Author Archives: ghotchkiss

Captiva-Ting Conversations from the Search Insider Summit

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

I promised MediaPost a wrap-up (from the programming chair’s perspective) of last week’s Search Insider Summit. Honestly, from the moment that Brett Brewer from Microsoft first fired up Pivot to the final moments of day three, when Jen Milks and Michelle Prieb from Ball State gave us a glimpse into the minds of Gen Next, I couldn’t have asked for anything more from my presenters. I’ve programmed a lot of these shows now and have never had as much positive response as I have from this one. Well-done, each and every one of you.

A lot has been said about the new TED-style format. I actually had a few TEDsters reach out to send best wishes prior to the summit. They also wanted feedback about the success of the show. I think it’s fair to say that the adopted TED format was a hit. Attendees loved the pace of the presentations, the varying perspectives presented — and, most of all, the conversations that were catalyzed by the content.

Here are a few of the many highlights from three days of SIS:

Brett Brewer from Microsoft Labs – putting Pivot through its paces and giving us some jaw-dropping visualizations of data and how we can work with it. There’s some very cool stuff coming out of MS labs.

Mark Watkins from Goby – driving home the point that every search is launched from a relevant personal context, and if engines could somehow understand that, it would be a huge leap forward for Web search.

Matt Kain from The Search Agency – making us all realize just how important really-good hair is — and also how, more and more, we’re launching our searches through apps that offer fingertip functionality.

Mike Moran from Converseon – causing us to rethink our whole approach to search optimization. Imagine, optimizing our Web sites for people rather than algorithms!

Chris Copeland from GroupM Search – asking us to imagine what the online world (and our media plans) might look like if there were no Google, and also scattering oblique mentions of Tiger Woods, Jesse James and “Brokeback Mountain.” There’s not enough therapy in the world to drive out some of the images that Chris brought to my mind.

Scott Brinker from ion Interactive – giving us the job description for a brand-new role within organizations, that of the marketing technologist. Scott made us realize the time is ripe for an individual comfortable in the worlds of marketing and technology, one who can bridge the chasm between them.

Yvette Lui from Facebook – showing us how the landscape of information dissemination is forever altered, and why we search marketers have to understand the new reality.

And, in the last session of the Summit, Michelle Prieb and Jen Milks from Ball State University, giving us a glimpse at what the ever-demanding Gen Next wants in their online search experience. Hint: everything, aimed just at me and available instantaneously! Oh, and while you’re at it, don’t be evil!

The bar was set high, with these talks being just a sample of the many presenters who took the stage. As always, though, the conversations that happened in the hallways, during the roundtable breakouts, on the golf course, beaches and during the sunset cruise somehow managed to exceed the formal presentations. This is a show about connections, community and conversations. The best part of the Summit is, was and always will be the attendees. It won’t be easy, but we will make this show even better next time. Mark it on your calendar, because you really don’t want to miss it.

10 Things I Learned from Disney – #5: The Importance of Simultaneous Satisfaction

If you set out to entertain families, you have an inherent challenge in front of you. Successful family entertainment has to appeal not just to one one person, but a group of distinct individuals. In the average family, you have several demographic and psychographic divides to bridge: males and females, age groups ranging from grandpas and grandmas (or great grandpas and great grandmas) to newborns, different education levels, different areas of interest, different levels of patience, different tastes in humor, different thresholds for motion sickness. The question, if you set out to keep a family happy, is how do you possibly keep everyone happy at the same time?

Everybody Laughs..Just at Different Jokes

Walt knew this. It was the challenge that led to the birth of Disneyland. Keeping both adults and children happy in a film or TV show is relatively simple. Early on, producers of successful family entertainment, including Disney, Warner Brothers and Hanna Barbera learned the importance of a multi-level story line. At one level, popular cartoons would entertain children with colors, actions, pratfalls and simple humor. But writers also weaved references into the storyline that would be picked up on by adult viewers. These included pop culture references, double entendres and more sophisticated verbal gags. The device worked well, endearing Fred Flintstone, Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck not just to one generation at a time, but several. The fact that TV and film offered not just video but also an audio track allowed the creators to use the two to appeal to two audiences at once. When the kids were being entertained by the visuals, the adults could catch the more subtle references in the dialogue.

The Secret of Happy Families

But how do you maintain this multilevel appeal when you move beyond the two dimension world of TV or film to the fully immersive experience of a visit to a Disney park? Disney wanted to create an experience where both parents and children could be entertained simultaneously. First of all, the parks had to be immaculate. While children may be more tolerant of a little dirt and crease, nothing makes a parent’s stomach turn faster than the unsavory environment of the typical amusement park. Visions of weird infections, salmonella and just genera ickyness leap immediately to mind. If parent’s were to relax in a Disney amusement park, Walk knew it had to be spotless.

