Author Archives: ghotchkiss

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.

Rupert, meet Reality. Reality, meet Rupert.

rupert_murdoch_tokyoRupert Murdoch’s rantings are so out of touch that they’re bordering on lunacy, or, at a minimum, stupidity. He’s mad that his old revenue model isn’t working anymore. Maybe, Rupert, that’s because we’re in a new era and people have changed their minds. It has nothing to do with search engines being kleptomaniacs. It’s people doing what they do..finding the easiest path to information. This boat has sailed, dear Rupert. You can jump up and down and stamp your feet, but the only people to really get made at are your readers. They’ve found a new way to get information, and unfortunately, it bypasses your monetization model. You are no longer in control.

Murdoch’s answer is to throw a subscription model in on all his publications and stop Google and other engines from indexing it and “stealing” his precious content. Hmm..let’s see now. The entire world navigates through search. Every day, billions of eyeballs go to Google seeking content. You have content. So what do you do? You lock Google out. And you try to lock customers in by hijacking their wallets and leaving them no choice. Let’s recap: Lock the world out and lock your customers in. Isn’t that what East Germany tried to do with the Berlin Wall? Let me know how that works out for you Rupert.

Murdoch’s not alone in this. Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson took Google’s Marissa Mayer to task for encouraging digital promiscuity. Apparently, Google has built a virtual “red light district”, threatening the stability of the sacred union of readers and struggling publishers. Again, maybe it’s because the readers aren’t finding what they’re looking for at “home”.

This denial of a dying industry is nothing new. History has repeated itself over and over again in discontinuous shifts in the marketplace. Yet somehow the behavior of the terminal industries never changes. George Bernard Shaw nailed it a century ago:

” If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.”

I guess it’s understandable, really. We’re looking at evolution and when the environment shifts, dinosaurs can’t suddenly decide to become gazelles. Somehow, it helps to rant, rave and rail against the unfairness of it all. Oh..and perhaps it’s also beneficial to call the gazelles names like “kleptomaniacs”.

THIS JUST IN…

Techdirt has a gritty little post showing all the Murdoch owned sites that “steal” content as an aggregator. So, apparently it’s okay to be parasitic as long as you’re on the right side of the relationship.

SIS Sneak Peek: Looking Backward and Forward

First published November 12, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In about three weeks, we’ll be gathering in Park City, Utah for another Search Insider Summit. Between now and then, I’ll be providing a sneak peek at some of the content that will be covered. On Day 1 of the Summit, Jordan Rohan from Clearmeadow Partners and Mark Mahaney from Citi Investment Research will look both backward and  forward six months to help us get a fix on lessons learned and what we should be paying attention to. I asked both Jordan and Mark to provide some hints of what they’re seeing in their rearview mirrors and what’s coming down the road.

Mark Mahaney: The 6 Months that Was….

I’ve talked previously  about the economic belly-flop being the best thing that could have happened to digital marketing. Mark agrees: “I think that the recession accelerated the adoption of digital advertising, because it accelerated the adoption of performance-based advertising.”

In evolution, adversity speeds up the pace of change, and the past 18 months have certainly been adverse for marketers. There has been a lag between the uptake of digital advertising and its potential. Case in point, PEW estimates the average person spends almost 5 hours a day online, more than with any other medium. Yet advertisers have only allocated about 12% of their budgets to digital advertising. Print still dwarfs digital in most budgets, and we only spend a half hour a day with some type of publication in our hands.

The advertisers that move to digital are almost guaranteed some impressive “early entry” quick wins because of this adoption lag. When you start measuring and comparing performance, digital will shine. And search will shine brightest of all. I’m not sure “performance-based advertising” is an inclusive enough label, but it’s the one that’s stuck to this point. And by that measure, digital performs like a rock star.

But if the economy was the dark cloud, and the adoption of digital was the silver lining, there’s still one more nasty surprise hidden inside the silver lining for digital agencies: advertisers’ expectations are higher than ever, and in some cases, they will be impossible to meet: “It’s as if the recession taught us never to pay full retail again, and never to buy CPM again.”

The laser focus on performance may set a standard  that’s so demanding, even search might be hard-pressed to meet it. I believe this is a temporary attitude that will relax over time — but the fact is, the economy hammered several nails in the coffin of traditional advertising attitudes.

