Author Archives: ghotchkiss

Uncovering the “Curse of Captiva”

First published May 5, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

“May you live in interesting times….”

Just about the time you’re reading that line, I’ll be kicking off the Search Insider Summit on Captiva Island, Fla., with it.  I think those six words pretty much sum up the theme of the three-day event.

Here’s the thing about that well-known quote – it’s both a blessing and a curse. On the surface, it appears to be a benevolent wish of good will, but lurking just under the surface lays a malevolent storm that can rip organizations and institutions apart.

The origins of the so-called “Chinese Curse” are murky, but according to Wikipedia, it may be related to the Chinese proverb: “It’s better to be a dog in peaceful times than to be a man in chaotic ones;” perhaps one reason why we should let “sleeping dogs lie.” This is all well and good if we have any choice in the matter, but we really don’t. Chaos, especially in our chosen field, is the new normal. Like it or not, we live in interesting times.

Personally, I like it, even though it can get exhausting at times. I’m one of those perverse individuals who thrive on chaos and change. If things become too placid for too long, my inclination is to get a big stick and stir things up. I’m driven by the belief that there must be a better way. But I know not everyone shares that view. For many, if not most, change brings uncertainty, which usually comes knocking with its traveling companions: stress and anxiety.

Change, in various forms, is pretty much all we’ll be talking about at Captiva. If change was a sure bet, a trading of the mediocre for the improved, there really wouldn’t be much to talk about. Change would be sought, embraced and systematically incorporated into everything we do.

The problem with change is that there are no guarantees ensuring you’ll end up in a better place. It’s tossing that which you know in the bucket and taking a chance on drawing a new lot in life that could be better, the same, or worse — perhaps much worse. And there’s the rub. Humans don’t approach such decisions rationally.

There’s a lot of unusual psychology at play here, covered by numerous economic behavioral theories like endowment effect, loss aversion, disposition effect and Kahneman and Tversky’s Prospect Theory. The long and the short of it is that most times, we believe a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. And attitudes of that sort generally freeze change right in its tracks. We have not evolved to be born risk takers. This tendency can create bizarre behaviors that defy logic: like investors being much more willing to sell stocks that have gained in value than those that have decreased. We’ve all done that, with the unshakable belief that we can recoup our losses. But a purely statistical analysis of that theory would blow it to smithereens.

Through most of our history, the genetic evidence would seem to vindicate this aversion to risk. That we’re still around points to its success as a survival strategy. But current times are not representative of our general history. There are times, this being one of them, when external factors in our environment force us to make changes and embrace risk. Those that hesitate are lost.

During these times, it’s the nimble and adaptable that thrive. Bulk and baggage are impediments. Reinvention is the name of the game. It’s the prerequisite of living in interesting times.

Captiva Eve: Three More Sneak Previews of the Search Insider Summit

First published April 28, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

One week from today, the formal part of the Search Insider Summit will be kicking off on Captiva Island. Here are three more of the presentations you’ll be catching if you’re lucky enough to be joining us in Florida.

Reinventing the Agency

Yesterday I received an email from Advertising Age asking whether we should consider nixing the term “ad agency” all together. The “ad” part of that label, once a badge of honor held aloft along with a martini glass and a Gucci watch, has been pretty much stricken from the marketing vocabulary. But the email, which was an invitation to take part in a poll, was suggesting that we may want to consider throwing “agency” into the dustbin along with it. It brings home unflattering images of a Don Draper gone to seed.

Three different presenters will be tackling the question of what an agency might look like in the future. Dave Tan from Google, Lucinda Holt from Click Equations and fellow Search Insider Rob Griffin from Havas Digital will each peer forward into the not-so-far-off future to see how agencies, or marketing firms, or whatever we’re called, can add true value to the market in the future. Accountability, transparency, micro-measures of performance and the forging of a new type of relationship with clients are all sure to be factors of the equations being explored on stage.

Moving Beyond “What” to “Why”

Anyone who has ever heard me speak, read my writing, bumped into me in a Starbucks line or come within my 50-yard “bubble zone” knows I’m a huge fan of qualitative research. It’s not that I don’t think quantitative research is important — after all, crunching numbers is an essential part of marketing. It’s just that I find our industry hugely biased towards spreadsheet jockeying. We spend so much time with data, but we often forget to speak to the people on the other side of the data. Data can help us identify “what’s” happening, but we actually have to spend some time with real living humans to understand “why” it’s happening.

