Author Archives: ghotchkiss

Is There a Search Marketer in the House?

First published December 8, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Once, just once, I’d love to hear an announcement come over the PA system in some public venue: “Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please. Is there a search marketer in the house?”

Let me explain. Recently, a friend of mine was at a soccer tournament with our school team. One of the other parents had a sudden heart attack. My friend, who is in the medical field, swung into action and applied CPR. When the first response unit took over, one of the attendants told my friend that he had saved the parent’s life.

Longtime readers will know I’ve had a long-running identity crisis about my choice of career. This recent incident led me to wonder if there will ever come a time when my knowledge and experience will be considered critical. Will I ever save a life?

It doesn’t even have to be that dramatic. If you’re a mechanic and see a stranded motorist on the side of the road, chances are you can help. All I could do is pull over, gaze in confusion under the hood, kick a tire and explain why you should really optimize your landing pages to get the most from your search marketing campaign.

My father-in-law, who has been a carpenter all his life, can walk into most any home and fix the drawer that sticks, or put up a set of shelves. That same father-in-law can’t help a sharp and panicked intake of breathe every time he sees me pick up a power tool. My wife has acquired the same habit. Neither can explain exactly what I do, and they’ve both known me for a quarter century.

Even an accountant will constantly be asked for tax advice, a lawyer about a particularly sticky divorce, or a veterinarian about Pookie’s unfortunate habit of passing noxious gas when company’s over (and yes, Pookie is a dog). Each of these careers contributes something to the greater good of mankind. But a search marketer? We’re just not in hot demand to make the world a better place.

In my fantasy, after the aforementioned announcement, I raise my hand and confidently stride forward: “I’m a trained search marketer. What’s the problem?”

“Thank God you’re here,” says the announcer, pointing to an obviously troubled man staring at a laptop. “This gentlemen here is extremely upset.”

Beaming with quiet confidence, I gently sit down beside the man and say, “Sir, I’ve been a search marketer for almost 20 years. How can I help you?”

Through his tears, I can see a small twinkle in his eye that indicates that he’s dared to hope again. “I don’t understand it. I just can’t get this damned site to rank.”

“Well, here’s your problem — your title tags aren’t optimized. And your incoming links have no anchor text. I can fix that.”

As I take the laptop from his trembling hands, a single person in the circle of onlookers who have been drawn by the scene starts clapping. Slowing, it spreads around the circle. In minutes, uproarious cheering and clapping surround me. Outwardly, I respond with gracious humility, but inside, I’m high-fiving myself and saying, “Yah..who’s da man? I’m da man!”

Maybe there should be a medal for search marketing bravery.

The Challenge of Social

First published December 1, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Every quarter, I fill out an online survey about digital marketing trends. One question always shows up: “Are you looking at social as a replacement for search in your online marketing strategy?” I always answer no, and to myself, comment that it’s a stupid question asked by someone who obviously doesn’t know much about online marketing. But now I wonder  — is it really such a stupid question? Aren’t many experienced marketers asking themselves exactly the same question?

The Social Graph (or Network, or whatever you want to call it) should be the single biggest opportunity in marketing history. But marketers are stubbing their toes by the millions in trying to step over the threshold into the golden glow of the online social party. It seems it’s incredibly difficult to figure out.

Search, on the other hand, was easily pigeonholed as a direct-marketing channel. Search was so easy to “get” for marketers that Google turned it into a self-serve model and became the fastest growing company in history as a result.

For marketers, I suspect, the very ease of search has caused it to be considered a limited opportunity. Social, on the other hand, seems virtually limitless. It expands into hundreds and thousands of fascinating, if somewhat cloudy, opportunities to connect with customers. As I said, in theory, social seems like a marketer’s dream come true. But in practice, it’s an unwieldy animal to wrestle to the ground.

Here’s just one example of the challenges inherent in mapping the online social landscape.  Pitney Bowes felt there was tremendous potential in social to foster deeper engagements with its customers, building long-term loyalty. But rather than jump headlong into it, Pitney Bowes decided to test its assumptions through a survey of those customers first. The result? Social may not be all it’s cracked up to be:

“These findings will give decision-makers pause for thought,” the report (from the survey) stated. “Businesses can be forgiven for getting swept away by the hype of surrounding social media and wanting to invest in such activity as soon as possible. … But results show that those businesses tempted to lead with such techniques will quickly find themselves out of step with customer thinking.”

