Category Archives: Behavior & Psychology

Macro-Economics and Macro-Emotions

Another interesting article I ran into while cleaning out my inbox. Biometric monitoring research firm Innerscope tracked people’s emotions through vests that capture heartrates and other signals of emotional engagement while they were watching Super Bowl Ads. The objective: to see which ads got the biggest response from people. The results were interesting. The winners were Career Builder and Cash4Gold.

People are scared poopless by the economy and it’s impacting the ads we pay attention and react to. I’ve written before on the macro-emotional trends that dictate everything from the stores we shop at to the searches we launch. And now, it’s even edged in on the Super Bowl. What is interesting is that this is a self perpetuating trend. The economic news scares us, we spend less, the economy gets worse because no one is spending, the news gets worse… well, you get the idea.

Also saw CITI Analyst  Mark Mahaney at Covario’s InflectionPoint Summit in San Diego, who gave us an update on macro economic trends. The short version is..more bad news. He did have a silver lining for search marketers though, which lines up with what we’ve been seeing. Budgets from other channels are migrating into search. Mark gave us a quick and admitedly non scientific calculation of the categories most at risk, Yellow Pages, Print and TV, showed a total potential of $120 billion up for grabs. Of course, total migration is ridiculous. Search doesn’t work unless something is creating awareness, which creates search inventory. But still, that’s $120 B in ad budget that’s going to be scrutinized pretty carefully over the next year or two. It does make you think how much of that might leak into search.

Along the same lines, just got a preliminary glimpse at the SEMPO State of the Search Market Preliminary results. What we’re seeing seems to support Mark’s theory. Can’t go into specifics right now, but if you’re at SMX in Santa Clara next week we’ll be sharing some preliminary findings. I think I’m scheduled on Day One for that session. Drop by if you have a chance.

Tweets from the Edge

First published February 5, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’m now on Twitter (@outofmygord if you’re interested), which, to use the emerging verb of consensus, means that I tweet.  I’m not sure I’m a Twaddict (a la Todd Friesen) but I am moving through Rohit Bhargava’s 5 Stages of Twitter Acceptance

1 . Denial  — “I think Twitter sounds stupid. Why would anyone care what other people are doing right now?”

2. Presence —  “Ok, I don’t really get why people love it, but I guess I should at least create an account.”

3. Dumping –“I’m on Twitter and use it for pasting links to my blog posts and pointing people to my press releases.”

4 .Conversing — “I don’t always post useful stuff, but I do use Twitter to have authentic 1X1 conversations.”

5. Microblogging — “I’m using Twitter to publish useful information that people read AND converse 1×1 authentically .”

My self-assessment has me currently lodged between steps 3 and 4, but with signs of promise. And so, through the phenomenon of synchronicity, it now seems that everywhere I turn I see signs of Twitter. One of the recent one’s was Kaila Colbin’s Search Insider column about Twitter’s monetization strategy, or lack of same. Twitter is not unique; virtually every social network struggles with this issue. I would like to add two observations from my perspective.

The Curse of the Early Adopter

Social networks seem to be perennially stuck on the edge of the wrong side of Geoffrey Moore’s Chasm.  They flourish with early adopters, who are by nature fickle when it comes to technology and any bright shiny object, but social networks have difficultly embedding themselves in the mainstream. I’m seeing signs that Facebook might successfully make the leap across the Chasm, based on my “Jill” litmus test. When my wife is familiar with a technology, it usually means it’s crossed the Chasm.  Jill doesn’t have a Facebook page, but she has visited it (due largely to the fact that we have teenage daughters — ’nuff said).

The problem in trying to track these things is that whatever the blogosphere is buzzing about bears little resemblance to what will actually gain traction with a mainstream market. We (and yes, I include myself) are exactly the wrong people to prognosticate about what may be the next killer app for the average Joe. We are all technology nerds. Everyone I know in this industry is a technology nerd. The ones who actually blog and emerge as thought leaders are the most hopeless of the lot. We exist in a rarified technological atmosphere and have largely lost touch with the real world. It doesn’t mean we’re inherently prone to be wrong about the marketability of new technology, but it also means we’re not inherently right. We’re guessing, and all too often we let our personal enthusiasm bias our forecasts.

Social networks are always held up to Google as the monetization baseline, and it’s an unfair and misleading comparison. There were a number of circumstances unique to Google that won’t be replicated with a social network. They include user intent, the nascent stage of the Internet during Google’s introduction, lack of visionary competition and the luxury of developing a critical mass of usage on its own real estate.  The problem with monetizing Twitter is that much of the interaction with it happens on a third-party app.

