Author Archives: ghotchkiss

The Virtuous Cycle of SEO

First published August 9, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Virtuous cycles are anomalies. They fight the universal law of entropy, and for that reason alone, they are worth investigation. Rather than a gradual slide toward dissipation and equilibrium, virtuous cycles build upon themselves, yielding self-sustaining returns cycle after cycle.

In marketing, there are not a lot of virtuous cycles. Most marketing efforts need to be constantly fueled by a steady stream of dollars. The minute the budget tap is closed, so is the marketing program. But there are a few, and SEO is one of them, if done correctly. Let’s take a quick look at the elements required to build a truly virtuous cycle.

The Power of Positive Feedback

Positive feedback is the engine of a virtuous cycle. It’s what drives sustainable growth. Think of it as the compound interest paid on your marketing efforts.

In an SEO program, positive feedback comes in the form of the algorithmic love shown to you by the search engines, dragging in an ever-increasing number of eyeballs. These eyeballs also contribute to the feedback loop, creating new links, new user-generated content, new activity, all of which continue to drive rankings, up, which drives new eyeballs, which… well, you get the idea. And the cycle continues.

Investment Required

Virtuous cycles require an upfront investment, and it’s usually a significant one. You can’t collect compound interest on a zero balance. Cycles don’t start from scratch.

In SEO, the investments required come in the form of content and an engaging user experience. You have to give a user a reason to come, to engage and to evangelize to really leverage the benefits of SEO. You can evaluate if you have the makings of a virtuous cycle by asking yourself the following questions:

–      What are my users coming for?

–      What will they do?

–      How can they engage?

–      Why will they care?

–      Will their expectations be exceeded?

If you have a less than satisfactory answer to any of these questions, you don’t have what it takes to create a virtuous cycle.

Appealing to Human Nature

If your cycle depends on human behavior, as most do, you have to appeal to one of the basic tenets of human nature. As complicated as we can be, we are generally driven by a surprisingly small number of basic needs. Harvard professors Nitin Nohria and Paul Lawrence, in their book “Driven,” identified four fundamental human drives: We need to acquire, to learn, to bond and to defend. Examine any virtuous cycle, and you’ll always find at least one of these drives at the heart of it.

Ask yourself how your online presence contributes to these drives. Remember, for a cycle to begin, positive feedback is required. And positive feedback depends on engagement from your visitors.

Universally Beneficial

Finally, a virtuous cycle needs to benefit all parties in order for it to be sustainable. It needs to be a win/win/win. If, somewhere along the line, someone gets screwed, the cycle will ultimately fall apart.

In SEO, this means you must play along with the algorithm rather than try to beat it. Short-term thinking and virtuous cycles never go well together. One algorithmic update to crack down on a SEO loophole will shut down your cycle in a heartbeat. But if you work with a search engine to make a great user experience discoverable, the cycle will begin.

Three Catalysts for Healthy Social Networks

First published August 2, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Look at any graphic representation of a social network, and you will see a somewhat globular cluster of nodes — and, at the center, you’ll find the subject or owner of the network. The density of the nodes will be greater near the center, but there will be small clusters of interconnected nodes that will appear throughout the map. This pattern, the visual interpretation of human connection, looks much the same now as it did for tribal humans 100,000 years ago. But there is one important difference. Then, you probably only had one network you belonged to, which was defined by geography. Today, you can belong to many networks, and they’re often defined by ideas.

Connecting the nodes in a typical social network map are small lines representing the glue, or ties, of the network. At the simplest level, a network can consist of just two nodes and one line, called a dyad. The line represents the relationship between the two nodes. But what is the raw material of that line? What causes it to exist in the first place? Sometimes, we can find clues in language. If that line represents a relationship, what causes two people to relate to each other? The word relation comes from the Latin noun relatio, which has two relevant meanings: carrying back and to narrate. Both meanings depend on communication. Communication, in turn, has its etymological roots in the latin comoenus, which means shared. From this, we see the structure of a network depends on both the sharing of a common concept (a value, goal or ideal) and communication. These are the raw materials of those little links in the diagram.

