Author Archives: ghotchkiss

Summer Stories: How I Became a Researcher

First published August 13, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

About six years ago, I had one of those life-changing moments that set me on a new path. I’ve always been curious. I’ve always had questions, and up to that point in my life, I was usually able to find an answer, with enough perseverance. But in 2003, I had a question that no one seemed able to answer.  It didn’t seem to be an especially difficult question, and I knew someone had the answer. They just weren’t sharing it.

The Unanswerable Question

The question was this: what percentage of searchers click on the organic results and what percentage click on the sponsored ads? Today, that’s not even a question; it’s common knowledge for search marketers. But in 2003, that wasn’t the case. Sponsored search ads were still in their infancy (Overture had just been acquired by Yahoo, and Google’s AdWords was only a couple years old) and no one at either engine was sharing the clickthrough breakdowns between organic and paid.

I reached out to everyone I knew in the industry, but either they didn’t know, or they weren’t willing to go public with the info. My connections into Google and Yahoo were nonexistent at the time. No one, it seemed, had the answer. My curiosity was stymied. And that’s when my revelation happened. If no one had the answer, perhaps I could provide it.

At the time, research was not something Enquiro did. When we wanted to find out an answer, we combed through the forums, just like everyone else. But there seemed to be a noticeable gap in available information. There was plenty of discussion about technical SEO tactics, but no one seemed to be interested in how people actually used search engines.

To me, this was an unforgiveable oversight. If we were using search as a marketing channel, shouldn’t we have some understanding of how our prospects used search?  Off the top of my head, I jotted down a list of several questions I had about how people actually search; questions that appeared to have no readily available answers. It was at that point that I officially became a researcher.

Discovering “Why”

Our first research project proved to set the path we would go down for much of the follow-up: we just looked at how people used search to do things. Our methodology has become much tighter and we now have added eye-tracking and even neuro-scanning to our arsenal, but from the beginning, our research was more focused on “why” than “what.” The first paper was called “Inside the Mind of the Searcher” and it’s still referenced on a regular basis. Frankly, we were surprised with how quickly it was picked up in the industry. Suddenly, we became the experts on search user behavior, a crown I was uncomfortable with at the beginning. Yes, we were exploring new ground, but I always worried about how representative this was to the real world. Did people really do what we said they did, or was it just a research-created anomaly?

Defining the Golden Triangle

For us, the groundbreaking study was our first eye tracking study, done through Eyetools in San Francisco. I had read the Poynter study about how people interacted with online publications and was fascinated. “What if,” I wondered, “we did this with a search engine?” I found a similarly curious cohort in Kevin Lee from DidIt and together with Eyetools we launched the first study, which discovered the now-famous “Golden Triangle.” I remember sitting with Kevin in a speaker prep room at a show whose name escapes me, looking at the very first results of the data. The pattern jumped off the page:

“Look at that!” I said, “It’s a triangle!”

Kevin, always the search optimizer, said, “We need something catchy to call it, something that we can optimize for. The Magic Triangle?”

Because the heat map tends to indicate the most popular areas in a reddish yellow color, the answer was right in front of us. I can’t remember whether it was Kevin or I that first said it, but as soon as we said it, we knew the name would stick: “It’s a gold color… The Golden Triangle?”

Is It Real?

Even with the release of the study and the quick acceptance, I still questioned whether this represented real behavior. It was later that year when I got the confirmation I needed. I had just presented the results during a session at an industry show and was stepping down from the stage. Someone was quietly standing in the corner and came over as I started to head out of the room.

“Hi. I just wanted to let you know. I work with Yahoo on user experience and your heat map looks identical to our internal ones. I actually thought you had somehow got your hands on ours.” The validation was a few years in coming, but very welcome when it finally arrived.

Today, ironically, things have come full circle. I have talked to sales and engineering teams at all the major engines and much of the research they refer to about user behavior comes from Enquiro.

And the answer to my original question has held remarkably consistent in the past 6 years: What percentage of users click on paid ads vs. organic listings? For commercial searches, it’s about 70% organic, 30% paid. Just in case you were curious.

Summer Stories: How I Almost Got Busted by the St. Louis FBI

First published August 6, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This week, the latest in my “fireside chats” (phrase courtesy of Aaron Goldman) about past SEM memories.

In the early days of our search marketing business, our collection of SEO clients ran the gamut from slightly off-white to shades of gray approaching black. Yes, back in the day we too did some stuff that wasn’t smiled upon by the anti-spam gods of the search universe. Of course, it was (and still is) sometimes difficult to determine where the line between white and black could be found.

