Author Archives: ghotchkiss

Murdoch and Bing: The Sound of Two Dinosaurs Dancing

This morning in Ad Age:

Why Murdoch Can Afford to Leave Google for Bing

The author, Nat Ives, reasons that Google traffic doesn’t translate into revenue for Murdoch anyway. This is true, but the logical conclusion that you can afford to kiss this traffic goodbye is seriously flawed. I’ll explain why in a minute.

Yesterday in Search Engine Land, Danny offered his thoughts on “The OPEC of News“. He approached it from the flow of information and indexing cycle perspective, and I think he did a good job of hitting the salient points. From the mechanics of the search space, Danny’s right, but what’s more interesting to me is the human behavior that sits behind all this.

The biggest reason why this is a stupid deal is that it’s out of touch with where the market is going. I touched on this in a previous post, but I’ll expand on it this week in a few posts that will tie together Enquiro’s past research and other seminal research :

Today – The Primacy of the Patch – Why Information Foraging is the Key to Behavior

Wednesday – The Mindlessness of Web Search – How We Don’t Think Our Way through Online Interactions

Thursday – Engagement with Online Ads – The Importance of Aligned Intent

Friday – Tying it Together – Why Murdoch and Bing’s Logic is Fatally Flawed

The Primacy of the Patch: Information Foraging is the Key to Behavior

As I said, this week I want to dissect some aspects of human behavior to show why Rupert Murdoch is seriously out of touch and how Bing can’t corner the news market.

The primary reason is that we’re changing how we get information. The implications of this are fascinating, because the implications will soon spread through all marketplaces and aspects of our society. And it comes down to one important factor to consider: Humans are inherently lazy.

Laziness is a Good Thing

Now, before you get all morally indignant on me, let me explain: humans are lazy in the evolutionary sense, the same way that Richard Dawkin’s genes are selfish. We’re lazy because it’s a natural advantage, it’s built into our genome. To be more accurate, we’re lazy when the expenditure of more energy doesn’t make sense. We’re lazy in a subtle, subconscious way. And, like all aspects of human behavior, we’re not all equally lazy. There’s a bell curve of laziness. Laziness has gotten a bad rap in our puritanical, WASPish culture, but the fact is, when it comes to survival, laziness is often the optimal strategy.

Look at it a different way. Say you need to drive from Detroit to Chicago. The only goal is to get to Chicago and pay as little for gas as possible on the way. What vehicle are you going to take – a Hummer or a Prius? The Prius is a no brainer. In terms of fuel efficiency, the Prius is a lazy car. It does what it has to do more efficiently than a Hummer. In a vehicle, this is a virtue, but somewhere in our twisted culture, it’s become a bad thing for humans.

Fat And Lazy? Maybe Not …

Calories are a human’s gas tank. We’ve been genetically hardwired to be very fuel efficient. In fact, we’ve developed very sophisticated subconscious mechanisms to ingest as many calories as possible without expending calories to find them. This worked well when we lived on the African savanna and the only food source was the odd Baobab tree. It doesn’t work so well when there’s a McDonald’s around every corner. It’s not a cruel joke what we’re attracted to high fat, high sugar foods. These provide lots of calories in one sitting. That’s why our society is fat (fat and lazy – how’s that self esteem so far?)

So, what the hell does this all have to do with search? Well, when humans are faced with new challenges, we’re stuck using the tools that evolution has endowed us with. We borrow from other abilities. The technical term for this is exaption. When digital information came along, we had to look into our evolutionary toolkit and find something that would work.

Foraging for Information

At Xerox’s PARC in the late 90’s, Peter Pirolli was exploring how humans navigated hypertext linked information environments. The invention of hyperlinking introduced a new challenge in information retrieval. Throughout history, information was structured into an imposed taxonomy or hierarchy. We sorted it alphabetically or by the Dewey decimal system. And, because information was static, it stayed within the boundaries we built for it. But the creation of the hyperlink meant that information suddenly became unstructured and organic. Topical links from source to source meant that imposed editorial restrictions no longer worked. Links kept leaping above the boundaries we tried to impose on information.

