Category Archives: Behavior & Psychology

We’re Looking in the Wrong Place for our Attribution Models

First published June 16, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

The online landscape is getting more complex. Speaking from a marketer’s perspective, there are more points of influence that can alter a buyer’s path. At the last Search Insider Summit, John Yi from Facebook introduced us to something he called Pinball Marketing. It’s an apt analogy for the new online reality.

Hoping for a Strike

In the past, marketing was like bowling. You would build a campaign with sufficient critical mass and aim it toward your target, hoping at the end of the campaign (or lane) your aim was good enough, and the ball/campaign had enough kinetic energy (measured in REACH X FREQUENCY X AD ENGAGEMENT) to knock down all the potential customers.  If you think about marketing in this perspective, it explains the massive amount of pain traditional marketers are feeling as they pull their bowling-shoe-clad feet from the old world and gingerly dip their toes in the new. The bowler was in control (theoretically) and the success or failure of the campaign lay in her hands alone. The paradigm was simple, clean and linear, just the way we marketers like it.

The new game of marketing is much more like pinball. The intersections between a buyer’s decision path and a product’s marketing presence are many, and each can send the buyer off in a different direction. Some of those intersection points are within the marketer’s control — and some aren’t. Marketers now have to try to understand engagement and buyer impact at each of these intersections and, in the process, try to piece together a map of the buyer’s journey, assigning value in the appropriate places.

Repealing Newton’s Law

But even though the frenetic path of a pinball gets us a little closer to today’s marketing reality, it still doesn’t get us all the way, because there’s one fundamental difference: pinballs don’t have brains. Nor do they have emotions, feelings, or needs. Pinballs are just little metal spheres that obey the laws of physics.

And therein lies the difference.  How much more challenging would pinball be if, rather than relying on Newtonian physics to set the path of a ball coming off a flipper, it could decide whether it wanted to go right, left or simply stop dead in its tracks, refusing to go one inch further until you showed it a little more respect.  As physicist Murray Gell-Mann once quipped, “Imagine how hard physics would be if particles could think.”

As we try to understand what influences our buyers, we tend to apply something like the laws of physics to unraveling attribution. We apply formulas to various touchpoints, mathematically weighting their respective values. We can weight it to the first click, the last click, or divvy up the value based on some arbitrary calculation. But, in the end, as we try to figure out the new rules of marketing, we tend to forget that these balls have brains.

Go to the Source

If we want to understand what makes buyers buy, we should ask them. We should base attribution models on decision paths, not arbitrary formulas. We should walk through the buying landscape with our prospects, seeing how they respond at each intersection point. And when we build our attribution models, we should base them on psychology, not physics.

Is this approach harder than the holy grail of a universal attribution formula (or even multiple variations of said formula)? Absolutely. It’s fuzzy and sometimes messy. It tends to squirm around a lot. And unlike Newtonian physics, it depends on context. What I’m proposing is riddled with “ifs” and “maybes.” In short, it’s human in its ambiguity, and that’s really the whole point. I would much rather have ambiguity that’s somewhat right than clarity that’s completely wrong.

Different Platforms, Different Ads

First published June 9, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

There’s little argument that mobile’s time has come. According to Google, mobile searches make up anywhere from 5% to 12% of the total query volume for many popular keywords. And for many categories (like searches for local businesses) the percentage is much higher. That officially qualifies as “something to consider” in most marketing strategies. For many marketers, though, the addition of mobile is a simple check box addition in planning a search campaign. In Google’s quest to make life simple for marketers, we’re missing some fundamental aspects of marketing to mobile prospects. Okay, we’re missing one fundamental aspect:  it’s different. Really different.

Last week, I talked about how my behaviors vary across multiple devices. But it’s not just me. It’s everyone. And those differences in behavior will continue to diverge as experiences become more customized. The mobile use case will look significantly different than the tablet use case. Desktops and smart entertainment devices will be completely different beasts. We’ll use them in different ways, with different intents, and in different contexts. We’d better make sure our marketing messages are different too.