 

Michael Holmes, the Director of Insight and Research at Ball State University, will join us on stage to help put a little more balance into how we approach research, explaining the role qualitative methodologies could and should play.

Is IBM’s Watson the Future of Search?

Several weeks back, we reached out to our Insider roster of past presenters and explained what we had in mind for this year’s Summit. Many rose to the challenge of RE:Invention by suggesting provocative and intriguing topics, but one of my favorites came from Josh Dreller, Vice President of Media Technology at Fuor Digital.

On Feb. 16, IBM’s Watson eventually triumphed over human challengers Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter to become the all time “Jeopardy” champ. This may seem like a throw-away story on “Entertainment Tonight,” but Josh found something much more intriguing in the Watson challenge. “Jeopardy” was purposely chosen as a type of Turing test for IBM’s DeepQA technology — which combines a computer’s ability to index vast reams of information with a way of navigating the vagaries of human language. The linguistic twists presented by “Jeopardy”‘s way of framing questions proves to be a daunting challenge for the rigid structures of digital processing. Although some of the rounds proved too much for Watson, it eventually emerged victorious by amassing over three times the winnings of it’s human competitors.

Is DeepQA the future of search? Josh Dreller thinks so, and he’ll explain why next week in Captiva.

See ya in a week

Countdown to Captiva: Reinventing the Organization

First published April 21, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Aaahhh…I can almost feel the warm tropical breezes of Captiva. We’re getting very close to the Search Insider Summit and, as promised, I wanted to preview some of the sessions we have lined up for the agenda.

As a quick reminder, the theme is RE:Invention. I’m particularly looking forward to a number of sessions we have scheduled that will explore the reinvention of the organization.

I spend a good part of my time talking to marketers challenged with guiding  their traditional organizations through the massive transformations required to compete in a digital marketplace with totally new rules. It’s a topic that’s particularly fascinating to me. Most of the brands we know today were built in a marketplace that favored size and scale. The ability to have a presence in as many locations as possible was key, so complex market distribution networks quickly sprung up.

But today, thanks to a digital paradigm shift, the marketplace is defined differently. Physical fulfillment is being outsourced, allowing the smallest E-Bay vendor to sell globally, and the importance of physical “shelf space” in a brick and mortar store is being challenged by new virtual shelves (i.e. search listings, e-commerce sites and other online destinations). Also, manufacturers, who, because of scale and the complexity of their distribution networks, found themselves further and further away from the end consumer, are suddenly rediscovering a new intimacy with these customers.

These challenges will be explored in a trio of presentations at the Search Insider Summit:

IBM and the Agile Revolution

Massive scale and nimbleness tend to make odd bedfellows. But that’s exactly the balance required at many organizations to compete in a new real-time marketplace. Ben Edwards, VP of Digital Strategy at IBM, will look at how new “agile” methods have begun to spread from the software development industry to other forms of white-collar work, bringing with them work rituals and artifacts that are able to negotiate accelerated market change and uncertainty.

The Power of Design

I remember Amy Curtis-McIntyre, who has handled the marketing efforts of JetBlue, Hyatt Hotels and, most recently, Old Navy, saying that good design was a necessity, not a luxury.  That’s where Lance Loveday of Closed Loop Marketing picks up for his presentation on the Search Insider stage.  Lance believes that good design can be the essential difference between success and failure (or, even worse, mediocrity). He’ll follow the rather large design footsteps of Apple, Virgin and IDEO. What is really different about companies built around good design — and what are some ways you can discover your own inner Steve Jobs?

3M: Back to the Digital Smokestack

In the 109-year history of 3M, they’ve had to reinvent themselves several times, but one thing has remained constant: the DNA of 3M springs from innovation in the workplace. By mixing and matching their core technologies (numbering 40, including adhesives, abrasives, coatings and moldings) 3M has been providing industrial solutions since they first glued sand on paper. Internally, this innovative intimacy is called “back to the smokestack” — and Interactive Marketing Group Manager David Reynolds-Gooch will share how 3M is now looking at how to leverage digital technology to make these collaborations faster and more effective than ever.

Seven Years as a Search Insider

First published April 14, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

“Ahh…our fledgling little industry is growing up.”

And with those words, I became a Search Insider on August 19, 2004, writing my very first column for MediaPost. Today, six years, seven months and 26 days later, I’m writing my 300th Search Insider column.  And yes, our little industry is still growing up.