Those who analyze social network structure often look for reciprocity in those links: are they two-way links?  Reciprocity is hardwired into humans. Evolutionary biologists and behavioral economists have found that the most successful survival strategy is something called “tit for tat.” Even if you’re among the 46% of Americans who don’t believe in evolution, you still can’t ignore reciprocity. Every single religion has as one of its tenets its own variation of the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It all comes down to the same thing: it’s not beneficial to keep investing in a one-way relationship. If we keep inviting you for dinner and you never invite us, sooner or later the invitations will stop coming (offspring and certain relatives being the exception — and then there’s another whole evolutionary dynamic at play).

Here we have the three foundations for a stable social network: communication, sharing and reciprocity. Not exactly rocket science, just plain common sense. Yet it’s amazing how often we lose sight of these three things when we start applying them to our marketing efforts. Let’s take just one example. Look at any company’s social presence, whether it‘s their Facebook page, their Twitter feed or their Linked In profile, and see if there’s evidence of reciprocity. Is all the communication going out, or are people responding? Active user feedback is one of the primary signals we look for in a healthy social network.

Another signal is clear evidence of shared values. As I’ve said before, frequency of engagement (especially if it’s of the nonreciprocal variety) does not lead to brand loyalty, but shared values do. Are the values of an organization clearly evident in their social outposts? Are there active conversations based on those shared values?

Finally, we have communication. Marketers have to take every opportunity to facilitate communication. Often, commercial social networks are based on the sharing of required information. Companies (especially in the B2B space) have to become much better at sharing the wealth of information they have in their own particular industry. They have to start thinking like publishers. And they have to enable forums to allow for active feedback.

Get these three things right, and strong social networks will grow organically.

Marissa Mayer and Yahoo’s Regression to the Mean

First published July 26, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

There is not a lot of overlap between the universes of Gord Hotchkiss and Marissa Mayer, but our orbits have intersected on a few occasions in the past. I’ve had the opportunity to talk to Mayer about various aspects of search on a handful of occasions, so it was with some interest that I watched the announcement and subsequent buzz about her appointment as Yahoo CEO.

Much has been said about Mayer’s personal qualifications for the job, and the general consensus is that this is a good thing for Yahoo. If this were a movie, I’m thinking she would score an 82% on the Tomatometer, handily qualifying as “fresh.” Personally, I would agree. Mayer has a razor-sharp (and somewhat intimidating) intellect, a core love for search and an innate sense of what’s right for the user. All of these things will be big plusses for Yahoo. What she hasn’t been tested on is her ability to run a big company. And that’s where things could get interesting.

No doubt Google still imparts its own “halo” effect on anyone who has spent time at the “Plex” in a leadership position. And few have spent as much time there as Mayer, who, as hire number 20, was Google’s first female engineer, logging 13 years with bosses (and hopefully still friends) Page and Brin.  These three tied a tight little knot in the early days of Google, but from the outside, that knot seems to have frayed just a little in the past few years. Mayer’s recent moves in the company have been more lateral than vertical, as later additions to the Google team were promoted above her. Undoubtedly, this was a contributing factor to the parting of the ways with Google.

But how much value does Mayer’s vast inside knowledge of Google and its past successes bring to Yahoo? It must have played a major role in her selection as the new chief Yahooligan. But was she instrumental in the streak of seemingly picture-perfect management calls in the early days of the Internet’s Golden Child? And, even if she were, does it really matter?

Earlier this year, I took part in an open forum on search at an industry conference. Our moderator tossed a ticking time bomb at the panel, in the form of this delicately stated question: “What the #%^&$ is Google doing lately? Have they gone insane?” We each offered our opinions, which ranged in the degree of madness ascribed to Google’s executives. I started my response with this, “I think we tend to downplay the role luck played in the early days of Google. Maybe their luck is just running out.”