Desperately Seeking Sublets

One of the more interesting groups we dealt with was a network of apartment-locating services. Prior to working with them, I had no idea that apartment locating was such a hyper-competitive business, but these were voracious adopters of search at the very earliest stages of the industry. The goal was to position all 10 of their various “doorway” domains in the top 10 for the prime keywords, essentially shutting out the competition. And for some reason, Texas was the hotbed of apartment finders. In 2002, if you had searched for apartments in Dallas, Houston or Austin, you’d have seen our clients.

These independent Web-based businesses formed a national association, effectively creating their own link farm. And soon after forming the association, they decided to have a meeting. The location was set to be St. Louis because it was the geographic center of the country,  And, for the first time, my company’s co-founder, Bill Barnes, and myself were asked to fly down and make a live client presentation.

My Laser Focus

As we started to work through the logistics, we realized we had no way to show the presentation slide deck we had put together. We didn’t have a projector, and the hotel meeting room we were to meet the clients in didn’t have one either. I quickly scoured St. Louis and found an AV rental shop that could provide us with a projector for the day. I arranged to have it waiting for us at the hotel when we checked in. At the time, a projector was more than a business essential; it was a cool toy that we could use to project a movie on the hotel wall, giving Bill and I our own big screen experience the night before the meeting. But the projector also came with a laser pointer, the first time I had ever encountered one of these nifty little gadgets. For regular readers, you might remember that I’m still fascinated by them, a personality quirk that came to light at the last Search Insider Summit.

Soon, a fully grown man was running around a hotel room in St. Louis, shining the little red dot at anything he could find. Bill cowered in the corner, covering his eyes for fear of inadvertent laser surgery. Being a scientifically curious type of individual, it became vitally important to me to see just how far the range of my pointer was. I ran to the window to find some targets further afield.

Could it hit the car in the parking lot below? Yes!

Could it hit the opposite wing of the hotel, some 150 feet away? Yes!

Next door to the hotel was a large, featureless office block. I had to see if the laser’s reach extended that far. The little red dot traveled along the wall, hundreds of feet away. In fact, you could see it go right through the window, shining on the interior walls of the offices inside the building. Bill, only half jokingly, said, “For God’s sake, shut that thing off, before someone thinks you’re a sniper.” Reluctantly, I hit the off switch and settled down to watch Julia Roberts in our makeshift hotel cinema.

From the Files of the FBI

The next morning, we had a few hours to kill before the presentation was scheduled. We decided to talk a walk in the bitter St. Louis cold to check out some of the surrounding area. We started walking past the office building next door that had served as my target range the night before. There, at 2222 Market Street, St. Louis, we discovered we were next-door neighbors to the headquarters of the FBI.

To this day, I can imagine the scenario: Two FBI agents, putting in extra hours to finish paper work, heads down in the nearly empty office. Suddenly, one raises his head to grab his coffee cup and is somewhat startled to see a small red laser dot moving along the wall and slowly coming to rest on his partner’s forehead. Somewhat shakily he says, “Ed, I think we may have a situation.”

Nope, not a terrorist.  Just a search marketer.

Summer Stories: How I Met Fredrick Marckini

First published July 30, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

As I said last week, I’m in the mood for a little reminiscing, so today, I’ll be sharing the story of my first industry event and how I met iProspect’s founder, Fredrick Marckini.

Bound for Beantown

It was 2001 before I attended my first industry trade show. As you might imagine, doing SEO in a small city of 120,000 people in Western Canada, our ability to “talk shop” with anyone who had the slightest clue what we were talking about was limited. The idea of being in a room with a few hundred other SEOs was mindboggling, so we checked our corporate credit card limit (our primary source of financing) and I was soon Boston-bound for SES.

The goal for the show was to “get to know people in the industry.” I had a “hit list” of industry notables I was instructed to make contact with. I staked out hallways and skulked around the doors leading into the sessions with the intention of “bumping into” Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman, Detlev Johnson, Marshall Simmonds, Bruce Clay and, yes, Fredrick Marckini. I swear to God, I had an actual list and would put tick marks beside names when my mission was accomplished. Each day I would phone back to the office in Kelowna to report my success rate.

SES Here I Come!

Industry events in 2001 (the show site is still live) were not quite like industry events today. I’m not sure what the official total attendance was, but it was in the hundreds, not thousands. Everyone from the show could fit in one moderately sized meeting room for lunch, and there was still room left around the perimeter for the “trade show floor,” which consisted of six or seveb folding tables with vinyl banners hung behind.  One would think, given the relatively intimate nature of the show, meeting my “targets” wouldn’t be that difficult. However, I had two things going against me: First, I’m not the most social of animals. I’m the guy who’s awkwardly waiting just outside the “conversation cluster” at most networking events, waiting to be noticed. Small talk has never been my forte. And secondly, search isn’t the most visual of industries. I knew the names of the people I wanted to meet, but I had no idea what they looked like.