Mark Mahaney – The 6 Months to Come

Mark hedged his bets by picking two horses in the upcoming race for the hottest trend over the next 6 months, and neither come as a surprise: “The galloping market share of smart phones has to finally, perhaps, translate into the move to mobile search that we all know is coming. Certainly, the smallest hints of adoption are starting to show up in the search usage logs, but it’s still infinitesimal compared to desktop search.”

And finally, Mark urges us to pay attention to social media advertising. Again, there are a lot of questions still to be answered, but study after study (the latest being FEED 09 from Razorfish) is rolling out now talking about the importance of social in the digital marketplace.

Jordan Rohan – Don’t Look Now, But We’re Recovering…

Jordan had one theme that stretched back 6 months and projects 6 months in the future: growth returns to media (aka: what a difference a year makes). Jordan provides some supporting evidence:

  •       Ford is profitable again
  •       CBS is charging advertisers double the rates (scatter TV ads) of a year ago.
  •       Apple has its most profitable quarter ever, thanks to the sale of 7.4 million iPhones.
  •       Google buys AdMob for $750 million in stock.For more on Mark and Jordan’s crystal ball, join us for the Search Insider Summit in Park City.

Canada’s Highway of Heroes

Today is Remembrance Day in Canada. This year, the sacrifice has been brought home by those Canadian soldiers who have given their lives in Afghanistan. The Canadian soldiers are brought back home to the Canadian Forces Base in Trenton, Ontario and from there, they are then taken to the Center for Forensic Sciences in Toronto along a stretch of Highway 401 that has since been renamed the Highway of Heroes. The stretch of highway is about 100 miles long, and since 2002, as the convoys transport the fallen soldiers, Canadians show their respect and gratitude by lining the side of the highway and every overpass, silently saluting as the convoy passes.

Today I’d like to share a little of the Highway of Heroes with you with a video by John Hill:

Socially, We’re Suckers for a Deal

Razorfish’s new FEED 2009 report found that consumers like to spread the word digitally about great deals on brands. In fact, this far surpassed their desire to just talk about brands.

Humans are still Humans, even Online

Here’s the thing that gets me. When we talk digital channels, we seem to forget that humans are humans. We’ll still be the way we’ve always been, we’ll just do in on a new canvas. The “finding” of FEED 2009 discovered that we like to talk about deals. This has been hardwired into humans since we crawled out of caves. In a bit, I’ll share the findings of an interesting study that looked at how this social news spreads through our networks.

The Results of FEED

But first, let’s look at the other results of the study. Despite my morning grumpiness, this is a report worth downloading:

FEED09_Chart-Q1765% of consumers have had a digital experience that either positively or negatively changed their opinion about a brand. Again, this is behavior that is common, we all have perception altering brand experiences. As we spend more time online, it’s natural that this will happen here too.

Branding is now a participatory experience. We’re no longer passive consumers of brand messaging. We now expect to roll up our sleeves, get in and muck around with the building of brands. We want to do things with the brand. We will now participate in building the aggregate story of a brand. 73% of study participants had posted a product or brand review on web sites like Amazon, Yelp, Facebook or Twitter. We now have a voice and we’re using it.

We’re becoming Brand Fans. 40% of consumers have “friended” a brand on Facebook and/or MySpace and 26% of followed a brand on Twitter. Again, this isn’t new, it’s just going digital. There are certain brands that inspire fierce loyalty: Apple, Harley Davidson, Nike. It’s natural that these Brand Fans would now be expressing themselves online. One word of caution for Brand Marketers here. People won’t suddenly become fans just because you’re on FaceBook. You have to be a brand that people care about.

FEED09_Chart-Q27Here’s the study tidbit that was “surprising”. Of those that follow brands on Twitter, 44% said access to exclusive deals is the main reason. Same is true for those that “friended” a brand on Facebook or MySpace..accounting for 37% of participants. The next highest reason for following a brand on Twitter? Being a current customer, at 23.5% And again, this would be for those brands that inspire an unusually high degree of loyalty.