In the last post, I also talked about attention to detail. This becomes more important to the experience as you get older. Your appreciate the care that has gone into the engineering of your experience. It provides a sense of value for your admission price. Kids are plugged more viscerally into the thrill, the excitement and the magic of Disney. They suspend belief easier. We adults tend to be more skeptical, which makes us appreciate the lengths that Disney is willing to go to to maintain the illusion.

A Restroom around Every Corner

But perhaps the biggest reason is that it seems Disney has gone to great lengths to anticipate the needs of a family. It’s uncanny how, just when you start thinking you might need something, it magically appears around the next corner. Washrooms, food booths, sit down restaurants, benches for resting, stroller drop off areas – all these seem to be seamlessly and conveniently integrated into the experience. Yes, a day at Disneyland or Disneyworld can be gruelling for even the most diehard fans, with plenty of highs and lows, but it seems that just when frustration seems to mount to dangerous points, relief is close at hand.

I remember one summer visit during an exceptionally busy long weekend. We were heading out of the park and our nerves were frazzled. Yet, I was told we had to make one more stop on Main Street to pick up a souvenir in one of the shops. While not thrilled at the prospect (getting the hell of there was my primary goal) the day was redeemed by an exceptionally friendly Disney employee who managed to bring the smile back to our faces. And that, perhaps more than anything, is the Disney secret of simultaneous satisfaction. Rather than the bored, vacant expression that’s commonly found on staff faces at the competition (Universal is particularly notorious for this) it seems that everyone at Disneyland is genuinely happy you’re there. Disney people are awesome, but that’s actually one of the 10 Things I learned from Disney, so more on that in a future post.

We’re Only as Happy as the Group We’re In

To wrap up this post, let me touch on some reasons why simultaneous satisfaction is so important if you’re targeting customers in groups rather than as individuals. Perhaps the best way to illustrate this is with an example. Restaurants are another business that typically targets groups. Think about what happens if just one person in the group has a substandard experience. You talk about it. And suddenly, even if your experience was fine, you become dissatisfied. Our opinions about joint experiences are formed as part of the group. We defer to the decision of the majority, and typically, the consensus will sink to the level of the least satisfactory experience.

The other reason why group experiences are so important can be found in the way they’re recalled. Daniel Kahneman had an interesting presentation at the last TED conference about experiential vs remembered happiness. This is one of the little illogical quirks of humans. We make future decisions based not on how happy we were experiencing the actual event, but on how happy we remember being. This is critically important when we look at the group dynamic I just described in the restaurant. If we go to Disneyland as a group, we will also tend to remember our experiences when we’re with the same group. And, as we relive our remembered experience, our happiness level will sink to the lowest level of the group. If not everyone was happy, no one will be happy.

There’s a flip side to this as well. If we were all generally happy (the little annoyances tend to fade with time) the nostalgia effect tends to boost and sharpen the level of actual experience. We remember good things as great. I’m not sure Walt knew the psychology of simultaneous satisfaction when he insisted that Disneyland would be a place where both parents and children could all be happy at the same time, but it’s worked out pretty well for him.

10 Things I Learned from Disney – #4: Details Make the Difference

PartnersstatueThere are a lot of theme parks in Southern California. The competition for Disneyland is tough. Yet, for over 50 years now, the pattern has been the same. People plan their vacation around Disneyland, spending 3 to 5 days at the park, and may add a day at one of the other parks – Universal, Knott’s or Magic Mountain. If you looked at the size of the theme park pie and the slice that Disney carves off, the imbalance would be remarkable. Why does Disney suck up over 80 cents of every theme park dollar spent in the region?

It’s not the rides. Universal’s rides are probably more technically impressive. Magic Mountain and Knott’s certainly has more thrilling rides. Disney’s biggest coaster, California Screamin’, is a rather mild ride for a coaster fanatic (which I am).

I believe there are several reasons, and I’ll try to deal with them in individual posts. Today, I want to talk about attention to detail.

The Hotchkiss Detail Obsessive Guide to Disneyland

My family has been to Disneyland at least 6 times. People hate visiting the park with us because we have routines (others are less kind and call them rituals, or cult-like behavior) that have to be adhered to. It’s important which side of the train station you enter onto Main Street on. And you don’t rush past the circle at the top of the street. You spend a few minutes lingering and drinking in the atmosphere. You either stroll (never rush) down main street or take the horse drawn tram. You may stop at the Blue Ribbon Bakery for a coffee. You make your way to the Partners statue at the center of the park for a few minutes with Walt and Mickey and while you’re there, pay particular attention to the flowers planted around them. Take note, because they may be completely different tomorrow. From the center in front of the Castle, we then veer to the left, usually ambling through Adventureland and head towards New Orleans Square because the first ride has to be (this is non-negotiable) Pirates of the Caribbean.

Pirates is one of our favorite rides, earning it’s place as a Hotchkiss Tradition. And it’s not because it’s thrilling (it’s not) or technically amazing (although it may have been with the ride debuted in 1967). It’s because the attention to detail on this ride is simply amazing. It’s the last ride that Walt himself personally oversaw the design of. Everything has been thought through, down to the smallest scar, gold doubloon or cobweb. And that is the Disney difference. You won’t find that fanatic attention to detail in Universal, Knott’s or Magic Mountain. It’s a Disney hallmark.

