Category Archives: Corporate Darwinism

The View Above the “Weeds”

First published November 10, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Yesterday was not a good day.

It was a day that made me wish I had never gone into this business — a day that made me long for a warm beach and a mai tai. I don’t have these days very often, but yesterday, oh boy, I had it in spades!

I’ve been doing search (yesterday, I used a different, less polite noun) for a long time.  And I have to be honest, some days it feels like a thousand leeches are sucking the blood out of me. Given that, it was impossible to muster up much enthusiasm for the roll out of Google+ Business Pages or the raging controversy of Facebook’s “LikeGate.” Really? Are those the most important things to litter our inboxes with?

On days like yesterday, when I get caught in the weeds of digital marketing (where the blood-sucking leeches tend to hang out) I sometimes lose sight of why I got into this in the first place. This is a revolution. What’s more, it’s a revolution of epic, perhaps unprecedented, proportions. In macro-economic terms, this is what they call a long-wave transition or a Kondratieff wave (named after the Russian economist who first identified it). These cycles, which typically last more than 50 years, see the deconstruction of the current market infrastructure and the reconstruction of a market built on entirely new foundations. They are caused by change factors so massively disruptive, often in the form of technological innovations or global social events (for example, a World War), that it takes decades for their impact to be absorbed and responded to.

The digital revolution is perhaps the biggest Kondratieff wave in history. One could tentatively peg the start of the transition in the early to mid ‘90s with the introduction of the Internet. If this is the case, we’re less than 20 years into the wave, still in the deconstruction phase. To me, that feels about right. If history repeats itself, which it has a tendency of doing; we have yet to get to the messiest part of the transition.

These waves tend to precipitate what’s called a “regime shift.” Here is how the regime shift works. Companies started in the old market paradigm eventually reach a stagnation point. In our particular case, think of the multinational conglomerates built around market necessities such as mass distribution, physical locations, supply-chain logistics, large-scale manufacturing, top-down management and centralized R&D. In this market, bigger was not only better, it was essential to truly succeed. Our Fortune 500 reads like a who’s who of this type of company.  But eventually, the market becomes fully serviced, or even saturated, with the established market contenders, and growth is restricted.

Then, a disruptive change happens and a new opportunity for growth is identified. At first, the full import of the disruption is not fully realized. Speculation and a flood of investment capital can create a market frenzy early in the wave, looking for quick wins from the new opportunities. Think dot-com boom

The issue here is that the full impact of the disruptive change has to be absorbed by society — and that doesn’t happen in a year, or even 10 years. It takes decades for us to integrate it into our lives and social fabric. And so, the early wave market boom inevitably gives way to a collapse. Think dot-com bust.

As the wave progresses, the “regime shift” starts to play out. Established players are still heavily invested in the existing market structure, and although they may realize the potential of the new market, they simply can’t move fast enough to capitalize on it. Case in point, when industrial America became electrified in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the existing regime had factories built around steam power.  Steam-powered factories had a central steam engine that drove all the equipment in the factory through a complex maze of drive shafts and belts. The factories were dirty, dangerous and inefficient. New factories powered by electricity were cleaner, brighter, safer and much more efficient. But even with the obvious benefits of electricity, established manufacturers tried to retrofit their existing factories by jury-rigging electrical motors onto equipment designed to run by steam. They simply had too much invested in the current market infrastructure to shut the doors and walk away. New companies weren’t burdened by this baggage and built factories from scratch to take advantage of electricity. The result? Within a few decades, the old manufacturers had to close their doors, outmaneuvered by newer, more nimble and more efficient competitors.

When I plot our current situation against the timelines of past waves, I believe that given how massive this wave is, it could take longer than 50 years to play out. And, if that’s the case, there is still a lot of deconstruction of the previous marketplace to happen. The good news is, the building of the new market is a period of huge growth and opportunity. There is still a ton of life left in this wave, and we haven’t even realized its full benefits yet.

On days like yesterday, when my to-do list and inbox conspire to burn out what little sanity I have left, I have to step back and realize why I did this. Somehow, way back then, I knew this was going to be important. And yesterday, I had to remind myself just how massively important it is.