Let’s go back to the Jacquelyn Krones research from Microsoft, which I talked about in the last column. If we divide search activity into three buckets: missions, excavations and explorations, we can also see that three different approaches to search ads should go along with those divergent intents.

Excavation search sessions, which still live primarily on the desktop, are all about information gathering. Success ads for these types of searches should offer rich access to relevant content. Learn to recognize the keywords in your campaigns that indicate excavation queries. They are typically more general in nature, and are often aligned with events that require extensive research: major purchases, planning vacations, researching life-altering events like health concerns, moving to a new community, starting college or planning a wedding. In our quest to squeeze conversions off a landing page, we often not only pare down content, but also on-page navigation pointing to more content. For an excavation-type search, this is exactly the wrong approach. Here, the John Caples approach to copy writing might be just the ticket: long, information rich content that allows the user to “create knowledge.”

Missions, especially on mobile devices, are just that. You get in and you get out, hopefully with something useful — that lets you do something else. Successful ads in this environment should do the same thing: take you one (or several) steps closer to a successful completion of the mission. Ad messaging should offer the promise of successful mission completion, and the post-click destination should deliver on that promise. Clean, hassle-free and exquisitely simple to use are the marching orders of mobile advertising.

Perhaps the most interesting search use case is that on a tablet device. I’ve chatted with Yahoo’s relatively new VP of search, Shashi Seth, about this. He believes tablets might open the door for the visually rich, interactive ads that brand marketers love. And Krones research seems to indicate that this might indeed be the case. Tablets are ideal for exploration searches, which tend to be meandering voyages through the online landscape with less specific agendas. The delight of serendipity is one big component in an expedition search. And it’s this that marks a significant departure for most search marketers.

Every search marketer learns the hard way that it’s incredibly difficult to lure search users away from the task they have in mind. When we do our keyword analysis, we’re usually disappointed to find that the list of highly relevant words is much smaller than we thought. So, we extend our campaign into keywords that, while not directly relevant, are at least adjacent to the user’s anticipated intent. If they’re looking for a jigsaw, we might try running an ad for free children’s furniture plans. Or, if they’re looking for a new car, we might try running an ad that reminds them that they can save 15% on their car insurance just by clicking on our ad.

We’ve all been here. In the mind of the marketer, it makes sense to buy these keywords. After all, the two worlds are not so far apart. A new owner of a jig saw might indeed be interested in building a set of bunk beds. And the new car owner will need car insurance. The problem is, neither of those things are relevant “in the moment,” and “in the moment” rules in most search interactions. So, after a few months of trying, we reluctantly remove these keywords from our campaign, or drop the bid price so low they’re buried 3 pages of results deep.

But perhaps tablet users are different. I’m certain the search experience on a tablet will soon look significantly different than it does on a PC. I would expect it to be more tactile and interactive – less rigidly ordered. And, in that environment, given the looser constraints of an expedition-type search, we might be more willing to explore a visually rich distraction. Shashi Seth thinks so. Krones’ research seems to also point in this direction. For this search marketer, that’s reason enough to test the hypothesis. Or, I will test it, as soon as Google, Yahoo and Bing make that possible.

The Segmentation of My Slime Trail

First published June 2, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

My connected life is starting to drop into distinct buckets. Now that I have my choice of connecting through my smartphone (an iPhone), my tablet (an iPad), my work computer (a MacBook) and my home computer (a Windows box), not to mention the new Smart TVs we bought (Samsungs), I’m starting to see my digital footprints (or my digital slime trail, to use Esther Dyson’s term) diverge. And the nature of the divergence is interesting.

Take Netflix, for example. It’s finally come to Canada, although with a depressingly small number of movies to choose from. My Netflix account stretches across all my devices, but the things I watch on my iPad are quite a bit different than my choices on an iPhone. And there is yet another profile for the things I choose on my MacBook (mainly when I travel). On the iPad, it’s typically an episode of “Arrested Development,” “Fawlty Towers” or, if I have a little more time, “Mad Men,” (and yes, I realize those three choices create an interesting psychological profile of myself) that offers some respite when the women of my household commandeer all available TV sets. On the new Samsung, it’s usually a movie intended for viewing by myself and at least one other member of my family.