Given this new challenge, Pirolli wanted to explore the subconscious strategies we used to navigate this unstructured information environment. He wanted to reduce it to a predictable algorithm. Time after time, he was frustrated. Humans would start down a predictable path, only to suddenly take an expected turn. The patterns didn’t seem logical. But, as chance would have it, he had recently read some work on biological foraging patterns and decided to overlay that on the behaviors he was observing. It was Pirolli’s “A Ha” moment. Suddenly, the patterns made sense. Humans, Pirolli (along with Stuart Card and others) discovered, foraged for information. We used the same strategies to navigate the web that we use to look for food. And, just as is the case with calories, laziness (or efficiency) is a pretty good strategy for finding information.

In information foraging, there is one overriding concern: take the most efficient path possible to the information you seek. I won’t get too far into the mechanics of how we do that except to say this – it’s not a conscious calculation. We’re constantly scanning the environment to see if a richer information “patch” is on the horizon. Information foraging is fundamentally important to understand if you’re to understand human behavior online. Jakob Nielsen called it “the most important concept to emerge from Human-Computer Interaction research since 1993.”

So, let’s look at how this applies to the Murdoch-Bing scenario. For almost 20 years now, we’ve been retrieving information online, using our foraging strategies. In that time, we’ve become conditioned to go to the most efficient sources of information…the places where we get the biggest information “bang” for our buck – and in this case, our investment is our time. As I’ve said before, this is a conditioned behavior. We don’t consciously think our way through this. Our subconscious efficiency circuits kick in and we do this by habit. To think of how powerful these subconscious loops are, just think about how hard it is to walk past a cookie lying on the counter. It’s not that you’re a bad person if you pick it up. It’s not that you’re stupid, eating it even though you know it’s not good for you. It’s those inherent human behaviors taking over. It’s powerful stuff!

So, for well over a decade, we’ve discovered that the shortest line between our need for information and the right online destination is a search engine. If there was a more efficient retrieval mechanism, we’d use it. This isn’t about brand, or loyalty. It’s just walking past the kitchen counter and seeing a cookie there. We’ll do it without thinking.

Murdoch’s strategy is flawed because he doesn’t realize that we now seek information differently. In the past, we picked the editorial channel that best met our needs. The Wall Street Journal may have been one of our favored patches, because we agreed with it’s “editorial voice”, it met a sufficient number of our information needs and we felt the investment of our time was warranted by the information we retrieved. in return for that, we started to build up loyalty to the brand, giving the publishers the right to sell advertising against that loyalty.

But the hyperlink and the internet didn’t just make information patchy, it also created a “just in time” need for information. 30 years ago, we didn’t suddenly develop the need to know who the director of “Booty Call” was because there was no easy way to retrieve the information. It wasn’t worth the investment. But Google made instant retrieval of information possible. It dramatically improved the efficiency of information retrieval. We started Googling everything because we could, without wasting huge amounts of time.

It’s this paradigm shift in information consumption that Murdoch is completely missing. Yesterday in Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan did a good job showing how the social web and the indexing of content makes any attempt to wall it off to preserve a revenue model futile. The one thing I disagree with Danny on is his assertion that a mutually exclusive Murdoch/Google relationship won’t hurt Google or Murdoch:

So what happens if the WSJ is out of Google? Nothing. Seriously, nothing. Remember, for years the WSJ was NOT in Google, and yet Google grew just fine. Also, the WSJ seems to have been fine. Neither is crucial to each other.

What we have here is a significant shift in human behavior, and right now we’re in the transition period. Google and other engines have dramatically changed the game of information retrieval and that means a huge upheaval in the industry. Society is moving en mass from one behavior, which publishers had build a revenue model around, to another behavior, which still hasn’t been fully monetized (Google has only monetized one small slice of it). To say that both will do fine is ignoring the lessons of history. These massive behavioral shifts are ALWAYS a zero sum game..somebody wins and somebody loses. Guess who will lose? Hint, it won’t be Google.