Amazon = Evolution, Google = Intelligent Design?

First published October 20, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Ironically, the hottest thing on Google+is a rant from a Google Insider about how Google+ is hopelessly limited because Google doesn’t get the importance of platforms.  Steve Yegge goes on at some length (over 4,000 words) contrasting his first six years at Amazon and his last six years at Google.

The media jumped on it, because Yegge spent some of his rant bashing Google+, which is rapidly collecting more holes than Bonnie and Clyde’s ill fated 1934 Ford sedan. But Yegge was simply using Google+ as an example of how badly Google has dropped the ball when it comes to building platforms to support external development. There are many, many things that Google does far better than Amazon (according to Yegge) but building out platforms is not one of them:

“Bezos realized long before the vast majority of Amazonians that Amazon needs to be a platform.”

In contrast, Google tends to keep their code base under internal lock and key to protect their IP. In fact, even their own Chinese developers didn’t have access to Google’s core code, for fear that IP would somehow leak out and end up on a Chinese competitor’s site. A valid concern, to be sure, but that approach runs directly counter to the open environment required to become a platform developer, something that Yegge says almost everyone does better than Google:

“That one last thing that Google doesn’t do well is Platforms. We don’t understand platforms. We don’t ‘get’ platforms.

What, Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo). We all don’t get it.”

What, then, is the advantage of being a platform developer?  For one thing, it leverages the power of Darwinian development. As long as development stays locked behind the corporate firewall, you simply can’t match the innovation that will come from an open ecosystem. This is especially true in a corporate environment where management tends towards micromanagement, true of both Amazon and Google. Bezos and Page both tend to run roughshod over internal developers, dismissing ideas out of hand and turning development into a political minefield. But Steve Bezos realized the limitations of this command and control approach.

“The other big realization he [Bezos] had was that he can’t always build the right thing.”

Every successful species evolves through a long and arduous process of trial and error. Evolution requires sheer volume, leaving the environment to be the eventual judge of success. Bezos has harnessed the same approach for Amazon. Google is instead taking an “intelligent design” approach. Personally, I much prefer Amazon’s odds for success. But they’re not the only one who has embraced Darwinian development.

In exploring the lack of momentum of Google Plus One, you have to compare against Facebook. One thing that Facebook did which helped build incredible momentum was to turn their site into a platform for social networking of all kinds.

“Facebook gets it. That’s what really worries me. That’s what got me off my lazy butt to write this thing.”

In looking at social, Google got that it was important, but what they didn’t get was that communities, whether online or in the real world, develop organically on top of required superstructures. They evolve, they aren’t created.  Facebook understands this, but Google hasn’t quite caught on yet.

“Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that’s not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work.”

As luck would have it, Yegge also touched on the topic of last week’s column, the incredible intuition of Steve Jobs. I mentioned that I hadn’t seen the same “magic” in Larry Page. Yegge seems to agree:

“The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them. You can’t do that. Not really. Not reliably. There have been precious few people in the world, over the entire history of computing, who have been able to do it reliably. Steve Jobs was one of them. We don’t have a Steve Jobs here. I’m sorry, but we don’t.”

Yegge’s post is required reading, because it offers a startlingly frank and transparent view inside Google, and I applaud Google’s courage in allowing it to remain open to the public. What is really fascinating though, is what this means for the future of search and the role of Google in it. Unfortunately, I’m at my maximum word count, so I’ll explore that next week.

What’s So Interesting about Google, Anyway

First published July 7, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I just received my review copy of “I’m Feeling Lucky, The Confessions of Google Employee # 59” by Douglas Edwards. That brings to six the number of Google themed books that are sitting on my bookshelf (including one by fellow Insider Aaron Goldman).

That got me to thinking. Are six books a lot to be written about one company?

Well, it turns out that there are more than six. A quick check on Amazon turned up no less than 11 books on Google, the company. That doesn’t include the gazillions of Google-inspired how-to books. So, to return to my original question, are 11 a lot? And if they are, why do authors write about Google? What does Google have that other companies don’t? And how does the Google story stack up against other corporate sagas?