Nevertheless, with persistence and dumb luck, I worked my way down the list, having less than memorable (on their part, not mine) introductions with Danny, Chris and Detlev. But one name on the list remained unchecked. Fredrick Marckini proved to be remarkably elusive. Fredrick was one of the few stars of the industry: a regular columnist for ClickZ, author of not one but three books on search marketing and the founder of  iProspect, the most successful search agency in the industry. I sniffed the winds of the Boston Marriott Copley, determined to bag my prey before I headed back to Kelowna.

The Smell of Desperation

My opportunities were rapidly running out. But on the last day, a small glimmer of hope! I was chatting in a hallway with another attendee and he mentioned that someone from iProspect had given a fascinating presentation on keyword research in the session he was just at. With only the slightest hint of a tremor of excitement, I asked if Mr. Marckini was in attendance.

“I think so. He was standing near the back.”

I literally vanished before the guy’s eyes, rushing down the hallway to the aforementioned conference room, hoping that Marckini would still be lingering in an after-session chat. I burst into the room, but alas, it was empty. Dejected, I wandered out, deciding to make a quick pit stop at the nearest men’s room.

Note: For the squeamish, the next passage is slightly tasteless but essential to the story, so please forgive me.

Steady Now…

While standing at the urinal, I was carefully maintaining the unwritten rules of men’s room etiquette, staring intently at the featureless tile in front of me. I became aware of a presence beside me: fairly tall, dark blue suit, dark hair and glasses. I turned my neck the tiniest fraction of an inch, to allow discreet scanning with my peripheral vision. I think..yes., yes…I’m sure! According to the best description available to me, Fredrick Marckini was at the next urinal!

But what to do? You simply don’t introduce yourself at a urinal, especially when there’s still directly relevant business to be completed. Timing was essential here. We had to finish at the same time. So, by imposing a not inconsiderable degree of biophysical control, I managed to reach the sinks simultaneously with Fredrick. But still, there was awkwardness to contend with. At what point is it okay to initiate social contact? Pre-rinse, mid-rinse or post-rinse? The specter of time ticking away drove me to recklessness. With hands still wet and soapy, I threw caution to the wind. It was now or never!

“Fredrick? Nice to meet you. I’m Gord Hotchkiss from Search Engine Position [our name pre-Enquiro].”

Our hands tried to grasp in a firm, manly handshake, but the soapiness made it more of a slippery glancing blow.

“Oh. I know about Search Engine Position. You guys do great work!”

My respect for Fredrick as a charming gentleman started at that moment. Not only was he gracious to a wild-eyed and soapy stranger, he actually invited me to be his guest at an Overture dinner that night. It’s been awhile since I bumped into Fredrick at an industry event (I think SES Toronto a few years ago was the last time) but it’s still one of my favorite memories.

You’re a classy guy, Fredrick!

Summer Stories: How I Got into Search

First published July 23, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This time of year always causes me to look backwards. My birthday is in the summer, so the increasing tally of years is hard to ignore. But it was also summer, specifically the summer of 2004, when I wrote my first Search Insider column, called “The Growing Pains of Search.” That was 213 columns and about 180,000 words ago (I’m rapidly closing in on David Berkowitz and his 224 SI columns). And, finally, it was the summer of 1999 when Enquiro (then Search Engine Position) was born, so this marks my tenth official anniversary in the biz (I’ve been playing around at organic optimization since 1996).

All this preamble brings me, finally, to my point: I really don’t want to write about Bing or Google or Yahoo today. In fact, for the next few weeks, I want to go public with a few of the stories that usually only get told at Enquiro staff parties when I’m feeling a touch nostalgic (or a touch inebriated).

This week: How Danny Sullivan first got me into search…

As I said, it was in 1996 that I first started playing around with organic optimization. As the owner of a small, fledgling ad agency, my clients (in this case, a hotel in Kelowna, BC) started to ask whether I designed Web sites.

“Of course I design Web sites…”

How hard could it be? Soon, I had FrontPage and was trying to figure out how to get a sliced image to stay together in a table. After much trial and error, I had a Web site that was good enough (by 1996 standards, which thankfully weren’t too stringent) to go live. There’s still a reasonable facsimile of the original design at archive.org (check out the funky animated gif of the rotating diamonds). Inevitably, the next question came…

“So, when does everybody start booking online?”