So, what about Bing? If my theory is correct, will Bing become the new favored patch by signing with Murdoch? I doubt it. There’s just not enough critical mass there to disrupt conditioned behaviors. The “just in time” information economy has eroded our brand affinity for favored patches. We’ve become more publisher agnostic. Again, this isn’t universally true. We still appreciate “editorial voice” for some types of information and may seek out one specific publisher, but our new promiscuity means an erosion of page views and traffic, which is killing the traditional publishing revenue model. But, more about this in tomorrow and Thursday’s  post.

Nicotine and Memory: Things Seemed Better with Smoke

iStock_000003125082XSmall“My God,” you think, as you swirl your drink in front of you, “I could use a smoke right now.” The urge is all the stronger because of all those memories of past times with friends and a cigarette. Your life just seemed more fun when you were smoking. Was life more exciting before you kicked the habit? It sure seems so.

It’s not all your imagination. A recent study at Baylor College of Medicine says nicotine actually tricks the brain into linking cigarettes and the environment you’re in when you smoke them. The brain is wired to reward you with a shot of dopamine when you do things that ultimately end up in your living longer. The problem is that this mechanism was built to reward us in an environment where scarcity was the norm. So, we get a reward when we eat, for example. Move this forward into our age of excess and the result is rampant obesity.

This mechanism also fires when we’re in an environment that typically prompts these reward releases of dopamine. We’re driven to spend more time there. If we typically get rewarded in one location (i.e. great dinners at our parent’s house) and not another we develop a subconscious affinity for the rewarding environment.

So, what do cigarettes do to this hard wired reward mechanism? They short circuit it in a couple ways. Nicotine not only hijacks the dopamine reward system, but it also alters the way our memories are laid down, drawing us back to environments where we smoke. Nicotine supercharges the hippocampus, a part of the brain that lays down new memories. The Baylor study, which was done on mice, found that mice “on nicotine” recorded twice the neuronal activity as the control group. Nicotine tricks the brain into believing that smoking is a beneficial activity and laying down memories to reinforce this belief. It’s a double whammy for those trying to kick the habit.

The Usability Acid Test

I slagged eMarketer last week for misleading reporting on Twitter usage, so in the spirit of fair play, I’ll show them some love for an interview they did with Kevin Ertell, Vice President of Retail Strategy for ForeSee Results.

In the interview, Kevin nailed the top thing that every single business should have on the top of their to do list:

“We’re seeing at many, many retailers that the amount of people that say they came to make a purchase today is 20% or higher. Yet, those people’s conversion rates are nowhere near 20%. So, there’s a massive gap there, and a lot of that gap can be attributed to usability issues. ”

Kevin is talking retailers, but developing a core usability practice should be a no brainer for any type of business, no matter what their online objectives are. It just doesn’t make sense to spend all that time, money and effort driving leads to a website that then lets those leads slip through hundreds of cracks. I’m a big believer in picking one thing and doing it really, really well. For online marketers, that one thing should always be delivering a great user experience. If you have to make a sacrifice to do it, do it. Nothing is more important than this.

This is one of those things that falls into the common sense category, but very very few companies do usability well. There are a lot of really horrible user experiences out there. Here are 5 usability acid tests to hold yourself to:

Have you crawled inside your customer’s minds? The percentage of companies I know that have done robust research into understanding how their prospect’s brains tick is almost nil. This is the first place you have to start. Why are they coming to your site? What do they want to do? Like I always say, a good place to start is just to stand over a prospect’s shoulder when they’re on your site and start asking why. Sure, it’s not sophisticated usability testing, but it’s a beginning. The important thing is just to start doing something!

Can they find what they’re looking for? Prospects are coming to your site because they’re looking for something. Everybody is looking for something. And the vast majority of your visitors will be looking for a handful of common things. Make sure they find them. Make sure the cues and paths are easy to find, clearly lit and simple to follow. Provide site wide assistance in the form of clear sitemaps and internal search tools that don’t suck.