Social and Market Norms

Perhaps the biggest reason why it’s difficult to monetize social results has to do with how our online experiences are framed, and the concept of social vs. market norms.  Here’s an example. You take your family out for an Italian dinner. The meal is fabulous. The portions are huge. After one of the best meals you’ve ever had, you hand $180 to the hostess. She throws it back in your face, storms into the kitchen and you’re abruptly escorted to the door. If we were at a restaurant, this reaction would be rather surprising. But if we’re at my mother-in-law’s for Sunday dinner, it suddenly makes sense. The difference is the frame in which we view the scenario. If we look at it through a market norm, the rules that govern commerce and fair trade, it’s entirely appropriate to offer fair compensation for a meal. If we look at it through a social norm, the rules that govern our family and friend relationships, it’s an unforgivable insult.

This slippery slope between market and social norms is the treacherous one that a social network must tread. Here’s another example. You’re at a party and you’ve asked two friends about their opinions on the best car for you to buy. Another person at the party overhears this — someone who just happen to be a salesperson at the local Ford dealership. Sensing opportunity, the salesperson whips around and immediately starts telling you why the Ford Mustang is the perfect car for you. How would you feel? How would you respond to the information?  How uncomfortable would the discussion become?

The challenge is that you moved from a social norm to a market norm and you weren’t in control of the transition. The same is true when you use a social network to ask for information and suddenly the network uses that to present targeted ads to you.  Kaila was right to point to Twitter’s search functionality as its only monetization opportunity. Google has conditioned us to accept a search results page as a place we can look at through market norm eyes. Also, we’re searching all Tweets for mention of a product, not specifically asking our friends. The difference is crucial in how we accept the advertising message.

The confluence of social networking and search is exciting to contemplate, but expect a lot of trial and error in the quest to find the right business model. Personally, I don’t expect to find it any time soon, and I also expect a lot of miffed users as part of the collateral damage.

Hyperlinking Reality

First published January 29, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Fellow Search Insider David Berkowitz (David, it’s been too long since we riffed on each other’s columns!) allowed his curiosity to wander down some fascinating potential directions search may evolve in a couple of recent columns, first looking at Ford’s plans for integrating GPS-enabled voice search  in all its  vehicles, and then speculating how one search could be launched in 17 different ways, both today and in the future. One of his speculations is what I wanted to explore further today:

“Instead of entering a query, Penny may be able to put on a special set of glasses and scan her surroundings for store names and reviews. The headsets and eyewear from Vuzix now link up to other portable devices such as iPods and camcorders, but they keep including more functionality within the gadgets themselves.”

Picture This…

Sound far-fetched? Not according to the MOBVIS (Mobile Attentive Interfaces in Urban Scenarios)  project in Europe. In a nutshell, the MOBVIS technology allows you to take a picture of your surroundings with your camera-equipped mobile device, then MOBVIS recognizes aspects of your environment and places hyperlinks on the items where it has relevant information. So, if you take a picture of a bus stop, MOBVIS can retrieve what buses stop there and what the schedule is. Assuming city buses are equipped with GPS and telemetric units, it could also tell you how long you have to wait for the next bus.

Currently, the MOBVIS project is visually mapping and testing in three European cities; Graz, Austria; Ljubljana, Slovenia; and Darmstadt, Germany). Geo-referenced imagery tied to streetscapes from these three centers is online and available to the scientific community. One has to imagine that Google would be paying particular attention to this, as it’s a natural tie-in with its Street View project.

Say Cheese and Search…

So, let’s imagine what MOBVIS could do. First of all, it could be an incredible interactive guide, bringing mountains of information about your surroundings to just one click away on your mobile device. Dining reviews, items on sale in local stores, entertainment schedules and reviews, transit schedules, self-guided tours, could all live on the other side of the MOBVIS linking icon. Now, all that is theoretically available through GPS positioning, but in urban pedestrian applications, GPS has some functional limitations. It’s difficult to get an accurate enough fix to narrow your location to even a half block radius, especially in the downtown “urban valley” core. MOBVIS allows you to restrict your information quest to exactly what you want to include in your viewfinder, making it a much more specific query tool. Also, MOBVIS could be tremendously useful for the visually impaired, allowing them to scan their surroundings and retrieve information.

