping the privacy storm clouds from coming to a head. The reality is, like most things, we won’t impact the smooth sailing of our day-to-day lives unless we get burned. And then, we’ll be looking for someone to blame.

The Ultimate Market Research Technique?

sharingbrainThis is kind of cool, in a really creepy way. According to a recent study, Scientists can now tap into the brain and predict whether you’re going to buy something or not. Not to get all scientific on you, but apparently a portion of the brain called the nucleus accumbens “lights up” on a brain scan if you’re ready to whip out the plastic. But, if the price tag is out of your budget range, another region of the brain called the insula is activated and the mesial prefrontal cortex is deactivated. Dr. Brian Knutson of Stanford and his team are doing the research.

So, think of this future scenario:

Google gets wind of this and brings this into the Google Labs. They work with Intel to develop a small implantable chip that constantly monitors this part of the brain. Through a secret agreement with the U.S. Government, giving the Homeland Security teamaccess to everyone’s online history, Google gets the right to implant the chip in every new child born in the U.S. The chips are connected through wi-fi, so that Google can monitor everyone’s inclination to make a purchase. You can now test your Google campaigns right down to the purchase, setting up A/B tests with the ultimate feedback loop.

Mmm..the mind boggles with the possibilities here….