Kindle offers a similar divergence of reading patterns — again, one application that’s spread across multiple devices. And, like my movie watching, my reading habits vary significantly depending on what I’m doing the reading on. I almost never read on my laptop, but it’s my preferred platform for research and annotation. My favorite reading device is my iPad, but it’s primarily used at home. I only take it on the road for extended trips. My fall-back is the iPhone, which gets called into duty when I have time to kill when traveling or in between my kid’s volleyball games.

Jacquelyn Krones, from Microsoft, did a fascinating research project where she looked at search habits across multiple devices. She found that our searches could be grouped into three different categories: missions, excavations and explorations.

Mission is the typical task-based single interaction where we need to get something done. The nature of the mission can be significantly different on a mobile device, where the mission is usually related to our physical location. In this case, geo-location and alternative methods of input (i.e. taking a picture, recording a sound or scanning a bar code) can make completing the mission easier, because the outputs are more useful and relevant in the user’s current context. This is why app-based search is rapidly becoming the norm on mobile devices. Missions on the desktop tend to be more about seeking specific information when then allows us to complete a task beyond the scope of our search interaction.

Excavations are research projects that can extend over several sessions and are typically tied to an event of high interest to the user. Health issues, weddings, major travel, home purchases and choosing a college are a few examples. The desktop is the hands-down winner for this type of search engagement. It provides an environment where information can be consolidated and digested through the help of other applications. Krones calls this “making knowledge,” implying a longer and deeper commitment on the part of the user.

Finally, we have exploration. Explorations are more serendipitous in nature,  with  users setting some fairly broad and flexible boundaries for their online interactions. While excavation can become a part of exploration, the behaviors are usually distinct. Exploration tends to be a little more fluid and open to suggestion, with the user being open to persuasion, while excavation is more about assembling information to support an intent that is already decided upon. Tablets seem to be emerging as a strong contender in the exploration category. The relaxed nature of typical interaction with an iPad, for example, supports the open agenda of exploration.

What this means, of course, is that the trail I leave behind on my mobile device starts to look significantly different than the trail on my laptop or tablet. Each fits a different use case, as they start to become tools with distinct capabilities, over and above the fact that they’re all connected to the Internet.

There is No Blank Slate in Marketing

First published May 26, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In 2002, Steven Pinker wrote a book called “The Blank Slate.” For 509 pages, Pinker argues that when it comes to our brains, and by extension, our minds, there is no such thing as a blank slate. While our destinies are not predetermined by our genes, there are certainly hardwired mechanisms that influence the paths we take.  It’s not solely nature or nurture, but a combination of both. Our minds are neither perfectly malleable plastic (the “blank slate” of behavioralists) nor are they cast in stone. In the end, you cannot deny human nature.

Recently, Google has been spending a lot of time talking about the Zero Moment of Truth, or ZMOT for short. In effect, they’re saying that when it comes to influencing a buyer, Pinker’s argument is also applicable. In marketing, as in psychology, there is no such thing as a blank Ssate.

Former Procter and Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley started this market-driven quest for truth a few years ago when he introduced the first and second moments of truth. The first (abbreviated as the FMOT) was when the customer is standing in front of the store shelf, trying to decide which package to pick up.  It’s been labeled the most important moment in all of marketing. The second moment of truth is what the customer actually experiences when she uses the product.

But Google, led by ZMOT evangelists including U.S. director of sales Jim Lecinski, is stepping backwards from the FMOT to show that there’s a whole chain of activity that now leads up to the FMOT, which has received the collective Zero Moment of Truth label. It appears that we marketers need a crystallization of the ultimate moment of decision where the balance of a consumer’s mind is tipped in favor of our product.  To use the blank slate metaphor, it’s the moment when the “brand” is seared into our cortical grey matter.

Google is correct in drawing attention to the substantial research that precedes most purchases. The biggest change in the marketplace has been the balancing of Akerlof’s information asymmetry in favor of the buyer. No longer does the seller hold all the cards in the typical transaction. We buyers research because we can. It’s the way we not only mitigate risk but also explore the expected utility of a purchase.  These are fundamental components of decision theory.  The mechanisms that drive decision theory haven’t changed, but the information available to us certainly has.