Making Reality More Useful

What MOBVIS does, along with all the other search permutations mentioned by David, is point the way of search’s future. I’ve always said that search is not about the destination, whether it’s Google, Yahoo or Live. It’s about the functional engine that sits behind the portal. It’s about the ability to link people with relevant information and, more importantly, timely functionality. Search is about letting people do what they have to do. MOBVIS is just one more way to establish the link. It’s a pretty amazing way that opens up some intriguing possibilities, but what makes MOBVIS exciting is its potential for helping us navigate our current reality. David’s 17 ways to search, Aaron Goldman’s past speculations about ambient findability, and my ongoing exploration of search as an expression of us reaching for our goals all share a common theme: search enhances our ability to do things.

In a recent post, Silicon Valley writer Sarah Lacy speculated that Google might be nearing the end of its reign as online’s Golden Child. She used some dubious logic about usage and traffic to posit that the mantle is ready to be passed to Twitter or Facebook. What she missed is the central premise of Google’s mission. It’s not about driving traffic to Google.com. It’s about connecting us with what we’re looking for. What Google has been doing through Google Maps, Street View, Universal Search, personalization, Google Mobile and yes, even the lowly but ubiquitous Google Toolbar, is weaving together the functionality needed to deliver on that mission. It remains to be seen whether Google will be successful in doing so, but it’s certainly well in the lead. And that’s the power of Google’s potential. It’s about providing the infrastructure to connect all the dots, both online and in the real world. It’s not about being one of the dots.

Your Brain on Google Update

I had a chance to read through the fMRI study from UCLA, Your Brain on Google, on a plane ride down to visit with..you guessed it..Google. Pretty interesting stuff…here are a few quick highlights:

  • In the Internet Naive group..there was little difference in brain activity between searching on Google and reading text. The reason, I suspect, was that the group was just reading the search results.
  • But in the Internet Savvy group..a totally different story. Suddenly, many more parts of the brain started lighting up, including the parts governing decision making and the visual cortex. What this shows is that these users were using the results to help make decisions. They were fluent in search.
  • One other interesting note. The increased activation in the visual cortex may indicate that searchers see the information differently. The information presented was exactly the same, with the same stimuli, but in the search savvy group, when they were scanning the visual stimuli as search results, they seemed to be more visually rich. I suspect that as we get more savvy with results, we scan more and read less, treating the results more like a picture.

Just a few tidbits for now. I’m setting up an interview with researcher Teena Moody to dive deeper, which will probably become a Just Behave column. Also, don’t be surprised if it’s what I talk about at SMX West in Santa Clara.

Got the UCLA Googlized Brain Study!

Thanks to UCLA, I just got a copy of the UCLA fMRI study of what happens to people’s brains when they use Google. This is fascinating..well..it is if you live in my skull.

The study was done by Dr. Gary Small, Dr. Susan Bookheimer and Dr. Teena Moody. Just got it so I haven’t had a chance to read through it, but I’m looking forward to it. As chance would have it, I just finished Gary Small’s book – iBrain – last night. The most interesting part of the book was references to several fMRI studies done around the world, showing what parts of the brain fire in given situations and while we’re undertaking different tasks. When it comes to searching, I have my own theories..which I talked about here and in my Search Insider Column. I’d like to see if the UCLA results match up.

Small’s discussion of Digital Natives vs Digital Immigrants is really interesting as well, and something I want to take a much deeper dive on in future posts and articles. Briefly, natives grew up with technology, so their brain basically molded itself with hard wired capabilities, while immigrants learned their tech skills after the brain had largely formed itself. Think of the difference between growing up with a language and learning it as an adult. Digital natives are fluent in technology..for the rest of us, it will never be our native tongue. Small does make one serious transgression in the discussion which drove me nuts. He keeps swapping out neuroplasticity for the word “evolution”, giving the impression (which he never bothers to clear up) that genetic evolution can happen in one generation. It just doesn’t work that way.

That said, it’s pretty fascinating research and a question that seems to be of interest to many. I did a Search Engine Land article on it called “Are Our Brains Becoming Googlized” which picked up a healthy number of Diggs and became one of Search Engine Land’s most read articles. I’m trying to land an interview with one of the researchers. If successful, I’ll let you know how to access.

I’m very happy in my own nerdy little neuro-world!

Entertainment vs Usefulness – Which Builds More Loyalty?