As the senior Search Insider (both, I suspect, in terms of output and age) I’ve seen and written about a lot of things over the almost seven years I’ve been doing this. In that very first column, I forecast that we were a tipping point in the industry. Search was going to move from the cottage industry category to big business. Based on Google’s every-increasing balance sheet, I’d say that happened, but search is still an amazingly small world. At a recent search conference, a few of us (Bruce Clay, Chris Sherman, Danny Sullivan and some other “pioneers”) mentioned how we feel like a village elders council amongst more and more unfamiliar faces. Yet, for every new face encountered, these search events still feel a lot like a high school reunion.

I’ve been fortunate to be blessed with a lot of editorial leeway in what I choose to write about in Search Insider. Many have dealt with the world of search, but ironically, some of the most popular columns (at least, in terms of reader response) have been much more personal in nature. Columns about my family, our various family vacations and the loss of people dear to me (my wife’s grandmother and, more recently, my Uncle Jim) have all struck a chord with the Search Insider audience. For me, search has been an integral part of my life for the last decade and that has been reflected in my columns. It’s always been the human part of searching (or doing anything online) that I’ve found fascinating, and I’ve done my best to share that. I guess you could call it the recurring theme of the Thursday slot on the Search Insider line up.

For me, the fact that my daughter learned how to crochet on YouTube, or that my wife discovered that mobile computing can actually make a difference in her life, or that a long-haul truck driver that loved family embodied the very same ideals that we see in Facebook at its very best — these are the things we should care about. As I’ve said many, many times, technology is transitory, but people and their behaviors are what endure. At the end of the day, technology is just a tool.

I wanted to spend part of this milestone column thanking Ken Fadner, Phyllis Fine and the rest of the MediaPost editorial staff. Writing a weekly column can sometimes be a real pain when I hit Wednesday afternoon and come up completely dry on ideas. But I’ve also found that this forum has been tremendously rewarding for me personally. It reinforced for me that my internal thoughts and views become more valuable when they’re shared. You may not agree with me (and I can be pretty contentious at times, as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Ask and the Canadian marketing community at large can all attest to) but the discussions generated through this column have always been fascinating. And each time I’m out somewhere and someone tells me they read my column, it reinforces the value of the time I’ve spent generating some 180,000 words of content over the last seven years.

With that first column, I never imagined it would continue for as long as it has. There is no contract in place to secure the relationship. I suppose if I really wanted to quit writing tomorrow, I could. But week in and week out, I have to say that Thursday has become my favorite day. In fact, this column has been the most consistent part of my entire career in search. So I’ll be back next Thursday. And, most likely, the Thursday after that.

Why stop when you’re having fun?

Captiva: 27 Days and Counting

First published April 7, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

As of today, we’re  27 days away from the kick-off of the Search Insider Summit on Captiva Island, Fla. Yesterday, after several weeks of going through pitches, we locked down the agenda.

As I mentioned a few weeks back, we’re trying to put a little more vertical in our perspective for this summit, taking our view to a higher level than is typical at most search-based conferences. The theme is Re:Invention, with sessions on the Re:Invention of Marketing, Organizations, Customers, the Search Experience and pretty much everything else.

The format is the same we field-tested last spring — think TED for Search.  In total we have 39 sessions spread over the 3 days, ranging from 10 to 20 minutes each. I’ve asked presenters to be thought-provoking, future-focused — and, if appropriate, even controversial. For those three days, we’ll ponder how everything we know may be reinvented in the very near future and what it means for each of us.

We’ve worked to bring different perspectives to the stage. We have publishers speaking (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook will all be there), as well as agencies, academics (Wharton and Ball State) and a few vendors. But we also have marketers. In fact, almost 20% of our agenda is marketers talking specifically about their experiences and their view of the future, including presenters from IBM, 3M and Logitech.

Over the next few columns (with the exception of next week, but more on that then), I’m going to spotlight some of the presentations that will take the stage at Captiva:

Sharon Drew Morgen: Buying FacilitationTM: A New Sales Paradigm

I met Sharon Drew Morgan (virtually) last year and was instantly astonished by the clarity of her view of the sales process. Sharon has been working on understanding the decision process of buyers for most of her professional life. Her Buying Facilitation approach is one of those astoundingly logical frameworks that almost everyone overlooks. I guarantee it will forever change how you think about marketing, nurturing and sales.