Can they do what they want to do? Again, prospects come to your site with an objective – something they want to do. The better you understand that objective, the more successful you can be in helping them meet it. Your job – your only job as the site designer – is to understand the paths your visitors want to take and remove any possible friction on those paths. You’ll have business objectives (i.e. capturing lead information) but these should never take priority over your visitor objectives.

Do You Make Your Visitors Do Too Much Thinking? (thanks Steve Krug!) – We do very little thinking when we navigate websites. Most of our online wayfinding is done subsconsciously. The minute you make a prospect stop and think, you’ve introduced friction and reduced their site experience. You should be able to get to where you’re going on the site quickly and intuitively. It’s not a puzzle to be solved. It’s a tool to be put in the hands of your prospects to help them do the things they want to do.

Do you have a servant based site philosophy? – This final point sums up all the previous ones. You don’t own your website..your customers do. Your goal is to meet their needs. Call it a servant based site design philosophy. Never make them sacrifice their objectives to meet yours (as in collecting lead information in a long form before they can get to where they need to get). If you provide enough value, they’ll meet you half way, but never force the issue.

This acid test for usability, if answered honestly, will help you understand how far you are away from a robust usability discipline. Assess and then make it a priority for 2010. There is no better place to spend your time!

Predicting Innovation

innovationSmallIsaac Asimov once said “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but rather, “hmm…. that’s funny….”. Based on a 30 year study across 300 product categories and 225 countries, the phrase might actually be “Hmmm…. that’s what I thought.”

A new whitepaper from Phillip Roos from GFK sums up 30 years of findings started by product guru Robert McMath. The paper deserves a deeper dive – (which will be coming in some form or another) but I’ll try to share the highlights with you at least:

The Chord of Familiarity – Great innovation builds on what comes before it. This lines up with something I have long believed – there is no such thing as revolutionary innovation, just a series of incremental evolutionary innovations that at some point reaches a tipping point and appears to be revolutionary. I’ve used the iPhone as an example before.

Great Innovation does not require people to make radical changes in beliefs or behavior – Again, with incremental innovation, the market must understand the innovation and relate it to something they’re used to. The iPhone made smartphones smarter, more fun and more useful. It didn’t require us to make a great leap of understanding (unlike Apple’s ill fated Newton, which was too far ahead of it’s time).

Consumer Needs evolve in predictable ways – Innovation tends to mirror a natural evolution in consumer needs.

Innovation “news” that addresses consumer needs gets adopted in predictable ways – Smaller players generally lead the way (as they naturally are more innovative), as competition picks up others build on the original innovation (witness what’s currently happening in mobile technology with Android, the Palm Pre and others) and then finally we reach the tipping point of mass adoption (we’re getting very close to this cusp with mobile technology).

Roos also shares some drivers of winning innovation:

Business Dynamics – Supporting innovation with strong business practices and process. A.G. Lafley built a culture of innovation at the core of P&G. 3M, Apple and Google are other corporate cultures that have injected systemically into their core.

Consumer Dynamics and Insights – It’s essential for innovative companies to consistently maintain the customer’s perspective and approach product development from this frame of reference. Again, Apple is brilliant at this, due in no small part to Steve Jobs amazing intuition about what Apple’s customers want. Intuit and P&G have robust customer insight programs that bring them to where the customer works and lives, outside of the market research lab.

Creativity and Design – Innovation specialists tend to be creative and design enthusiasts. They typically have a great ethnography process that keeps them squarely aligned with their customers and then excellent design teams that can translate this understanding into innovative products….

