Category Archives: Behavior & Psychology

I Guess Guy Kawasaki is Never Going to Ready My Blog

According to Guy Kawasaki, I do pretty much everything wrong in a blog post. I write too much, I avoid numbered lists that are too neat and pat and I don’t try to condense everything down to spoonfuls of Pablum for easy digestion. Hey, I do eye tracking. I know that Guy’s suggestions make for faster scanning for someone looking for a quick information bite. But is fast and easy what everyone is looking for?

Blogs are where I work out thoughts, opening them up to the public. And a lot of those thoughts (like the ones last week, or my post on the Intel brain chip) don’t fit in nice little numbered lists. Sorry Guy. If you’re looking for a quick bite, graze on elsewhere. I prefer large chunks of partially digested ideas.

I think the Internet has jammed far too many numbered and bulleted lists down our gullet. I think someone has to provide content that a few people are willing to spend some time over and ponder. I want people to think a little. I don’t want a grocery list of simple to implement ideas that you can tack to your fridge. That’s what everyone does. I want to do something different. I think more people should do the same. I suspect the internet is carving our brain into tiny little pieces that are incapable of grappling with anything that requires an attention span longer than that of a gnat.

Look at the really great ideas of the world and the people who expressed them. Sure, there are some lists and quick quips (the Golden Rule, the 10 commandments) but there are also long essays and treatises. The world needs both.

Guy gets a lot more readers than I do, so I’m sure if I was looking for pure quantity, I’d do well to follow his advice. But I blog because I have a voice and ideas I want to share. They may not meet Guy’s guidelines for a perfect blog post, but you know what? I’m okay with that.

Wrenching Changes in Ad Revenue Models

This week, I’ve talked about the importance of information foraging in understanding online behaviors and our interactions with content, the fact that we don’t really think our way through online interactions, but rather navigate through instinct and habit, and yesterday, how different intents lead to different levels of engagement with ads. All of this has been to show how Rupert Murdoch and other publishers are seriously off base in trying to put walls around their content to protect their obsolete business models.

The Planting of Intent

But, as comScore Chair Gian Fulgoni commented on yesterday’s post, does all this mean that display ads have no value? Yes, we agree, ads aligned with intent, such as search and relevant text ads, are the ideal, but something needs to plant that intent in the first place. Something needs to create awareness, which sparks need and kicks the brain into gear to go seek information. In Gian’s words:

there’s another issue that needs to be addressed: not all consumers search for information via an online search query. They’re just not all that rational. As a result, using display ads can get an advertiser a far higher reach against the target audience. And that higher reach can cause the total sales lift from a display campaign to rival that from search – even if the sales lift among those exposed is higher in the case of search.

There’s also another even more important point that we need to consider: brand building. That needs to occur even when the consumer isn’t foraging for information in support of an impending buying decision. Otherwise the value of an individual brand name isn’t going to be as meaningful to the consumer when he / she is in the shopping / buying mode. CPG manufacturers know this well. Every week, their special prices (“temporary price reductions”) are shown in the local newspaper feature ads. Placed by the retailer but funded by the manufacturer. The consumer can pick and choose the products they intend to buy and where they will buy them (and, incidentally, store loyalty is not the norm). This information – delivered by old media still, but, I would argue, aligned with consumers intent to shop and buy – determines, to a great extent, the store at which a consumer shops and the brands they buy in a particular week. But the important point is that the CPG manufacturers don’t just leave it with running these types of feature ads. They understand that they need to be supplemented with “branding” advertising that they run themselves because they need to make sure that their brand value has been firmly established in the mind of consumers before they compare prices across brands at the shopping / buying stage. This type of branding advertising is delivered via TV, print and radio – and increasingly today, via the Internet. It’s a critical part of brand marketing, and I think it should remain that way even in today’s Internet world, because — as one of our clients recently said to me — “God forbid that price becomes the only determinant of consumers’ brand choice!”

I voiced similar opinions in a previous post, No Search is an Island. Search itself has a naturally limited inventory. If no one is searching for a term, there is no inventory to buy. This lack of scale and reach has been the single biggest limiting factor in search marketing. If you suddenly cut out all awareness advertising, you’ll eventually find your available search inventory dwindling in lock step. Gian’s points are well taken, and indeed, one of the biggest questions for me is how much residual branding value is derived from an ad that is noticed but not clicked. As I said yesterday, I think it depends on how pressing the user’s intent is. If they’re browsing content, my suspicion is that the residual value would be higher than if they’re on a focused information finding mission.