On Wednesday, I talked about how digital marketers always tend to jump on fads, assuming they’ll become trends. I called it digital fluff. My position was that something has to become useful before it will have staying power. And our judgement of usefulness takes time. We have to get beyond the initial obsession with novelty. Marketers jump on channels when they’re still a novelty, which creates churn when the majority of these channels die away because they’re just not useful to the average person.

Lance Loveday posted a great comment and in it he brought up another potential factor of audience longevity and loyalty: entertainment value:

I’d add “entertaining” to usefulness as a requirement for achieving sustained behavior. TV and video games aren’t very useful, but they’ve definitely made sustained behavior status. I can only assume it’s because they’re entertaining.

Hmmm…the Psychology of Entertainment. Sounds like a good topic for a further post. In fact, I’m thinking a series of posts: How Our Brain responds to Entertainment.

After Lance’s post, I started doing some digging. In short time, I dug up a fairly rich vein of research into how our brain responds to entertainment. My goal is to find out why some types of entertainment have more staying power than other types. And then, once we discover the psychological underpinnings of entertainment, lets look at how that applies to some of the digital trends I disparaged: things like social networks, microblogging, mobile apps and online video. What role does entertainment play in online loyalty? How does it overlap with usefulness? How can digital entertainment fads survive the novelty curse and jump the chasm to a mainstream trends with legs? Why are we continually attracted to bright shiny objects to begin with? And is that trait universal or is it just a function of the early adopter tendencies of the current online audience?

I haven’t had a lot of opportunity to go through the research, but already, some interesting titbits have come to the top that present some compelling questions:

Why Does Fiction Typically Outsell Non Fiction?

If you look at the best selling books of 2009, or any year for that matter, you’ll almost always find that fiction tops the list. And, when you do get down to the fiction books, you’ll probably find that close to the top is a book by Malcolm Gladwell. Why? Well, in both instances, we’re suckers for the appeal of a story. We enjoy narratives much more so than rhetoric. Gladwell is a master of this. He wraps his points (and he always has a point) in a rich tapestry of anecdotes and stories.

Why do humans love stories? Well, it appears it’s a hardwired trait. Research seems to indicate our brains process narrative differently than rhetoric. This is one area I’ll be diving deeper into.

What Makes some TV Shows Great and Some Flashes in the Pan?

Lance brought up the example of TV as a bed for sustained behaviour. There is probably no source of sociological data richer in the past half century than our TV viewing habits. I’ll be taking a look at what separates a one season wonder from a multi season success story.

What is the Appeal of a Video Game anyway?

Lance’s other example was video games. Here there’s a psychological buffet of hardwired enticements. In fact, some psychologists are worried that the jolt received from video games may be addictive – a mainline hit of dopamine producing stimuli wired directly to our pleasure centres.

Why Do Boys play Video Games Much more often than Girls?

Video games may be addictive, but the danger seems to be much greater with males than females. We’ll explore why.

What is the Entertainment Value of Social Networks?

Of all the trends playing out currently online, that of social networks seems to be the most prevalent. Are social networks useful, or simply entertaining? Are they in transition from entertainment to usefulness? What is the future of social networking?

Can Online Compete with TV for Entertainment Value?

When we look at where our entertainment comes from, we’re definitely a culture in transition. Increasingly, more and more of our video consumption is online. So, if we find that entertainment and usefulness are both factors in online audience loyalty, what does this mean for future marketing?

The Difference Between Entertainment and Usefulness in Targeting Strategies?

At some point, I’ll have to address the fundamental question raised by Lance: If entertainment is also important, what are the implications for marketers? What mental modes are in place in both instances? This gets to some of the fundamental questions I’ve been wrestling with in marketing – the nature of engagement, the role of intent, the question of attribution. What is the difference in a strategy for search (usefulness) vs a strategy for Hulu (entertainment). And, does online bring about a significant paradigm shift as the worlds of usefulness and entertainment come closer to merging?

Lance..you got me thinking. Stay tuned!

Chasing Digital Fluff – Who Cares about What’s Hot?

Marketers are falling over themselves in their rush to the digital landscape. Social media is SO hot! But not as hot as behavioral targeting. And if you think that’s hot, wait till you see what you can do with mobile!

The Digital Dogpile

blow-dandelionMarketers desperately scramble over each other, grasping for a tenuous handhold on some emerging tactic that gives them, however briefly, a fraction of an inch advantage over the competition. New digital marketing directors prove their worth through their savvy of online technology. They cut their teeth on Facebook advertising and put Powerpoints (or, because they’re uber-cool – Keynote presentations) together on the immense potential of the social graph.