Roger Dooley: Neuromarketing: The Brain on “Buy” 

Neurosciencemarketing.com is one of my “must read” blogs. Its author, Roger Dooley, has been covering the science of neuromarketing pretty much from day one.  We share a fascination for how the brain works, especially in a marketing context. Roger will bring us up to speed on where neuromarketing is at these days, and speculate on how it might reinvent marketing in the future.

Aaron Goldman, Craig Danuloff and Matt Lawson – The Slippery Slope of Privacy 

These are actually three presentations with one common theme: What are the implications of privacy, and how will it impact advertising? Fellow Search Insider (and rapper) Aaron Goldman kicks off with exploring the differences between privacy and personalization. Then Craig Danuloff unpacks a fascinating idea we chatted about recently at another show: how might your digital “footprint” change the way we look at personalized marketing? Finally, Marin’s Matt Lawson explores Apple’s view of privacy, a timely conversation considering how intimate we’re getting with the company’s various devices.

Of course, as with every Summit, it’s not so much what happens on the stage as what happens off it that defines the value of the show. Count on departing Saturday feeling challenged and better connected than ever.

Vacationing “On the Grid”

First published March 31, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

It’s 5 a.m. in Kauai. I’m sitting on the lanai of our condo, writing this in the glow from my laptop. I’ll continue to work on various things until about 8 a.m., when I’ll try to swim some lengths in the pool and then see what else my wife and daughters have planned for the day. Every so often I’ll check emails to see if there’s anything urgent that has to be responded to. The rest I’ll file away until tomorrow, when again I’ll get up at 5 a.m. Also, tomorrow (your today as you read this) I’ll have a 5-hour plane ride back to the mainland that will largely be used to “catch up.” I’m not jockeying for leadership in the holiday martyr’s club (it doesn’t seem like work when you’re watching the sun rise over Poipu), I’m simply describing a typical Hotchkiss vacation. It’s been this way for the past 14 or 15 years. I’ve heard about getting “off the grid.” I’ve just never been able to do it.

Some of my colleagues rave about dropping off this proverbial grid. “It was amazing!” they enthuse. “I didn’t check one email for five days!” I wonder what weird u-turn technology has taken when we feel we’ve created this monster we have to escape from, hiding in some far-flung unwired backwater, hiding from the penetrating gaze of our Outlook inbox. A number of analogies spring to mind: the fiery eyeball of Sauron that scans the Middle Earth landscape, ready to rain down pure, malevolent evil on the unwary tourist (or hobbit). Or, perhaps more appropriately, a massive wired mesh similar to a bug zapper, ready to trap and jolt any innocent vacationer who is foolish enough to fire up his laptop.

Much as we’d love we’d love to blame technology for our digital indentureship, it’s not really the one who’s at fault here. We started going down this path the minute we decided we wanted to work with ideas rather than physical things. My first job was loading 50-pound bags of various animal feed into the back of semi trailers. Had I chosen to stick with that original career path, I would have no problem leaving my job behind. It’s hard to pack a warehouse full of pig feed and several 18-wheelers in your suitcase. Getting “off the grid” would have simply meant changing location.

But today I earn my living by constructing ideas rather than stuff, and ideas are pretty portable. They have a nasty habit of following you around the world. In fact, the whole justification of getting “off the grid” is to recharge your mental batteries so you can come up with more ideas. It may cut into your vacation time, but I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. It’s not often I gaze longingly into the back of an empty semi, wishing I had 45 tons of something to load into it. A few hours on a laptop seems like a pretty good trade-off to me.

And let’s face it. My day job has allowed me to travel to places like Kauai with my family. This grid we speak of disparagingly is the very same grid that allows me to earn my living the other 350 days of the year. It’s often frustrating, and the pressures can be downright debilitating some days, but it’s also challenging and exciting. One of the main reasons I don’t mind staying “on the grid” during my vacation times is that I find a change of scene often helps me attack problems with a new perspective.

“But what about your family?” you ask. Getting up early to spend time with my laptop almost seems like I’m conducting some illicit affair. It’s actually a topic I’ve discussed at length with my wife and daughters. We realize that this is a mixed bag, with pros and cons. But we all agree that the pros far outweigh the cons. And, besides, they all carry their own personal “grids” around as well.

Someday, perhaps, I’ll truly get “off the grid” and I’ll have a new view of things. But as for today, this column is rapidly drawing to a close, I’m seeing a faint pink glow in the sky over Kauai, and the birds are starting to sing. All in all, it’s looking like another fabulous day, thanks to the “grid.”