Ooops! I hadn’t thought about traffic. If you build it, aren’t they just supposed to come? That was when I first started thinking about search engines, which at the time were Infoseek, Yahoo, Lycos, Excite and AltaVista. How the heck do you get on those things? I submitted the site, but it seemed to have little impact. The hit counter was ticking over at a rate slightly slower than Continental drift.

At that time, I was also a regional reseller for an online yellow pages site, which was supposed to be the “next big thing.” I remember going down to a reseller meeting in Vancouver, B.C. where an outside consultant was introducing a new service we could sell: search engine positioning.

“Hmm, this sounds intriguing.”

The guy, who was counting on this new business to finance a semiretired lifestyle, passed out an information sheet explaining what he did, along with what he charged, which was several thousand dollars per site.

“How hard can this be?” I said to myself (yes, it’s a recurring theme in my life). I looked over the information sheet….

“Meta tags. I know what those are. Alt tags. Yep. I know what those are too. I wonder…. ”

I took the sheet home and decided to check out this “search engine positioning” thing. The verbiage on the sheet seemed impressive. The guy sounded like he knew what he was talking about. But the sheet was very short on detail. There must be something else out there on this search “stuff.”

After some stumbling around the Web, I happened on a site with the title “A Webmaster’s Guide to Search Engines.” And there, verbatim, was all the stuff from the sales sheet. This “consultant” had simply cut and pasted sections from it. The great part was that everything was there, all the things you needed to do to optimize your own site. The guy was charging thousands for doing the same stuff that was laid out free for anyone on the Web. I was so grateful I actually became a subscriber to that site so I could lend some support.

I immediately started optimizing the client’s site. A few weeks later, they broke the top 10. And by the end of the month, they were number one for their top key phrases. For those of you who have been around as long as I have, you may remember playing Infoseek “Leapfrog.” Because Infoseek indexed almost instantly and updated results, you could use it to test your SEO skills and see what happened, ratcheting up the rankings against your competitors. Using the Webmaster’s Guide as my base, I soon figured out the fundamentals of search positioning (as it was then commonly called).

“What the hell! This stuff actually works! Maybe there is a business idea here after all.”

It took me a few more years to actually get the guts to focus exclusively on search, but that’s how I got started. Of course, the author of the Webmaster’s Guide was Danny Sullivan, and it later became Search Engine Watch. It would be 2001 before I ever met Danny, at my first Search Engine Strategies event in Boston. I didn’t get the chance to say it then (or since), so I’ll publically say it now: Thank you, Danny, for getting me into this business. It’s been more fun than I ever imagined.

The Ebbs and Flows of Market Share

First published July 16, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

It’s been just over six weeks since the birth of Bing. While I didn’t actually say Microsoft’s new search baby was ugly, I was less than optimistic about its chances of unseating Google in a popularity contest. So, with every measurement panel carefully following Bing’s debut, I think it’s time to see just how the little engine is doing in the search (oops, make that “decision”) sandbox.

Let the Record Show

First of all, much acrimonious commentary has been attributed to me about Bing. I just want to say I never said Bing was a failure, a bad search engine or a step backwards on Microsoft’s part.

I simply said Bing would not break the Google habit, despite 100 million dollars of advertising.

In fact, here’s exactly what I said would happen. Driven by the advertising, people would temporarily disrupt the playing out of their habitual Google script, try Bing and find that it wasn’t all that different from using Google: better in some ways, worse in others. Without having a compelling reason to consciously break the Google habit (which is hard cognitive work) they would just go back on autopilot and continue to use Google. A temporary blip upwards for Bing would soon disappear, at roughly the same time as Microsoft’s $100 million ad budget, and we would all go back to mindlessly Googling what we’re looking for.

Survey Says...

So, what’s happening in terms of market share? Well, the various numbers seem to show that Bing has gained a small uptick in market share (the exact amount is difficult to determine, but Compete puts it at a 0.3% gain in share), Google’s up as well, by about half a percentage point, and Yahoo and Ask are both losing ground in what seems to be an irreversible death spiral.

If you just look at the Google and Bing numbers, the words “I told you so” naturally spring to mind. And this is still with the $100 million tap fully open. Google could come out of this with the biggest net gain, paid for by Microsoft’s ad budget.

But the story gets much more interesting, and more compelling for Microsoft, if you look at what’s happening with Yahoo and Ask. This is something I didn’t think about in my original forecast, but the logic seems clear in hindsight.