So why is social so awkward to leverage effectively? I suspect it’s because the exact same things that make social so promising also make it incredibly unwieldy to manage.  It’s part of our lives, which means we’re engaged, but what we’re engaged with is rarely what an advertiser wants to talk to us about.

Marketers get caught up in the concept of participation rates and usage. Facebook has one of the highest reaches of any online property, second only to Google. Alexa estimates that almost half of the total Internet user population (about 49%) uses Google regularly. Facebook is just behind at 43%. But if we look at time spent on site, Facebook comes it an about 25 minutes a day, compared to 13 minutes a day for Google. If we were using engagement as an indicator of marketing potential, this would have us salivating like a St. Bernard over a fresh bowl of kibble.

But the reason I don’t trust engagement as a metric is that it doesn’t consider intent. And intent is the key difference between social and search. The reason search excels in marketing is that it’s all about intent, and what’s even better, it’s about identified intent, neatly labeled by the search query. In the history of marketing, it’s never been easier than this to intercept a motivated buyer.

I don’t mean to minimize the value of a well-managed search campaign, but compared to other channels, it’s pretty difficult to completely flop on a search campaign. The same is not true for social. To illustrate, let’s step back and look at this from another point of view, one that removes some of the hyperbole that surrounds online social.

Let’s say you’ve just decided to sell your 2007 Honda Civic. As you’re backing out of your driveway, your neighbor flags you down and asks you how you like your Honda, and if you know where she could buy a good used one? From your perspective, this aligning of the planets seems too good to be true, but it’s similar to what happens on a search engine millions of time every day. It’s the power of alignment with purchase intent.

But let’s take a different tack. Let’s imagine that as you drive down the street, you see that one of your neighbors is having a party. In front of their house, there are at least 12 cars parked, including four Hondas. “A-hah, “ you say, “a perfect gathering of potential Honda buyers, with at least 33% of them showing a preference for Hondas” (note: if this is what your internal dialogue actually sounds like, you should consider an extended leave from work). You ring the doorbell and begin to work the crowd. The only problem is, no one came to the party to buy a Honda. Not to mention the obvious question on everyone’s mind: “Who the hell invited you?”

If your goal is to unload your Honda, I know what scenario I’d be betting on. It almost seems ludicrous that we’re even considering Scenario B as a substitute for Scenario A. Yet, every three months, I get that survey asking me if I’m thinking about it.

I know — it doesn’t make any sense to me, either.

Walmart vs. Amazon: A Regime Shift in Motion

First published November 17, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Financial analysts are not predicting a rosy short-term future for Amazon’s stock price.  Recent blunders with the rollout of new Kindle devices and earnings under increasing pressure have these analysts predicting a shorting of Amazon stock. In all likelihood, Amazon’s share price will tumble.

So why is Walmart so worried about Amazon?

A recent article indicates that Walmart is preparing for what could be the “retail battle of the decade.” When you match the two up on numbers alone, it seems like the “mismatch of the decade.”  Walmart is 10 times the size of Amazon in overall sales. It’s the largest retailer on the planet, by a huge margin. Amazon doesn’t even crack the top 10. In fact, Amazon sits at #44 on the list of global retailers.

But let’s flip the numbers. When it comes to online sales, Amazon outsells Walmart 10 to 1, and its topline growth is 44% while Walmart’s per location sales growth is trapped in the low single digits (if there is growth at all). So, if online retail is a game changer, and if this signals a “regime shift” in the retail landscape, then Walmart is right to worry. In fact, they should be petrified.

The article steps through Walmart’s strategy for ramping up e-commerce, but one line in particular raises a huge red flag: “Walmart would love Amazon’s top-line growth, but isn’t about to settle for its profits.”

Walmart has built its empire on incredibly precise supply chain management, obsessing over the details of physical fulfillment. Company strategists hope to use this to their advantage in their war on Amazon. Fair enough. But when it comes to the tough calls required to fully embrace digital (and they will come), Walmart will be hampered by the need to protect an existing model that relies on bricks and mortar. This mixed set of priorities will virtually ensure Walmart will move slower than Amazon, who has no option but to excel when it comes to e-com. This is a classic “regime shift” scenario, and history is not on Walmart’s side. The fact that its e-com head office is pretty far removed, philosophically and physically, from the head office in Bentonville, Ark. speaks to the challenges that Walmart has ahead of it.