It’s What You Do Between the Rides that Counts

Disney knows that in between the momentary jolts of adrenaline, it’s the details that build an experience worthy of a 3 or 4 day investment of your family’s time. Disneyland has this down in spades. Each square foot is jammed with amazing detail, carefully crafted and maintained to add to the experience. And I’m not even talking the obscure Disney-mania touches like Hidden Mickies. I’m talking about carefully planned sight lines, well placed benches, meticulously groomed greenery and the architectural detail on buildings, to say nothing of the imagination fuelling touches found in rides like Splash Mountain, Peter Pan, the Haunted Mansion and Indiana Jones. The competition cut corners. Walt absolutely forbid that in the making of Disneyland.

The post-Walt Disney Parks have struggled with this. We’ve been going to Disneyland for over 20 years now, and the overall look of the park hasn’t changed much. Toontown was added and a few new rides have debuted, but 50 years of planning and development have created an almost perfect entertainment experience. Major overhauls aren’t needed. The same can’t be said for Disney’s California Adventure. Disney is currently overhauling huge sections of the park because the same detailed magic was missing. Visitors treat California Adventure more like a typical theme park, rushing from major attraction to major attraction without lingering to enjoy the experience on the way. Of all the rides in California Adventure, the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror is one of the few engineered to the same standards of detail that you’ll find in the earlier rides. But this legacy of detail isn’t found so much in the rides, but rather the transition zones between the rides. It’s here where the acid test of detail is really found. It’s detail that keeps crowds amused while they’re waiting in line. It’s detail that keeps them from feeling like cattle, shunted from one chute to the next.

Most Skip the Details, Disney Doesn’t

So what’s the takeaway? Disney’s eye for detail came from an absolute certainty about what his visitor’s wanted and an iron-willed determination to deliver that without any compromise. Every last element of the visitor experience was considered and planned for. Every detail you see in Disneyland had a purpose – to make the visitor happy.

I think too many corporations rush past the details when it comes to the experiences of their customers. It’s because details take time. They’re hard work. You can get lost in a forest of detail. And obsessing over detail just doesn’t seem that profitable. In fact, if you get lost in the wrong details, it can be sure death for a corporation. But yet, details make the difference for Disney. Why? How does Disney avoid the trap of paying attention to the wrong details? They know which details are important because they take the time to understand what is important to their visitors. They spend a lot of time thinking about how visitors perceive and interact with those details. This is a legacy from Walt. It comes from a leader that obsesses about details.

Apple and the User Experience: A Lesson Learned

iPad-gallery-books1Another example of attention to detail is Apple. They obsess about the user experience. I recently watched someone demo their new iPad. You know what was one of the first things he showed me? How the iPad mimicked the look of turning an actual physical page in a book. Depending on where you place your finger on the page, the page itself curls up appropriately. It’s a silly little detail, but it was important in creating a Wow experience for this new owner. And it’s something that stood out to me as one reason why, eventually, I have to get an iPad. It’s a feature that probably took an absolutely silly number of hours of programming to implement but it was important to Apple because it was important to users.

Detail can differentiate you from the competition. It adds a premium to the value you provide. It tells the customer that you value them as users (or visitors), not just as another wallet to be emptied.

Next Week in Captiva: Shaking Things Up, TED-style

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

Today you sit there, an audience spread across the digital marketing landscape, scraping together a few precious moments on your daily calendar to read this column. Next week I hope you’ll all be basking in the sunshine of Captiva Island, Fla., your cranium brimming over with tidbits and brain-bombs about search and the industry we toil in. The Google-gods willing and major algorithmic overhauls aside, we can all get away from the daily grind long enough to step back and take a look at where this whole thing might be going.

A Summit Three Years in the Making

I’ve been fortunate to work with MediaPost to help program the Search Insider Summit for the past five shows (I think, the brain’s a little numb at this point). Over time we’ve refined and tweaked to the point where we had a pretty smooth-running operation. This time, however, I decided to change all that. I’ve never been a particularly loyal adherent to the maxim: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I believe in mixing stuff up on a pretty regular basis. In this case, the catalyst for change was a chance to attend the TEDActive conference this spring.

I loved how TED managed to lodge particularly toothsome concepts in my brain (at a breathlessly unrelenting pace, to be honest) and then throw me loose amongst the TED-sters (yes, it is a little cult-like) to try to digest in my limited downtime.

The resulting conversations were nothing short of amazing. The first day at lunch, I was sharing a picnic basket with five other strangers and eavesdropping on a conversation happening beside me. The topic? The role of mirror neurons in determining the vicarious enjoyment on thrill rides at an amusement park. I didn’t catch names at first, but one speaker owned an amusement part in New Jersey, and the other was a professor of neuroscience at UC Irvine.

