Author Archives: ghotchkiss

White Salmon and Black Swans

First published July 22, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

The conversation started innocently enough. We were entertaining out-of-town guests at a winery and restaurant overlooking Lake Okanagan. And, as often happens when people visit B.C., they ordered salmon.

“You know, I heard that not all salmon are pink. There are actually white salmon.”

“Really, I’ve never heard of that.”

“Well, let’s see if there really are white salmon.”

So, we turned to the arbitrator of all such things: Google. If it can be found on the Web, apparently it exists. Which is an interesting behavior in itself, and a point I’ll come back to in a minute. But first, let’s talk about why the existence of white salmon is important.

A Fish by any Other Color

A white salmon is important because it’s a black swan. Or, rather, it’s a Black Swan. The capitalization is critical, because it’s not the animal I’m referring to, but the phenomenon identified by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book of the same name.

For all of human history, until the 17th century, it was commonly accepted that all swans were white. But in 1697, Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh discovered a black swan in western Australia. Why is that important? Well, for the vast majority of us, it’s not. But what if, for some reason, our world revolves around swans? What if our ability to earn a living depends on the predictably of a swan’s natural coloring? Then suddenly, it becomes vitally important.

Black Swans — and white salmon, for that matter — are outliers. And outliers are important because they cause us to change our view of the world. The normal, regular and expected allow our lives to run down predictable paths. As long as this continues, nothing changes. But the unpredicted, the unknown outlier, is an undeniable occurrence that forces us to reframe our view of things and take a new path. It was a Black Swan that changed the world.

According to Taleb, Black Swans have to have three things: they have to lie outside the realm of regular expectations, they have to carry extreme impact, and, when we discover them, they force us to alter our view of things to explain their existence. We have to change our view of the world to accommodate them. Taleb asserts that all of human history has taken a path that pivots on the discovery of Black Swans.

Discovering Black Swans

Now, back to our dinner conversation. Black Swans only become important when they were discovered. The vastness of the physical world meant that it took us a long time to find that first black swan.

But the world today is significantly different than it was in 1697. Today, Black Swans pop up all the time on YouTube or in a blog post. Every single day, somebody somewhere is googling a Black Swan. And, when they find them, Black Swans go viral because the unexpected is naturally fascinating to us. We can’t help but talk about it, and today, when we do, chances are it’s through a digital channel.

The more the world becomes digitally connected and synchronized, the faster word spreads about Black Swans. And when word spreads, we are forced once again to change our view of the world. This means that the pace of change in human history, catalyzed by Black Swan discoveries, is picking up speed. Today, you can’t step outside your door without tripping over a Black Swan.

The discovery of a Black Swan sets in motion a recurring chain of events. First, we have to acknowledge its existence. Let’s call this the Black Swan Googling stage. Then, we have to talk about it. This would be the Black Swan Twitter stage. Then, we have to rationalize its existence, creating an explanation for it — the Black Swan Wikipedia stage. Then, it becomes an accepted part of our new worldview, the new normal. What used to take centuries to filter through the civilized world now happens in the matter of days, or, at the most, weeks.

After all, when I woke up yesterday morning, I didn’t know there was such a thing as a white salmon. Today, my world has changed forever.

SEO: The Road to Strategy

First published July 8, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’m burnt — toasted, roasted and completely fried. I’ve just spent the last two days in stakeholder meetings with a client. In those two days I’ve met with representatives from every department imaginable — from channel sales to governance, corporate relations to analytics, corporate marketing to website design, social media to IT. In total, a dozen meetings with almost twice that many people. I’ve got about 20 pages of notes I have to sift through.

Why?

I’ll give you the same answer I gave before each meeting, in what officially became known as the “preamble”:

“You might be wondering why you’re here. For the past two years we’ve been working with your company on the organic visibility of your website. With organic optimization, there are really two things you have to think about — what you say about yourself, and what others say about you. Up to now, we’ve been focused on the first category: the content on your website, how the site is coded, the keywords customers might use to find you. That was relatively straightforward because you controlled all the things we were looking at. But now, we have to look at the second category — what others are saying about you. And that gets a lot more complicated. Now, suddenly, we need to understand what’s happening in almost every aspect of the business. What makes it even more complicated is that we have to begin to understand how all those pieces fit together.”