There is a much fancier name for the hypothetical situation I described, which is called “regression to the mean.”  In his recent book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” (a HIGHLY recommended read) psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman explores how this can lead us to overvalue executive talent when it’s combined with the halo effect. Kahneman even uses Google as an example: “Of course there was a great deal of skill in the Google story, but luck played a more important role in the actual event than it does in the telling of it. And the more luck was involved, the less there is to be learned.”

Regression to the mean simply means that when you take a snapshot in time that represents either exceptionally good or bad performance, subsequent snapshots tend to move closer to the average. And those highs and lows generally involve luck to some extent. So you can poach talent from a company on a hot streak, only to find that it wasn’t the executives responsible for the performance, but simply the planets aligning in a favorable way.

As an ex-CEO of a company, albeit a tiny one, I find it hard to swallow that leadership might not be as important as we think in the fortunes of a company. But I generally find Kahneman to be an incredibly astute observer of human errors in judgment, so I have to resist the urge to go with my own cognitive biases here and trust Kahneman’s research.  He doesn’t say leadership is inconsequential, but he does caution against ignoring the role of timing and sheer luck.

This is also not to downplay the role Marissa Mayer will play in the future of Yahoo.  Somebody has to lead the company, and Mayer is at least as good a choice as anyone else I can think of.

Who knows? Maybe Yahoo’s luck is due to change. In their case, “regression to the mean” means there’s no place to go but up.

Bet Big on Digital Acceleration

First published July 19, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

The other day, I was going through some background research for a client. What struck me, as I waded through the reams of PowerPoint decks and research reports, was how integral digital was to the core functions of this particular industry. Whether it was key influencers in the purchase decision, reasons for doing business with a company or competitive differentiators, technological proficiency was right up there with traditional factors like price, value, convenience and reliability.

As potential customers, we expect companies to have their digital acts together. More than this, it appears we’re ready to reward companies that aggressively invest in raising the bar of their own connected maturity level. Why, then, are companies so loath to place significant bets on their own digital future?

I deal with big companies all the time, and when it comes to investing in their own websites, online marketing, web support platforms and other planks in their digital platform, they seem to prefer hedging their bets, squeezing out miserly budgets at a level that would make Ebenezer Scrooge seem hopelessly profligate. None of them are looking at digital proficiency as a way to distance themselves from the competition. Instead, it seems that they prefer the security of the herd, nervously watching the pack for signs of movement and only investing when they feel they have to to avoid being trampled by a stampede. It’s Geoffrey Moore’s classic Crossing the Chasm behavioral pattern, writ large.

It’s not the first time this has  happened. The same thing took place about 100 years ago, as Industrial America embraced electrical power. The entrenched manufacturers had all invested heavily in steam power. Despite the obvious benefits that electricity offered (cleaner, safer, more efficient factories) they never did fully embrace it, jury-rigging factories and doing ad hoc retrofits, stranding themselves in a competitive no-man’s land between electricity and steam. New competitors built new factories that maximized their advantages, and the old guard never recovered. In a decade, most of them were gone.

Economists refer to this as a regime transition. In hindsight, it seems hedging your bet when it comes to new technology is not really “playing it safe.”

To me, it seems obvious we’re in exactly the same place. History is repeating itself. If these companies look at their own research, it’s easy to see the signs. Yet research tends to be digested in context, and often people see what they want to see in it. What’s potentially worse, they fail to see what they don’t want to see. Even more frustrating, the cost of making a significant, best-in-class investment in accelerating digital maturity is relatively minimal — perhaps even infinitesimal — given the other operating costs these companies are carrying.

When it comes to digital maturity, I find the real acid test is how effectively companies connect with their customers, both present and future, through online channels. Is the website truly effective? Do they have good search visibility? Have they found a way to play in social that recognizes the importance of authenticity and the forging of true relationships? Do they understand how their customers might use a mobile device to connect with them? If a company can do these things right, chances are they’re well advanced in the digital maturity model.