This past week, as I was zipping past TV channels, I saw a familiar face. There was my neuroscience prof! He was appearing as himself on the crime drama “Criminal Minds.” He just happens to be one Dr. James Fallon, a world-renowned expert on the psychology and neurology of psychopaths! Now, where else could you just happen on a conversation like that?

The Convergence of Conversations

That was the spirit I wanted to create at Captiva (minus the psychopathic stuff).  Like TED, we have an atmosphere that invites conversations. The informal and intimate atmosphere is conducive to brainstorming. And this time, I wanted to borrow from the TED concept and transition what happens up on stage to be more forward-looking and strategic in nature. I wanted to give more people a chance to share their thoughts, so I borrowed the TED format of a mix of 18-minute and five-minute (TED actually limits to three-minutes) talks. Plus, we retained unique Search Insider traditions like our roundtable break-out sessions.

The challenge I threw at presenters was to crystal-ball the question: Where is search going from here? I divided the question into five parts: the core technology, the user experience, the marketing strategies, the search marketing industry and the data and tools. Then, with the help of our advisory board (Gian Fulgoni – Comscore, John Nicoletti – Google, Stefan Weitz – Microsoft, Chris Copeland – GroupM and Frank Lee – The Search Agency) we created a 3-day agenda from the pitches we received. It’s promising to be a fascinating summit. And for good measure, we’re bringing Ball State University back to re-envision Google through Gen-Next eyes.

It was a little hairy, taking a tried-and-true format and reinventing it, but I think you’ll be pleased with the results. See you soon in Captiva!

10 Things I Learned from Disney – #3: Leadership Matters…a Lot!

walt-and-roy-01How many companies today are run by caretakers? How many of the Fortune 500 are run by CEO’s who are really just thinly disguised accountants?

The Leader of a company determines the heart and soul of that company. If you run the company by your profit and loss statements, you’ll end up with a fiscally responsible corporation that will slowly screw itself into the ground. If you have a reckless leader, you’ll flame and burn in spectacular style. Somewhere in between the extremes is where you have to live

Walt Disney was not overly concerned by fiscal responsibility. That was Roy, his brother’s job. Walt drove the company by embracing risk. Roy lost his hair by trying to balance Walt’s enthusiasm.

Risk is the fuel that drives the future. And risk is risk. It can only be calculated up to a certain point. After that, you have to close your eyes and jump. Walt jumped again, and again, and again, each with spectacular style.

1923 – Walt moved to Hollywood from Kansas City with a short film called Alice’s Wonderland that he hoped would net him a distribution contract. The film was pretty much all Walt had. He managed to secure a contract and teetered on the edge of bankruptcy for 4 years. And just when he looked like he had a winner, in a new cartoon character called Oswald the Rabbit, the distributor stole both the rights and the animators, shutting Walt out.

1928 – After losing Oswald, Walt started from scratch with Mickey Mouse. But he only created two cartoons with the new character before deciding to risk it all with the first sound cartoon. The struggling studio dumped everything they had into the cartoon, Steamboat Willie. Luckily, Walt’s gamble paid off. Mickey was a hit.

1937 – Building on the success of Steamboat Willie, Disney turned out a series of profitable Mickey Mouse cartoons, and added the Silly Symphony series, netting himself a number of Academy Awards in the process for pushing the boundaries of animation technology and art. but Walt soon found a new dream worthy of risk – the first full length animated movie. It what was quickly becoming predictable behaviour for Walt, he risked all their profits from the animated shorts on Snow White. And, as before, it was a phenomenal success, becoming the highest grossing movie until Gone with the Wind bumped it from it’s perch.

In it’s following releases, Disney struggled with finding the right balance between budget and profitability. The war restricted access to foreign markets so profits relied on domestic audiences. Walt continued to push the envelope of what was possible with animation in Disney’s next two releases, Pinocchio and Fantasia. This came at a cost – a budget that meant these films didn’t break even until decades after their debut (thanks to eventual release on VHS and DVD). Walt continually tried to find the right balance between artistic accomplishment and profitability, eventually finding a happy middle ground with classics like Bambi, Cinderella and Mary Poppins (another technical and artistic milestone). It’s amazing to consider how quickly animation progressed, from the primitiveness of Steamboat Willie to the polished art of Show White in just 9 short years.

In the interim Walt also explored TV and live action features, finding significant success in both. Finally, it seemed, Disney had found the groove that led to sustained profitability. Almost any other leader would cling to this groove for dear life, building up the bank account and enjoying the rewards that come with success. Not Walt.

1955 – Walt got restless when he stayed in one place too long. he became bored with incremental improvement, no matter how profitable it proved to be. Walt thrived on risk and new, monumental challenges. And so, he looked for a new one. Walt was 54 years old and had been running Disney, in one form or another, for 35 years. By any measure you might want to apply, he was successful. And he risked all this, everything, on a new dream – an entertainment park. Disneyland represented Walt’s biggest roll of the dice yet, because he had everything to lose.