BUT

Roos says even if you do all these things well, it may still not be enough. Apple gets check points beside each of these prerequisites, but they still turn out clunkers. In the end, innovation in product design is a bit of a crap shoot and the trick is to stack the odds in your favor. Innovative technology, even if it’s superbly designed, is a failure if no one uses it. And it’s this last point that Roos says is critical. You have to understand the patterns of innovation adoption. You have to find the right place on Everett Roger’s Technology Diffusion curve. And it’s here where the same patterns have emerged with successful innovations over the past decades. Here are the steps Roos recommends:

To understand the patterns, you have to understand the drivers of the product category. Historically, why have customers come to this category. This will boil down to some primary human drivers: safety, convenience, gratification, productivity & well being/wellness. These needs don’t change. They represent the first wave. Example: The telephone introduced instant voice communication, offering convenience, gratification and safety. It wasn’t an “out of the blue” innovation, as it built on the consumers understanding of telegraph communication.

The second wave is when innovation allows these drivers to be satisfied in new and better ways.Typically, innovation is fragmented at this step. Single innovations drive forward one aspect of the product and yields a temporary competitive advantage. Example: The introduction of the mobile phone took all the drivers satisfied by the telephone and suddenly unanchored it. We could take those advantages with us anywhere.

The third wave is fusion of the drivers. Single point innovation is no longer enough. We want the advantages to merge into a more holistic experience. Example: The SmartPhone. Mobile voice communication was now supplemented by texting, web access, digital cameras and PDA functionality.

The fourth wave is where secondary needs come it. We extend the functionality of the innovation. Example: The mobile device, and the iPhone in particular, is suddenly become core to our lives. It ceases to be a single purpose product and becomes a personal platform. Computers have also gone to this level.

The fifth wave is addressing new targets in new occasions. Taking the innovation and extending it into all parts of our lives. Example: The iPhone becomes a GPS device. It becomes a shopping assistant.

All too often, I think we regard innovation as something magical and mysterious. Innovation is something predictable and replicable. It can be planned for, encouraged and fostered.

Twitter Declining? I Don’t Think So…

One item in this morning’s in box caused me to look twice – eMarketer, using numbers from Nielsen, stated that “Data on Twitter Decline Stacks Up.”

twittergraph

Turns out it caught the eye of Jim Jansen at Penn State as well. After a quick and flurried Twit-Talk with my friend Jim, we both agreed the title’s misleading.

If you continue to read down to the fourth paragraph, you start to find the article begins to refute itself:

“The decrease in visitors could mean either falling interest in Twitter or simply migration to other platforms, such as third-party applications and mobile access. ”

Well..duh! Through the rest of the post, eMarketer starts to show just how much Twitter traffic has migrated to 3rd party platforms. As Jim said in a tweet “Don’t even know why they are reporting it like this.” Why indeed? This is just sloppy and misleading. It’s one thing to attract eyeballs from the email in box (worked with me) but it’s another to falsely or misleadingly report research and drop the real picture down to the bottom of the post. I’ve seen enough eye tracking to know that the majority of readers would never get past the first paragraph or two.

Shame on you eMarketer!

The Twitter Follower Personality Sorter

I had a friend in college who said he could tell everything he needed to know about a person by asking them who their favorite Beatle was. The frustrating thing was, he was usually right. For the record, mine was John Lennon. His was George Harrison. I miss them both.

I was just thinking that you can also get a great glimpse inside someone’s psyche by checking out their Twitter follow list – published there for everyone to see. For example:

I just started following Marissa Mayer. I don’t know Marissa very well and the extent of our acquaintance stretches to a few telephone interviews, but I do know what makes it to the popular press, and we share a passion for user experience. But I found it interesting to find in her list fairly slim list of Twitter follows a rather eclectic collection including Ivanka Trump, Ballet Russe, SF MOMA and Al Gore. Of course, there’s a fairly healthy dose of Google and tech based follows as well, but these others may provide some bearing points for Marissa’s personality.

Of course, you’re now going to wonder who I’m following. Well, in addition to the typical industry folks, my bearing points include Jack Welch, John Cleese and NASA.