Churn is the norm in digital marketing. And marketers are the worst, whipping the industry into a froth because they get all breathless about the latest thing. My inbox gets a hundred emails every single day talking about how freaking cool everything is and how we’re stumbling to figure out the importance of everything. If you’re not an early adopter…scratch that…if you’re not a bleeding edge pioneer, you’re a hopeless loser. The pace of marketing testing and adoptions just keeps spinning faster and faster.

Step Away from the iPhone

Stop! Take a breath. Relax for a few minutes. Get outside and breath some honest to God fresh air. And don’t take your iPhone with you. Because here’s the scoop Kemosabe, all the technology in the world is useless until your audience figures out how to use it. And here’s the nasty little secret. Humans love bright shiny objects but we’re pretty slow when it comes to figuring out how to jam it into our already busy lives. Until that happens, your nifty online strategies will never be anymore than a pointless treadmill jammed on overdrive. You can run as fast as you want, but you’ll never get anywhere.

I do financial analyst calls every quarter and the last question on the call is always the same: anything else we should be looking at? Apparently, technologiosis (or technitis, or technophilia, take your pick) is contagious. My answer is usually the same..wait till people figure out how to use it.

Think about the buzz that’s been devoted to social networks and, more recently, real time search, in the last 2 years. That’s 2 years of foaming-at-the-mouth marketing buzz about how this channel is:

A) the savior of marketing
B) most effective connection with consumers
C) coolest technology without an identifiable purpose
D) biggest waste of time on God’s green earth
E) all of the above

The Geekiest Guy on my Block

Now, I’ll be the first to admit I don’t have a clue how to use social media in a meaningful way in my life. I have a Facebook page, I tweet, I have a Linked In profile, a Trip-It network, just to name a few, making me the geekiest guy I know. Maybe not at an online marketing show, but if you ever visit Kelowna, take a walk with me down my block and I’ll prove my techno-geek status is several Trekkie parsecs ahead of anyone else. I suspect the same is true for you. And you know what? I have no frigging idea why Facebook is important or why I should log into my profile today. It’s cool, but it’s not useful in an every day kind of way. And if I, who spend over 10 hours a day online and have a network of friends and colleagues that span the globe, can’t jam Facebook into my life in a useful way, how is the average techno-pleb going to?

As far as I can see, most of things marketers salivate over fall into the same category..digital candy that tweaks our dopamine supplying pleasure centre but serves no real, sustainable purpose in our lives. This puts it in the same category as 95% of my iPhone apps, 99% of the computer games on my laptop and the Wii my nephew got last Christmas – an obsession for approximately 27 hours, an occasional pastime for another 36 hours, then something we ignore for the rest of our lives.

The one difference, at least in my experience, seems to be teenagers. Most of things that seem to be passing fancies to us do seem to become useful in the lives of the average 15 – 23 year old. But, as I said in a previous post, when you look at what the live of a high school or university student looks like and what they want to do, a Facebook suddenly makes sense. For me, not so much.

An Eyeball is an Eyeball, Right?

So, even given this notorious degree of fickleness, why should marketer’s care? Eyeballs are still eyeballs, right? Even if the eyeballs we’re capturing this week will be completely different than the eyeballs we capture next week. This approach only works if you consider your market a faceless blob of unleashed consumer potential. If you actually want to get relevant messages to real people with real needs, the logic starts to break down immediately.

Effective marketing depends on reliable targeting. And reliable targeting depends on established patterns. And established patterns depend on sustained behaviors. And sustained behaviors depend on things we find useful. Otherwise, we’re marketing via fad, condemning ourselves to spending our professional lives and our client’s ad dollars chasing fluff in a hurricane. Our audience will always be “just passing through” on the way to the next thing.

I Miss Frank Cannon, PI

movies_070708_cannonMarkets have to stabilize in order for us to understand the individuals that make up that market. Also, brand relationships need a stable environment, allowing them to germinate and flourish.

When I was a kid, Kraft always sponsored Cannon. When you tuned in to see William Conrad somehow roll his fat old carcass out of his Lincoln Continental and pick off a sniper 3 miles away on a mountain top with his trusty .38 revolver, you could depend on Kraft telling you how to cook Mac & Cheese in every commercial break. Much as the entertainment value may have sucked (beggars with 2 channels in the Canadian prairies can’t be choosers) you knew Kraft would be there and Kraft knew who they were talking to. The audience had stabilized.