What became clear over the two days was that the discussions that we initiated about our SEO strategy could also have been the beginning discussions required to craft a companywide strategy. The fact is, trying to please a search engine algorithm means you have to think of your online presence in its totality. Google and Bing determine your online relevance based on nothing less than the digital footprint of your organization. And, as the boundaries continue to dissolve between the virtual realities of our businesses and the brick-and-mortar reality, who we are online is who we are, period.

This opens up an interesting challenge for organic practitioners. They have to be prepared to step out of their cozy niches, wedged somewhere between the worlds of marketing and IT, and be ready to truly “get” their clients at all levels. The best SEO practitioners have to abandon the quick fixes, like buying links, and roll up their sleeves, putting in the sweat equity required to come up with strategies that come from the very DNA of the company. SEO tactics that are grounded in the day-to-day business and the strategic objectives of the company will always outperform the “links for hire” and ghostwriter content creation that still flourishes in this business. Is it easy? Hell no. Is it worth it? I believe so, or wouldn’t have spent the last two days holed up in a nondescript meeting room across the hall from cubicle B23.

Here’s the thing. Trying to understand what is required for the next phase of SEO is imposing a discovery process and discipline that I believe will make us better vendor partners and make our clients better marketers. The same is true, by the way, for a truly authentic social media strategy. A while ago, I wrote a column in which I said that companies “get the SEO rankings they deserve.” It’s also incumbent upon us, as partners in this process, to be ready to rise to the challenge for those clients who have proven themselves ready to move beyond the quick fixes and questionable practices.

More Ways B2B Search Marketing Differs from B2C

First published July 1, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I looked at ways that B2B search marketing is different from search campaigns aimed at consumers. I looked at how risk avoidance was an overriding concern. Also, a B2B purchase is almost always an item on someone’s to-do list, so they have little patience for being “immersed” in experiences or heading down navigational dead ends on a Web site. Today, I’ll look at two other ways that B2B buying behaviors differ from those in the consumer marketplace:

Unfamiliar Territory

In the consumer world, billions of branding dollars are spent to create a sense of familiarity not just with a product but also with a brand. Even if we’ve never bought a product before, there’s a good chance that we have some idea of the competitive landscape within the product category.  If we were looking to make a purchase for ourselves, I would venture to say there are very few things we would consider buying where we wouldn’t even know the name of the product. Yet, this is an everyday occurrence in the B2B world. Often, we’re asked to make informed purchase decisions about products and services that we hadn’t heard of yesterday.

When we strike into unfamiliar territory, we create a challenge for the B2B marketer. If we don’t even know the name of the product we’re looking to buy, how do we start looking for it? Where do we begin? It’s pretty hard to Google something when you don’t know what to call it. This makes keyword discovery one of the most challenging and important parts of any B2B search campaign.

Often B2B purchases are not only a buying decision, but also come with a steep learning curve. Buyers have to identify a potential solution, learn about the product category, identify the potential vendors, and determine decision criteria — all tasks that must be accomplished before buyers even start evaluating their alternatives.  Imagine trying to buy a car or a flat-screen TV if you had no idea what those products were — or even if they existed at all.

Decision by Committee

Sometime ago in my life, as I hung out my advertising consultant shingle, I was introduced to the joys and tribulations of committee-driven decision-making. I uncovered the sad truth behind the joke, “How do you determine the average IQ of committee? You take the lowest IQ in the group and divide it by the number of people in the committee.”

B2B purchases are often driven by committee. And, as we found in the BuyerSphere research, different members of the committee have different agendas. In high-risk, long-cycle purchases, the internal politics involved in a purchase can rival anything you’ll find on Wisteria Lane. These differing agendas mean that signals from committee members can seem to be at cross-purposes, making life exceeding difficult for the vendor.

Here’s the big challenge from a search marketing perspective: If different committee members are looking for different information (as determined by their own objectives) they will also expect distinctly different experiences. Your Web site and search campaign somehow has to be able to offer clear and compelling paths through this tangled knot of prospect behaviors. Clear segmentation options, relevant messaging, and highly intuitive navigation are three ways to guide different buyers with different objectives to the right destination.

B2B is different from B2C. It’s more complex, more challenging — and, in my opinion, much more interesting.

How B2B Search Marketing Differs from B2C

First published June 24, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

As I write this, I’m at the B2B Search Strategy Summit in San Francisco. Mary O’Brien, the summit organizer, told me that many potential attendees — and yes, even some panelists — questioned where B2B search marketing was really all that different from B2C. Shouldn’t the same basic practices apply?