It’s Amazon’s move into CPG that has raised the ire of the giant from Bentonville. Soap, diapers and other consumer staples are the essentials that drive Walmart’s revenues, and these are areas that Amazon is aggressively expanding into. But it’s not just consumer packaged goods that Amazon has set its sights on; it’s also going after the industrial and B2B market. In fact, Amazon is attacking the established marketplace on all fronts, with the full intention of smashing the current model and replacing it with one that takes full advantage of online efficiencies. In short, if we remember the stages of a Kondratieff wave, Amazon is building the foundations of the reconstruction phase.

Amazon’s plans go far beyond the Kindle sales and struggles with profit margins currently beleaguering its stock price. This is a massive long-term play, and one that I would be hesitant to bet against. The act of shopping is about to change forever. In my previous column on this topic, many commented that for some things, the ability to touch and feel a product is essential. That may be true, but there are many, many more things where we could care less about the need for physical evaluation. Also, this divide between online and physical shopping tends to be a shifting one. Things we couldn’t imagine buying sight unseen just a few years ago are now purchased online without a second thought.

I’m not sure what lies ahead for retail in general, or the battle between Walmart and Amazon specifically. But I do know the retail landscape of the future will bear little resemblance to the one we know today. And I also know that the battlefield will be littered with causalities. It’s not beyond reason (or historical evidence) to suspect that the world’s biggest retailer may well be one of them.

The View Above the “Weeds”

First published November 10, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Yesterday was not a good day.

It was a day that made me wish I had never gone into this business — a day that made me long for a warm beach and a mai tai. I don’t have these days very often, but yesterday, oh boy, I had it in spades!

I’ve been doing search (yesterday, I used a different, less polite noun) for a long time.  And I have to be honest, some days it feels like a thousand leeches are sucking the blood out of me. Given that, it was impossible to muster up much enthusiasm for the roll out of Google+ Business Pages or the raging controversy of Facebook’s “LikeGate.” Really? Are those the most important things to litter our inboxes with?

On days like yesterday, when I get caught in the weeds of digital marketing (where the blood-sucking leeches tend to hang out) I sometimes lose sight of why I got into this in the first place. This is a revolution. What’s more, it’s a revolution of epic, perhaps unprecedented, proportions. In macro-economic terms, this is what they call a long-wave transition or a Kondratieff wave (named after the Russian economist who first identified it). These cycles, which typically last more than 50 years, see the deconstruction of the current market infrastructure and the reconstruction of a market built on entirely new foundations. They are caused by change factors so massively disruptive, often in the form of technological innovations or global social events (for example, a World War), that it takes decades for their impact to be absorbed and responded to.

The digital revolution is perhaps the biggest Kondratieff wave in history. One could tentatively peg the start of the transition in the early to mid ‘90s with the introduction of the Internet. If this is the case, we’re less than 20 years into the wave, still in the deconstruction phase. To me, that feels about right. If history repeats itself, which it has a tendency of doing; we have yet to get to the messiest part of the transition.

These waves tend to precipitate what’s called a “regime shift.” Here is how the regime shift works. Companies started in the old market paradigm eventually reach a stagnation point. In our particular case, think of the multinational conglomerates built around market necessities such as mass distribution, physical locations, supply-chain logistics, large-scale manufacturing, top-down management and centralized R&D. In this market, bigger was not only better, it was essential to truly succeed. Our Fortune 500 reads like a who’s who of this type of company.  But eventually, the market becomes fully serviced, or even saturated, with the established market contenders, and growth is restricted.

Then, a disruptive change happens and a new opportunity for growth is identified. At first, the full import of the disruption is not fully realized. Speculation and a flood of investment capital can create a market frenzy early in the wave, looking for quick wins from the new opportunities. Think dot-com boom

The issue here is that the full impact of the disruptive change has to be absorbed by society — and that doesn’t happen in a year, or even 10 years. It takes decades for us to integrate it into our lives and social fabric. And so, the early wave market boom inevitably gives way to a collapse. Think dot-com bust.