The View from Haleakala

First published March 24, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

On the island of Maui, Haleakala is a dormant volcano that climbs 10,000 feet above sea level. When you visit Maui (I’m writing this column from the lanai of our rented condo in Kihei) you’re told, repeatedly, that you have to see sunrise from Haleakala. This is not an undertaking for the faint of heart. It means bundling up. Hawaiian breezes become significantly colder at 10,000 ft. It also means dragging yourself out of bed at an ungodly hour to drive an hour and a half up a winding mountain road in the dark. But the view, should you make the effort, is otherworldly. There is a reason why everyone tells you that this is a must. It’s one of those moments that forever jams itself in your memory. You’ll be talking about it for the rest of your life.

The point is, the best things in life take effort. They don’t come to you like a mai tai delivered on the beach. They belong to the same category as the view from Haleakala. You have to work your butt off to achieve it, but when you do, something stirs in your soul and lifts you to a higher plain. You feel, quite literally, on top of the world.

This analogy, although it feels far from the world of search, actually bears more relevance to my day job than you might realize. I once said that search marketing was like golf: easy to do, but almost impossible to master. Anyone can throw together a search campaign, just as anyone can hack their way around 18 holes. But to take search to its full potential takes a huge amount of time, thought and effort. It means tearing apart every element of a campaign and building it back up from scratch, looking for the advantages that raises your performance to another level. Search at this level is not for everyone. It’s only for those willing to work this hard.

One of the non-vacation things I’m doing on this trip is finalizing the agenda for the Search Insider Summit on Captiva Island, Fla. The sheer complexity of search was driven home as I reviewed dozens of pitches for the available slots on the agenda. The programming committee wants to continue what we started on Captiva last year, putting together three days that challenge marketers to take search to an entirely different level. As I read through the pitches and responded with suggestions, the theme of the Summit jumped out at me: reinvention. The next stage for search requires taking nothing for granted and being willing to reimagine everything we do.

To add to the challenge, search cannot be isolated from other marketing efforts. Its very nature is to connect and leverage every marketing element that’s in play. So, as we reinvent our search strategy, we reinvent everything: our marketing program, our sales channels, our relationship with our customers, the structure of our organizations and the fabric of our marketplaces. We really have no choice. Technology is forcing our hand in this. The world is changing quickly. We may be able to survive by going through the motions (although that’s not a sure bet) but thriving is going to take some — really, a lot of — effort .

My goal for the Search Insider Summit is to create three days that cause attendees to challenge the norm and consider the possible – even the impossible. It’s not for the faint of heart or those looking for easy answers. It’s like a drive up a 10,000 foot dormant volcano at 5 in the morning to stand shivering on the edge of a crater — inconvenient as hell, but something that may forever change your view of the world.

The 1% of News that Matters

First published March 17, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider.

I first heard about the earthquake in Japan from a cab driver in Milwaukee. By the time I got to the airport, it was all over the monitors. And by the time I could find a Wi-Fi connection, the first details were just starting to emerge.

Our society digests news differently now. Electronic media paints news in broad strokes. Digital media offers a never-ending deep dive into the details. In the few days since disaster struck, the Web has already built up a vast repository of information about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. The Web stretches infinitely to accommodate new content, stretching its digital boundaries as required. The shelf life of broadcast news is much shorter. Time constrains the content. Detail has to be sacrificed for impact.

But on the Web, news is also a participatory experience. News isn’t a broadcast, it’s a conversation, guided by editors and journalists but often veering in unexpected directions as our collective voice hits its stride. We shape the coverage by voicing our opinions, our concerns and, for those who are in the middle of the news, our experiences. The world is smaller, rawer, more visceral, more vital — and, hopefully, more human.

In the convergence of these two shifts in how we digest what happens in the world, there lies something impactful. Traditionally, because news was a shifting canvas where yesterday’s events quickly faded to make room for today’s, we had no choice but to move on to the next story. But now, thanks to the Web, the content remains, if we choose to seek it out. While Japan’s pain is still horribly fresh, more than a year later the traumatic story of Haiti is still unwinding online.

The fact is that 99% of the news you hear nightly won’t really make much of a difference in your life in five years. They’re stories of passing interest, but in the big scheme of things, they’re rather inconsequential. And the things that will make a difference seldom make the news. But, on the Web, the time limitation of being “new” doesn’t artificially constrain what is news. For those who continue to care about Haiti, the information is there, living on in indelible binary bits.