I answer that question the same way I answer all questions about marketing: Let’s look at it through the eyes of the buyer. And when we do that, we find some significant differences as we step from the consumer side to the business side.

It’s All About Risk

When we make decisions in any part of our lives, we have a “brake” and a “gas pedal” that governs the decision-making process. Call it risk and reward, prevention and promotion, loss and gain. Whatever you call it, in most decisions, there are opposing forces, and the ultimate decision depends on the balance between the two. If reward overcomes risk, we buy. If risk rules, we don’t.

On the consumer side of our lives, there’s often a strong emotional investment in the reward part of the equation. For example, I really want a new road bike. I can’t rationalize the purchase, seeing as I have a perfectly good used road bike, but that doesn’t quell the pangs of jealousy I feel when I see someone wheeling down the road on a new Cervelo or Trek Madone. Someday, I know, reward (the joy of saying “look, me too!”) will overcome the risk (parting with a significant chunk of cash) for me.

But think about most B2B purchases. If we’re looking at buying a new rack of servers, or supply chain management software, where’s the fun in that? The only real emotion at play here is the risk of screwing up and being fired. Emotions in B2B purchases are heavily biased towards risk mitigation. And that directly impacts your search strategy. Messaging has to minimize risk in the eyes of the buyer, rather than try to build on the emotional reward side of things. I can’t say the same would be true if you were bidding on terms like “convertible roadster,” “touring motorcycle” or even “iPad.”

It’s Their Job

The second difference is directly related to the first. B2B purchases are part of someone’s job. They’re not doing it because they simply love buying enterprise software or industrial supplies. No one makes a hobby out of buying O-rings or heavy-duty water pumps.

How does this affect a search strategy? It heightens the need for efficient retrieval of information. While a consumer looking at a sports car or booking a cruise might want to get “immersed” in an “experience,” typical B2B purchasing agents want to get in and out, allowing them to put one more check mark beside their ever-growing to-do list. They will not be in a forgiving mood if you send them down dead ends or tie them up in confusing navigation. This is all about making their job easier. And that becomes crucial when you think about landing page strategies and the path that leads from them.

Next week, I’ll cover the other two ways that B2B differs from B2C: the fact that often buyers are in unfamiliar territory, and that B2B purchases are typically group decisions.

The Two Meanings of Engagement

Engagement: a betrothal. An exclusive commitment to another preceding marriage

Engagement: as in an engaging conversation.  Being highly involved in an interaction with something or someone.

The theme of the Business Marketing Association conference I talked about in last week’s column was “Engage.”  At the conference, the word engagement was tossed around more freely than wine and bomboniere at an Italian wedding. Unfortunately, engagement is one those buzzwords that has ceased to hold much meaning in marketing. The Advertising Research Foundation has gone as far as to try to put engagement forward as the one metric to unite all metrics in marketing, a cross-channel Holy Grail.

But what does engagement really mean? What does it mean to be “engaged?” The problem is that engagement itself is an ambiguous term. It has multiple meanings. As I pondered this and discussed with others, I realized the problem is that marketers and customers have two very different definitions of engagement. And therein lies the problem.

The Marketer’s Definition of Engagement

Marketers, whether they want to admit it or not, look at engagement in the traditional matrimonial sense. They want customers to make an exclusive commitment to them, forgoing all others. It’s a pledge of loyalty, a repulsion of other suitors, a bond of fidelity. To marketers, engagement is just another word for ownership and control.

When marketers talk about engagement, they envision prospects enthralled with their brands, hanging on every word, eager for every commercial message. They strive for a love that is blind.  Engagement ties up the customer’s intent and “share of wallet.”  Marketers talk about getting closer to the customer, but in all too many cases, it’s to keep tabs on them. For all the talk of engagement, the benefits are largely for the marketer, not the customer.

The Customer’s Definition of Engagement

Customers, on the other hand, define engagement as giving them a reason to care. They define engagement as it would relate to a conversation. Do you give me a reason to keep listening? And are you, in turn, listening to what I have to say? Is there a compelling reason for me to continue the conversation? I will be engaged with you only as long as it suits my needs to do so.  I will give you nothing you haven’t earned.

The engagement of a conversation is directly tied to how personally relevant it is. The topic has to mean something to me. If it’s mildly interesting, my attention will soon drift. But if you’re touching something that is deeply important to me, you will have my undivided attention for as long as you need it. That is engagement from the other side of the table.