Search Insider Sneak Peek: The Three-for-One Keynote

First published November 19, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Analytics Evangelist, will be kicking off the Search Insider Summit in just two weeks. I had the opportunity to chat with Avinash last week about what might be in store. As anyone who has heard him before would agree, it won’t be-sugar coated, it will be colorful and it will probably wrench your perspective on things you took for granted at least 180 degrees. Here are the three basic themes he’ll be covering:

The Gold in the Long Tail

Avinash believers there is unmined search gold lying in the long tail of many campaigns. The secret is how to find it in an effective manner.  I’ve talked before about how longtail strategies must factor in the cost of administering the campaign, which can be a challenge as you expand into large numbers of low-traffic phrases. Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory assumes frictionless markets where there is no or very low “inventory management” costs, such as digital music (iTunes) or print on demand bookstores (Amazon). In theory, this should apply to search but, in practice, effective management of search campaigns requires significant investments of time. You have to create copy, manage bid caps and, optimally, tweak landing pages, all of which quickly erode the ROI of long-tail phrases, so I’ll be very interested to see how Avinash recommends getting around this challenge. I’m sure if anyone can find the efficiencies of long tail management, Avinash Kaushik can.

Attribution Redefined

For the past three Search Insider Summits, attribution has been high on the list of discussion topics. Avinash thinks much of the thinking around attribution is askew (his term was not nearly as polite). All search marketers are struggling with attribution models for clients with longer sales cycles; often these models are little more than a marginally educated guess.  I believe simply crunching numbers cannot solve the convoluted challenge of attribution. The solution lies in a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches. This, by the way, is the topic for another panel later in the day, “Balancing Hard Data & Real People.”  Avinash, despite his reputation as the analytics expert, always drops the numbers into a context that keeps human behavior firmly in focus.

Search Data Insights

The third topic that Avinash will be covering is how to take the massive set of consumer intent signals that lie within the search data and leverage it to not only improve your search strategies, but every aspect of your business. We chatted briefly on the phone about how unfortunate it is that search teams are often separated from much of the day-to-day running of a company. Typically, search marketers and their vast resources of campaign and competitive intelligence are not even connected to the other marketing teams. Avinash will show how the “database of intentions” can be effectively mined to provide unprecedented insight into the hearts, minds and needs of your market.

Any one of these topics is worthy of a keynote slot, but at the Search Insider Summit, you’ll be getting all three! See you there in just two weeks!

A Lesson in Social Media from Glee

My kids are hopeless Gleeks, and after watching last week’s episode, I might just be too.

Glee may just be the most perfectly designed social entertainment experiment of this year. I’m not sure if the producers of Fox’s runaway hit did this by intention or dumb luck, but they’re providing a textbook example of how old media can leverage new media.

Fans of Glee (Gleeks) are driving tons of traffic online, and the end of every road seems to be an opportunity for deeper engagement with the show, most with a small price tag attached. Let’s sum up the lessons Glee could teach us about how to leverage online.

Package for YouTube

Each episode of Glee contains at least 4 to 5 “minishows” that can be sliced and packaged to be the perfect “YouTube” length. Of course, there are the musical performances themselves, lasting anywhere for 2 to 5 minutes, but there are also sections obviously intended to go viral, for example, the “All the Single Ladies” football clip from Episode 4 (below). Tell me the director didn’t have Twitter and YouTube in mind when he set up this. The typical Glee episode feels like a series of YouTube clips, glued together with bridging dialogue and storylines. That sounds like a criticism, but it works extremely well with our digital attention spans.

“Glee” Football Team Dances To Single Ladies?!?!

Understand the Basics of Buzz

Boring doesn’t go viral. Something has to tweak our primary emotions in a big way for us to feel compelled to pass it along. According to Gerard Parrot, there are six basic emotions: love, joy, surprise, anger, sadness and fear. If you move the needle far enough on any of those, you’ll create an irresistible urge to share with someone. If the goal is to entertain, your choices are somewhat limited – you probably want to steer clear of anger and sadness tends to make people draw within themselves in unexpected ways. Love is also a deeply personal emotion, so doesn’t have the same viral opportunities as some of the other emotions. That leaves joy, surprise and fear, which are more universal in nature. Glee, being a musical comedy, plays the joy and surprise cards regularly. Again, using the Single Ladies Football clip as an example, tell me that anyone can watch that without feeling a little bit happier. It surprises and delights.