Differing Shades of Gray

As is most transitions, the truth is there there is no absolute answer here. One is neither right or wrong, black or white. What is happening is a shift from one type of behavior to another. The answer is gray, and each day, that shade of gray is gradually shifting more from black to white. Murdoch won’t suddenly find his revenue model shutting off one day. But what will happen (and there are dozens of newspaper bankruptcies to support my case) is that the revenue model will gradually erode. In fact, it has been happening for some time. As we switch our behaviors from a destination information economy to a just-in-time information economy we’ll spend less time casually browsing content and more time taking brief forays through search to find specific pieces of information. And when we do so, all the challenges in ad engagement I addressed yesterday will have to be dealt with. Murdoch’s revenue model won’t shut off tomorrow, but it will gradually melt away to the point where it’s unable to support the business. That is why there’s more than a hint of desperation in his rantings. He knows the ship is sinking and he’s lashing out at what he thinks the cause is: Google. Unfortunately, he’s lashing out at the wrong cause. The real cause is his reader’s changing behaviour.

Brand Building = Fence Painting?

The other point I would make about brand building is this: Gian is right, we need some way to build brands in public consciousness. But even the options for building brand are rapidly shifting. It used to be that mass media was the most efficient choice. It offered reach and frequency. It was scalable and could be measured in GRPs. The market was treated like a fence to be painted. What was the most efficient way to apply as much paint to as much area as possible? The answer, the biggest possible spray gun. It was a pretty simple equation: Area of fence X density of paint = complete saturation. The spray gun didn’t even need to be that efficient at painting, we just had to keep pouring in more paint. Which was fine, as long as the fence was all in one place. But now, the fence is scattered over an impossibly large area. There are fragments spread everywhere. Suddenly, the spray gun isn’t working so well anymore. We need a new approach to brand building, and we’re beginning to explore new techniques, such as tapping into social networks and word-of-mouth. It seems in today’s world, Tom Sawyer had it right..the best way to paint a fence is to enlist an army of recruits to do it for you.

You Can’t Put a Wall Around News

The challenge advertisers face now is trying to find a way to reach an increasingly fragmented market who is spending less time with traditional media and are increasingly seeking information in bite-sized pieces, rather than sitting down to a full meal. And that’s a challenge that traditional media, represented by Rupert Murdoch, seem unable and unwilling to face. Their answer seems to be to rant, rave and hope the whole mess will go away. If people are increasingly seeking information through Google and not looking at my ads, fine, I’ll just lock out Google and lock in my audience by forcing them to pay. Murdoch is skiing down the wrong side of the adoption curve. And, as Danny Sullivan pointed out in his Search Engine Land post, you can no longer put a fence around information and keep it proprietary, especially in the news industry. Breaking stories will break in hundreds of ways online – through Twitter, networks, blogs and news aggregators. Even if the Wall Street Journal breaks a new story, they can’t control it. People don’t care about the source anymore, all they care about is the information. Even if Google is locked out of Murdoch’s content, it will find it somewhere else and will index it. And people will go where ever Google lets them go. For this reason, I disagree with Danny about the viability of a mutually exclusive relationship. Google doesn’t need the Wall Street Journal, but I do believe that the Wall Street Journal needs Google.

So what about the deal with Bing? Is that the answer to Murdoch’s woes? After all, you still get search visitors and you control your content. Again, for all the reasons I’ve stated over the past week, I don’t think this is any answer at all. It may look good on paper to two companies that are entrenched in command and control thinking, but it doesn’t reflect the real world at all. And if Murdoch would take a few minutes to glance at the latest search market share numbers, even he might see why it doesn’t make sense to kick the elephant out of bed to make way for the mouse (okay..perhaps a small dog).

In the final analysis, we have people changing their information consumption habits, which is giving advertising a wrenching kick right in its revenue model. The dramatic success of search was indicative of the power and speed of this behavioral change. The successful model of the future will understand and embrace the reality of information foraging and will leverage the changing habits of people. The search part, aligning with consumers when intent is present, is the easy part to work out. The challenging bit will be to swim upstream and figure out the pieces that have to be in place to spark intent and put the mental train in motion. My suspicion is that mass solutions will no longer work. We’ll have to figure out how to brand build one prospect at a time, one relationship at a time. None of this is good news for traditional publishers, but hey, if everyone won in evolution, the world would be a much more crowded place.

Aligned Intent: A Different Ad Engagement Metric

On Tuesday, I talked about the importance of information foraging in understanding our online behaviors. Yesterday, I talked about how we navigate online based on habit and instinct, keeping our thinking to a minimum. Both of those behaviors are threatening  traditional ad revenue models. The very nature of engagement with advertising is undergoing a dramatic shift. Today, I want to talk more about that shift, because at Enquiro, we’ve seen dramatic evidence of it in our research over the past few years.

The Traditional Model

Let’s begin by exploring how advertising has worked up to now – the model that Rupert Murdoch is still pinning all his hopes on.