So, as we talk about engagement at a marketing conference, let’s first agree on a definition of engagement. And let’s be honest about what our expectations are. Because I suspect marketers and customers are looking at different pages of the dictionary.

Marketing: Leading the Way

First published June 10, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

At last week’s national Business Marketing Association (BMA) conference in Chicago, three marketing executives from three well-known B2B brands each made an interesting comment:

“In the 3M scheme of things, marketing wasn’t even a second-tier priority. It was fourth or fifth tier at best. But in the future, marketing needs to lead 3M.” — Jeff Lavers,  Vice President of Marketing, Sales and Communications, 3M

“Emerson didn’t even have a CMO before me. They didn’t believe they needed one.”– Kathy Button Bell, CMO, Emerson

“We’re announcing a marriage at GE. We’re not sure how they’ll get along, but IT and marketing are about to become married. We’re combining the two functions.” — Beth Comstock, CMO, GE

Wow! Three iconic B2B brands, each rethinking the role of marketing within their organizations. Is this a wave?

What Marketing Should Be

The reason I love marketing, at its purest, is because it’s the connection between an organization’s business model and their customers. Marketing owns that essential bond. But that’s a responsibility that has been abdicated by many organizations, and never explicitly acknowledged by others. That connection, that reason to do business in the first place, is ignored by a startling number of companies.

Marketing should be the voice of the customer, driving product development, service delivery, operation — indeed, every aspect of the business. That’s what Lavers was hinting at in his challenge to 3M. Companies need to be driven by their customers. Marketing should be accountable for keeping the two firmly in sync. But somehow, in the past several decades, marketing has become cheapened, to the point that the function was essentially abolished in many org charts.  3M relegated it to a seat way at the back of the bus. Emerson never even bothered to put in on the corporate directory until 10 years ago. Marketing needs to be put back on the org chart, right at the top.

The excuse in the B2B world was that there was no need for marketing. The channels owned the relationships with the customers.  But the digital marketplace is re-forging relationships between manufacturers and end customers. Suddenly, brands matter. Customer feedback matters. Conversations matter. Marketing has to be the one constantly reminding everyone inside the corporate walls that those connections are vital in the future.

The Marketing – IT Connection

So that explains the import of the comments from Jeff Lavers and Kathy Button Bell. What of the impending nuptials between marketing and IT at GE? What are we to make of Beth Comstock’s BMA announcement?

This signals a fascinating shift in the practice of marketing. If marketing takes over the wheel and drives the company forward, then IT has to provide the infrastructure to help it win. This will be an uneasy shift of power. IT is used to being the control point within organizations, though marketing folks would use a different label: “bottleneck” or ” black hole” is one I regularly hear. With the shift in importance of marketing, IT dragging their heels will no longer be tolerated. In their drive to be nimble, marketing will be pushing — and pushing hard. I see no signals here that indicate potential wedded bliss. Essential? Yes. Easy? Not on your life!

If America’s iconic B2B brands are now ramping up for a new kind of marketplace, one where they take back accountability for end-to-end relationships, we are definitely dealing with a new normal. But I fear many in the C-suite ponder the prospect with the same reluctance they would have about giving the kids the keys to the Porsche.  Sure, we’ll go fast, but we will be driving off a cliff?

Our Indelible Lives

First published June 3, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

It’s been a fascinating week for me. First, it was off to lovely Muncie, Ind. to meet with the group at the Center for Media Design at Ball State University. Then, it was to Chicago for the National Business Marketing Association Conference, where I was fortunate enough to be on a panel about what the B2B marketplace might look like in the near future. There was plenty of column fodder from both visits, but this week, I’ll give the nod to Ball State, simply because that visit came first.

Our Digital Footprints

Mike Bloxham, Michelle Prieb and Jen Milks (the last two joined us for our most recent Search Insider Summit) were gracious hosts, and, as with last week (when I was in Germany) I had the chance to participate in a truly fascinating conversation that I wanted to share with you. We talked about the fact that this generation will be the first to leave a permanent digital footprint. Mike Bloxham called it the Indelible Generation. That title is more than just a bon mot (being British, Mike is prone to pithy observations) — it’s a telling comment about a fundament aspect of our new society.

Imagine some far-in-the-future anthropologist recreating our culture. Up to this point in our history, the recorded narrative of any society came from a small sliver of the population. Only the wealthiest or most learned received the honor of being chronicled in any way. Average folks spent their time on this planet with nary a whisper of their lives recorded for posterity. They passed on without leaving a footprint.

