Category Archives: Behavior & Psychology

Mindless Online Behavior: Web Navigation on Autopilot

One of the biggest problems with Rupert Murdoch’s view of the world is that he’s assuming people are making conscious decisions about where they go to get their news and information. He somehow believes that people are consciously deciding to get their information from Google rather than one of his properties, and Google is encouraging this behavior by indexing content and providing free “back doors” into the WSJ and other sites. In other words, Murdoch has a conspiracy theory, and Google and online users are co-conspirators. The truth isn’t quite so evil or intentional.

Our Stomach’s Autopilot

I talked yesterday about the importance of information foraging and how we use the same strategies we use to find food to find online information. But tell me, how conscious are your decisions about where and what to eat? How long do you deliberate over eating a piece of toast in the morning, a sandwich at lunch or a plate of pasta at night? If you’re hungry, how often do you find yourself standing in front of the fridge, staring inside for a quick snack? It wasn’t as if you had a detailed series of decisions here: Hmmm..I’m hungry. Where would be the best place in the house to find food? The bathroom? No, that didn’t work. How about the bedroom? No, no food there. Hey, this kitchen place seems to be promising! Now..where in the kitchen might there be food? In this cupboard? No, that’s dishes. Down under the sink? Ooops..no, I don’t know what the hell’s under there, but it’s definitely not food. Hey..what’s in this big steel box here? Ah…Bingo!

Okay..it’s a ridiculous scenario, but that’s my point. It only seems ridiculous because we’ve found a more efficient way of doing it. We don’t have to go through these decisions every time because we’ve done it before and we know where to find food. Even if we went into someone else’s house, we would know that the kitchen is the best place to find food, and the fridge is probably the surest bet in the kitchen. We don’t have to think, because we’ve done the thinking before and know we can navigate by habit and instinct.

Where Do You Keep the Cockatoo Chichild Fillets?

But what if you visited the Jivaro tribe of South America, where the culture is so different that we have no cognitive short cuts to follow? Much of the food they eat we’ve never even seen before. And, as one of the most primitive cultures in the world, there are not a lot of kitchens or fridges to act as hints about where we might find something to eat. If we were suddenly dropped into the middle of a Jivaro settlement with no guide, we would have to do a lot of thinking about what to eat and where to find it. And how would we feel about that? Anxious? Frustrated? Uncertain? We don’t like it when we have to think. We much prefer relying on past experience and habits. The brain heavily discourages thought if there’s a more efficient short cut. It’s the brain’s way of saving fuel, because mobilizing our prefrontal cortex, the “reasoning” part of our brain, comes with a big efficiency hit. The PFC is powerful in a “single minded” way, but it’s also an energy hog. The way the brain discourages unnecessary thought is through stimulating unpleasant emotions. If you’ve spent much time in foreign cultures, you know the constant stress of finding something to eat can quickly go from being exciting to being a complete pain.

Here’s the other thing about our brain, it isn’t discriminating about when to kick in and when not to kick in. It usually takes the path of least resistance first, relying on past experience rather than thinking. The more familiar the environment, the more the brain feels safe in relying on past experience and habit. What does this mean? Well, when you’re hungry, it will mean you suddenly find yourself standing in front of the fridge with the door open without even knowing what you’re looking for. When you realize you actually want some crackers (i.e. when your brain finally kicks in), you swing the door shut and go to where the crackers are kept. Online, it means you go to Google and launch a search without thinking through what your actual destination might be.

Google, The Information “Fridge”?

So, I’ve gone fairly far down the path of this analogy to make a point. According to Pirolli, we use exactly the same mechanisms to find online information. We go first to the fridge, or, in this case, Google, because nine times out of ten, or even 99 times out of a hundred, we find what we’re looking for there. And, if we don’t, we start to get frustrated because our brain is suddenly called into service and it isn’t at all happy about it. There’s no conscious conspiracy to screw Rupert Murdoch, there’s just us following our own mental grooves. And these grooves dictate a huge percentage of our online activity. There’s been little neuro-scanning research done on how our brains work during online activity, but the little that’s been done seems to indicate a regular shifting of activity from the “reasoning” to the “autopilot” sections of the brain. I suspect strongly that this is especially true when we use search engines. If we can navigate on autopilot, we will.

This principle holds true for almost all online interaction. I keep hearing about the “joy” of discovery online. I believe that’s largely crap. As online becomes a bigger part of our lives, we depend on it to do more and more and we don’t have the time for “discovery”. We don’t have the time to set aside 2 hours to browse through WSJ.com, meandering through the content and providing a willing set of eyeballs for all those ads. We want to find what we’re looking for, get in and get out. There are occasions when we’re willing to invest the time for a long voyage of discovery, just as there are times when we will go out and graze our way through a smorgasbord buffet, but it’s not the norm. As I said in the last post, Google and search has given us a “just in time” information economy and we have forever shifted our concept of information retrieval. How the providers of the information make money from that remains to be figured out, something I’ll spend some more time talking about tomorrow.