In the past, we used a “destination” based information gathering strategy. We depended on someone to gather the information and get it to us at a destination that would become a mental landmark for us. This was the model that gave rise to our traditional news industry. We trusted our favored sources to cover the world for us. It was their job to stay on top of what was happening, interpret it and present it back to us. Publishers developed editorial voices and we grew to trust those voices. We didn’t have time to cover every possible news channel, so we short listed it down to the information sources that best matched our interests and personality. We picked our favourites and trusted these few sources to keep us informed. These favorites formed the most visited locations in our mental information “landscape”.

Once we had our list of a handful of information sources, we would set some time aside every day to stay informed. It was a different paradigm of information gathering. We treated our sources as destinations and made the trip worthwhile by investing some time in it. We’re read the paper in the morning. We’d watch the news at night. We’d listen to news radio. In each of these cases, we’d take a discrete and substantial chunk of our available time and devote it to “staying informed”. There was no specific piece of information we were looking for. We trusted our information sources to serve us something interesting. Our intent wasn’t tied to any particular topic, although there might be sections that we favored (sports or business). Our intent was simply to spend some time with our favorite information source. Just like a trip to a physical destination, we understood that this journey would take some time.

This relationship, that of a favored source, then offered the published a willing set of eyeballs without any set agenda. The audience was there to browse through the content offered. That was the objective. And that objective allowed publishers, and through them, advertisers, to make some safe assumptions: the audience would be there for awhile, the audience had no other urgent priorities, and the audience could be safely categorized by the characteristics of the ideal audience of the channel. One could assume that the reason they favoured the channel was that they matched the target profile. All of this formed the foundation of traditional advertising as we know it.

The publishers job was to amass the audience. By doing so, they could then go to advertisers and deliver the audience. And it was the advertiser’s job to catch the audience’s attention. Again, remember, the audience had already set a significant chunk of time aside to spend with the publisher and the audience had no specific intent other than visiting their information “destination.” This mindset is critical to understand, because it forms the “before” state of the shift I’ll be exploring. The audience had to be distracted by the advertising, but the distraction was a minor derailing of our attention. Let’s dive a little deeper here.

Yesterday, I talked about the switching on and off our our neural autopilots as we do any mental task. Our attention and the full power of our brains only get focused when we need to. The rest of the time, we’re subconsciously scanning to see if there’s anything that merits our attention. The arousal of intent, the mental embedding of a clear objective, kicks the brain into high gear and causes us to focus our attention, including the full power of the frontal lobes – what we can consider the turbocharger of the brain. With those mental mechanics understood, let’s look at how we might browse a newspaper.

Newspapers, or any traditional information source, look the way they do because over years of trial and error, publishers and advertisers have discovered what it takes to catch a few fleeting seconds of a brain’s attention while it’s idling on autopilot. As we pick up the paper, there is no intent which has aroused the full power of the brain. It’s doing what it should be doing, idling as the eyes scan the headlines, graphics and other information cues, looking for something of interest that merits the brain kicking into a higher degree of engagement. What catches our eye depends totally on what we’re interested in. With no set mental agenda, when we look at a newspaper, a story on major crime, a business report on a company we know, a box score for a team we’re a fan of or an ad for a car we’ve been considering all stand a good chance of dragging our eye balls to them and jolting our brain from it’s semi-slumber. The typical display ad (at least, the effective ones) have been honed by years of experimentation to be very good at this. Their entire purpose is to stop the eyeball just long enough for a fragment of the message to sink into the brain.

The Just In Time Information Economy

Now, let’s look at what’s shifted. Through the ubiquity of information online and the reasonable effectiveness of web search in making that information instantly available, we’ve changed the way we gather information. We’ve moved from a “destination” to a “just in time” information economy. Let me return to our food foraging analogy for just a second to illustrate this.

When you shop for groceries, you probably have a favoured store. You trust this store because they have a good selection, the produce is fresh, the deli counter has your favourite cheese, the prices are reasonable, the location is convenient and the staff is courteous. This store becomes your primary food destination, just as a newspaper could become your primary information destination. For certain items, prices may be a little cheaper elsewhere, the produce might be a little better at an organic whole food store and the deli counter may be amazing at a little store you know across town, but it’s just too much trouble to go to all these destinations. You compromise and stick with your store, giving it your loyalty.