This restlessness and desire to push the limits epitomized the Disney company for the first 45 years of its history. Walt and the company were really one and the same. His leadership determined the soul of the company. When he died of lung cancer at the age of 66, he left a hole in the heart of Disney that took years to mend (and some might say Walt was never successfully replaced). Never let it be said that one person does not determine the direction of a huge corporation. Disney was testament to the fact that a single person’s vision and ideals can shape and guide a company for decades. This is not the job for a caretaker or bean counter. This is a job for someone who can grasp the impossible and shape the future.

Human Irrationality Online

irrationalLast week, I talked about the work of Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Herbert Simon and George Akerlof, key figures in helping define the foundations of consumer behavior, both rational and irrational, that dictate the realities of the marketplace. Today, I want to talk about how these emotional and cognitive biases and limitations play out online, but first, a quick recap is in order:

Prospect Theory – The role of psychological framing and emotional biases in determining human behavior in risky economic decisions. For example, how we’re more sensitive about loss than we are about gain.

Bounded Rationality – How we cannot endlessly consider all alternatives for the optimal behavior, but rather rely on “gut instincts” to help sort through the available alternatives.

Information Asymmetry – Why the marketplace has traditionally been unbalanced, with the seller almost always having more information about the product than the buyer.

This is Nothing New…

As I said last week, these are all hardwired human conditions that have been present for hundreds of generations, even though it’s only been recently that we’ve learned enough about human behavior to recognize them. And it’s these inherent tendencies that have changed the marketplace since the introduction of the Internet. The huge volume of information available online allowed us to shift the balance of the marketplace to be more equitably distributed between sellers and buyers. Let’s explore how each of these occurrences drove the behavioral change, which was enabled, not caused, by the introduction of the Net.

We understand that risk is present in almost all consumer transactions. This fact brings Prospect Theory into the picture. We will unconsciously employ our emotional biases to deal with the risk inherent in each purchase: the greater the risk, the greater the degree of bias.

The Risk/Reward Balance

Consumer motivation relies on us mentally balancing risk and reward. The balance between these opposing forces will dictate how we deal with risk mitigation. If there is a high reward — for example, buying our mid-life crisis sports car or taking our dream vacation — our emotional biases will be tilted towards maximizing this reward. Consumer research is really more about wish fulfillment than it is about risk mitigation.

But if there is little or no reward, our research takes a much different path. Think about how we approach the purchase of life insurance, for example. There is no inherent reward here, just risk — or rather, mitigation of risk. And insurance salespeople mercilessly exploit the emotional bias of loss by getting you to picture your family’s future without you in it.

Informed Does Not Always Equal Rational

This risk/reward balance will dictate what our online research will look like. And this is where Akerlof’s Information Asymmetry comes in. One of the ways we mitigate risk is by educating ourselves about our purchase. We look up consumer ratings, read reviews and pore over feature sheets.

Today, consumers are much more informed than they were a generation ago. But all that information does not necessarily mean we will make a more logical decision. We humans tend to look at information to support our emotional biases, rather than refute them. So, the balancing of information asymmetry is still done through the lens of our emotional and psychological frames, as shown by Kahneman and Tversky. We have access to information online, but each of us may walk away with different messages, depending on the lens we’re seeing that information through.

All This Information, All These Choices…

And that, finally, brings us to Simon’s concept of Bounded Rationality. We have more information than ever to sift through. As I said a few columns back, we can employ different strategies to make decisions. Some of us embrace bounded rationality, or satisficing, making us more decisive. It’s important to note here that the fact we’re trusting our gut to make these satisficing calls means that we may be trusting emotion rather than logic. Others try to optimize each decision, weighing all the variables. While this is perhaps a more rational approach, it can tax our cognitive limits, leading to frustration and often abandonment of the optimal path, resulting in a decision that ends up being a “gut” call anyway.

Our need to access information to mitigate risk has lead to the behavioral changes in consumer behavior. The Internet enabled this. It wasn’t technology that changed our behavior; it was just that technology opened the door to allow us to pursue our hardwired tendencies.

Search May Not be Sexy Anymore, But It Pays the Bills

First published August 5, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Is it just me, or is search getting boring? It’s been months since we’ve had a good, ruckus-raising tidbit to get our teeth into. The Bing-Yahoo integration? That’s the best you can do? Yawn.

Is it me…

I suspect that it is, in part anyway, me. To be honest, I haven’t been much of a “Search Insider” lately. In the past few months, precious little of my time has been spent pondering the industry. I’m way behind on industry news and haven’t attended a search conference or event for a few months. My days have been full with the busy-ness of running a business. I’ve had other things on my mind.

My first Search Insider column ran six years ago and since then, I’ve written 276 columns, counting this one.  That’s a little over 220,000 words — most of them at least tangentially relevant to search. Perhaps the well has just run dry.

Or is it search?