But even with all this access to information, we still approach buying decisions with our all-too-human biases and foibles. Our online research is filtered through brand beliefs and emotional prejudgments. Even on the search results page, that most brand-agnostic of advertising pallets, brand is a powerful predictor of behavior.  If we launch a search by using a generic product category term, we often have a short list of brands we expect to see bubble to the top of the results page. There is no blank slate here waiting to be impressed upon. There is a sometimes-vague notion of brand preference waiting to be confirmed by Google’s algorithm. And we scan the results page guided by our expectations and preconceptions.

The ZMOT landscape is a difficult thing to map. Google is providing some guidance through the new ebook,, with some practical advice for marketers. This should be a valuable addition to the marketer’s virtual bookshelf. Jim is a smart marketer and Google has privileged access to all of our ZMOT behavior. But, as with everything in marketing, there will be no hard and fast rules. One of the challenges in producing repeatable results in an experimental setting is to control the variables that could impact outcomes. But one of those variables is human nature, and when the experimental setting is marketing, you’re just going to have to accept the fact that there will always be a significant degree of unpredictability.

New Circles of Intimacy: Presenting in the Social Sphere

First published May 12, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

The recent Search Insider Summit provided me with a real-world example of how our world is connecting in new ways.

First, let me set the stage. In the conference room on Captiva Island, we had the actual attendees, usually averaging between 85 and 120 people. But the typical one-way exchange of information in most presentations was made a little less asymmetrical thanks to Twitter. The folks at MediaPost put a screen next to the stage where there was a live stream of Tweets with the #mpsis hashtag, giving us a real-time social commentary on what was happening at the front of the room. The vast majority of tweets came from people in the room (and the vast majority of these came from Rob Griffin – @telerob – who gained notoriety as the Joan Rivers of the summit for his acerbic commentary).

The addition of real-time tweet monitoring is fairly common at conferences now, but feedback seems to be mixed. I think speakers are fairly unanimous in detesting it (it can be incredibly distracting). That said, Craig Danuloff threw caution to the wind and pulled off the somewhat magical feat of presenting in person at the same time as he was tweeting tidbits from his presentation, with the help of an accomplice. But what about the audience? Does a social critique help or hinder a listener’s ability to get the most from the message being presented?

To answer that question, I did a little digging into the psychology of cheering and heckling and their impact on the dynamics of an audience. It’s the closest analogy I could think of.

Both ends of the audience participation spectrum, cheering and jeering, come from the same psychological need: to be part of something bigger than our selves. We cheer in recognition of talent, certainly, but just as often, we cheer because we want to be identified with what’s happening up on stage. It’s a “me too” type of emotional response. And these types of participatory experiences tend to go in waves. Cheering is contagious. So, it would seem, are laudatory tweets, based on the degree of retweeting I saw at the conference. It’s a digital way of saying, “I wish I had said that!”

Positive tweets raise the stature of the speaker in the eyes of the audience. The crowd is swayed to align with and respect the speaker’s opinion. The burden of social proof weighs heavily on us, as we’re not really built to go against the flow.

Heckling has a little different foundation, but it also comes from a need for control over the crowd. And it typically comes from a type A personality who is used to being the center of attention and is not comfortable relinquishing that control to another, even when that person has the stage. Heckling is intended to discredit the message of the presenter. It’s the human equivalent to two rams butting heads (and yes, hecklers are more often male) and the audience is asked to make a choice: do they side with the presenter or the challenger? If the challenger wins, the presenter goes down in flames.

This real-time exercise in social dynamics introduced an additional dimension of interest to the Search Insider conference stage. You could see some presenters being lifted in the audience’s opinion on a wave of positive tweets. But the occasional negative tweet introduced uncertainty.