It seems Google actually heads the high-tech pack when it comes to attracting ink. Again checking Amazon, I only found one book on Yahoo and two on Facebook. There were four on Microsoft and seven books on Apple. Of all the tech companies I checked, only IBM equaled Google’s tally, at 11. Of course, IBM has been around for over 100 years, compared to less than two decades for Google.

Google even beats corporate stalwarts like GE (seven), Proctor & Gamble (three) and HP (seven).

In looking at the list, a few things immediately came to mind. First of all, many of the books written about a company are actually written about a founder or chef executive of the company. Half the books written about Microsoft are actually biographies of Bill Gates. The same is true for Apple (Steve Jobs), GE (Jack Welch) and IBM (Lou Gerstner). But none of the Google books I’ve ready are about Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They’re about the company. Certainly, Larry and Sergey have starring roles, but they don’t overshadow the company itself. Google is always front and center.

Secondly, many of the other companies that are the subject of books have gone through massive restructurings or turnarounds, which formed the central theme of the respective books. Google hasn’t hit a slump yet. There isn’t even a lot of conflict in Google’s history to chronicle. Unlike Facebook, Aaron Sorkin (who adapted Ben Mezrich’s book “The Accidental Billionaires” for the movie “The Social Network”) would have a difficult time creating a juicy script out of the Google story.  It’s not nearly as “Hollywood” as Facebook’s rise to glory. And Google doesn’t generate near the animosity of a Wal-Mart (20-plus books, most of them about how the retail giant is destroying America) or Enron (the grand Champion of corporate story telling, with over 30 books, all about its ignoble collapse). So, what is it about Google that fascinates us, if it isn’t a rags to riches to rags to riches saga, an inside glimpse at an evil empire, or a superstar CEO?

All the books written about Google are generally complimentary, respectful and, in some cases, even a touch obsequious and over-enthralled. Those who choose to write about Google generally fawn all over the company, the brilliance of the co-founders, the velocity of its growth and the vibrancy of its culture. If there is muck to rake here, potential authors have yet to uncover it. The only other company I’ve found that even comes close to inspiring the sycophantic awe of Google is Disney, with over 20 titles, the majority of them complimentary.

I think the Google story has appeal because Google is something we all use. In many ways, the story of Google is the story of Web search (John Battelle’s approach) — and that has changed our lives in some pretty fundamental ways. It’s Google’s role as a catalyst of change — in how we think about information, in marketing, in how companies conduct themselves, and in a number of yet-to-be determined ways — that compel us to keep turning the pages. This isn’t a story about a company, or a brilliant founder. It’s a story about a society balanced on the cusp of dramatic and massive change.  Google is just the narrative framework many have chosen as the vehicle for their social parable.

Really, if you were going to write a book about search and how it’s changing our world, whom else would you write about?

The Apple Approach to Digital Service Delivery

First published October 7, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

A few weeks ago, I was at a conference where the future of advertising was being debated. One of the topics that came up naturally was the future of advertising agencies. What will they look like in the future? It’s a stone-cold cinch that they won’t look much like they do today.

Here’s the challenge. Marketing is changing faster than most companies can keep up with. So many marketers find themselves chasing technology. This is an approach guaranteed to frustrate. Technology is impossible to predict. It’s an area rife with “Black Swans.” You can’t pin future strategies on technological bubbles that expand and burst. As one marketing head said, “the minute someone comes to me with a Facebook/Twitter/Foursquare strategy, I fire them.”

How to Build a Racecar

What marketers are trying to do to keep up with the digital transition wave is akin to buying miscellaneous mechanical parts and then trying to assemble them into a racecar on the fly. In most cases, you don’t know what those pieces do, how they fit together, or even if they do fit together. We’re not even sure what the end product should look like. Yet we keep having digital marketing technology vendors say we have to buy these parts because if we don’t, we’ll lose the race. It’s madness to continue this way. It’s one of the reasons my friend Scott Brinker of Ion Interactive says that we need CMTs – Chief Marketing Technologists. The theory – at least one person in the pit crew should have an idea of what a car looks like.