But then again, perhaps it’s the industry.  Maybe search just isn’t that sexy anymore. Remember the day when Google was going to change the world? Remember how marketers just couldn’t wrap their heads around this “search” thing? Back then, I could get righteously indignant and bang out a column wondering when the world would “get” how important this it. But now, they’ve got it. It seems silly to proselytize search now that Google has become a verb. Search has come, has conquered, and we’ve all moved on. Again…yawn.

Sure, there are always new search entries in the marketplace, but when’s the last time somebody used the words Google Killer? Is it because Google is invincible, or is it just that we really don’t care anymore? Even Aaron Goldman, who surely has squatter’s rights on “Google Killer,” hasn’t squeezed it into a column since last May. In the last year, only three Search Insider columns have used the term. When we Insiders stop caring about the world after Google, imagine how disinterested the rest of the population must be.

Search and the Oxygen Cycle

As I watch my family’s day-to-day routines unwind, I realize that search is like air. We use it without thinking about it. We just accept it. And so, the industry that lies behind the query box falls into the same category as the biochemical process that ensures we have oxygen. I don’t care how it works, as long as it does work.

So, maybe search is boring. Maybe it’s lost its luster, ceasing to be a bright shiny object. Maybe the cool people have all moved on to social media and mobile, where they attend conferences wearing block logoed T-shirts, sipping free mimosas and talking about how no one gets Foursquare. It’s the same group you used to see at the search shows, waiting to board the bus to the Google Dance.

But I can’t help thinking that perhaps this is a good thing. You can only be cool for so long. Sooner or later, you have to grow up and do some real business. It’s the difference between a bar pick-up and a marriage. Social might be sexy, but search pays the bills and puts food on the table.

On second thought, maybe a little diversion is just what the doctor ordered. Look over here, all you journalists and financial analysts! Look at what’s happening where the really cool people play. Ooh and aah at these social widgets and nifty apps. Meanwhile, we search people will drudge along, cranking out a few more billion in search revenues.

How and Why I Blog

i-have-nothing-to-sayMy last post on the psychology of entertainment forced me to ask myself an important question: why the hell do I blog anyway? I thought it might be helpful to work this out in the full transparency of a blog post. As I find the answer for myself, perhaps someone else will find it useful as well.

Talking to Myself…Online

For me, my blog is a little more structured exercise than talking to myself. It helps me take some of the ideas I’m exposed to and give them an intellectual workout. I suppose at first I intended my blog to be a promotional vehicle but as I started to blog, I realized that provided poor motivation to continue to blog. I don’t really structure my blog posts to be rapidly disseminated. As I said before, I break pretty much all of Guy Kawasaki’s rules for successful blogging. But then, Guy doesn’t blog the same way I do. It doesn’t serve the same purpose. For Guy, blogging is a broadcast channel. For me, it’s an intellectual “grist mill” that allows me to pull ideas together in new combinations.

Truth be told, I don’t really have a structure that I follow when blogging. I sit down and start typing about whatever happens to be on my mind that day. I try to set an hour aside a day, but often I find the clock running on to two hours and I reluctantly have to pull myself away and get to the rest of my daily to do’s. Worse, often I get on a track that’s impossible to cover in a single post. For example, a single comment on a single post got me wondering about the psychology of entertainment and that resulted in a string of 14 posts that’s still going on. When this happens, it’s very difficult to know where to end each post.

Educational Multitasking

Also, when I blog, I simultaneously learn. I bounce back and forth between TextEdit (using Word for blogging causes no end of headaches when importing into my blogging platform) and Google, exploring threads and “berrypicking” ideas. Often, I don’t have enough time to search for empirical backing. If an idea appears interesting, it gets thrown in with a link. My blog is a place to speculate in the open air, not to worry about making each post bullet proof. I try to make sure everything passes my personal “gut test” but I expect my readers to call me on concepts that are obviously off-base.

My motivation for blogging is simple: I have ideas that I want to share, both mine and other ones that I run into. I try to be fair when I am presenting the ideas of others, providing links to the original source. I find the challenge of translating these ideas into words very healthy. It helps me internalize them, bringing them into my own perspective. I tend to favour academic work that borders on marketing. I’m become an armchair neurologist, psychologist and sociologist. The common link I look for is the “why” in human behaviour.

For me, blogging is a means to an end. I know other authors, including Chris Anderson, Seth Godin and John Battelle, work their book ideas out through their blog. I suspect I’m following the same path. After my first book which came out last year, I already have several ideas jostling for their place in the queue. The blog allows me to jump back and forth between these ideas, picking up a thread and pursuing it, then dropping it for another. I suspect blogging is the attention deficit approach to book research. The benefit, I hope, is that in the process, you expose potential readers to your thoughts, leading to a very healthy and helpful vetting before anything actually makes it to paper.