The other dimension that was of interest was how the real-time social interaction took the conference beyond the walls of the South Seas Resort conference center. There were a handful of virtual attendees that appeared to follow the entire conference through the live video feed (including David Szetela, who did have to get off his porch to present on day one) and contributed their thoughts via Twitter. Then there were the inevitable nuggets that went viral. The winner in this category seems to go to Gian Fulgoni from comScore (@gfulgoni) who dropped this retweeted tidbit: LOL. Overheard at SIS: “A Starbucks barista gets more training than the average entry level ad agency employee”

The 1% of News that Matters

First published March 17, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider.

I first heard about the earthquake in Japan from a cab driver in Milwaukee. By the time I got to the airport, it was all over the monitors. And by the time I could find a Wi-Fi connection, the first details were just starting to emerge.

Our society digests news differently now. Electronic media paints news in broad strokes. Digital media offers a never-ending deep dive into the details. In the few days since disaster struck, the Web has already built up a vast repository of information about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. The Web stretches infinitely to accommodate new content, stretching its digital boundaries as required. The shelf life of broadcast news is much shorter. Time constrains the content. Detail has to be sacrificed for impact.

But on the Web, news is also a participatory experience. News isn’t a broadcast, it’s a conversation, guided by editors and journalists but often veering in unexpected directions as our collective voice hits its stride. We shape the coverage by voicing our opinions, our concerns and, for those who are in the middle of the news, our experiences. The world is smaller, rawer, more visceral, more vital — and, hopefully, more human.

In the convergence of these two shifts in how we digest what happens in the world, there lies something impactful. Traditionally, because news was a shifting canvas where yesterday’s events quickly faded to make room for today’s, we had no choice but to move on to the next story. But now, thanks to the Web, the content remains, if we choose to seek it out. While Japan’s pain is still horribly fresh, more than a year later the traumatic story of Haiti is still unwinding online.

The fact is that 99% of the news you hear nightly won’t really make much of a difference in your life in five years. They’re stories of passing interest, but in the big scheme of things, they’re rather inconsequential. And the things that will make a difference seldom make the news. But, on the Web, the time limitation of being “new” doesn’t artificially constrain what is news. For those who continue to care about Haiti, the information is there, living on in indelible binary bits.

It’s this concept of “caring” about news that is served so well online. Humans tend to react to our surroundings in two distinct ways. We react to the immediate and awesome (in both its negative and positive connotations) simply because we’re wired to notice dramatic and potentially harmful events in our environment. But, if it has no personal impact, we move on with our lives. We’re like a herd of sheep that goes back to its collective grazing after a loud noise startles us in our pasture. For this fleeting level of engagement, broadcast news works exceedingly well. It’s been designed to impact us at this transitory level, hammering us for maximum effect by a parade of violence, negativity and trauma.

But for the 1% of stories that do affect us, that will matter to us in a very personal way in five years, the 30-second sound bite is simply not enough. If news can affect our well-being, the second level of human engagement kicks in. Now, we are hungry for information. We need to dive deep into the details, so we can understand what the personal impact might be.

Consider the difference in how I would react to the news coming out of Japan if, rather than observing it at arm’s length as I did, I had a child who was teaching English as a second language in Sendai, the epicenter of the quake. Think about how I would voraciously devour any information I could find online, trying to determine if my child was safe.

For the 1% of news that does matter to us, online provides us something we never had before. It takes the temporal and archives it at a scale never before possible. Individual slivers of history are frozen in a digital record. It allows us to connect to information that is personally relevant, even long after it qualifies as “news.”

The Nobler Side of Social Media: Voices in a Choir

First published March 3, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I took social media to task for making us less social. This week, I’m in Palm Springs for TED Active — and on day one, saw three very real examples of how the Internet is also connecting us in ways we never imagined before. They provided a compelling counterpoint to my original argument.

Eric Whitacre is a composer and conductor. In “Lux Aurumque (Light and Gold)” he conducts a choir singing his original composition. The choir, 185 strong, never sang together. They never met each other. They live in 12 different countries. Whitacre posted a video of himself conducting the piece, and every one of those 185 members of the choir submitted their individual parts through YouTube. The 247 separate tracks were combined into a rather amazing work that has been seen almost 2 million times. One of the contributors lived in a cabin in the remote Alaskan wilderness, 400 miles from the nearest town. Her satellite link was her only connection to the world.