Until things pass through the temporary obsession phase to something that adds real value to our lives, we can’t consider advertising on these channels as anything more than an experiment. The trick in picking the right digital channels is not to look at the eyeballs they’re attracting today, but in how these things might be used in real, practical ways. That will give you an idea of how real people might be using these things next week or next month, when the technoratti have moved on to the latest bright shiny object.

Fear, Greed and the Google Parallax View

First published December 18, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Greed is right.

Greed works.

Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.

Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind.

— Gordon Gekko, “Wall Street”

Yesterday, I listened to an interview with Canadian businessman Stephen Jarislowsky. Jarislowsky is one of Canada’s richest men, our version of Warren Buffet. And he said something simple but profoundly important in the interview: Greed is strong, but fear is stronger.

Gekko is right. Greed does drive us. It is evolutionary. It’s hardwired into us. Harvard professors Nitin Nohria and Paul Lawrence identified the drive to acquire as one of the four primary drives of humans But as Abraham Maslow pointed out, there is a hierarchy of human needs and drives, and fear will always trump greed.

Our society has been defined by greed but I don’t agree that greed is right. It forces a zero-sum mentality, which, due to the blessings of fate, has resulted in a inequitable division of resources for us here in North America. The world’s possessions are seriously out of balance, and there is no way to redistribute without severe pain for those that currently have the possessions. Bill Clinton has been warning us about this for years, and it’s now beginning to happen. That is the pain we’re just beginning to feel, and we’re afraid. So, our evolutionary transmission has geared down into the first gear of survival: fear.

The interesting thing about this, from our own little slice of the world, is that we see our collective human consciousness captured in the query logs of Google. As we switch from greed to fear, we see search volumes reflect that. That’s why, in the past year, we’ve seen number of searches for “recession” catch and surpass the number of searches for “mortgages.” We’ve gone from dreaming about acquiring to worrying about defending, and whatever we’re thinking about, we search for.

This is a powerful demonstration of the power of search. It shows just how accurate a barometer it is of our collective mood. And mood determines reality. Our emotions are the jet fuel of our drives. They are our internal guidance systems that keep us on track to realize our goals. Our emotions, in aggregate, swing the economy, and the nation with it, from boom to bust. And there’s no better indicator of that then the searches we do on Google. John Battelle had it right. Google is the database of our intentions.

There has been endless speculation about whether search will weather the financial crisis. The question is really not worth asking. The fact that search has so accurately reflected the shift of our confidence shows how essential it is. Yes, people will use it less to search for things to buy and use it more to search for ways to survive, which will impact advertising revenues and cause pain (and hence, fear). But it is what it is. The search patterns show who we are and what’s on our mind.

But there will also be an interesting side effect that search marketers will have to adjust for. Kevin Lee called it aspirational searches. Just because we go into defend mode doesn’t mean we stop dreaming. Greed can be pushed out of the driver’s seat temporarily by fear, but soon we start planning our escape. Fantasy is a favorite activity of ours. Look at the boom of the movie industry through the depths of the Great Depression. Even though we can’t afford a new car or a trip to Mexico, we can still pretend that we can, and this ersatz consumer activity will also show up on Google’s query logs, causing much head-scratching about the sudden drop in conversions.

We’ll adapt to the new reality and we’ll survive. That’s why fear exists. It allows us to marshall our resources and focus on the threat. And eventually, greed will once again turn on the tap. The balance between these two forces has been swinging back and forth for hundreds of thousands of years. But never before have we had such a clear view of how it happens, thanks to search.

P.S. Just realized, because of the way the holidays stack up on the calendar, that this is my last column for 2008. It’s been a true pleasure spending each Thursday with you talking about search, branding, the brain and anything else that crossed my mind. Thank you for listening (and responding). I look forward to picking up the conversation again in 2009!

David vs. Goliath Brands on the Search Results Page

First published December 4, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I talked about branding on the search page, effectively intercepting the user during consideration. Certainly if you’re a household brand name, you have to be at or near the top of searches for your product category if you want to defend your position in the prospect’s consideration scent. But what if you’re a new entry into the market or a relatively unknown brand. Can you still effectively play in the category? Yes, but you have to be smarter than your behemoth competitors. Fortunately, in most cases, that’s not too hard to do when it comes to search.