The other thing to look for is how the company is using digital technology to reinvent the traditional ways it does business, especially when it comes to handling relationships with real people. I find sales to be one of the last bastions of “we’ve always done it this way” thinking. If a company is seriously considering how to make its sales force more effective by leveraging digital channels, it’s a good sign for the future.

In my opinion, betting the farm on digital maturity seems to be a no-brainer — especially when, in terms of real dollars and cents, it’s a relatively small farm we’re talking about here.

A Cyclist’s Farewell

First published July 12, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This past Sunday, I spent the day riding a bike 100 miles through searing 95-degree heat in Canada’s only desert. Bet you didn’t even realize Canada has a desert, did you? Well, we do. Trust me. And it’s freaking hot. After about 60 miles, I was ready to pack it in and grab a beer. But I gutted it out for another 40 miles, because that’s what cycling is about: gutting it out.

Just to put my accomplishment in humbling perspective, in the Tour de France, cyclists cover over 2,200 miles in 21 days, averaging somewhere around 110 miles a day. And they do it over some of the toughest climbs on the European continent and still have enough left to attack at the end.

If you’ve never ridden a long distance, you can’t fully appreciate how mind-boggling it is that these guys have enough left in their legs to sprint across the finish line. You can’t win the Tour without gutting it out. Luck plays a huge role, both positively and negatively (just ask Giro d’Italia champion Ryder Hesjedal, who got caught in a crash and had to withdraw), but at the end of tour, it’s the gutsiest performer who will prevail. I love cycling because it matches my personality: putting your head down and slogging it through to the finish line.

I give you this preamble because last week, the world of search marketing lost a very gutsy guy who also happened to be a cyclist.

I met Ron Jones when we both served on the board of SEMPO. I never really knew Ron that well, but within moments of meeting, we were both talking about cycling. That’s another thing you’ll learn about cyclists. It’s kind of like a secret handshake. We recognize each other immediately and then bore everyone else to tears talking about our favorite bikes (I ride a Trek, but damn those Pinarellos look fine), our favorite ride (aforesaid ride through the desert with none other than the incomparable Eddy Merckx), our own near-death experience (every cyclist has one) or our preferred brand of chamois butter (don’t ask).

Ron had all the earmarks of a serious cyclist: quiet determination, passion, drive and a ready smile. Ron had guts. He could go the distance — and he did, in pretty much every aspect of his life. He was a driving force in the world of search, founding his own successful agency, writing a book and always giving back to the greater SEM community. He was a consummate family man. I never met his family, but you couldn’t talk to Ron long before the subject of his wife Tracey and his four kids came up.  He was a mainstay in his church and community.

Yep, Ron knew how to gut it out and get it done.

But as I said, luck has a big part to play here as well. In Ron’s case, it was luck of the worst kind: a diagnosis of cancer. I haven’t seen Ron for a few years, so I learned about his passing from an email that went out to past members of the SEMPO board who were fortunate enough to have served with Ron.

I was devastated.

Ron was vital and alive and vibrant. He was a contributor. He was one of the great guys that cause you to smile automatically when you mention his name, because you hold the memory so fondly. It’s circumstances like this that cause you to say, “@#$%#, that’s not fair!”

I don’t know how Ron’s battle went. I wasn’t there for the climbs and descents. I don’t know how often he “bonked” on the way to the finish line. But I do know this. Ron gutted it out. He finished like the champion he was. And now, he’s got the wind at his back.

As part of this weekend’s ride, I got a souvenir shirt. I’m actually wearing it right now. On the front it says, “Ride Hard. Smile Often.”

That pretty much describes Ron Jones. He will be missed.

 

Three Myths About Customer Love

First published July 5, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Today, I want to talk about the last of the three posts by Harvard Business Review bloggers, Karen Freeman, Patrick Spenner and Anna Bird  I have been surveying: “Three Myths about What Customers Want.” Specifically, I want to look at this post’s implications for online marketing.

Myth #1: Most consumers want to have relationships with your brand.