Explicit and Implicit Content Creation

But today — or if not today, certainly tomorrow — all of us will leave behind a rather large digital footprint. We will leave in our wake emails, tweets, blog posts and Facebook pages. And that’s just the content we knowingly create. There’s a lot of data generated by each of us that’s simply a byproduct of our online activities and intentions. Consider, for example, our search history. Search is a unique online beast because it tends to be the thread we use to stitch together our digital lives. Each of us leaves a narrative written in search interactions that provides a frighteningly revealing glimpse into our fleeting interests, needs and passions.

 Of course, not all this data gets permanently recorded. Privacy concerns mean that search logs, for example, get scrubbed at regular intervals. But even with all that, we leave behind more data about who we were, what we cared about and what thoughts passed through our minds than any previous generation. Whether it’s personally identifiable or aggregated and anonymized, we will all leave behind footprints.

 Privacy? What Privacy?

Currently we’re struggling with this paradigm shift and its implications for our privacy. I believe in time — not that much time — we’ll simply grow to accept this archiving of our lives as the new normal, and won’t give it a second thought. We will trade personal information in return for new abilities, opportunities and entertainment. We will grow more comfortable with being the Indelible Generation.

Of course, I could be wrong. Perhaps we’ll trigger a revolt against the surrender of our secrets. Either way, we live in a new world, one where we’re always being watched. The story of how we deal with that fact is still to be written.

Google vs Apple: an Open and Closed Case

First published May 27, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Yesterday, I was eavesdropping on a debate about open-source vs. closed systems. I found the debate fascinating because two of the most important contributors to what our search experience might look like live at opposite ends of this debate. Apple is adamant about locking down every aspect of the user experience. Google wants to open it up to any and all comers. The third player, Microsoft, sits somewhere in between. The debate was about who might prevail. I was uncharacteristically silent during all this, because I had to think about it before throwing in my two cents. Now, 24 hours later, it’s time to toss in my ante.

In theory, open source should win hands down. The open environment allows a cooperative ecosystem to evolve, guaranteeing a rate of innovation simply not possible in closed system. But I think it depends on where we are in the maturity of the market. Open source allows for more innovation, but it’s also an open invitation for more things to go wrong. This can be deadly as you try to push along market adoption.

Apple Closes the Loop

There is a reason why Apple is the darling of the early adopter. The company insist on things working. And you can only do this when you can lock down each and every aspect of the user experience. If there’s one thing Apple understands at its core (sorry, couldn’t resist), it’s how to make a user happy. The Jobs BHAG of creating “insanely great” products only works if all that insanity leads to an expected end result. And I challenge anyone who’s used both a Mac and a Windows box to tell me that the Apple user experience isn’t more refined, more elegant and more delightful.

In the early days of market adoption, this stuff is important. You don’t want to drop way more cash than you should on a new tech-toy only to find the interface is clunky, amateurish and full of glitches. With Apple’s meticulous attention to detail, you know that whatever is available on your new iToy will work near-flawlessly. Sure, the code-police from Cupertino are overly dictatorial, which isn’t winning them any friends in the programming community, but the apps that are the end result are ridiculously simple to use and frequently beautiful to look at.

Google’s UX Challenges

Now, look at Google. I tried to find a polite way to say this, but couldn’t, so I’ll just lay it on the table: Google sucks at interface design. For years we’ve been lauding the simple, spartan look of Google search. The fact is, simple was all we needed for an ordered list of text results. Google’s algorithm provided enough power in the backend to make up for an anemic interface. But today, now that everyone’s caught up in the algo department, Google’s interface looks like a Grade 8 coding project.  The new 3 column search format follows in the footsteps of Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendars and most other Google interfaces: it looks like it was designed by an engineer.

In my company, we tried to move to using Google’s suite of tools based on the fact that in an open-source environment, we should see more rapid innovation. Well, that and the price was hard to argue with. But the fact is, everyone on our team is completely fed up with clunky Google interfaces that seem full of quirks. It doesn’t feel like we’re using leading-edge innovation, it feels like we’re using freeware. And I, for one, expect more from Google.

Google … Give me that GUI Feeling!

That’s the problem with open source early in the market adoption model. There’s not enough maturity in the market to force developers to worry about nuance. User experience is considered the polish — the last thing to be applied. You can’t lock down all the details needed to guarantee a consistently acceptable user experience.