As the wave progresses, the “regime shift” starts to play out. Established players are still heavily invested in the existing market structure, and although they may realize the potential of the new market, they simply can’t move fast enough to capitalize on it. Case in point, when industrial America became electrified in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the existing regime had factories built around steam power.  Steam-powered factories had a central steam engine that drove all the equipment in the factory through a complex maze of drive shafts and belts. The factories were dirty, dangerous and inefficient. New factories powered by electricity were cleaner, brighter, safer and much more efficient. But even with the obvious benefits of electricity, established manufacturers tried to retrofit their existing factories by jury-rigging electrical motors onto equipment designed to run by steam. They simply had too much invested in the current market infrastructure to shut the doors and walk away. New companies weren’t burdened by this baggage and built factories from scratch to take advantage of electricity. The result? Within a few decades, the old manufacturers had to close their doors, outmaneuvered by newer, more nimble and more efficient competitors.

When I plot our current situation against the timelines of past waves, I believe that given how massive this wave is, it could take longer than 50 years to play out. And, if that’s the case, there is still a lot of deconstruction of the previous marketplace to happen. The good news is, the building of the new market is a period of huge growth and opportunity. There is still a ton of life left in this wave, and we haven’t even realized its full benefits yet.

On days like yesterday, when my to-do list and inbox conspire to burn out what little sanity I have left, I have to step back and realize why I did this. Somehow, way back then, I knew this was going to be important. And yesterday, I had to remind myself just how massively important it is.

Bye Bye Big Box, Hello Digital

First published November 3, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

My friend Mikey (whom you may remember from the “Mikey Mobile Adoption Test”) and I were recently driving through our hometown, past a long row of new big-box retail locations that have recently sprung up.

I, somewhat exasperatedly, said, “Who the hell is going to buy all this stuff?”

Our town’s population is only 120,000 but we seem to have a huge overcapacity of retail space, with more going up all the time, thanks in part to a development-hungry First Nations band with plenty of available real estate.

Mikey replied, “Well, the town isn’t getting any smaller and people need to shop somewhere.”

That, and a recent article by MediaPost reporter Laurie Sullivan, got me thinking. Do we? I mean, do we need to shop “somewhere,” as in a physical store location?

I paused, and then replied, “I’m not so sure. I buy a lot more things online.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

A few days later, I was in a presentation where someone showed digital marketing growth projections for local advertisers on a slide. The growth over the next few years was relatively moderate: about 5% to 6% year over year. This despite the fact that the current penetration rates were well short of 50%.

Put it all together and I can’t help wondering whether we, collectively, are “sandbagging” our local digital growth potential. Modest growth projections assume fairly linear trends in the future. We use past adoption and extrapolate these into the future. Statistically, it’s probably the rational thing to do, but it doesn’t take into account the possibility of a dramatic shift in behavior. For example, what if we’ve reaching a tipping point where, as Sullivan notes, it’s just a lot easier to shop online than to actually hop in your car, drive across town and then try to navigate through a 25,000-square-foot massive retail location?

That’s the way things tend to go in real life. We don’t incrementally change behaviors, we change en masse. And when we do, we trigger massive waves of change that deconstruct and reconstruct the marketplace. I suspect we’re getting close to that tipping point.

Personally I, like Sullivan, find the physical act of shopping a royal pain in the tuchus.  Recently, my wife and I decided to go buy some coasters, those little squares that go under cups on your coffee table. Indiana Jones has embarked on less daunting quests. When we finally found them I reckon that, accounting for my wife’s and my time at fair market value, those coasters cost somewhere around a thousand dollars. All this for a six-dollar set of coasters that I don’t even particularly like (don’t tell my wife)!

We’re to the point now where shopping should be painless — a search, click and buy, then relax and wait for FedEx to deliver. Even local shopping can become massively more efficient through mobile technology. At some point, we have to realize that going to huge retail stores that are built to maximize per visit sales rather than enable you to find what you’re looking for is a horribly inefficient use of our time. And when we do, the current retail paradigm is flipped on its pointy little head. The net impact? Those modest growth curves suddenly shoot for the sky!

And all those big-box stores that Mikey and I drove by?