This myth is at the crux of many, many social media campaigns. The theory is, a “like” = “intent to buy.” I have said before that I believe this is hogwash. The HBR bloggers concur:

“Only 23% of the consumers in our study said they have a relationship with a brand. In the typical consumer’s view of the world, relationships are reserved for friends, family and colleagues. That’s why, when you ask the 77% of consumers who don’t have relationships with brands to explain why, you get comments like ‘It’s just a brand, not a member of my family.’”

Marketers being marketers, we tend to think the entire world revolves around whatever it is we’re trying to sell. We believe people actually give a damn. They don’t, at least not in the vast majority of cases.  In contrast, relationships endure. They are there for the long haul. Consumer consideration runs on much shorter timelines.

There are degrees to consider here, however. What consumers can develop for a brand is loyalty. This falls into the category of beliefs, and that is what drives a lot of consumer behavior. We can believe a brand offers good value without having a relationship with it. Beliefs are heuristic decision shortcuts, which help consumers cut through cognitive overload.

Myth #2: Interactions built relationships.

Actually, say the HBR team, relationships are built on shared values:

“Of the consumers in our study who said they have a brand relationship, 64% cited shared values as the primary reason. That’s far and away the largest driver. Meanwhile, only 13% cited frequent interactions with the brand as a reason for having a relationship.”

Values can be a powerful driver of how we form beliefs. The brand I probably have the strongest affinity for is Apple. And it’s not because I have a relationship with Apple (never having visited its Facebook page). It’s because I believe Apple shares my values of creative freedom, uncompromising design and aesthetically pleasing experiences. I interact with an Apple device every day of my life. But I interact with the company only when I need something.

Myth #3: The more interaction, the better.

Marketers want to dominate a prospect’s time, in the mistaken belief that it will make the relationship “stickier.” If “stickier” means frustrating and annoying, they could be right.

“There’s no correlation between interactions with a customer and the likelihood that he or she will be ‘sticky’ (go through with an intended purchase, purchase again, and recommend),” writes the HBR team. “Yet, most marketers behave as if there is a continuous linear relationship between the number of interactions and share of wallet. That’s why, as the Wall Street Journal recently reported, you see well-established retailers like Neiman Marcus, Lands’ End and Toys R Us sending customers over 300 emails annually.”

We all have lots to do. The last thing on that list is to spend unnecessary time interacting with a brand because they’ve targeted us as a “loyal” customer. Here’s a question to ask yourself: Who benefits most from all these interactions — the customer or the marketer? If the answer is the marketer, then why should the customer care?

The danger of becoming marketers is that we gain a distorted perception of reality. Our job is to love a brand. It consumes our professional lives. This does weird things to a human brain. It makes it almost impossible to look at our brands the same way the rest of the world does. We care because we have to. We get paid to. The rest of the world doesn’t share the same motivation.

Paralyzed by Choice

First published June 28, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In last week’s column, I looked at how Harvard Business Review bloggers Karen Freeman, Patrick Spenner and Anna Bird spelled the end of the purchase funnel. Today, I’d like to look at the topic they tackled in the second of the three-part series, “If Customers Ask for More Choice, Don’t Listen.”

Barry Schwartz, the author of “The Paradox of Choice,” believes we’re overloaded with choices. In fact, we have so many choices to make, often about inconsequential things, that we live with the constant anxiety of making the wrong choice.

This paradox meets today’s consumer head on, over and over, in situation after situation. The other factor, which I’ve seen play a massive role in buying behaviors, is the degree of risk in the purchase. The bigger the purchase, the higher the risk.

The final piece of the buying puzzle is the reward that lies at the end of the potential purchase. Our brains are built to balance risk and reward in fractions of a second. But we don’t do it by a calm, rational weighing of pros and cons, thus engaging the enlightened thinking part of our brains. We do it by unleashing emotions from the dark, primitive core of our brain. The risk/reward balance whips up a potent mix of neural activity that sets our decision-making engine in motion.