As I was thinking about this, I started thinking what a possible parallel might be. Where else does technology move so fast that’s it’s hard, if not impossible, for the end user to keep up? Almost immediately, I thought about personal computers.

The PC Service Model

Consider the PC approach. You buy a box designed to accommodate as many pieces of hardware and software as possible. In return for this open flexibility, you have to figure out how to get all the pieces to fit together. You have to download the patches, try to get the box to recognize the new peripheral and figure out how to get one program to talk to the other. Granted, it’s easier than digital marketing because at least the various developers of hardware and software go in with the intention of trying to get along nice with each other. There is no such consensus with digital marketing vendors.

The Apple Service Model

Now consider the Apple approach. Within an enclosed ecosystem, the pieces are pretested to ensure they fit together. The goal: to deliver a plug-and-play experience. Apple is not 100% successful in this, but its track record is much better than on the PC side. Do you have the open flexibility of the PC world? No, but you’re also spared seeing how the sausage is made.

Could you not extend this same approach to a digital marketing agency? Rather than embroiling the client in the nitty-gritty detail of multiple platforms and technologies, couldn’t you integrate the pieces so they work well in the background, pumping out results through a simple and elegant user interface?

It sounds simple, and indeed, this is what many full-service digital agencies say they do, yet there still seems to be a disconnect when it comes to satisfied customers. I haven’t heard many enthusiastic evangelists for digital agencies. I haven’t seen the same devotion and/or longing I see in other’s eyes when I pull out my iPad in a meeting or on the plane. It was expressed in clear terms on a flight last week when, as I was reading a book on it, an elderly gentleman walked down the aisle and asked, “Do you love it or do you LOVE it?” We talked for 10 minutes about iPads. Until those same conversations start happening about your favorite digital agency, we’re missing the boat.

Zappos and the SNAFU Syndrome

First published September 23, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Who can say no to MediaPost Publisher Ken Fadner? Certainly not me. And so, next Monday, I’ll be joining all you OMMA-ites (OMMAhanians?) in New York City for the big show. Ken wanted me to set the stage by spending a little more time talking about a subject I raised a few columns back, entitled “SNAFU: the New Normal.” In that column, I mentioned that a lot of companies going through huge transitions ask if there are any examples of other companies that have done it right. I said then the simple answer is no. We’re all figuring this stuff out as we go. But today, I wanted to share a further thought from one of the people that asked that question:

Enough Zappos Already!

“Tell me, are any companies doing this right. And don’t give me examples like Amazon or Zappos. I’m sick of hearing about these dotcom poster children. We’re not them. We can’t do the same things!”

Coincidentally, I’ve just finished reading Tony Hsieh’s book, “Delivering Happiness,” where he gives his perspective of what worked and what didn’t at Zappos.  One passage, in particular, shows that Zappos is not immune to the SNAFU Syndrome:

“It may seem sometimes like we don’t know what we’re doing. And it’s true: we don’t. That’s a bit scary, but you can take comfort in knowing that nobody else knows how to do what we’re doing either. If they did, they’d be the Web’s most popular shoe store. Sure, people have done parts of what we do before, but what we’ve learned over the years at Zapoos is that the devil is in the details. And that’s where we’re breaking new ground.”

It’s More than Foosball

Here’s the thing: Survival in the SNAFU storm is not about pizza lunches, foosball tables or wacky staff parties. It’s not about gourmet cafeterias, Segways or even culture handbooks. Hsieh didn’t do anything with Zappos that hadn’t been documented long before the dot-com era. He (like me) is a big fan of Jim Collins (“Good to Great”) and  Dave Logan  (“Tribal Leadership”). The foundations laid out in both those books have been field-tested across many different types of companies, from hospitals to hotels, grocery stores to banks, manufacturers to consulting firms. In fact, in both books there is a notable lack of high-flying dot-coms, as that wasn’t the flavor du jour when these books were researched.

These books look at the very foundations of organizational effectiveness and found that it wasn’t about cultural perks; it was about believing in something. Success comes from the feeling that you’re part of a bigger whole. It was about rising above profit statements and shareholder reports by creating a mission that makes people want to come to work in the morning.