26% Still Up for Grabs

When Bing debuted, there was a 26.7% percent of the U.S. search market not owned by Google, again according to Compete. At the end of June, that shrunk to 26.1%. And that’s the share that Microsoft should be paying close attention to. Don’t worry about breaking the Google habit. Concentrate on picking off the weaker contenders. And right now, when it comes to search, Yahoo and Ask are lying limp and lifeless on the side of the road, easy pickins for a Bing drive-by. In the past year, Yahoo is down in market share by almost 3 and a half points, and Ask is off by a full point. All of this has gone to Google, plus some. They’re up almost 10 full share points in the past year.

Is Google Domination Inevitable?

If these are the trends, is it inevitable that Google will eventually own the entire search market? No, because we always like alternatives. We get nervous when there is a de facto monopoly, so we’ll keep even a weak contender on life support just to give us an alternative. At the height of the Window’s OS dynasty, Mac still managed to hold onto 4.5% of the market and Linux 0.5%. Since then, Mac has come back to take almost 9% of the market and Linux almost a full point (according to Net Applications).

That’s the other thing to remember about humans. If we have a viable underdog, we’ll throw it more than its fair share of support. Case in point: the browser wars. In 2004, Explore owned 91.35% of the market. The fledgling Firefox was its biggest competitor, at 3.66%. But over the past five years, the balance had shifted decidedly in Firefox’s favor: 65.85% for Explore vs. 22.39% for Firefox. The fact that Firefox improved its product at a much more aggressive rate than Microsoft didn’t hurt either.

I believe Google is getting very close to its natural market share cap. And the stronger the alternatives, the lower that cap will be. Yahoo and Ask have lost their appetite for competing in the search arena, but Microsoft has a viable contender in Bing. I still don’t expect it to break a Google habit, but it could well become our No. 1 alternative when we’re ready for an occasional break from our habitual search rut.

How ironic! Microsoft’s Bing playing the White Knight to Google’s Evil Empire!

SEO Success: Sign of a Healthy Corporate Culture

First published July 9, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’ve been working with companies on SEO for over a decade now, and there’s one thing I’ve noticed: all things being equal, healthy companies with great cultures seem to do much better in organic search results. And by organic success, I mean the good, white-hat, Matt Cutts-approved kind of success. I bet that if you found the companies that do well in organic search, you’d also find companies that Jim Collins (author of “Built to Last” and “Good to Great”) would be proud of. This correlation can’t be coincidence, so I’ve outlined some reasons why this might be so:

Flatter and more-responsive organizations. Working on SEO is like taking your Web site to the doctor: a good SEO consultant will tell you what you have to do, but the hard work is up to you. Companies that listen and respond will do better than companies that justify, finger-point and go on the defensive. Healthy companies look for ways to improve; dysfunctional companies offer reasons why improvement is impossible. Companies that refuse to do the heavy lifting required to whip their site into shape generally are equally negligent in other areas of their business.

Better communication channels. SEO is by nature a cross-functional exercise. It involves many different departments, all working together toward a common goal. This approach is well within the comfort zone of healthy organizations, but totally foreign to dysfunctional ones. An SEO initiative severely tests the communication and cooperative capabilities of an organization. It requires marketing, IT, product managers and often legal to all work together, and the faster they can do this, the more positive the results will be. SEO is not a one-shot tactic. In the most competitive categories, it’s a full-out and ongoing war. The companies that can respond and adapt quickly will win that war. The ones mired in bureaucracy and butt-covering will inevitably sink in the rankings.

Healthy community connections. The new era of digital communications requires companies to be engaged in an ongoing dialogue with their community of customers. Great companies do this instinctively. Bad companies put up huge corporate communication barricades, keeping the angry hordes at bay. Because much of this dialogue happens online, these dialogues tend to generate reams of content and links. Raving customers generate link love; angry customers generate link hate and reputation management problems. A company that can effectively engage in conversations with customers will find a natural lift in organic rankings is often the result.

Efficient execution habits. Companies that keep a clean house do better organically than companies that keep skeletons in the closet. Both approaches are symptomatic of the company’s overall approach to business. Highly effective companies constantly upgrade systems and infrastructure, both in their organizations and their online presence. They invest in best of breed tools and technology. And they are able to quickly prioritize and executive as the landscape shifts. Again, a clean technical online infrastructure makes SEO much, much easier.

Executives that “get it.” C-level executives who make SEO a priority realize that the marketing landscape is shifting quickly. They’ve been paying attention to customer behavioral trends and have committed to being proactive rather than reactive. This usually indicates well-placed intelligence gathering “antennae” and feedback loops. It also indicates an executive who isn’t hopelessly mired in “old-boy” thinking and outdated command and control management models.

Corporate pride. Content might not be the sole king anymore (SEO is more of an oligarchy now) but it’s still part of the ruling class. Great cultures tend to engender pride that naturally precipitates an explosion of content. People blog about where they work, people tweet and product managers enthuse verbosely about what they’re working on. All of this generates great, searchable content online.