Perhaps bowling will make a sudden comeback. I know several great locations for an alley.

Why Google has to “Get” Platforms: It’s the Future of Search

First published October 27, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I shared portions of Steve Yegge’s post (from inside Google) about how Google doesn’t “get” platforms. But why, you may ask, does Google have to get better at platforms? Certainly, open platforms open greater levels of innovation, one reason why Facebook gained the critical mass needed to dominate social networking. That is certainly applicable given Google’s forays into the social space. But there’s another reason, one very germane to Google’s core business. Becoming a platform provider is likely the only way Google can compete in a new search ecosystem.

Consider this recent shot across the bow from Microsoft, which is opening the Bing backend as a service to be integrated into third-party apps. The company is making its search engine a platform. And, according to Yegge, Microsoft does “get” platforms:

“(Microsoft) understands platforms as a purely accidental outgrowth of having started life in the business of providing platforms. So they have thirty-plus years of learning in this space. And if you go to msdn.com, and spend some time browsing, and you’ve never seen it before, prepare to be amazed. Because it’s staggeringly huge. They have thousands, and thousands, and THOUSANDS of API calls. They have a HUGE platform.”

Now, by all competitive measures, Google is beating the Bejezus out of Bing, but pay close attention to this move, because it likely marks the future of Web search. Increasingly, we’re going to see a wider and wider gap between the back end algorithms and index of a search engine and the actual search interface. The days of a search engine being a destination are numbered. In this scenario, search becomes a utility, providing a portion of the functional underpinnings of thousands of specialized apps.  The search provider of the future will have to excel at three things:

A)   Indexing increasingly complex forms of content;

B)   Interpreting a user’s interests and intent — and then

C)   Delivering the best results given the optimum intersection between A and B.

The third part is critical, as the actual delivery point of the results moves outside the scope of the search provider and into the domain of independent developers, who will rely on robust platforms to accommodate this.

Google is the current leader in A and B, although recent work by Microsoft shows it closing the gap. But C may prove to be Google’s Achilles heel. Google will be reluctant to share its user’s eyeballs with third-party developers, because those eyeballs represent the vast majority of the company’s current revenue stream. There will be all kinds of internal pressure at Google not to head down this road. By contrast, Microsoft has nothing to lose by doing this. As Steve Yegge rightly points out, this strategy is actually a better fit for Microsoft’s corporate DNA, as the development of platforms is familiar territory for them. Being the end destination for users has never been Microsoft’s strong suit.  And Microsoft still has reams of cash coming in from other revenue channels, so it will be more likely to share the search revenue pie with other parties than will Google.

Some time ago, Steve Ballmer signaled the possibility of this shift of revenue streams coming from search.  Google was able to capitalize on a perfect storm of revenue opportunity, by tapping into the single biggest concentration of consumer demand in history. But the window of opportunity that has fueled Google’s growth to this point is rapidly closing. The new models will require search providers to slice up the revenue pie with an increasing number of partners.

It will also require those partners to wholeheartedly embrace platforms. Let’s see if Google can “get” that.

Amazon = Evolution, Google = Intelligent Design?

First published October 20, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Ironically, the hottest thing on Google+is a rant from a Google Insider about how Google+ is hopelessly limited because Google doesn’t get the importance of platforms.  Steve Yegge goes on at some length (over 4,000 words) contrasting his first six years at Amazon and his last six years at Google.

The media jumped on it, because Yegge spent some of his rant bashing Google+, which is rapidly collecting more holes than Bonnie and Clyde’s ill fated 1934 Ford sedan. But Yegge was simply using Google+ as an example of how badly Google has dropped the ball when it comes to building platforms to support external development. There are many, many things that Google does far better than Amazon (according to Yegge) but building out platforms is not one of them:

“Bezos realized long before the vast majority of Amazonians that Amazon needs to be a platform.”

In contrast, Google tends to keep their code base under internal lock and key to protect their IP. In fact, even their own Chinese developers didn’t have access to Google’s core code, for fear that IP would somehow leak out and end up on a Chinese competitor’s site. A valid concern, to be sure, but that approach runs directly counter to the open environment required to become a platform developer, something that Yegge says almost everyone does better than Google:

“That one last thing that Google doesn’t do well is Platforms. We don’t understand platforms. We don’t ‘get’ platforms.

What, Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo). We all don’t get it.”

What, then, is the advantage of being a platform developer?  For one thing, it leverages the power of Darwinian development. As long as development stays locked behind the corporate firewall, you simply can’t match the innovation that will come from an open ecosystem. This is especially true in a corporate environment where management tends towards micromanagement, true of both Amazon and Google. Bezos and Page both tend to run roughshod over internal developers, dismissing ideas out of hand and turning development into a political minefield. But Steve Bezos realized the limitations of this command and control approach.

“The other big realization he [Bezos] had was that he can’t always build the right thing.”

Every successful species evolves through a long and arduous process of trial and error. Evolution requires sheer volume, leaving the environment to be the eventual judge of success. Bezos has harnessed the same approach for Amazon. Google is instead taking an “intelligent design” approach. Personally, I much prefer Amazon’s odds for success. But they’re not the only one who has embraced Darwinian development.

In exploring the lack of momentum of Google Plus One, you have to compare against Facebook. One thing that Facebook did which helped build incredible momentum was to turn their site into a platform for social networking of all kinds.

“Facebook gets it. That’s what really worries me. That’s what got me off my lazy butt to write this thing.”

In looking at social, Google got that it was important, but what they didn’t get was that communities, whether online or in the real world, develop organically on top of required superstructures. They evolve, they aren’t created.  Facebook understands this, but Google hasn’t quite caught on yet.

“Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that’s not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work.”

As luck would have it, Yegge also touched on the topic of last week’s column, the incredible intuition of Steve Jobs. I mentioned that I hadn’t seen the same “magic” in Larry Page. Yegge seems to agree:

“The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them. You can’t do that. Not really. Not reliably. There have been precious few people in the world, over the entire history of computing, who have been able to do it reliably. Steve Jobs was one of them. We don’t have a Steve Jobs here. I’m sorry, but we don’t.”

Yegge’s post is required reading, because it offers a startlingly frank and transparent view inside Google, and I applaud Google’s courage in allowing it to remain open to the public. What is really fascinating though, is what this means for the future of search and the role of Google in it. Unfortunately, I’m at my maximum word count, so I’ll explore that next week.

Steve, I Wish I Knew You

First published October 13, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I wish I had met Steve Jobs.

My heroes from the world of business number exactly two: Walt Disney and Steve Jobs. Walt died when I was 5 years old, so it’s not surprising that our paths never crossed. But theoretically, I could have met Jobs. It was not beyond the realms of possibility. Unfortunately, I never got to meet either of them. And for that, I’m immeasurably saddened.

The thing I admired about both of them goes beyond what I have seen in the recent stream of accolades that has issued forth since last week’s news of Jobs’ passing.

Jobs, and Disney before him, had an amazing ability to know what it was we wanted before we knew it ourselves. It wasn’t business or technical acumen, although both men had it in spades. It was the uncanny ability to ride on the edge of reason and intuition while placing bets on the future, getting it right more often than wrong.

If I knew more about them, I suspect I’d add Henry Ford and Thomas Edison to the list, but the fruit of their labors predates me, so I don’t have the same appreciation for what they did in their lifetimes.

Yes, Jobs (and Disney) shaped huge parts of the world we know today. Yes, our lives have been changed thanks to the mortal time they spent with us. Yes, they had passion. But more than anything, they could reach deep inside themselves, draw a spark of intuition and from it, start a fire in our hearts. That gift comes one in a generation, if we’re lucky. In my lifetime, I’ve only seen it twice.

As smart as Jobs was, he had many contemporary counterparts in the IQ department. Bill Gates and Larry Ellison are no slouches when it comes to mental acuity. More recently, Mark Zuckerberg’s intellect has been lauded on celluloid, no less. And anyone who seems to cross Larry Page’s path is awed by the hammering intensity of his engineering brilliance.

But the genius of Disney and Jobs was of a different sort. It came from being able to take our collective pulse, and somehow knowing what would make it quicken. They could pluck unrealized dreams and transform them into the treasured stuff of our lives.  It was more art than science, more love than logic, more passion than profit. It was, from our awed viewpoint, magic. It seems to me that Bill Gates and Larry Page have little time for magic.