The degree of risk or reward sets the emotional framework for a purchase. High reward, low risk generally means a fairly fast purchase, such as an impulse buy. High risk, low reward may mean a very long purchase cycle with an extended consideration process. Whatever the buying path, there will be an undercurrent of emotion running just below the surface.

Now, let’s match up the findings of the HBR team. High-risk purchases automatically ramp up the level of anxiety we feel. We’re afraid we’ll make the wrong decision. And, in a complex purchase, there’s not just one decision to be made – there are several. At each decision point, we’re bombarded by choices. If the hundreds of purchase path evaluations I’ve done are any indication, the seller spends little time worrying about presenting those choices in a user-friendly way. Catalog pages are jammed with useless and irrelevant items. Internal site search results are generally abysmal. And product information typically takes the form of a long shopping list of features. Very little of it speaks to buyers in a language they care about.

This is a dangerous combination. We have the natural anxiety that comes with risk. We have a gauntlet of decisions to make, each raising the level of anxiety. And we have websites that contribute greatly to the frustration by making it difficult to navigate the information that does exist, which is either too little, too much, too irrelevant or too salesy — never does it seem to be just right.

Again, Freeman, Spenner and Bird ask us to make it simpler for the buyer. Provide them with fewer choices, and make them as relevant and compelling as possible. Ease the burden of risk by providing information that reassures. Realize that one of the components of risk is the degree of bias in the information we’re given. It that information reeks of marketing hyperbole, it will be discounted immediately.

In our numerous eye-tracking studies, we’ve found that in most instances, three to four options seems to be the right number to consider on a Web page. These can be easily loaded into working memory and compared without causing undue wear on our mental mechanics. So, on a landing or home page, three or four groups of coherent and relevant information seems to be an optimal level. We call them “intent clusters.” For navigation bar options, we try to keep it between five and seven choices. If we expect mostly transactional traffic, we ensure there is a “fast path” to purchase. If we expect a lot of purchase research, we aim for rich promises of relevant and reliable information.

As Freeman, Spenner and Bird remind us, “The harder consumers find it to make purchase decisions, the more likely they are to overthink the decision and repeatedly change their minds or give up on the purchase altogether. In fact, regression analysis points to decision complexity and resulting cognitive overload as the single biggest barrier to purchase.”

As marketers, our job is to eliminate the barriers, not erect new ones.

The Death of the Purchase Funnel

First published June 21, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

A recent series of three posts on the Harvard Business Review blog by Karen Freeman, Patrick Spenner and Anna Bird explored some of the myths about how consumers make decisions. I think each of these has direct implications for search marketers, so over the next three weeks I want to explore them one at a time.

The first, titled “What Do Consumers Really Want? Simplicity,” talks about the breakdown of the purchase funnel. The HBR bloggers contend the funnel, which has been around for well over a hundred years, no longer applies to consumer behaviors. I concur, and said as much in my book, “The BuyerSphere Project.”

We differ a little on the reason for the demise, however. The HBR team credits the demise to cognitive overload on the part of the consumer. We’re simply bombarded by too much information on the purchase path to fit it all into the nice, simple, rational filtering process captured in St. Elmo Lewis’s elegant funnel-shaped model. The accompanying research, a survey of 7,000 consumers, shows decision simplicity was the number-one thing people wanted when making a purchase.

I agree that information overload is part of it, but I also believe that two other factors have led to the end of the purchase funnel. First, the purchase funnel assumes a rational filtering of options based on careful consideration of a consumer’s requirements. I don’t think this was ever the case. Emotions drive our decisions, and more often than not, rationality is applied after the fact to justify our choices. Prior to the Internet, emotion was tough to distinguish from rationality, as buyers didn’t have much control over the content they accessed during the consideration process. They were limited to whatever the marketer pushed out at them. So, whether driven by emotion or logic, they tended to go down the same path and display many of the same behaviors. Given the pervasive believe in humans as rational animals at the time, it was not surprising that a logic-driven model emerged.