The Strategy: Play Broad, but Think Niche

First, it’s important to know the common behaviors of the searcher. We start at the top left and scan the results in the “Golden Triangle” first. Only after this will we look at the ads on the right. We look for relevance, based not just on the query we used, but the implicit labels we carry in our mind. We will start with the simplest query that we feel will yield acceptable results with the least amount of investment. And, we will click through on two or three results to compare the information scent on the landing pages. So, given this behavioral pattern, what can you do to catch the attention of prospects with broad generic queries?

First of all, you have to target your messaging with exquisite precision in the title of your ad. This is no mean feat, because the limit is 25 characters, including spaces. Each one of these characters is precious, because this is the part of your ad that will get read. At best, you’ll get spot scanning of your description (bonus hint, move your most important “hot button” words in your description so they’re in the line right under the title and near the front. And don’t be afraid to put prices in. They’re a disruption in the text-based pattern and so stand out to the eye).

Rule of thumb, start with the query (hit bolding of the query is an important relevancy cue) and then laser focus on the primary hot button for your niche target. Don’t be afraid to identify the target. If you’re on a broad category, but your target is B2B buyers, say so. If the differentiator is benefit, move it into the title. One example, laptops that are durable enough to stand the rigors of road warrior treatment: The query you’re bidding for could be “laptops,” but your title should be: “Rugged Laptops.” Because your brand is unknown to the prospect, don’t worry about putting it in the title.

Pick Your Spot

Secondly, in a broad category, you want to avoid unqualified clicks. So you’re going to have to move down the right rail, preferably targeting the #4 or #5 spot. Eye-tracking studies show that this spot gets decent visibility (because of how we move over to the right rail when we reach the bottom of the golden triangle) relative to the rest of the ads, yet doesn’t pull a lot of unqualified clicking. This position, together with your targeted message, stands a decent chance of catching the prospect’s eye without capturing ROI-deflating gratuitous clicking. The challenge will be fighting the tendency of Google’s quality score to push you off the first page of results.

Plan Your Tactics in Context

All too often in search, we plan our messaging without paying attention to the user context that leads to engagement. Your ad will be appearing together with a number of other ads and organic results on a search page. Users will be scanning through those ads and making their choice based on not just what your ad says, but what all the others do as well. Additionally, there will be at least a few clicks through to competitive landing pages. You’re going to have to plan your messaging relative to what your competition is doing. Do a query yourself and see what the landscape looks like, through the eyes of your prospect. What other choices are available? How effective is the landing page experience, again, with your prospect’s potential intent firmly in mind? If you adopt this mindset, you’ll be amazed at how the biggest brands in the business (any business, yours included) routinely fumble the ball when it comes to delivering what the prospect is looking for on the search page. Unfortunately, non-targeted messaging and irrelevant landing page experiences seem to be the rule rather than the exception. There’s plenty of room for smart search marketers on the average results page.

Measure, Test, Optimize and Repeat

If you’re playing in the high traffic but generic keyword space, devote a lot of time to testing and tweaking. Find optimum positions and wording. Carefully watch your ROAS metrics. Capture the micro-conversions. Be smarter than the competition and you’ll find that search page where you can pull off a victory, even when you’re faced with David vs. Goliath odds.

Digging Googlized Brains: Front Page Stuff!

In my Just Behave column last week, I looked at the recent UCLA fMRI study on brain activity during online searching. I also looped this back to Nicholas Carr’s article from the summer, Is Google Making Us Stupid? and a few of my other posts on how cognition plays out when we search and potential neural remapping. All pretty geeky stuff right?

Well, it seems that putting the words “Google” and “brain” in the same title hit a nerve with readers. Somehow I made the front page of Digg (my first time) and Danny Sullivan fired me an email saying the story had 18,000 views in one day, making it one of the most read Search Engine Land articles ever. I know I find this stuff fascinating, but it’s good to know others do as well. Here was one of the Digg comments:

First off, this is the most interesting article I’ve seen on the front page of Digg in a good while. It doesn’t say that Jesus doesn’t exist nor does it compare Jesus to Obama. It’s about a revolutionary scientific study and it made it to the front page of Digg. WOW!

The column seems to have found it’s way onto a ton of blogs, but just in case you didn’t see it in any of your other feeds, thought I’d do a quick post. Feel free to continue to Digg it. I have to admit, now that I made the front page once..it’s getting a little addictive!