Strength of Weak Ties

Sometime ago, I talked about a fascinating study by Frenzen and Nakamoto that looked at how rumors, or in this case, news of a bargain, spread through social networks. It explored the roll of Mark Granovetter’s famous “Weak Ties” in social networks. Social networks tend to be “clumpy”, rather than uniformly dense. There are dense clumps, representing our families, closest friends and co-workers that we see every day. You’re connected to these people with “Strong Ties”. But the clumps are also connected with “Weak ties” that span the gaps. These are ties between more distant family, casual friends and acquaintances. As Granovetter discovered, news spreads quickly through the strong ties within a clump, but it’s the ability to jump the weak ties that really causes word to spread throughout the network. We rely on the “connectedness” of these weak ties for things like news on potential jobs, social tidbits and yes, the scoop on a great bargain. If you look at the nature of these weak ties, you’ll realize that it’s exactly those types of ties we tend to maintain on Twitter and Facebook.

In 1993, Jonathon Frenzen and Kent Nakamoto decided to explore the conditions that had to exist for news to jump from cluster to cluster across those weak ties. They tested the nature of the message itself and also how the news would impact the person delivering the message, a condition called moral hazard. In other words, would the messenger lose something by spreading the word? The scenario they used to test the conditions for this social “viralness” was news of a sale. There were three variables built into the study: the structure of the network itself (strongly connected vs weakly connected), the attractiveness of the sale (20% off vs 50 to 70% off) and the availability of the sale item (unlimited vs very limited quantities – introducing the aspect of moral hazard).

Frenzen and Nakamoto found that in all cases, news of the sale spread quickly through the strong clusters. But when the message wasn’t that remarkable (the 20% off example), word of mouth had difficulty jumping across weak ties. Also, when moral hazard was high (quantities were limited) again, the message tended to get stuck within a cluster and not be transmitted across the weak ties. If you look back at the original post, I go into more depth about how this impacts our inclination to spread news through our networks.

Twitter: The Weak Tie Pipeline

So, let’s take this back to the Razorfish study. There needs to be a few conditions present for news to spread along weak ties: The information has to be valuable (50 to 70% off) and it can’t put the person holding the information in moral hazard (if I share this information amongst too many people, there will be nothing left for me or my family). The example given in the study, following a Brand on Twitter to get news of exclusive offers, is our “weak tie” to the brand, so we can be first to benefit. And, if the discount is substantial and there is low moral hazard, we will in turn Tweet about it ourselves.

The Razorfish study indicated surprise that more people were engaging in social networks to learn about discounts and not to evangelize brands. Again, if we look at human behavior, there is no surprise here. Brand evangelization engages a completely different part of our brain, the same part, incidentally, that gets triggered when we talk about religion and other unusually strong beliefs. These are things most of us hold closer to our chest. We share them with our strong ties, but we don’t usually spread that across weak ties. There are exceptions, of course, but I think most marketers assume all of us are willing to build public shrines to their products. That’s just not how humans tick.

But, humans can’t resist spreading the word if that word has social value (a great bargain) and we don’t miss out ourselves by spreading the word. Those are the messages built to set Granovetter’s weak ties singing in a social network. We’ve been this way for a long, long time. And now that Twitter and FaceBook are here, we’ll still be that way.

The Common Denominator between Brains, Cities and the Internet (..oh..and ants too)

If you took the time to look at an ant colony..really look at it…you’d be amazed. In his book Emergence, Steven Johnson did just that. And here’s what he found. Ant colonies are perfectly designed. The food supply of the colony is the perfect distance away from trash pile, and both are strategically placed to be the greatest possible distance from the ants’ graveyard. It’s as if some ant mastermind somewhere took the time to plot out the colony design on some ant-sized draftboard. Of course, that didn’t happen. What did happen is that even ant sized brains can remember a set of simple rules and over time, even with the complexity of thousands of ants doing their thing, a sort of order emerges. Patterns that look to be deliberated planned emerge out of complex and seemingly chaotic activity.