It’s this concept of “caring” about news that is served so well online. Humans tend to react to our surroundings in two distinct ways. We react to the immediate and awesome (in both its negative and positive connotations) simply because we’re wired to notice dramatic and potentially harmful events in our environment. But, if it has no personal impact, we move on with our lives. We’re like a herd of sheep that goes back to its collective grazing after a loud noise startles us in our pasture. For this fleeting level of engagement, broadcast news works exceedingly well. It’s been designed to impact us at this transitory level, hammering us for maximum effect by a parade of violence, negativity and trauma.

But for the 1% of stories that do affect us, that will matter to us in a very personal way in five years, the 30-second sound bite is simply not enough. If news can affect our well-being, the second level of human engagement kicks in. Now, we are hungry for information. We need to dive deep into the details, so we can understand what the personal impact might be.

Consider the difference in how I would react to the news coming out of Japan if, rather than observing it at arm’s length as I did, I had a child who was teaching English as a second language in Sendai, the epicenter of the quake. Think about how I would voraciously devour any information I could find online, trying to determine if my child was safe.

For the 1% of news that does matter to us, online provides us something we never had before. It takes the temporal and archives it at a scale never before possible. Individual slivers of history are frozen in a digital record. It allows us to connect to information that is personally relevant, even long after it qualifies as “news.”

A Search History of TED

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

I always find it interesting to look at a cultural phenomenon through the lens of search. Search provides a fascinating and quantitative look at the growth of interest in a particular topic. Having spent all last week immersed in the cult that is TED (I was at TEDActive in Palm Springs, Calif.) I thought that this was as good a subject as any to analyze.

TED’s Back Story

The TED story, for those of you not familiar with it, is pretty amazing. TED was originally held in Monterey, Calif. in 1984, the brainchild of Richard Saul Wurman and Harry Marks. Some of the content on that first TED stage? The unveiling of the Mac, a rep from Sony demonstrating the compact disc, Benoit Mandelbrot talking about fractals and Marvin Minsky speculating on the possibilities of artificial intelligence. Due to its proximity to Silicon Valley, the conference had a decidedly tech-heavy focus. The first one lost money, and Wurman didn’t attempt another one until 1990. It was then held annually in Monterey.

In 2001, Chris Anderson took over the show and broadened the focus, adopting a more philanthropic approach. Technology still figured prominently on the TED stage, but the conference became an intellectual smorgasbord of content, with a single session known to veer from musicians to world adventurers, scientists to CEOs.

Probably the biggest change in the fortunes of TED, however, came in 2006 when the world was invited to share what happened on the TED stage. The talks were videotaped and made freely available online. And it’s here where our search story begins.

TED:TSI (TED Search Investigation)

If you use Google Insights (as I did), you see something interesting begin to happen in the search activity surrounding TED. Through 2004, 2005 and 2006, most of the search activity for TED was about the conference. There were peaks every February when the conference took place, but other than this, the volumes were pretty consistent. There was little year-over-year growth. TED remained an exclusive club for the intellectually elite. The rest of the world had never heard of it.

In 2006, when the videos were launched, a new trend began. By the end of the year, more people were using search to find the TED talks themselves than to find out about the conference. The gap continued to widen until in 2011, the search popularity of the Talks themselves is almost 3 times as much as query volume for the conference. But volumes for both have seen impressive growth. The conference rode the wave of the popularity of the videos, with query volumes over 10 times the levels seen in 2006. The videos fueled the growth of TED, making it the must see conference of the year.

The Global Mapping of TED

Another interesting trend has been to see how TED has become a global phenomenon. TED talks are most popular in Canada, followed by New Zealand, the U.S. and South Africa. They’ve also shown impressive growth in South Africa, Singapore, Australia and India. And it’s this global popularity that led TED to announce TEDx, in 2009. These are independently organized shows held around the world, with some mentorship and guidance from the TED mother ship. They have been tremendously popular — and now search volumes for TEDx have surpassed queries for the main conference.  Epicenters of the TEDx tidal wave include the Netherlands, Portugal, Finland, India and Argentina.

If we drill down to the U.S., we find the greatest concentration of TEDsters (the official moniker of members of the TED community) in Oregon, Washington and Vermont. Surprisingly, California, where the conference is held, doesn’t even make the list of top TED states. Massachusetts, New York and Hawaii all beat it out. The top 10 TED states are all solidly blue (based on the last presidential election) — except for Montana.