There’s a Reason It’s Called Out of My “Gord”…

I also don’t consider my own blog as a promotional vehicle for my company, Enquiro. There is inevitable overlap, and you can find my posts on our corporate blog, ask.enquiro.com, but the musings and thoughts belong to me, not Enquiro. We have a few bloggers in Enquiro and they are all finding their own voice. We take a very organic approach to this content creation, trusting that our shared passions will keep us somewhat aligned, rather than pushing editorial guidance down from above. Writing is much more rewarding and effective when you’re writing about something you care about. As the CEO and President of Enquiro, it’s natural that whatever I’m interested in will eventually find it’s way into the company’s corporate strategy in one form or another, but outofmygord.com is definitely not a corporate blog. The name (which I’m rather proud of, by the way) very much indicates what this blog is about, random thoughts that are bouncing around my cranium. Just like any given group of readers, some of my staff reads the blog every day, and others don’t. It’s not compulsory.

For me, the discipline of regular blogging, although difficult to maintain, has been very rewarding. If I could spend all day blogging I would, but so far, I haven’t figured out a way to keep the wolves from the door through blogging alone. Also, although my visitor stats have been consistently climbing, I have little idea who actually reads my blog. My readership, I suspect (at least based on the comments that get submitted) includes a number of SEO’s looking for backlinks. If you’re one of them, here’s the drill. I look at all feedback, sort out the obvious spam, and post if a comment looks thoughtful and adds to the conversation, even (in some cases) if it includes a fairly subtle backlink. No, I don’t use no follow tags (yet) so I figure that if you go to the trouble of making an intelligent comment, I’ll repay you with a little link love.

Advice? Just Write, Often and Regularly…

If you’re looking for advice on blogging, I’m not sure there’s much I can give. There are certainly bloggers with a much more commercial approach than I have, and they have the visitor numbers to show for it. What I would say is that you need to post often. I try to do 5 posts a week, and I usually manage at least 4. If you approach blogging like I do, with no set agenda or editorial guidelines, it’s hard to know which posts will become popular and which ones will go virtually unnoticed. I’m the worst judge of this. My most popular posts are ones I would have never expected to go viral. And my favorite posts often seem to be read by me and me alone. But, if you keep cranking them out, day after day, I believe your audience will eventually find you. Traffic to my blog has increased about 6 times since I started becoming more regular in my posts.

Finally, I acknowledge that the findability of past posts is abysmal on my blog. I was going to reorganize the site, but I recently decided to migrate the contents to WordPress (which has proven to be a much bigger pain than I thought). I’m hoping the change of platform will allow me to do some retroactive categorization and organization.

Some Wisdom from Walt

For the next week or two, I’m going to be on a much needed spring vacation with my family. During that time, I’m going to try to keep up the posts, but expect them to be much shorter. And, in the spirit of the vacation (which is in Southern California) I’m going to share some of the lessons I learned from Disney, one of my favorite companies, and from Walt Disney (one of my personal heroes). After that, I’ll pick up the psychology of entertainment thread again and see where it goes from here.

The Four Horsemen of the Consumer Behavior Apocalypse

First published March 25, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Right out of the gate, let’s assume that we all agree consumer behavior is in the throes of its biggest shift in history. And the cause is generally attributed to the Internet.

While I don’t disagree with this assessment, I believe there may be some misattribution when it comes to cause and effect. Did the Internet cause our consumer behavior to change? Or did it enable it to change? The distinction may seem like mere semantics, but there’s a fundamental difference here.

“Cause” implies that an outside force, namely the Internet, pushed us in a new direction that was different from the one we would have pursued had this new force not come along. “Enable” is a different beast, the opening of a previously locked door that allows us to pursue a new path of our own volition. I believe the latter to be true. I believe we weren’t pushed anywhere. We went there of our own free will.

Free Will? Or Hardwired Human Behavior?

But, even in my last statement, language again gets us in a sticky place. “Will” assumes it was a conscious and willful decision. I’m not sure this is the case. I suspect there were subconscious, hardwired behaviors that had a natural affinity for the new opportunities presented by the online marketplace.

For most of our recorded history, we have assumed that rational consideration and conscious will forms the basis of human thought. If we did seem programmed automatically to respond to certain cues, this was as a result of being conditioned by our environment, the classic Skinner black-box approach. But when we were on top of our game, we were carefully considering pros and cons, making consciously deliberated decisions. These were the forces that drove our society and our behaviors. This theory formed the basis of economics (Adam Smith’s Invisible hand), Cartesian logic, and most market research.

But in the last few decades, this view of rationality riding triumphant over human foibles has been brought into question. In particular, there were three concepts put forward by four academics that caused us to question what drove our behaviors. These folks uncovered deeper, subconscious routines and influences that lay buried beneath the strata of rational thought. And it’s these subconscious behaviors that I believe found the new online opportunities so enticing. Let’s spend a little time today looking at these four thinkers and the new paradigms they asked us to consider.

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman – Prospect Theory

Adam Smith’s Invisible hand, driven by the wisdom of the market, has been presumed to be the ultimate economic governing factor. The assumption was that each of us, individually making rational economic decisions, would ultimately decide winners and losers and capitalism would stay alive and well.