There have certainly been more financially successful companies. Disney was on the edge of the bankruptcy for much of its history. And when Walt did hit a home run, he quickly ploughed his profits back into his next long shot.

Apple wouldn’t be around today if Microsoft hadn’t come to the rescue in 1997 with a $150 million dollar bailout. That amount seems miniscule today next to Apple’s  $370 billion market cap, making it the most valuable tech company in the world (ironically, worth more than half again as much as Microsoft’s $227 billion.)

Jobs and Disney had the ability to create entirely new categories of consumer demand: full-length animated features, theme parks, personal computers, computer animated movies, personal music devices, smartphones and tablet computers. Each of these innovations owed much to the personal vision of the leader.

I’m not sure what Apple’s path will be in the future. I suspect it will bear an eerie similarity to Disney after Walt’s untimely departure in 1966, where management asked the same question about every decision: “What would Walt do?” I have no doubt that the words “What would Steve do?” will be heard often in Cupertino. I’m also sure that it will be some time before we see the likes of another Steve Jobs or Walt Disney.

The gift they had is not often given. I’m just thankful that they both chose to share it.

Google +1 Goes Critical, But Not in a Good Way

First published October 6, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I was in Minneapolis’ Mall of America and happened to wander by the new Microsoft store. The layout, the look and the feel were a near-exact clone of the very popular Apple Stores, one of which just happened to be directly across the concourse. Here, in the largest mall in the world, I had the opportunity to compare and contrast the physical embodiments of two of the most ubiquitous brands in the world.

If not for the several floor staffers in the Microsoft store, it would have been almost empty. Only one person was wandering through the aisles showcasing the latest from Redmond, significantly outnumbered by the two staffers glued to his side, as well as two more looking on over the potential buyer’s shoulder — and still one more, whom I took to be the manager, overseeing the scene from a more discreet distance.

I then swiveled 180 degrees and saw how the Apple store stacked up against the Microsoft challenger. To be fair, the store wasn’t nearly as busy as most locations I’ve been to, but even a conservative estimate would put the customer count at 15 to 20 times the sole Microsoft customer.

This brought to my mind the importance of critical mass. We humans are notoriously impressionable — especially so when being asked to adopt new things. On the average, we have more in common with sheep (or lemmings) than “lone” wolves. So critical mass becomes well, critical in determining the success of new things.  It’s called social proof, and it makes or breaks markets. All things being equal, I’m going to choose Apple over Microsoft just because I have proof than other people have done the same. Then, this movement becomes self-perpetuating. The more people who follow the herd, the more that others want to join it. It’s how we’re wired, and all the Kinect games in the world won’t be enough to fight it.

Critical mass is also vital in social networks. In fact, the concept is central to the health and continued viability of any online community. When the momentum drops, the community is on its way to being a ghost town. When’s the last time you logged onto MySpace? Or Friendster? Or, unless you live in Brazil, Orkut?

Which brings me to Google’s+1. Just a few weeks ago, Rob Garner, one of my fellow Search Insiders, was pondering what Google’s new social offering might do for search.  Millions signed onto Google’s service as soon as it went public. Critical mass seemed well on its way. If the trends held up, this could change everything.

And then it died.

It’s been 2 weeks since I received a Google+1 invite, and that came from a Google employee. There has been no reason to check my +1 circles. I really haven’t given it a thought prior to writing this column. Each and every day, I receive one or two LinkedIn invites in my inbox. I generally receive 4 to 5 Facebook invitations a week. But Google+1? Crickets.

Apparently the only ones using +1 are Google employees who are forced to if they want their bonus, wannabe programmers from India and journalists who are researching the Google+1 obituary they’re writing.

The rapid demise of Google+1 is not new in the world of social media. Other networks have followed a similar path into oblivion, although perhaps not with the same speed. It’s the dilemma of social networks, managing to get beyond the predictable burst of the early adopters and cross the chasm to mainstream usage. To date, Facebook, LinkedIn and perhaps Twitter are the only ones to have managed the chasm crossing successfully. Google+1 sputtered before it even got to the precipice.