Murdoch and Bing: The Sound of Two Dinosaurs Dancing

This morning in Ad Age:

Why Murdoch Can Afford to Leave Google for Bing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laziness is a Good Thing

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

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

Fat And Lazy? Maybe Not …

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

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

Foraging for Information

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nicotine and Memory: Things Seemed Better with Smoke

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

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

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

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

The Usability Acid Test

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Top 10 Reasons We Love Top Ten Lists

Somedays it seems to me that the whole world has become a search results page. I fear we have become obsessed with ranked and ordered lists. I’m not sure what it is in the human psyche that loves lists conveniently numbered for our perusal, but heaven knows we’re suckers for the Top Ten.

The Internet has fed this addiction to the point that I feel like the whole world can be sorted like an Excel spread sheet. Sort my best friends by geographic proximity and likelihood to lend me a wheelbarrow. Rank all the parties my teenage daughter will be invited to this year by availability of alcohol, physical presence of dictatorial parents and incidence rate of teenage boys who think they “have a shot”. Give me a list of the 10 things my wife hates so I can create a Pivot Table of my odds of doing one of them in the foreseeable future.

As any direct marketer, blogger, magazine publisher or show organizer will tell you, slapping the “Top Ten” on the front of anything virtually guarantees you an audience: The Top Ten Hot Dog Stands in Manhattan, The Top Ten Ways to Get Rich if You Love Wearing Pajamas All Day, The Top Ten Christmas Crafts that Can Be Made From Recyclable Yard Waste..It’s like we’re being spoon fed our lives by some idiot with a ranking algorithm for everything.

Why are we like this? Well, I think it’s because thinking is hard. It’s much easier to take someone else’s opinion about something, especially when it’s offered in the irresistible format of a ranked list. We can choose to agree or disagree, but we don’t actually have to think about it too much. Someone else has done it for us. Also, we travel in social herds, so it’s really important to know what everyone else feels about anything. And finally, the world just has too much complexity now. There are too many choices to think about in every aspect of our lives, even the stupid ones. I don’t really want to spend a lot of time wondering who the Ten Sexiest Olympians are this coming February. I know somewhere some obliging magazine publisher or blogger will do that Herculean intellectual task for me.

I guess ordered lists offer us the illusion of control. If we can slow the frenetic pace of the world down by looking at a list that someone has conveniently put numbers beside, our lives seem a tiny bit more orderly and organized. Yes, I know the economy and the environment is going to hell in a handbasket, yes, I know the global forces of power and control are undergoing a fundamental shift, but right now I’m focused on the 7 Greatest Reality TV Show Moments of 2009. I’ll worry about global warming some other day.

Of course, the urge to put a numbered list in as part of this post is overwhelming (get it..irony), so, I’ll give you the “Top 8 Reasons Why I Gave In and Did It”:

  1. I have the bladder control of an 80 year old man and have already had 2 cups of coffee, so I had to finish this post somehow
  2. I really want to see just how many of you will Tweet this list because you’ve been helplessly programmed to do so
  3. I’m obsessed with PostRank and I spend way too much of each day worried about my Engagement Score
  4. Given the choice between thought provoking content and a cheap laugh, guess which way I’ll always lean
  5. I’m still figuring out how numbered lists work in my blogging platform and needed the practice
  6. I felt guilty teasing you with a title about Top Lists and felt obliged to deliver. See, I really care about you, my readers and didn’t want to disappoint you
  7. I wanted to prove to my daughters that my brain is still capable of counting up to 8. There has been some question lately
  8. I believe that children are our future (Okay, I ran out of reasons, but I felt that Whitney deserved a plug because she’s trying really, really hard)

Two Different Views of Tweeting

DigitalNativeComparison2Last week in San Jose, I was talking to a group of marketers about how digital natives and digital immigrants use social networking. Inevitably, the subject of Twitter came up. In our recent BuyerSphere research, we found that Digital Natives (the younger generation that grew up with technology) use Twitter or microblogging platforms more than Digital Immigrants (the older generation that adopted technology as adults). Someone in the audience said that he thought it was common knowledge that younger people don’t “tweet” but older people do, running counter to our research. The following chart shows the percentage of difference in time spend each week between the Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants in our sample:

As you can see, Digital Natives spend significantly more time on social networks and Twitter..almost 50% more time than Digital Immigrants. Yet, Twitter is labeled as an older person’s platform. Today, from the PEW Internet group, new numbers came out on Twitter usage that seem aligned with our findings:

emarketertwitterThe core audience for Twitter is squarely in the Digital Native age group. I think the answer lies in how the respective groups use Twitter. And this difference in usage and attitude extends beyond Twitter to almost any social networking platform.

The Digital Immigrant views Twitter as a tool. It’s a way to get information out, build traffic to a blog, connect with someone. We treat it as technology that offers us another way to get things done.