I still have tremendous respect for the innovation engine that sits at the heart of Google, but if I had one piece of advice to pass along, it would be this: Worry less about changing the world, and  more about polishing up the Gmail interface. You can always change the world tomorrow, but today I’d like to retrieve my email from something that doesn’t look like a dog’s breakfast.

More Thoughts on Outside In Thinking

Before I move on to Carlota Perez and her Regime Transition Theory, i just wanted to add some additional thoughts to yesterday’s post about Outside In Perspectives.

Strangers Amongst Us

As I mentioned yesterday, sometimes a stranger in a strange land is better able to see things than the natives. For the inside group, what they see everyday ceases to become remarkable. It’s just their everyday reality. And, as I said, people in a group tend to conform to the norm of the group. Herds work much better when everyone is heading in the same direction, so we have an inherent drive to get along with our herd-mates. There are multiple ways this plays out, but in the end, our collective behaviors define our culture. However, as we conform to the norms of our group, they tend to become invisible. What strikes an outsider as a quaint custom or odd behaviors is, to the insider, simply the routine of their day. Culture dictates what is remarkable or what is numbingly normal. For example, our noses curl up at some of the dishes from other cultures (China comes to mind, with roasted scorpions on a stick) yet we think there’s nothing remarkable about wolfing down a couple of scrambled chicken fetuses on toast. We may even add a couple of fried slices of belly fat from that foul smelling animal that loves to roll in its own excrement. Normal is in the eyes of the beholder.

When I travel (as I am right now) I notice things about a culture that a native never would. I also notice that travelers from different countries tend to have different levels of tolerance for the new and novel. For example, I find Canadian tourists quicker to conform to the customs of a foreign country than Americans. Americans (and realize, I’m talking about averaged behavior here) tend to like to take a little piece of America with them. They are like cultural missionaries, transplanting the seeds of American culture to the destinations they visit. Canadians are cultural observers, taking note but leaving few traces of their home country. Of course, when it comes to hockey games, all bets are off. The maple leaf suddenly sprouts everywhere.

Canadians in Search of a Culture

McDonaldsinRomeAmericans like the world to conform to them, where as Canadians are more apt to conform to wherever they are. The sheer bulk of American culture spreads far beyond its borders, where as Canadian culture is still struggling to fill the huge empty spaces that make up Canada itself.

Why the cultural differences between Canadians and Americans? Actually, Canadians have a long history of cultural observance. Some of the most esteemed observers of American society all have Canadian roots: Marshall McLuhan, Malcolm Gladwell and Steven Pinker – to name just a few. Of course, entertainment is also about observing the foibles of our society, and Canadians have long mined this rich vein – Mike Myers, Jim Carrey, Seth Rogen, Ivan Reitman, Rick Moranis, Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Michael J. Fox, Eugene levy, Howie Mandel, Lorne Michaels, Leslie Nielsen, Martin Short, Norman Jewison and James Cameron are all Canadians.

Why are Canadians cultural observers and conformists, while Americans are cultural imperialists? In the animal world, Canadians would be chameleons and Americans would be peacocks. I think it has to do with the vibrancy of the culture, its critical mass and also the prevailing attitudes of the inhabitants. For example, there’s a strong correlation between the military history of an nation and the aggressiveness of it’s cultural imperialism. If we look at critical mass, that presents another challenge for Canadians. The sheer size of our country means we have pockets of population spread across the landscape, rather than one contiguous community. Each pocket has unique cultures (militantly so in Quebec) so Canadians continually conform to new cultures, even as we travel within our own borders. We don’t have the same unifying cultural icons that Americans do, in their TV, their movies and obsessions with celebrities. In fact, all those things we import from the US. If you go beyond hockey and Tim Hortons, there are precious few cultural threads to stitch our nation together (and we refuse to believe that our precious Timmie’s is now owned by a US corporation – PepsiCo). Before the US, we imported our culture from our British and French founders. As Helen Gordon McPherson said, Canadians have been so busy explaining to the Americans that we aren’t British, and to the British that we aren’t Americans that we haven’t had time to become Canadians.

Carry No Assumptions

My point in this rather long aside is that the less preoccupied you are with spreading your own culture, the more observant you can be with others. Canadians seem naturally suited to this. If you are going to become an effective observer, try to go in without assumptions.