Zappos isn’t about selling shoes. In the big scheme of what’s truly important, footwear doesn’t factor very highly. Zappos is about spontaneously creating smiles through exceptional experiences.  And that, my friends, is something any company can aspire to.

North Star

Here’s why these organizational foundations are so important in the new world. It’s very easy to lose your bearings in a sea of SNAFU. As I said, there are no maps or blueprints to follow. Strategies and five-year plans can get torn to shreds in a matter of seconds. When that happens, you’re going to need something to set your bearings by. Inspiring mission statements and real, living, breathing core values will always be there. They rise above strategy. They’re a North Star that’s always in sight.

If you do this right, everyone knows why they come to work in the morning. And, when the world goes to hell on you, it will give you a bearing point against which you can correct your course and head in the right direction.

Want to give yourself a chance to survive the SNAFU Syndrome? You don’t have to be Zappos or Amazon (and even they don’t have any guarantees). You just have to make up your mind to do it. Start by reading these two books.

If you’re not inspired, consider a new career. If you don’t now, you’ll probably be forced to later.

SNAFU: The New Normal

First published September 2, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week I heard this in a meeting:”We’re in the middle of tremendous change. The organization is going through the biggest transition in its history.”

The line is usually delivered with a mix of desperation, a touch of helplessness and an apologetic tone. The admission comes, with the predictability of a carefully timed script, as I’m trying to assess where companies are in terms of their digital marketing maturity.

Just a few years ago there was a lot of brash boasting about how cutting-edge companies were, but it’s been a long time since I’ve heard that confidence. Even former dot-com rock stars are realizing that they have a lot to learn. They know things are messed up and they think it’s their fault. Somehow things have gotten fouled up in the execution machinery of their company. They’re not smart enough, nimble enough or gutsy enough.

Hello, My Name is Gord, and My Company is Struggling to Keep Up…

Here’s the secret that most of these companies don’t know. As gut-wrenching the changes they’re going through — as messed-up as everything seems to be — they’re not alone. I hear that same apologetic admission from almost every company I meet with. I say it myself with a regularity in our internal company meetings that has lead to the formation of a betting pool with our more cynical team members. The next line that follows in the script is a desperate question: “Can you give us an example of a company that’s doing this right?”

The answer, though disappointing, is at least succinct:”No.”

We’re all learning — and we’re all screwing up. Get used to it, because it’s the new normal. This is the environment in which we have to learn to exist. There are no blueprints or case studies of perfect execution, because we’re heading into virgin territory.

If You Don’t Laugh, You Cry

World War II gave birth to my favorite acronym: SNAFU. It stands for “Situation Normal: All F*&%ed Up.” As a born cynic, I love the tang of acrid yet amused resignation in the face of an impossible situation that the term carries. It sums up the one attitude that ensures that we will eventually triumph: Look, we all know the world is a big ball of crap. Suck it up and get the job done. And while you’re at it, stop your whining.

There are two things that have shoved the world into massive disruption. First, we have the tidal wave of change unleashed by digital technology. It was like strapping a rocket pack on the back of our society and lighting it up. The only problem was that we didn’t know where we were going. At first, it didn’t matter, as long as we were moving fast. We were just exhilarated by the speed at which we were moving.

That led to the second factor, the crumbling of the economy. Suddenly, fast wasn’t good enough anymore. We had to be fast and focused. The stuff we did had to make sense. We — and by we I mean everybody — were being held accountable.

There’s Actually a Name for This…

These twin factors are ushering us through a period economists call a Long Wave Transition. Venezuelan economist Carlota Perez, in particular, has spent a lot of time thinking about this.

Here’s a quote from one of her papers:

“The problem is that, in such periods, institutions face a chaotic and unaccustomed situation, which requires much deeper changes than the great majority of their leaders and members had ever experienced. The difficulty is increased by the fact that there are no proven recipes and change has to take place by trial and error experimentation under the pressure of the very high social costs of the techno-economic transformation.”