The Johnny Cash Project is an equally amazing collaborative effort. Aaron Koblin and Chris Milk took archival film footage of Johnny Cash, dissected it frame by frame, and asked artists from around the world to redraw each frame. The contributions were stitched back together with Cash’s song, “Ain’t No Grave” as the soundtrack. The result is mesmerizing.

But perhaps the must stunning example of digital collaboration came not from art, but the very real world of the Middle East. Wadah Kanfar, the chief of Al-Jazeera, told us how the voices of many, amplified through technology, are bringing democracy and new hope to Egypt, Tunisia and Libya.

These examples speak of something much broader and powerful than just the typical applications of social media. And, like social media’s less attractive side, the impact of these new connections on society is yet to be determined. There is a social experiment being conducted in real time — but the results will only be fully realized through the lens of hindsight. Can true democracy be established in a place like Libya, even with the power of connection? Time alone will tell.

The new technology of connection releases things that are deeply human: the need to be part of the greater whole (for example, the choir member from Alaska); the need to contribute something of ourselves to the world (for example, the Johnny Cash Project); and the need for fairness and justice (as in the protests in the Middle East). In the last example, these connections illuminate the human condition in the darkest corners of the world and force accountability. Since the beginning of time, unfairness in the tribe has been punished. The difference now is that our human tribe extends around the world.

Kanfar told an amazing story that unfolded during the height of one of the protests. The demonstrators pleaded with Al-Jazeera to keep the cameras rolling through the night. “If you stop, we’re lost. But as long as you keep showing what’s happening, we have hope.”

Perhaps the true paradox of social media is not that we’re becoming less social, but that we’re becoming social in different ways. As we spend less time in our flesh and blood engagements, we spend more time establishing connections that were impossible before. In the ’70s, Mark Granovetter found that our social networks are composed of two distinct types of linkages, which he called strong and weak ties. The strong ties are the family and friends bonds that generally require both proximity and significant time together. The weak ties are the extended bonds that we might call acquaintances. As Granovetter found, it’s the weak ties that carry the surprising power of a community, especially when they’re mobilized for a common purpose. We rely on weak ties for referrals, favors and job offers. They extend beyond our immediate circle and provide important social capital when required.

Perhaps social media has had a negative impact on our strong ties, as I alluded to in my last column. But, as I was reminded today, it has dramatically increased our ability to form weak ties that align to concepts, interests and causes. And don’t let the name “weak ties” fool you. When they’re synchronized, they can be tremendously powerful. You might call them the harmonized voices of a global choir.

 

The Paradox of Social Media: The More Social It Gets, The Less Social We Become

First published February 24, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I have teenage daughters. At least, I assume they’re still my daughters. They hang around our house and eat our food. But, to be honest, it’s been a while since we identified ourselves to each other. Between Angry Birds, SMS and Facebook, there’s precious little actual conversing going on in the Hotchkiss household. I barely recognize their faces, lit up as they are by the cool blue digital light of an iPhone screen. I assume that, at times, there’s a living being at the other end of their multi-texting, but I’m not really sure.

Yesterday, I overheard this in our lunch room: “I went for dinner the other night but have no idea how it was. Between tweeting my location, updating my status and posting a review to Yelp, I never actually ate anything.”

I’m guessing this comment was made in jest, but you never know. I remember one after-conference party held under the bridge in Sydney’s magnificent harbor, watching one very well-known search guru tweet his way through the entire evening. I don’t think he even noticed the Opera House on the other side of the bay. He was so busy tweeting his experience; he overlooked the actual “experiencing” part.

It seems to me that the more we engage in social media, the less social we actually become. The world in front of our noses is increasing being obstructed by one type of screen or another. The more we live in our new digital communities, the less we live in our real-life, flesh and blood ones. I can’t remember my neighbor’s name, but I can track the minute-by-minute location of people I’ve never met and probably never will. And by the way, congats on becoming Mayor of the Beans n’ Buns coffee shop on the corner of “LOL” and “OMG” in a city I’ll never set foot in. I’m not sure why that’s important to me, but all the “in” people assure me it is.