The other factor, as I alluded to, was that the Internet shifted the balance of power during the purchase process. Suddenly, we could choose which paths we took during the consideration process. We weren’t all forced down the same path, according to some arbitrary notion of a funnel-shaped model.

What became clear, when consumers could choose their own path, was that the simplicity of the funnel model bore little relation to the actual paths consumers took. And those paths were driven by emotion. People bounced all around, depending on what they were looking to buy. They could go all the way to a shopping cart, then suddenly abandon it and go back to a destination that would be considered “upper funnel” and start all over again. From the outside looking in, this resembled a bowl of spaghetti much more than it did a funnel.

So, we have a trio of suspects in the death of the purchasing funnel: cognitive overload, emotion trumping logic, and consumers gaining more control over their consideration path. All lead to an interesting concept to consider: laying an online path that anticipates the emotional needs of the buyer, and yet keeps the information presented from overwhelming them. For example, marketing has traditionally taken a “turf war” approach to persuading a prospect: “as long as they’re on our turf, we do everything possible to close the sale.

But this doesn’t really match up with the three trends we’re talking about. What online consumers are looking for, according to the HBR research, is a safe online zone that will make their decision easier. Rather than going from site to site, collecting information and filtering out overt marketing hyperbole, what consumers want is a single information source they can trust. They want to be able to lower their “anti-BS” shields, because being a rational, cynical shopper takes a lot of time and effort.

Today, it’s extremely rare to find that trustworthy information on a site you can actually purchase from, but it’s starting to happen in some high activity categories, where independent portals facilitate this simplified approach to shopping. Travel comes to mind.

But let’s consider what would happen if a brand’s website took this approach. Rather than bombard a prospect with exaggerated sales pitches, putting them on the defensive, what if a more neutral, objective experience was provided?  After all, why shouldn’t the decision path be built on your own turf, giving you a home field advantage?

In Search of Simpler Things

First published June 14, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Live with yourself long enough, and you learn a few things. For instance, I learned that I like digging holes.

One of the most satisfying jobs I ever had was a summer back when I was in college. My job was digging holes so someone (who was paid a lot more than me) could inspect a gas pipeline. Every morning, my supervisor would drop me off in the middle of a farmer’s field with nothing but a shovel and a lunch kit. My instructions were simple:

1.     Find where the pipeline was buried (which I did by witching, if you’re really interested. And yes, it worked for me.)

2.     Dig a hole big enough that a section of the pipeline (which was generally four to six feet underground) was exposed with 12 inches of clearance all the way around.

3.     Try to keep the farmer’s cows from falling in the hole.

That was it. There was no number 4 on the list. Even number 3 was optional, depending on the prevalence of cattle in the vicinity.  At the end of the day, my supervisor would pick me up and I’d go home.

I loved it. And I loved it because:

–       You can only dig one hole at a time. This essentially eliminated workplace stress.

–       Cows are a good audience. I got very little negative feedback.

–       It was virtually impossible to take your work home with you.

–       Shovels need little or no IT support. They pretty much always work as expected.

–       At the end of the day, you could see what you had done and know you were entirely responsible for it. Holes typically have no project managers, key stakeholders or requirements for client input.

That was a simpler time. My current vocation shares almost nothing with digging holes. A lot of times, it feels like I cast my work to the four winds and hope that the Internet gods are smiling that day. My fate often is tied up in factors beyond my immediate control. I can do my job to the best of my ability and things can go sideways because Google tweaked an algorithm, the economy went into a tailspin, or my client’s customers just don’t feel like buying anything that day.  No matter – I still have to answer for it.

Internet marketing actually has a lot more in common with another vocation of my childhood: farming. A farmer can do everything right and still get hailed out. In these types of careers — farming, marketing, running pretty much any type of company —  you find yourself spending an inordinate amount of time worrying about crap you can do absolutely nothing about. You feel disconnected from the controls of your own destiny. I don’t much care for that feeling. That’s one reason why I never became a farmer.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever give up Internet marketing and go back to digging holes. I suspect not. For one thing, as much as my mind yearns for the simplicity of a shovel, I’m not sure my back is on board with the idea. For another, I’m pretty sure digging holes doesn’t pay very well.