But Tversky and Kahneman, in their paper on Prospect Theory, showed that the invisible hand might not always be guided by a decisive and logical mind. We all have significant hardwired cognitive biases that often cause us to make illogical economic choices. For example, if I offered you $1,000, with no questions asked, or a chance to win $2,500 based on a coin toss, you’d probably take the sure bet, even though mathematically, the odds for net gain are better with the coin toss.

Prospect Theory shot some holes in the previous theory of Expected Utility, a model where we carefully weighed the pros and cons of a potential purchase based on a return on investment model. Emotional framing and risk avoidance played a much bigger role than we suspected, handicapping our logic and often guiding us down non-rational paths. Tversky and Kahneman single-handedly found the new discipline of Behavioral Economics and changed our thinking in the process.

Herbert Simon – Bounded Rationality

Simon’s concept of Bounded Rationality superseded Kahneman and Tversky’s theory, but it dovetailed with it very nicely. Even if we are rationally engaged in a decision, Simon argued, we couldn’t possibly optimize it, especially in complex scenarios. There were simply too many factors to consider. So, we took “gut feeling” short cuts, which Simon called “satisficing,” a combination of satisfy and suffice. We short-listed our consideration set by using beliefs and instincts.

To make the satisficing short list is the goal of any brand campaign. At some point, logical weighing of pros and cons has to give way to calls based primarily on instinct.  And, as Kahneman and Tversky showed, those instinctive calls may well be based on irrational emotional biases.

George Akerlof – information Asymmetry

The last piece, and the one that really drove the online consumer revolution, is George Akerlof’s Information Asymmetry theory. Traditionally, there has been an imbalance of information between buyers and sellers, to the seller’s advantage. The seller always knew more about what they were selling than the buyer did. This made purchasing inherently risky.

With an absence of information, consumers created strong beliefs about brands as a way to guide their future buying decisions. Brand loyalty, whether rational or not, filled the void left by a lack of information. Manufacturers and retailers carefully controlled what information did enter the marketplace, pushing the positives and carefully suppressing the negatives.

These three concepts, intertwined, defined the psychological make-up of the market prior to the introduction of the Internet. In my next column, I’ll explore what happened when these behavioral powder kegs were exposed to the fanned flames of the digital marketplace.

Search and Our Online “Set Point”

First published March 18, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Derek Gordon’s piece on Siri this week gave concrete proof of what I’ve been saying about the transition of search from a destination to a utility. Consider the example Derek gave of Siri’s functionality:

make action-oriented queries into your iPhone like “find me a good French restaurant for two tonight.”  Using your iPhone’s location coordinates, it will search Yelp for positive reviews of restaurants in your area, find a reservation for the most popular one via OpenTable and ask if you’d like to confirm a reservation.  Once you’ve confirmed the time, Siri will book the reservation for you. 

Notice the words Derek uses: “search” Yelp, “find” a reservation, both as intermediate steps to the end goal, allowing you to take action. And the Siri interface sits between you and the sources of the information. It’s exactly this interposing of a layer of functionality between the information and the user that I was talking about two weeks ago when I said that Steve Ballmer was thinking about the future of the search revenue model.

An application like Siri is only as good as the number of things it can do. Functionality, not information, is the new promise of the Internet. As John Battelle said in a recent chat with me, we quickly adjusted to the fact that the Internet could make us smarter. Now we expect it to let us do things better and faster. Information is only a means to an end.

Our Online ‘Set Point’

University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman believes that we have a happiness “set point.” For example, winning a lottery doesn’t really make us happier in the long run. We just ratchet up our level of expectation to accommodate our new circumstance. I believe the same is true about our feelings towards advanced technology.

In the early days of the Internet, we were consistently amazed when we found information “out there.”  It seemed that no matter what we were looking for, with enough diligence, we could find some source for it. The Internet was one big information archive, and search was the key we used to unlock it. But as with happiness , we’re very quick to reset our expectations. Amazement quickly gives way to a sense of entitlement. We now accept the fact that the information is out there somewhere.  We now expect applications to gather it for us and present us with an opportunity to act on it.

The Road Ahead for Search

In a few short weeks, we’ll be gathering on Captiva Island in Florida to discuss where search is going. I believe a central theme will be this idea of search as a step towards usefulness.  We have reset our expectations and we need more from search. And this raises an interesting possibility. I have talked before about how Google became a habit for us. But habits only remain stable as long as they produce the expected results. Once we stop getting what we expect, we ready ourselves to break the habit and build a new one. It’s hard cognitive work, but we will undertake it if the payoff is worth it in terms of expected utility. As our expectations, fueled by glimpses of potential functionality through apps like Siri, are raised to a new set point, we will be less satisfied with the vanilla search experience offered by Google. This means, finally, we may be ready to break the Google Habit.

Google’s counter to that will be that Siri benefits from having a very focused purpose, supported through a dedicated interface and structured data. It’s impossible to match that functionality across all categories and use cases. Very true and very rational — but it doesn’t matter. If our online “set point” gets reset, our loyalty to Google will suffer. Suddenly, we won’t be satisfied anymore, because we believe something better is out there.