Or, in other words: SNAFU. Get used to it, because you’re not alone.

White Salmon and Black Swans

First published July 22, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

The conversation started innocently enough. We were entertaining out-of-town guests at a winery and restaurant overlooking Lake Okanagan. And, as often happens when people visit B.C., they ordered salmon.

“You know, I heard that not all salmon are pink. There are actually white salmon.”

“Really, I’ve never heard of that.”

“Well, let’s see if there really are white salmon.”

So, we turned to the arbitrator of all such things: Google. If it can be found on the Web, apparently it exists. Which is an interesting behavior in itself, and a point I’ll come back to in a minute. But first, let’s talk about why the existence of white salmon is important.

A Fish by any Other Color

A white salmon is important because it’s a black swan. Or, rather, it’s a Black Swan. The capitalization is critical, because it’s not the animal I’m referring to, but the phenomenon identified by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book of the same name.

For all of human history, until the 17th century, it was commonly accepted that all swans were white. But in 1697, Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh discovered a black swan in western Australia. Why is that important? Well, for the vast majority of us, it’s not. But what if, for some reason, our world revolves around swans? What if our ability to earn a living depends on the predictably of a swan’s natural coloring? Then suddenly, it becomes vitally important.

Black Swans — and white salmon, for that matter — are outliers. And outliers are important because they cause us to change our view of the world. The normal, regular and expected allow our lives to run down predictable paths. As long as this continues, nothing changes. But the unpredicted, the unknown outlier, is an undeniable occurrence that forces us to reframe our view of things and take a new path. It was a Black Swan that changed the world.

According to Taleb, Black Swans have to have three things: they have to lie outside the realm of regular expectations, they have to carry extreme impact, and, when we discover them, they force us to alter our view of things to explain their existence. We have to change our view of the world to accommodate them. Taleb asserts that all of human history has taken a path that pivots on the discovery of Black Swans.

Discovering Black Swans

Now, back to our dinner conversation. Black Swans only become important when they were discovered. The vastness of the physical world meant that it took us a long time to find that first black swan.

But the world today is significantly different than it was in 1697. Today, Black Swans pop up all the time on YouTube or in a blog post. Every single day, somebody somewhere is googling a Black Swan. And, when they find them, Black Swans go viral because the unexpected is naturally fascinating to us. We can’t help but talk about it, and today, when we do, chances are it’s through a digital channel.

The more the world becomes digitally connected and synchronized, the faster word spreads about Black Swans. And when word spreads, we are forced once again to change our view of the world. This means that the pace of change in human history, catalyzed by Black Swan discoveries, is picking up speed. Today, you can’t step outside your door without tripping over a Black Swan.

The discovery of a Black Swan sets in motion a recurring chain of events. First, we have to acknowledge its existence. Let’s call this the Black Swan Googling stage. Then, we have to talk about it. This would be the Black Swan Twitter stage. Then, we have to rationalize its existence, creating an explanation for it — the Black Swan Wikipedia stage. Then, it becomes an accepted part of our new worldview, the new normal. What used to take centuries to filter through the civilized world now happens in the matter of days, or, at the most, weeks.

After all, when I woke up yesterday morning, I didn’t know there was such a thing as a white salmon. Today, my world has changed forever.

SEO: The Road to Strategy

First published July 8, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’m burnt — toasted, roasted and completely fried. I’ve just spent the last two days in stakeholder meetings with a client. In those two days I’ve met with representatives from every department imaginable — from channel sales to governance, corporate relations to analytics, corporate marketing to website design, social media to IT. In total, a dozen meetings with almost twice that many people. I’ve got about 20 pages of notes I have to sift through.

Why?

I’ll give you the same answer I gave before each meeting, in what officially became known as the “preamble”:

“You might be wondering why you’re here. For the past two years we’ve been working with your company on the organic visibility of your website. With organic optimization, there are really two things you have to think about — what you say about yourself, and what others say about you. Up to now, we’ve been focused on the first category: the content on your website, how the site is coded, the keywords customers might use to find you. That was relatively straightforward because you controlled all the things we were looking at. But now, we have to look at the second category — what others are saying about you. And that gets a lot more complicated. Now, suddenly, we need to understand what’s happening in almost every aspect of the business. What makes it even more complicated is that we have to begin to understand how all those pieces fit together.”