Tap Into Emotions

We love talent shows. We love geeky underdogs. We love struggling romance, especially if it’s twisted into a triangle. We like strong and quirky characters. And we love music. Glee wraps this all into a seamless package, thanks to the natural intuitions of its writers. For example, in the last episode, we have Kurt, perhaps the most interesting character on Glee, demanding a Diva showdown between himself and Rachelle (played by Lea Michele) to see who will sing the song “Defying Gravity” in an upcoming show. Kurt insists there’s no reason why this song “has to be sung by a girl” and he sets out to prove it by hitting a falsetto High F. This, of course, pushes all the right emotional buttons, setting up an irresistible storyline. The idea came from Chris Colfer, who plays Kurt. It was lifted directly from his own high school experiences. The result, perhaps the most popular Glee song yet, currently #28 on iTunes most popular tracks.

Glee Cast – Defying Gravity

Leverage Your Digital Asset Portfolio

The real genius of Glee comes from how they’ve spread their online net, welcoming all Gleeks with opening arms. Glee is the perfect example of the new diversified nature of online presence. It’s not simply about a website anymore. Glee is all over Twitter (@glee onfox), YouTube, Facebook, iTunes and all the right blogs and forums. And, all the pieces dovetail together perfectly. Audio and video clips lead directly to iTunes purchase links, opportunities to purchase the full soundtrack or online versions of the full episodes on Fox’s website, complete with advertising. Glee is creating revenue tie ins that extend far beyond the traditional TV show. Glee’s not the first to do this. They borrowed a page from American Idol’s playbook, also masters of digital integration. But I think this is the first time I’ve seen it so effectively done in a scripted show.

Understand that Communities Take Time

Fox had an understanding of this right from the beginning. The pilot was aired on May 18, several months before the show’s fall debut. The long, slow release was to give momentum a chance to develop. It was all part of Fox’s marketing plan. “The way we’re looking at May 19 is, it’s the world’s largest grassroots screening,” said Joe Earley, the executive VP in charge of marketing for Fox. “The show sells itself better than any (campaign) can. Our goal is to turn the people who watched it into brand ambassadors, to use hackneyed marketing-speak. We believe that when you watch this show, you can’t help but get out the word.” Earley’s strategy has worked before for some of the most loved TV shows in history: Cheers, M*A*S*H, All in the Family, Seinfeld and The Office. We need to get comfortable with a new show and develop some empathy for the characters. Fox also leverage the Web well in helping this grassroots community to take hold. The “Glee” pilot followed Chris Anderson’s marketing strategy: it was free and ubiquitous. Fox pumped it out through every available online channel: Hulu, Fox, YouTube and other sites.

Plan Your Online Landscape

Glee understands the new dynamics of our digital society and has staked out prime real estate at each of the intersections. I think the entertainment industry is substantially ahead of the curve in keeping its finger on the pulse of online activity. The following charts from Google trends shows the typical activity following each airing.

gleegraph1

This shows trends for Google searches throughout 2009. As Fox intended, the pilot debut (the first peak) had a corresponding jump in search activity. This has been steadily building as the series has kicked into gear. Like all things online, Gleeks are connecting through search (one area where Fox could brush up, but I’ll get to that in a minute). Let’s zoom in for a closer look at the traffic in the last 30 days:

gleegraph30days

Here, we see peaks corresponding with the typical air dates. What’s interesting here is that no new episodes aired between October 21 and November 11, due to the World Series. Yet search traffic still spiked during what would have been the air dates.