Companies get the SEO rankings they deserve. I’m guessing that if you asked any SEO consultant in the world, they’ll tell you their favorite clients are the ones that are the easiest to work with: clients who listen, are proactive and for whom continual improvement is a religion. Based on what I’ve seen in the past decade, this attitude extends beyond the SEO team (indeed, it has to) and permeates the entire culture. There are those who game the system and gain undeserved rankings, but more and more, “organic” rankings are just that: rankings that come from the very nature of the company and how they conduct themselves in the marketplace.

The New Metrics of Fame

First published July 2, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” — Andy Warhol, 1968
When Warhol made his oft-quoted prediction, he was referring to the ability of media to push anyone into the bright glare of the spotlight for a fleeting brush with celebrity. What he couldn’t have anticipated was the strange twist the Web would throw on this issue. The Web democratized media and accelerated Warhol’s prediction. Viral fame doesn’t depend on tightly controlled channels like newspapers and TV networks; it seeps, oozes and sometimes gushes, propelled by users. All of us, including middle-aged guys from New Jersey lip-synching to pop songs, kung-fu-fighting bears and teen-aged “Star Wars”-obsessed wannabes, can now be famous.

But it’s not just the opportunities for fame that have undergone drastic Web modification. It’s also the ways we measure fame. Humans are obsessed with status. We are mesmerized by social rankings, and thanks to the infinitely measurable nature of the Web, we have a legion of new status metrics available to see how we stack up against the world at large. And I’m just as big a sucker for this as everyone else. It’s not something I’m proud of, but I regularly check my status on various Web-based metrics. Here are a few of them.

Googling One’s Self

I think everyone’s guilty of this one at one time or another. You check to see what ranks for your name, who else of the same name shows up (my doppelganger is a photographer and musician in Scotland), and how many mentions Google finds of you out in the Web wilderness (22,900).As your digital fame grows, you broaden your search parameters. For example, do you break the top 10 for just your last name? This is admittedly dependent on how common your name is. Hotchkiss is not a household word, but I am competing with a prep school in Connecticut, a town in Colorado, a civil war cartographer, a precursor to the Jeep, the owner of the Calgary Flames and a ballroom dancing instructor. Or how about your first name? Gordon Lightfoot, a video game storeowner and a comic book about ultra bondage offer stiff competition for “Gord.”

Here’s a new variation: Search Suggestion Wheel of Fortune. With the search suggestions feature now available on all the major engines, see how many letters you have to type in for your name before you appear on the list of suggested searches. I come up in 5 letters (on Google.com — my home country is a little less kind. I need to go to 7 letters on Google.ca).

Techno-Rate-i

If you’ve joined the blogosphere, a number of destinations offer updated stats on how you stack up against the Seth Godins, Guy Kawasakis, Michael Arringtons and Arianna Huffingtons of the world. I have been tremendously delinquent here. I was once in the top 100,000 on Technorati, but have slipped back to the lowly 200,000s, due mainly to posting neglect. Still, with somewhere over 100 million blogs in existence (exact numbers seem hard to find) that still puts me in the top 0.2%, so my ego can live with that.

Twitterholics

The newest addiction for those seeking digital attention is Twitter. Now that the celebrities have glommed onto tweeting (come on, Kutcher, DeGeneres and Spears, can’t you share a little love?), it’s not as easy to gain top tweet status, but Twitterholics can get their fix of ranking reporting at Twitterholic. I do better here than on Technorati, once again breaking top 100,000 status. 1,649, 378 more followers and I beat Oprah (@outofmygord if you care).

Fame is Fleeting

In the new wired world, we are constantly reminded of our own notoriety, or lack of same, compared to everyone else in the world. In the pre-Web world, not only were we not famous, we were also blissfully ignorant of the fact. Today, it seems that everyone should strive to have some small sliver of fame. Keeping up with the neighbors isn’t about what’s parked in your driveway, it’s how many hits your blog gets. Social status is now measured in backlinks, hits and followers. My brother-in-law dealt my ego a devastating blow when he gave me a T-shirt that said “More people have read this T-shirt than my blog.” But I’ll get even. He won’t be getting any link love in this column.

Grandma Via YouTube

First published June 25, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This week we had a Webinar on Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives. We featured brain scanning images, survey results and the work of Marc Prensky, Gary Small and other researchers, showing how technology has created a generational divide between our kids and us. For me, though, it all came into sharper focus when I walked past our computer at home and saw my youngest daughter, Lauren, sitting there with crochet hooks in hand.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Learning to crochet.”