What became clear over the two days was that the discussions that we initiated about our SEO strategy could also have been the beginning discussions required to craft a companywide strategy. The fact is, trying to please a search engine algorithm means you have to think of your online presence in its totality. Google and Bing determine your online relevance based on nothing less than the digital footprint of your organization. And, as the boundaries continue to dissolve between the virtual realities of our businesses and the brick-and-mortar reality, who we are online is who we are, period.

This opens up an interesting challenge for organic practitioners. They have to be prepared to step out of their cozy niches, wedged somewhere between the worlds of marketing and IT, and be ready to truly “get” their clients at all levels. The best SEO practitioners have to abandon the quick fixes, like buying links, and roll up their sleeves, putting in the sweat equity required to come up with strategies that come from the very DNA of the company. SEO tactics that are grounded in the day-to-day business and the strategic objectives of the company will always outperform the “links for hire” and ghostwriter content creation that still flourishes in this business. Is it easy? Hell no. Is it worth it? I believe so, or wouldn’t have spent the last two days holed up in a nondescript meeting room across the hall from cubicle B23.

Here’s the thing. Trying to understand what is required for the next phase of SEO is imposing a discovery process and discipline that I believe will make us better vendor partners and make our clients better marketers. The same is true, by the way, for a truly authentic social media strategy. A while ago, I wrote a column in which I said that companies “get the SEO rankings they deserve.” It’s also incumbent upon us, as partners in this process, to be ready to rise to the challenge for those clients who have proven themselves ready to move beyond the quick fixes and questionable practices.

Marketing: Leading the Way

First published June 10, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

At last week’s national Business Marketing Association (BMA) conference in Chicago, three marketing executives from three well-known B2B brands each made an interesting comment:

“In the 3M scheme of things, marketing wasn’t even a second-tier priority. It was fourth or fifth tier at best. But in the future, marketing needs to lead 3M.” — Jeff Lavers,  Vice President of Marketing, Sales and Communications, 3M

“Emerson didn’t even have a CMO before me. They didn’t believe they needed one.”– Kathy Button Bell, CMO, Emerson

“We’re announcing a marriage at GE. We’re not sure how they’ll get along, but IT and marketing are about to become married. We’re combining the two functions.” — Beth Comstock, CMO, GE

Wow! Three iconic B2B brands, each rethinking the role of marketing within their organizations. Is this a wave?

What Marketing Should Be

The reason I love marketing, at its purest, is because it’s the connection between an organization’s business model and their customers. Marketing owns that essential bond. But that’s a responsibility that has been abdicated by many organizations, and never explicitly acknowledged by others. That connection, that reason to do business in the first place, is ignored by a startling number of companies.

Marketing should be the voice of the customer, driving product development, service delivery, operation — indeed, every aspect of the business. That’s what Lavers was hinting at in his challenge to 3M. Companies need to be driven by their customers. Marketing should be accountable for keeping the two firmly in sync. But somehow, in the past several decades, marketing has become cheapened, to the point that the function was essentially abolished in many org charts.  3M relegated it to a seat way at the back of the bus. Emerson never even bothered to put in on the corporate directory until 10 years ago. Marketing needs to be put back on the org chart, right at the top.

The excuse in the B2B world was that there was no need for marketing. The channels owned the relationships with the customers.  But the digital marketplace is re-forging relationships between manufacturers and end customers. Suddenly, brands matter. Customer feedback matters. Conversations matter. Marketing has to be the one constantly reminding everyone inside the corporate walls that those connections are vital in the future.

The Marketing – IT Connection

So that explains the import of the comments from Jeff Lavers and Kathy Button Bell. What of the impending nuptials between marketing and IT at GE? What are we to make of Beth Comstock’s BMA announcement?