But let’s imagine that you could build a pick up window right into your kitchen. Through this pick up window, you could order any food item and it would instantly be delivered to you from any store in the world, right when you need it. No travel was necessary. The idea of a destination suddenly becomes obsolete. Food comes to you, just in time. What would this do to your foraging strategies? How often would you visit your favourite store? Perhaps there would be occasions when an item from your store was offered by your magic “food window”, and you might order it. You might even feel twinges of old loyalties. But the nature of the relationship has forever changed. You’ve become store “agnostic”. Now all you care about are the food items you order. And your intent has also changed. Previously, you went on a “shopping trip” for an hour to a store to pick up a list full of items. Your intent was focused on the store, not an individual item. But with your magic window, if you’re making a recipe and suddenly find you’re out of shallots, your intent is focused on the item you need, not the store you get it from. All you care about is getting the best shallots at the best price. It’s an important mental shift.

That’s what search has done for information. We care much less about the source of the information and more about the nature of the information itself. Also, we have shifted our intent away from the source of the information and to the quality and relevancy of the information itself. This has a profound effect on the nature of engagement with advertising that may sit alongside that information.

The Alignment of Intent

The Just in Time Information Economy has implanted intent in the minds of online users now, dramatically raising the attention threshold that must be bridged by advertising. Think of our mental process as a train. If the train is idling through a rail yard with no particular destination, it’s not that difficult for a hitchhiker (which is what most advertising is, messages interrupting you just long enough to hop on your brain for the ride) to jump on board. But if the train is going full speed towards a destination, the hitchhiker had better be a very fast runner. The Just In Time information economy has meant that many more visitors to online information sites are speeding express trains with a firm destination in mind, rather than than idling in a rail yard. We visit sites because we’ve come through a search engine looking for specific information. The site that hosts that information is secondary to our intent.

In the past few years we’ve done a number of studies of engagement with advertising that have yielded some surprising findings:

  • When it comes to ad awareness (participants remembering seeing an ad on a site) display and video perform best, search and text ads perform worst.
  • When it comes to brand recall (participants remembering the brand featured in the ad) display and video still perform better than search and text, although the gap is dramatically less.
  • When it comes to click throughs, search performs best, followed by text, display and video
  • When it comes to purchase intent, search and text are substantially better than display and video.

Ads that are relevant to the information they sit beside (as in Google’s AdSense network) also have this strange inverse relationship:

  • For ad awareness, non contextually relevant ads performed better than contextually relevant ones
  • For brand recall, it was close to even, with contextually relevant ads having a slight edge
  • For click throughs, contextually relevant ads blew the doors off non contextually relevant ones
  • For purchase intent, again, contextually relevant ads were the clear winner.

Why Ad Awareness Does Not Equal Ad Effectiveness

This is counter intuitive. If an ad is noticed and recognized as an ad, it should have done it’s job, right? According to the old rules, that’s all we ever asked an ad to do. But somehow it seems the rules have changed. Suddenly, ads that often don’t even seem like ads (after all, they’re just a few lines of text) are drastically outperforming more traditional ads where it counts, motivating a prospect to take action. We’ve tested a number of traditional best practices, including more effective creative, increased exposure both through frequency and more channels and this inverse relationship held: search and text outperformed flashing graphics, blaring video and looping audio. What gives?

The answer is the introduction of intent. By having intent planted in the minds of the prospect, by focusing their attention on an objective, the rules of interaction with ads has suddenly changed. When we have intent, we plant a mental objective which narrows our attention and focuses it only on relevant items that get us closer to the objective. Anything not aligned with that intent suffers from “inattentional blindness”. In eye tracking, we see this often has people scan a page, looking directly at an ad for several seconds yet afterwards swear they didn’t see the ad. The most famous example is the video “Gorillas in our Midst.” The unsuspecting are asked to count the number of times the basketball is passed in the video. Once attention is focused, most viewers don’t even notice the man in the gorilla suit walking right through the middle of the teams. If you haven’t seen this, I just spoiled it for you, but you can still try the experiment with your friends.

If a visitor lands on a page with a specific intent, their interactions look much different than those with no intent. They’re laser focused on relevant content. They spend almost no time looking at content that’s not aligned with their intent, including ads. Often, a single glance to identify it as advertising (thus the high ad awareness recall) is the limit of interaction. And the more an ad looks like an ad, the quicker it’s eliminated for consideration. The visitor becomes blind to it.

But if an ad is aligned with intent, it ceases to be an ad. It becomes a relevant information cue, a navigation option, a link laced with information scent. It becomes valuable because it matches our objectives. The user evaluates it along with all the other relevant navigation options on the page. This is exactly what happens with search ads, and the more relevant a text ad on the page, the more likely this is to happen.

Why This Does Not Bode Well for Rupert Murdoch

Murdoch, and for that matter, everyone else who still depends on a revenue from a “Destination” based ad model, will lose in this transition. The ones that will win are those that effectively leverage the alignment of intent and the “Just in Time” Information economy. Tomorrow, I’ll walk through the specifics of why the “Destination” ad model is doomed.

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.