But I can tell you one thing: Next to digging holes, my next favorite job is landscaping. And I’m not talking about planting flowers and pulling the odd weed. I’m talking about moving huge mounds of topsoil or crushed rocks from my driveway to the back yard by wheelbarrow. Or — my latest hobby — building retaining walls with 80-pound concrete blocks.

My neighbors think I’m absolutely mad. But concrete walls don’t much care what Google is planning for their next update or if people are in a buying mood this week. They just stay where you put them.

I like that.

A Look at the Future through Google Glasses?

First published June 7, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” — Herbert Simon

Last week, I explored the dark recesses of the hyper-secret Google X project.  Two X Projects in particular seem poised to change our world in very fundamental ways: Google’s Project Glass and the “Web of Things.”

Let’s start with Project Glass. In a video entitled “One Day…,” the future seen through the rose-colored hue of Google Glasses seems utopian, to say the least. In the video, we step into the starring role, strolling through our lives while our connected Google Glasses feed us a steady stream of information and communication — a real-time connection between our physical world and the virtual one.

In theory, this seems amazing. Who wouldn’t want to have the world’s sum total of information available instantly, just a flick of the eye away?

Couple this with the “Web of Things,” another project said to be in the Google X portfolio.  In the Web of Things, everything is connected digitally. Wearable technology, smart appliances, instantly findable objects — our world becomes a completely inventoried, categorized and communicative environment.

Information architecture expert Peter Morville explored this in his book “Ambient Findability.”  But he cautions that perhaps things may not be as rosy as you might think after drinking the Google X Kool-Aid. This excerpt is from a post he wrote on Ambient Findability:  “As information becomes increasingly disembodied and pervasive, we run the risk of losing our sense of wonder at the richness of human communication.”

And this brings us back to the Herbert Simon quote — knowing and thinking are not the same thing. Our brains were not built on the assumption that all the information we need is instantly accessible. And, if that does become the case through advances in technology, it’s not at all clear what the impact on our ability to think might be. Nicholas Carr, for one, believes that the Internet may have the long-term effect of actually making us less intelligent. And there’s empirical evidence he might be right.

In his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,”Noble laureate Daniel Kahneman says that while we have the ability to make intuitive decisions in milliseconds (Malcolm Gladwell explored this in “Blink”), humans also have a nasty habit of using these “fast” mental shortcuts too often, relying on gut calls that are often wrong (or, at the very least, biased) when we should be using the more effortful “slow” and rational capabilities that tend to live in the frontal part of our brain. We rely on beliefs, instincts and habits, at the expense of thinking. Call it informational instant gratification.

Kahneman recounts a seminal study in psychology, where four-year-old children were given a choice: they could have one Oreo immediately, or wait 15 minutes (in a room with the offered Oreo in front of them, with no other distractions) and have two Oreos. About half of the children managed to wait the 15 minutes. But it was the follow-up study, where the researchers followed what happened to the children 10 to 15 years later, that yielded the fascinating finding:

“A large gap had opened between those who had resisted temptation and those who had not. The resisters had higher measures of executive control in cognitive tasks, and especially the ability to reallocate their attention effectively. As young adults, they were less likely to take drugs. A significant difference in intellectual aptitude emerged: the children who had shown more self-control as four year olds had substantially higher scores on tests of intelligence.”

If this is true for Oreos, might it also be true for information? If we become a society that expects to have all things at our fingertips, will we lose the “executive control” required to actually think about things? Wouldn’t it be ironic if Google, in fulfilling its mission to “organize the world’s information” inadvertently transgressed against its other mission, “don’t be evil,” by making us all attention-deficit, intellectual-diminished, morally bankrupt dough heads?