The Organized Cesspool: Manchester

In the 1800’s, the industrial revolution caused the city of Manchester, England to explode in size, from 24,000 in 1773 to 250,000 by 1850. The growth was not steered by any form of urban planning. Factories sprung up anywhere. Factories needed workers, so new neighborhoods, many shantytowns housing the poorest of the poor seeking work, suddenly sprouted up. People need some basic form of support, so new shops and services suddenly appeared. All this happened without a plan in place, a seemingly hopeless mishmash of urban development. Alex De Toqueville described it like this, “From this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilization works its miracles, and civilized man is turned back almost into a savage.”  Dickens was even less kind, ” What I have seen has disgusted and astonished me beyond all measure.”

One of the visitors to Manchester saw something different, however. Frederich Engels, who would become co-author of the Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx, came to Manchester to see first hand the horrific struggles of the Industrial-era working class. Certainly he found what he came looking for, but he also saw something that surprised him. There, in the squalid chaos that was Manchester, he found a strange sort of order that had emerged. Manchester had developed so that the factory owners that lived in the upper class neighborhoods could live for years in the city without seeing a working class neighborhood. Thoroughfares, businesses and social institutions emerged so that the city just “worked” for it’s inhabitants. Just like the ants, the citizens of Manchester had some social rules that dictated the pattern of the city that emerged.

Brains and Cities: Evolved Functionality

citybrainThis natural evolution of cities is the subject of a recent study that comes from Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute. The finding? Cities are organized like human brains.As cities grow, they not only increase in physical size, they also become more densely interconnected. As brains increase in complexity from species to species, you don’t just get more neurons, you also get more efficient neurons. Both can handle more traffic.

The study used Seattle and Chicago as examples. You couldn’t just take Seattle and triple it to become Chicago. The traffic corridors wouldn’t be able to handle the increased flow. There wouldn’t be enough on ramps and off ramps, and the ones that did exist would be would be too small. The services and support needed to accommodate the population wouldn’t be efficiently planned. As cities grow, they evolve to meet the needs of their citizens. Every time I visit New York, it amazes me that Manhattan can work at all. It seems to be an impossibly delicate act of magic..keeping that many people on an island fed and functioning. This is one of the reasons high growth cities struggle to keep up with infrastructure such as required freeways and public transit – they’re growing faster than the infrastructure, handcuffed by the need for administrative approval, can change to support them.

And if I think Manhattan is a miracle, the complexity of what the human brain has to deal with daily represents a feat of impressiveness several magnitudes greater. Indeed, the functioning of the human brain is so complex, all the combined efforts of science have barely scratched the surface of how the damned thing actually works.

The Emergence of the Internet

This common theme of functional evolution and patterns emerging from complexity is also playing out currently on the Internet. Much like Industrial age Manchester, the Internet is growing exponentially without any master plan. And yet, it seems to work. And, as the internet evolves, just like brains and cities, it becomes more interconnected. Functionality is increased through API’s and mash-ups. The internet is evolving into an incredibly complex ecosystem that is remarkably workable. And, like all complex systems, the emergence of workable patterns will depend on a handful of universal rules: the ability to find information, the ability to do things, the ability to talk to people, the ability to have fun and the ability to buy stuff. That’s all we really want and the Internet will naturally emerge in the way best suited to accomplish those simple goals.

Dr. Jansen’s Coming to Town

My friend Dr. Jim Jansen from Penn State is flying in to meet with the gang at Enquiro today. I’m thrilled! Jim has been spending his time of late slicing and dicing a huge data set of a major search marketer. He’s found a number of interesting things, including behaviors that tend to call the concept of a search funnel into question, and also that “gender neutral” queries convert better than “male” or “female” ones. I did an extensive interview with Jim a few weeks ago, which resulted in three articles for Search Engine Land, some background on Jim, one on the Search Buying Funnel and one on this idea of Search “Sex” and Personalization. You can also read the complete transcript here on Out of My Gord.

For my money, Jim is one of the few academics doing really interesting and relevant research into search. I’m usually aghast at how far behind the profs teaching internet marketing are compared to their students. Jim has proven the exception by rolling both sleeves up and diving deep into mounds of campaign and click stream data.

It will also be good to share with Jim the results of some of the research we’ve been doing here at Enquiro. A number of our studies have highlighted some very interesting behaviors. Because I tend to view research with a decidedly qualitative bias, it would be good to get Jim’s quantitative slant on things.

It’s going to be a great day!