Humans were built to be social, but I’m not sure we were designed for social media. For one thing, research has proven that multitasking is a myth. We can’t do it. Our kids can’t do it. Nobody can do it. Much as we think we’re keeping all our digital balls in the air, eyes darting back and forth from screen to screen, it’s all a self-perpetuated ruse. Attention was designed to work with a single focus. You can switch it from target to target, but you can’t split it. If you try, you’ll just end up doing everything poorly.

Secondly, we’re built to communicate with the person in front of our nose. We pick up the vast majority of a conversation through body language and visual cues. Try as technology might, there’s just no way a virtual experience can match the bandwidth or depth of engagement you’ll find in a real face-to-face conversation. Yet, we continually pass up the opportunity to have these, opting instead to stare at a little screen and text our thumbs off.

As we spend more time with our digital connections, it’s inevitable that we’ll have less satisfying engagements with the people who share our physical space and time. The disturbing part about that is we may not realize the price we’re paying until it’s too late. Social media has slyly incorporated many elements from online gaming to make using it treacherously addictive. I suspect if we wired up the average teen while she was using Facebook or Foursquare, we’d find a hyperactive pleasure center, bathing her brain in dopamine. We’re forgoing the real pleasures of bonding to pursue an artificially wired short-cut.

The ironic part of all this is that I wrote this column on a four-hour flight, spending most of it staring at some kind of screen or another. The person sitting next to me on the plane? I don’t think we spoke more than four words to each other.

How Smart Do We Want Search to Get?

First published February 17, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Imagine if a search engine was smart enough to be able to anticipate your needs before you know you need them. There it sits, silently monitoring your every move and just when you get a hankering for Thai food (burbling up to the threshold of consciousness), there it is with the hottest Thai restaurants within a 2-mile radius. You didn’t have to do a thing. It was just that smart!

Sound utopian? Then take a moment to think again. Do we really want search to become that smart? Sure, it sounds great in theory, but what would we have to share to allow search to become truly prescient?

The odd thing about humans is that we want our lives to be easier, but we don’t want to sacrifice control in the process. Well, to be more precise, we don’t want to sacrifice control in some situations. It all comes down to our level of engagement with the task at hand and the importance of gut instinct.

Humans have a mental bias towards control. We are most anxious when we have no control over our environment. In fact, even when we have very little control over outcomes (such as in a casino) we fool ourselves into thinking we do. We believe that the way we toss the dice on a craps table (or the hat we’re wearing, or the color of our underwear) has some impact of which numbers come up for us. Factory workers on an assembly line are much happier when they have a button that can stop the line, even if they never use it. We love control and are loath to relinquish it.

Even if a search engine had a 100% success rate in anticipating our intent, chances are we’d feel anxious about surrendering control of our decisions. In fact, this issue has already played out once online. At the height of the dot-com boom, billions of dollars were invested in creating friction-fee online marketplaces. The theory was that certain buying purchases, especially in the B2B marketplace, could be totally automated.  In a magazine article for supply chain management in 2000, an industry consultant saw a bright future for e-procurement: “”As long as you understand the business rules for making decisions, there’s no reason why you can’t automate.  Why can’t two computer systems – with built in rules – talk to each other?” 

It sounds completely rational, but ration has little to do with what we want. We want to feel in control. B2B buying didn’t become automated because we have too much investing in making buying decisions, even when we’re buying widgets for the assembly line, a bank of servers or copy paper in bulk. We don’t trust machines, no matter how smart they are, to make our decisions for us.

What we want is a search engine that guides us, but doesn’t push us. We want a smarter search experience, but we think of it as a filter rather than an arbitrator. Ideally, we want a concierge, who can make informed suggestions that we can then act on.  

Could a search engine become smart enough to predict our wants and desires before we’re even aware of them? Possibly, but the other part of that trade-off may be one we’re unwilling to make. How much privacy do we have to give up in order for the engine to know us that well? One of the hottest growth markets is in the area of personal technology. These little bits of tech live with us day in and day out. Consider the Fitbit, a sophisticated motion sensor that tracks our daily movements as long as we keep it with us. This daily diary of our activity (even how restless our sleep is) can be fed directly to the Web. The idea is intriguing, but the reality is a little disconcerting, especially when you think where this technology may go in the future. 