What this means is that Google doesn’t have the critical mass of social usage to provide a signal to noise ratio clean enough to impact search rankings. Both the reach and frequency of usage is simply not high enough to make a credible social graph. Eric Schmidt tried to say that there was more than enough online social activity for everyone, but it seems we simply don’t have the patience or free time to maintain multiple social destinations. We’ll kick the tires of a newcomer, but unless it offers something substantially better than the competition, we won’t come back with any regularity.

Google desperately needed a win with +1. But based on current traffic, it seems doomed.

Just like that Microsoft store stuck across the concourse from Apple.

Don’t Typecast Search as “Direct”

First published September 29, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

We should have taken it as a sign of things to come.

The panel I was moderating at OMMA Global, with the highly provocative title “The Evolving Role of the Search Marketer,” was in a tiny room that seemed to be an afterthought of whoever planned the meeting space layout in the Marriott Marquis in New York. You actually had to walk through another, much larger room and go through a door tucked in the back corner. If one of the show organizers hadn’t been personally guiding me, I might never have found it.

The second sign was equally hard to miss. Outside the “secret” door to my session was a small standard that indicated that this was the “Direct” marketing track.

Okay, relegated to the back closet and in a track that restricted search to being a “direct” channel — so far things didn’t bode well for the insightful voyage of discovery I was envisioning.

Nevertheless, we forged ahead with a very enthusiastic audience (who were no doubt glad to just have found the session) and a very seasoned panel of search veterans (Rob Griffin, Havas; Dana Todd, Performics; Michael Verghios, Mindshare; Scott Brinker, ion Interactive). And we weren’t five minutes into the session before we started talking about search being pigeonholed as a direct channel.

In the beginning, we search marketers had no qualms about the “direct” label. As advertisers began demanding more accountability for each and every ad dollar, we were perfectly positioned to benefit from the budget migrations. Dollars poured into search, propelling Google to glowing financials quarter after quarter. We proudly evangelized the measurability of search, eagerly thrusting forth dashboards with a laser focus on ROI.

And it worked. We rode the wave through most of the last decade. Even when the economy ground to a screeching halt in 2008, search bounced through with nary a scratch, due largely to its credentials as the most effective digital direct channel. While marketing budgets as a whole were slashed, search budgets either stayed the same or grew marginally, thanks to the continuing inflow at the expense of other channels.

But somewhere in the midst of that giddy party, someone should have whispered in our ear, “Be careful what you wish for!” It’s like the actor who gets typecast in a role — just as Michael Richards seems doomed to be stuck in Cosmo Kramer’s persona, we may never shake the “direct” tag. We’re stuck at the direct marketing table –quite literally, in the case of the latest OMMA conference.

But, as we discussed in our session, that shuts the door to the huge potential of search to connect and inform all manners of marketing. Increasingly, consumer intent is playing out across a digital landscape and search is the “glue” that connects many of the dots. If search gets a seat at the strategic table, we can provide vital input into consumer behavioral trends, budget allocations and attribution models, targeting strategies and much more. Search remains the clearest crystallization of buyer intent available at any time in marketing history, anywhere. That’s what made it such a phenomenal direct channel, but its potential reaches beyond that. Its power remains only partly tapped as long as it’s considered solely a direct tactic.

Here’s one example. Prior to the recession, Google and other engines were struggling to break out of the direct box by commissioning research showing the branding power of search. My company did some of this work for them. We created search scenarios and then used standard branding recall metrics to measure brand lift. Sure enough, we found significant lift with effective placement on a results page. But the problem was that we were using the wrong yardstick. We were trying to measure search using metrics pioneered in other, less efficient media.

The true power of search, when it comes to branding, is positioning a brand in a critical place during the key consideration process. As buyers, we use search to help us compile a mental list of options to consider. If brands are present and prominent, they’re not only included, their credibility as an option is enhanced. But if they’re not, even if the buyer is aware of them, they run a real risk of being dropped from the consideration set.

We shouldn’t have been measuring search as a branding channel on the same footing as TV or magazines. It’s not. It’s actually even more exciting than that. Search is positioned at the critical branch in the decision path, where it can either significantly amplify the effects of those branding channels, or wipe out all their efforts in one fell swoop. That’s how potentially powerful search is.

But we may never get the chance to tell that message, which must be heard at the planning table where the overall strategies are drafted. You won’t hear us, because we’ll be over here at the direct table, somewhere in the back corners of the Marriott Marquis.