“On the computer?”

“Yes, there’s a video showing how on YouTube.”

“Really?”

“Yes, Dad, YouTube has now replaced Grandma.” (Smart mouth on that kid — not sure where she gets it from.)

Adapting With Our Plastic Brains

Prensky and Small have written extensively on how exposure to technology can literally change the way our brains are wired. Our brains are remarkably malleable in nature, continually changing to adapt to our environment. The impressive label for it is “neuroplasticity” — but we know it better simply as “learning.”  We now know that our brains continually adapt throughout our lives.  But there are two phases where the brain literally reforms itself in a massive restructuring: right around two years of age and again as teenagers. During these two periods, billions of new synaptic connections are formed, and billions are also “pruned” out of the way. All this happens as a direct response to our environments, helping us develop the capabilities to deal with the world.

These two spurts of neuroplasticity are essential development stages, but what happens when there are rapid and dramatic shifts in our environment from one generation to the next? What happens when our children’s brains develop to handle something we never had to deal with as children? Quite literally, their brains function differently than ours. This becomes particularly significant when the rate of adoption is very rapid, making a technology ubiquitous in a generation or less. The other factor is how much the technology becomes part of our daily lives. The more important it is, the more significant the generational divide.

Our Lives: As Seen on TV

The last adoption that met both conditions was the advent of television. There, 1960 to 1965 marked the divide where the first generation to be raised on television started to come of age. And the result was a massive social shift. In his book “Bowling Alone,”   Robert Putnam shows example after example of how our society took a U-turn in the ’60s, reversing a trend in building social capital.  We became more aware and ideologically tolerant, but we also spent less time with each other. This trend played out in everything from volunteering and voting to having dinner parties and joining bowling leagues. The single biggest cause identified by Putnam? Television. We are only now beginning to assess the impact of this technology on our society, a half-century after its introduction. It took that long for the ripples to be felt through the generations.

You Ain’t Seen Nuthin Yet.

That’s a sobering thought when we consider what’s happening today. The adoption rate of the Internet has been similar to that of television, but the impact on our daily lives is even more significant. Everything we touch now is different than it was when we were growing up.  If TV caused a seismic shift of such proportions that it took us 50 years to catalog the fall-out, what will happen 50 years from now?

Who will be teaching my great grandchildren how to crochet?

Why Wolfram Alpha is Important

First published June 18, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In the new Bing-enabled world, search is hotter than ever. Your entire Search Insider lineup has been trading quips and forecasts about the future of search. Aaron Goldman thinks Hunch may be the answer to my call for an iPhone of search. Today, I want to talk about why Wolfram|Alpha is very, very important to watch. It’s not an iPhone, but it is changing the rules of search in a very significant way.

Search is more than skin-deep. To most users, a search engine is only skin (or GUI) deep. And anyone who’s taken Wolfram for a spin has judged it based on the results they get back. In a few cases, Wolfram’s abilities are quite impressive. But that’s not what makes Wolfram|Alpha important. For that, we look to what Stephen Wolfram has done with the entire concept of interpreting and analyzing information. Wolfram|Alpha doesn’t search data, it calculates it. That’s a fundamentally important distinction.

Unlike Bing, which is promising a revolution that barely qualifies as evolution, Stephen Wolfram knows this is the first step on a long, long road. He says so right on the home page: “Today’s Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone.”

Words are not enough.  Wolfram’s previous work with Mathematica and NKS (New Kind of Science) shatters the paradigm that every search engine is built on, semantic relationships. As revolutionary as Google’s introduction of the linking structure of the Web as a relevance factor was, it was added to a semantic foundation. PageRank is still bound by the limits of words. And words are slippery things to base an algorithm on.

The entire problem with words is that they’re ambiguous. The word “core” has 12 different dictionary definitions. It’s very difficult to know which one of those meanings is being used in any particular circumstance. Google and every other engine is limited by its need to guess at the meaning of language, one of the most challenging cognitive tasks we encounter as humans.

Potential advancements in relevance require gathering additional signals to help interpret meanings and reduce ambiguity. Personalization is one way to do this. Hunch, Aaron’s nominee for the iPhone of Search, requires you to fill out a long and rather bizarre quiz about your personal preferences. All this is to learn more about you, making educated guesses possible. If you’re going to stick with a semantic foundation, personalization is a great way to increase your odds for successful interpretation.

Another way to interpret meaning is to go with the wisdom of crowds. By overlaying the social graph, you can make the assumption that the one meaning people like you are interested in, is also the meaning you might be interested in. Again, not a bad educated guess.