As we embed more and more technology into our everyday lives, there is the opportunity to collect signals that could help a search engine (but at this point, the label “search engine” seems wholly inadequate), track behaviors and make very educated guesses about what we might be interested in.  Our dreams and desires could potentially be crunched into just another algorithm. Practical? Perhaps. Desirable? I suspect not.

Finally, slumbering just below this discussion is the lurking presence of ultra-targeted advertising, and it’s this that we may find most troubling. If technology someday succeeds in reading our very minds, how can we use that same mind to say no?

Why Can’t I Argue with Google (or Malcolm Gladwell)?

First published February 3, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This week I was in San Francisco for Big Think’s Farsight 2011: Beyond the Search Box. I took copious notes but there was one comment in particular I found intriguing. Luc Barthelet, from Wolfram|Alpha said that the company’s goal is not just to provide an answer, but show the route taken to arrive at the answer. Then we’re free to question the validity of the answer. “I want to argue with a search engine. I want to be able to challenge its logic.”

This was the first time I had ever heard this, but it immediately struck a chord. Why can’t we argue with Google? Why do we just accept its answers? How do we know they’re right? Of course, Google doesn’t really create an answer, it connect us with answers. But more and more, Google is disintermediating the source of the answer. For many searches, we never go beyond the search results page. We accept the answer as presented by Google, without ever questioning the rationale behind the answer.

Why is arguing important? What could we gain from arguing with Google? Let me give you one example of why it’s good to argue.

There is no problem…

The Summit featured recorded video clips from famed pundits, including Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell told us that the purpose of the Summit — to ponder how we might reinvent search — was misguided. “Can we build a better Google or Bing? Yeah, sure we can. But it solves a problem that’s not really a problem.” In Gladwell’s view, we already have access to all the information we need.

I diasagree vehemently with Gladwell. This same logic could be applied to any avenue of human endeavor and would stop all progress and innovation in its tracks. Could a horse and covered wagon transport us across the country? Yeah, sure it could. But I’d rather take a plane, thank you. And someday I hope there’s an even faster way. Gladwell’s off-the-cuff comment shocked the audience. How could he provide an answer so obviously lacking in informed context? The structure of his argument had holes so big we could have poked the Golden Gate Bridge through them.

Say What, Malcolm?

If Gladwell believes that a valid answer to every question is Wikipedia, perhaps his argument holds water. But he is ignoring the fundamental precepts of information foraging and retrieval. We need to surface the best information by taking the shortest possible path to it. Everyone who knows anything about search agrees with that, and we also agree that we’re not there yet. Not by a long shot.

But going beyond this, there’s the broader question: Is the current use case of search the one we need going forward? Right now, search is about the retrieval of relevant information. Let’s leave aside the question about whether it’s successful at doing that. But is simple retrieval of information (often false information) enough anymore? As Esther Dyson pointed out, perhaps “search” isn’t even the verb we should be using now. Is “solving” or “fulfilling” a better description of what we need? Dyson remarked, “We use the Ito connect to and affect the world around us.” And if that’s the use case, search falls far short of our expectations.

But I couldn’t argue with Gladwell, because he wasn’t in the room and I couldn’t uncover the rationale behind his pithy answer. He was a bit like Google; he dropped his wisdom from on high and was gone.

The Importance of Arguing

We argue because it knocks down intellectual straw men. It allows us to test and prod the logic that lies behind opinions. It challenges beliefs, which tend to keep us barricaded from the rest of world. If those beliefs are deeply held, they may be difficult (or impossible) to dislodge, but if they’re never questioned, minds will never change — and we’ll all barrel down those pre-laid tracks to a much too predictable future.

I agree with Barthelet. We should be able to argue with online information. We should be able to see the path taken to answers. We should be able to challenge sources. It’s more appropriate in some instances than others, and it’s an option we may not take advantage of very often, but it should be open to us.