These tendencies also speak to the role of past success in clouding our judgment of the present. It has seemed to me that the more successful an organization has been in the past, the more internally myopic they are now. Indeed, internal focusing of resources is one of the contributing factors to success, but that inward focusing often comes at the expense of an external perspective. Success entrenches group “in thinking” and even when marketplace dynamics cause the once successful company to begin to struggle, the thoroughly homogenized views within the company struggle to identify the problems. They can’t objectively benchmark against the outside world because they’re blind to their own blemishes.

IDEO and Organizational Observation

IDEO actually has a few processes that rely on an outside view. Here are some examples for the IDEO Method Cards:

Rapid Ethnography: Spend as much time as you can with people relevant to the design topic. Establish their trust in order to visit and/or participate in their natural habitat and witness specific activities.

Extreme User Interviews: Identify individuals who are extremely familiar or (for my point) completely unfamiliar with the product and ask them to evaluate their experience using it.

Unfocus Group: Assemble a diverse group of individuals in a workshop to use a stimulating range of materials and create things that are relevant to your project.

These are just a few of the ways that IDEO helps companies gain an outside perspective. My suggestion would be to develop this discipline, and, as your looking for outsiders to help identify your own reality, consider hiring a Canadian. It comes naturally to us!

Nimbleness is Necessary

This is a common theme I hear all the time, and one that runs directly counter to the structure of most companies: it’s all about nimbleness.

tony-hsieh-is-zappos-ceoI’ve spent the past few days at the Silverpop Summit in Atlanta and two of the keynotes touched on this theme. Tony Hsieh from Zappos talked about how nimble their business model has been, literally redefining their core purpose 4 or 5 times in the past decade. Yes, through that time, they’ve always sold shoes, but that only really defined Zappos in the first few years of business. Since then, they’ve focused on customer service, then on HR, then on culture, and most recently, on happiness. Shoes are incidental. The evolution of the core philosophy of Zappos has been extraordinarily swift by the standards of most companies.

Then, today, Charlene Li gave us a peak at some of the central tenants of her new book, Open Leadership. Again, it’s all about creating a revolutionary managerial framework that takes advantage of more touch points with customers, faster communication lines, the ability to tap into social communities and a leadership approach that can quickly recognize and seize on opportunities, as well as identify and mitigate failures.

But it’s all about speed and the ability to change (or at least, adjust) directions quickly. It’s as if Darwin is teaching an MBA course.

This got me to wondering. It seems that when we look at the best examples of nimbleness, they’re all online companies. Amazon, Zappos, Saleforce – to name just a few. Why is this? Why can’t traditional companies compete with their online cousins when it comes to doing things quickly?

Well, I think there are a few reasons.

It’s all about the Environment

Darwinian change is driven by the environment. The more dynamic and hostile the environment, the faster the change. Nothing changes faster than online. We call it Internet Speed. Entire new business models are built from the ground up in months. And outmoded ones fade away just as quickly. If you’re slow to move in the traditional world, you’ve got plenty of company. But slow to move equals death online. It’s simply not an option.

Closer to the Customer

Online businesses live closer to the customer. They handle the customer service calls, sales, fulfillment and all aspects of the client relationship. There are no middle men clogging up the pipeline between management and the customer. Technology allows online companies to collapse distribution into a much flatter model than is found in the online world. And that means the distance between a customer and the CEO is much shorter, especially if you have a CEO that makes it a point to reach out consistently, like Hsieh at Zappos. This shorter feedback loop makes for much faster change cycles.

Flatter Organizations

Most online companies don’t have a very long corporate history. They are younger companies started by younger founders. And most of the online plays I know started with a determination to do things differently. They’re run in a much more open and transparent manner. Management tends to value culture and communication more than is typical (or possible) in the multi-layered multinational. Communications lines are shorter and more effective. And because they’re new and built on a more efficient model, they tend to be smaller as well.

Less Baggage to Carry

Finally, things that don’t work can be jettisoned much quicker online. If you launch a new site and it doesn’t work, it simply goes dark and everybody gets on with their online lives. There is no chain of empty locations across the country with for lease signs in the window. Online plays don’t have to keep resource sucking bricks and mortar locations afloat. It’s faster to invest in new opportunities online and faster to cut your losses if they don’t work.

If the corporate world now spins on the axis of nimbleness, I suspect it’s going to be hard for traditional companies to keep up with their online competition. Things are just moving too fast to keep pace, given all the odds stacked against them. In the next act of corporate evolution, I think I would have to cast the Multinationals as the dinosaurs and the online players as the mammals.