Let’s now look at what’s happening on Twitter, thanks to Trendistic.com. Since the fall kick off, we’ve seen reliable peaks representing almost 1% of all Twitter traffic. That’s impressive. Notice the lack of traffic during the 2 week hiatus, from Oct 21 to November 11.

gleetwittergraph

Now, let’s look at the one thing Fox could do better – improve their search visibility (once a search marketer, always a search marketer). Although the official Fox site ranks #1 organically for Glee, the popularity of the show means that Fox should start considering expanding their search strategy. The three most popular characters: Lea Michele (who is going to be a major star), Cory Monteith and Chris Colfer are starting to generate some significant search volumes in Google.

gleecastgraph

Notice how Colfer and Michele took off after the November 11th episode which featuring their amazing duet of “Defying Gravity” (yes, I love show Broadway show tunes), which I’m sure led to a pile of iTune downloads. Yet, if you searched for any of these cast members, you would not find any official sites, but rather a motley collection of fan sites, forums as well as Wikipedia and IMDB entries. Fox is dropping the search ball here. As online communities build, you can provide warm, welcoming and well lit locations for them to visit. Fox has hugely popular content that would allow them to better leverage all this burgeoning search traffic.

Despite the rather mild criticism about Fox’s search strategy, Glee is doing almost everything right here. If you were looking for an example of how to integrate social into your strategy, you could do worse than becoming a Gleek.

Reality – Sundre Style

SundreSometimes, life has a way of slapping you in the face. In our business, one would think that the world revolves around Twitter, Facebook and Google. Normally, the digital world consumes a large part of my day. But I came face to face with what is reality for many people in the world.

I spent this weekend in Sundre. If you’ve never heard of Sundre, don’t worry, You’re not alone. Sundre is 2500 hardy souls that live on the edge of the foothills in Alberta, Canada. This is about as cowboy as it gets. Stetsons, Levis (the real Levis, deep blue with no fading, artificial holes or other city slicker crap) and cowboy boots. All the parking lots are full of North American trucks and every radio station (it seems) plays country music – deep rooted country full of twang and steel guitars. My dad (the reason for my visit, but I’ll get to that in a bit) was listening to some country show on the radio that consisted of some ancient announcer going on endlessly about the “honest deals” to be found at the local farm implement dealer, punctuated occasionally by a Hank Williams or Conway Twitty song. At one point, he started talking about an upcoming community event in Hanna (which is even smaller that Sundre) and threw in the tidbit that Hanna is the home town of the “boys of Nickleback.” Hearing this old codger talk about Chad Kroeger and a rock band seemed as out of place as a Prius in the Sundre Curling Rink parking lot.

Sundre is the town I grew up in.  And this weekend, I went back home because my dad just had hip replacement surgery and my mom broke her right arm. This is throwing a severe wrench into the day-to-day workings of my parent’s home. So I went to lend a hand, as well as a pair of mobile legs. The things I usually blog about never seemed further away. The role of Twitter or Facebook in defining our new social bonds didn’t come up in any of the conversations I'[ve had in the last 72 hours. Not once did the market share split of Google and Bing encroach upon my consciousness. My reality involved walkers, slings, several talks about recycling (this has become my dad’s passion) trips to grocery stores and hospital waiting rooms, cleaning out compost pails and cooking up enough food to last Mom and Dad for a week or two.

Still, the weekend was not without its charm. I was amazed during both my trips to the local grocery store (which, in a small town, is the original social network) when they insisted on carrying my bags out to my car. And I was equally astounded when on a quick trip into a liquor store to pick up a bottle of wine, the sole employee behind the till asked me to wait “just a minute” while she ran to the back of the store. Within arms reach there were at least 60 bottles of alcohol and the door was two steps away, with not a pair of watchful eyes in sight. Trust seems to run thicker in the country.

But even in Sundre, the digital revolution is being felt. High on my list of to-do’s for the weekend was getting their computer working (after a trip to Radio Shack) so they could check email. And I had to borrow a few hard back chairs with arms (borrow being a relative term, I just went to the meeting hall at the church and helped myself – they’ll make their way back eventually) for my dad so he could have three “stations” set up where he’ll be spending a good part of the next 6 weeks of recovery: one was in the corner of the front room, next to the window, so he can read his magazines and keep a watchful eye on the street, one at the table for eating, and one at the computer in the office, so he can play solitaire and check out the odd website. It may not be Ad:Tech or SES, but in Sundre, this is pretty revolutionary.