Knowledge as a complex system. But what if you could do away with the messiness of language entirely? What if you could eliminate ambiguity from the equation? That’s the big hairy audacious goal that Stephen Wolfram has set his sights on. If you look at the entire body of “systematic knowledge,” you have a complex system — and in any complex system, you have patterns. Patterns are abstractions that you can apply math against. In effect, knowledge becomes computable. You don’t have to interpret semantic meaning, which is intensive guesswork at best.  You can deal with numbers. And unlike language, where “core” has 12 different values, the number “3” always has the same value.

Wolfram|Alpha is not important because it provides relevant results for stocks, cities or mathematical problems. It’s important because it’s taking an entirely new approach to working with knowledge. It’s not what Wolfram|Alpha can do today; it’s what it may enable us to do tomorrow, next year and in the year 2015.

Wolfram|Alpha could change all the rules of search. Keep your eye on it.

Get It or Die: Online is Your Core Business

First published June 11, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In a recent survey, we asked B2B buyers how they prefer ordering the things they order all the time. Sixty-three percent said they prefer to order them online. The next largest group was the 15% who would go the traditional route of ordering from a local office over the phone. Another 12% said they’d prefer to order from a real live sales rep. In a recent presentation to a client, I kept that pie chart of results up for a while, allowing it to sink in, because I think the implications are astounding.  After it sunk in, I asked what I believe to be a fundamentally important question: “Look at the chart and ask yourself, how closely does your company’s strategic direction and resource allocation match that pie chart? That’s where your customers are going, and they’re moving fast. Are you going to be there when they get there?”

“getting it” vs. “Getting It”

Lately, I’ve also talked a lot about “getting it.” To me, there are two levels of getting it.  There’s the safe level: the proficient e-business unit that understands search and executes effectively, realizes that online strategies have to be planned across channels, is struggling to put attribution models in place that work, and is continually testing and optimizing landing pages. If we look at digital marketing alone, they understand it and are skilled practitioners. This level, “getting it” with a small “g,” is rare, although there are several examples to look at.

But then there’s “Getting It,” with a capital “G.” This is the company that realizes that online forms the core of the customer experience and that everything else has to support that — if not today, then in the very near future. This is the company that is rapidly and aggressively moving to digital as its primary way of doing business, that is already making the painful but required transitions and is willing to cannibalize its traditional core in order to support the move to online. Outside of pure online plays, this level of “Getting It” is so rare as to be basically nonexistent.

Digital Butt-Covering

Companies pay lip service to “getting it,” but they’ve hedged all their online bets. They have treated online as an incremental revenue channel, putting in rigorous ROI thresholds so that it can be separated from the core business and risk can be balanced against returns and investment, thus minimizing it. E-business is a siloed sandbox, relegated to the sidelines so it doesn’t rock the mother ship.

What these companies fail to realize is that this safe, incremental approach to moving online is probably the riskiest thing they can do. Here’s why.

Online is a discontinuous innovation in consumerism of all kinds. It’s a huge step forward for the buyer in almost every way imaginable. It’s easier, more convenient, more useful and more effective. If people aren’t buying online, they’re researching online. And no matter how much they’re doing both those things, they would like to do more. The only thing holding them back is a lack of destinations or a quality user experience on the destinations they do have to choose from.  Your customers are adopting online at an incredibly fast rate.

By easing towards online at a safe, incremental rate because you’re mitigating risk to your core business, you’re allowing your critical mass of customers to get in front of you. Whenever a mass of customers is underserviced, someone will fill that gap, and you can bet it will be a nimble, online pure play that’s moving at light speed compared to you.

Internet Speed Defined

Jim Lecinski from Google’s Chicago office has a chart he loves to show in client presentations. It slaps you upside the head with the reality of “Internet speed.” He first recounts a typical conversation with a client that falls squarely in the first category of “getting it.”

Jim: “What are you doing with your online campaigns?”

Client: “Oh, we have a lot happening. We’re expanding our keyword list next quarter and we’ll optimize that campaign over the following quarter. In Q3 and 4 we’re going to run some experiments with social media that we’re excited about. For the next fiscal, we’ve built more into the budget for better tracking and attribution. That will help as we move to cross-channel optimization because we’ll get great data showing us what’s working and what’s not. That will also allow us to step up our landing page testing and optimization.”

Jim: “So, you’ve got your plans set out for about 18 to 24 months ahead?”

Client: “You bet. We’re moving very quickly.”

Then Jim shows them the Google Trends graph that reminds them that both YouTube and FaceBook went from zero to Internet domination in under 24 months. Further, few people had heard of Twitter 12 short months ago.

That’s Internet Speed.

That’s “Getting It.”