But for the Digital Native, Twitter is just part of the world they live in..like air or water. They don’t treat it as technology. It simply is. This attitude towards technology as not being technology is common amongst Natives. They don’t have the same “Gee Whiz” awe of technology. They’re not constantly comparing Twitter or Facebook against the good old days. Why should they? For them, this is just part of the world they live it..there is no reference point in the past. That’s why Natives spend substantially more of each week interacting with technology that connects them with their lives and social circle. For myself, FaceBook is a destination, as is Linked In or Twitter. I only go there when I need to do something. But for the Native, it’s just part of their environment.

Finally, I want to share the view of another Digital Immigrant, Comedian C.K. Louis, who ranted about the Native lack of appreciation for technology.

The Cult of Technology

We held our B2B Expert Face-to-Face event yesterday in Redwood Shores, CA. Yes, we asked people to drive to the west side of the bay the same day the Bay Bridge was closed. Needless to say, it impacted our attendance somewhat. But it was also a smaller, more intimate opportunity to really talk about the challenges common in B2B digital marketing. The common themes that emerged what a tendency to “peg” search as direct response marketing, the realization that B2B is slower to adopt digital than B2C, the difficulties presented by the fragmentation of the B2B marketplace and why we’ve tended to silo off our digital strategies from the rest of our marketing. Most of the discussion came from the findings of the BuyerSphere Project, the extensive research we conducting into B2B buying behaviors.

Every timeI talk to a group of assembled search marketers, I can’t help but feel the palpable frustration in the air. The gulf between those that understand digital (particularly search) and those that don’t can seem impossible to bridge. We feel tied down by those within our organization that seem mired in the old way of doing things. Why the hell can’t everyone see the world as clearly as we can. Also, I mentioned that as marketers, we tend to focus too much on technology and not enough on the people that interact with that technology. Few companies invest in qualitative research As we chatted at the Hotel Sofitel In Redwood Shores, a thought struck me. One on the problems may be that we’re all too much alike. We’re suffering from cultural homogeneity.

If you look at most elements of human nature, there it a typical normal distribution curve, otherwise known as the Bell Curve. The majority of the population clusters around the mean, at the center of the curve. As you move further out, you have more deviation from the mean. The diversity of us humans: whether it be intelligence, wealth, behaviors, physical abilities or size, tends to spread out on this curve.

bell_curve

The same is true, as Everett Rogers discovered, about how quickly we adopt technology or (one supposes) adapts to change. His technology diffusion curve followed the typical Bell Curve model. A few of us adopt technology almost as soon as it becomes available. A few of us avoid adopting technology until it becomes common place for everyone else. The vast majority of us fall somewhere in the middle.

technology diffusion
But what happens when you’re constantly surrounded by people at one spot on the curve? What if everyone you knew had an IQ of 123, or you lived in a town where everyone was 6 feet 3 inches tall? Soon, you’d fall into the trap of thinking this represented the norm. If you never saw diversity, you’d start to forget that it exists.

This is almost never a healthy state of an affairs. A common ideology amongst the heads of Nazi Germany lead to a drive for cultural homogeneity. The unbelievable wealth that surrounded the French aristocracy (or the Russian, for that matter) led to revolts of the masses. History has not proved to be kind to groups that are too much alike in one aspect. At best, this homogeneity gives you a skewed view of the world that may cause you to make decisions that don’t map well to the general population.

And that, I realized on Wednesday morning, may be exactly what is happening to us digital marketers. We are in this business because we all love technology. We are all classic early adopters, lying at least one (and I suspect closer to two) standard deviations from the norm, here at the thin leading edge of the Bell curve. And because we are surrounded by others like us, we start to lose sight of what the large bulge in the middle is doing. We chase technology with an obsession worth of sex starved teenagers. Every digital marketer I know has a smart phone. More than half the digital marketers I know have iPhones. If you travel in the same circles as I, you would soon think that everyone has an iPhone. Yet the iPhone market share in the US is  still only 11% (although it’s growing quickly). Like I said, we live on thin edge of the curve.

I think this skewed view of the world makes us exactly the wrong people to be planning digital marketing strategies aimed at the general public. We live in a cult of technology. We’ve forgotten how the common person lives with their hopelessly antiquated mobile phone and without a Linked In profile that includes at least 500 connections. There are many, many people out there who have never Tweeted, don’t have a blog and are unsure what RSS means. They include almost all my relatives. Yet we never seem to take them into account where we’re salivating over the latest strategy for generating buzz on social networks.

So, how does a digital marketer keep their perspective when they’re so far removed from normality? They have to become digital anthropologists. They have to live with their prospects, watching them in their daily routines. They have to discover the way we were meant to discover, by watching other people, helping us to understand and empathasize with them. Evolution has equipped us with some very subtle tools for understanding other people when we’re face-to-face with them. To my knowledge, however, it hasn’t given us an inherent ability to generate pivot tables in Excel. Maybe we should spend more time doing what we were meant to do: hang around with real humans instead of technology.