And because Canada is such a TED hotbed (TED has an office in Vancouver) I’m proud to say that my home province of B.C. has perhaps the greatest concentration of TED fans in the world, followed by Manitoba, Alberta (which would be the Canadian equivalent of Montana) and Saskatchewan. According to Google, the TED world capital should be Victoria, B.C, which has the highest concentration of TED-related searches of any city, anywhere. The U.S. Capital? Portland, Ore. For some reason, TEDmania is very much alive and well here in the Pacific Northwest.

TED has legs!

Finally, you may ask if the wave of TED popularity is sustainable. I had this very conversation last week with another TEDster in Palm Springs. If you look at the growth of all search volumes so far in 2011, I would say the TED wave has barely begun. Volumes have skyrocketed this year in every category I looked at.  If you compare the query volume graphs to a typical S-shaped adoption curve, you would conclude that TED is just beginning a massive growth spurt.  Get used to hearing about TED, because that will be happening a lot in the future — especially if you’re visiting Victoria or Portland.

The Nobler Side of Social Media: Voices in a Choir

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

Last week, I took social media to task for making us less social. This week, I’m in Palm Springs for TED Active — and on day one, saw three very real examples of how the Internet is also connecting us in ways we never imagined before. They provided a compelling counterpoint to my original argument.

Eric Whitacre is a composer and conductor. In “Lux Aurumque (Light and Gold)” he conducts a choir singing his original composition. The choir, 185 strong, never sang together. They never met each other. They live in 12 different countries. Whitacre posted a video of himself conducting the piece, and every one of those 185 members of the choir submitted their individual parts through YouTube. The 247 separate tracks were combined into a rather amazing work that has been seen almost 2 million times. One of the contributors lived in a cabin in the remote Alaskan wilderness, 400 miles from the nearest town. Her satellite link was her only connection to the world.

The Johnny Cash Project is an equally amazing collaborative effort. Aaron Koblin and Chris Milk took archival film footage of Johnny Cash, dissected it frame by frame, and asked artists from around the world to redraw each frame. The contributions were stitched back together with Cash’s song, “Ain’t No Grave” as the soundtrack. The result is mesmerizing.

But perhaps the must stunning example of digital collaboration came not from art, but the very real world of the Middle East. Wadah Kanfar, the chief of Al-Jazeera, told us how the voices of many, amplified through technology, are bringing democracy and new hope to Egypt, Tunisia and Libya.

These examples speak of something much broader and powerful than just the typical applications of social media. And, like social media’s less attractive side, the impact of these new connections on society is yet to be determined. There is a social experiment being conducted in real time — but the results will only be fully realized through the lens of hindsight. Can true democracy be established in a place like Libya, even with the power of connection? Time alone will tell.

The new technology of connection releases things that are deeply human: the need to be part of the greater whole (for example, the choir member from Alaska); the need to contribute something of ourselves to the world (for example, the Johnny Cash Project); and the need for fairness and justice (as in the protests in the Middle East). In the last example, these connections illuminate the human condition in the darkest corners of the world and force accountability. Since the beginning of time, unfairness in the tribe has been punished. The difference now is that our human tribe extends around the world.

Kanfar told an amazing story that unfolded during the height of one of the protests. The demonstrators pleaded with Al-Jazeera to keep the cameras rolling through the night. “If you stop, we’re lost. But as long as you keep showing what’s happening, we have hope.”

Perhaps the true paradox of social media is not that we’re becoming less social, but that we’re becoming social in different ways. As we spend less time in our flesh and blood engagements, we spend more time establishing connections that were impossible before. In the ’70s, Mark Granovetter found that our social networks are composed of two distinct types of linkages, which he called strong and weak ties. The strong ties are the family and friends bonds that generally require both proximity and significant time together. The weak ties are the extended bonds that we might call acquaintances. As Granovetter found, it’s the weak ties that carry the surprising power of a community, especially when they’re mobilized for a common purpose. We rely on weak ties for referrals, favors and job offers. They extend beyond our immediate circle and provide important social capital when required.

Perhaps social media has had a negative impact on our strong ties, as I alluded to in my last column. But, as I was reminded today, it has dramatically increased our ability to form weak ties that align to concepts, interests and causes. And don’t let the name “weak ties” fool you. When they’re synchronized, they can be tremendously powerful. You might call them the harmonized voices of a global choir.