This signals a fascinating shift in the practice of marketing. If marketing takes over the wheel and drives the company forward, then IT has to provide the infrastructure to help it win. This will be an uneasy shift of power. IT is used to being the control point within organizations, though marketing folks would use a different label: “bottleneck” or ” black hole” is one I regularly hear. With the shift in importance of marketing, IT dragging their heels will no longer be tolerated. In their drive to be nimble, marketing will be pushing — and pushing hard. I see no signals here that indicate potential wedded bliss. Essential? Yes. Easy? Not on your life!

If America’s iconic B2B brands are now ramping up for a new kind of marketplace, one where they take back accountability for end-to-end relationships, we are definitely dealing with a new normal. But I fear many in the C-suite ponder the prospect with the same reluctance they would have about giving the kids the keys to the Porsche.  Sure, we’ll go fast, but we will be driving off a cliff?

More Thoughts on Outside In Thinking

Before I move on to Carlota Perez and her Regime Transition Theory, i just wanted to add some additional thoughts to yesterday’s post about Outside In Perspectives.

Strangers Amongst Us

As I mentioned yesterday, sometimes a stranger in a strange land is better able to see things than the natives. For the inside group, what they see everyday ceases to become remarkable. It’s just their everyday reality. And, as I said, people in a group tend to conform to the norm of the group. Herds work much better when everyone is heading in the same direction, so we have an inherent drive to get along with our herd-mates. There are multiple ways this plays out, but in the end, our collective behaviors define our culture. However, as we conform to the norms of our group, they tend to become invisible. What strikes an outsider as a quaint custom or odd behaviors is, to the insider, simply the routine of their day. Culture dictates what is remarkable or what is numbingly normal. For example, our noses curl up at some of the dishes from other cultures (China comes to mind, with roasted scorpions on a stick) yet we think there’s nothing remarkable about wolfing down a couple of scrambled chicken fetuses on toast. We may even add a couple of fried slices of belly fat from that foul smelling animal that loves to roll in its own excrement. Normal is in the eyes of the beholder.

When I travel (as I am right now) I notice things about a culture that a native never would. I also notice that travelers from different countries tend to have different levels of tolerance for the new and novel. For example, I find Canadian tourists quicker to conform to the customs of a foreign country than Americans. Americans (and realize, I’m talking about averaged behavior here) tend to like to take a little piece of America with them. They are like cultural missionaries, transplanting the seeds of American culture to the destinations they visit. Canadians are cultural observers, taking note but leaving few traces of their home country. Of course, when it comes to hockey games, all bets are off. The maple leaf suddenly sprouts everywhere.

Canadians in Search of a Culture

McDonaldsinRomeAmericans like the world to conform to them, where as Canadians are more apt to conform to wherever they are. The sheer bulk of American culture spreads far beyond its borders, where as Canadian culture is still struggling to fill the huge empty spaces that make up Canada itself.

Why the cultural differences between Canadians and Americans? Actually, Canadians have a long history of cultural observance. Some of the most esteemed observers of American society all have Canadian roots: Marshall McLuhan, Malcolm Gladwell and Steven Pinker – to name just a few. Of course, entertainment is also about observing the foibles of our society, and Canadians have long mined this rich vein – Mike Myers, Jim Carrey, Seth Rogen, Ivan Reitman, Rick Moranis, Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Michael J. Fox, Eugene levy, Howie Mandel, Lorne Michaels, Leslie Nielsen, Martin Short, Norman Jewison and James Cameron are all Canadians.

Why are Canadians cultural observers and conformists, while Americans are cultural imperialists? In the animal world, Canadians would be chameleons and Americans would be peacocks. I think it has to do with the vibrancy of the culture, its critical mass and also the prevailing attitudes of the inhabitants. For example, there’s a strong correlation between the military history of an nation and the aggressiveness of it’s cultural imperialism. If we look at critical mass, that presents another challenge for Canadians. The sheer size of our country means we have pockets of population spread across the landscape, rather than one contiguous community. Each pocket has unique cultures (militantly so in Quebec) so Canadians continually conform to new cultures, even as we travel within our own borders. We don’t have the same unifying cultural icons that Americans do, in their TV, their movies and obsessions with celebrities. In fact, all those things we import from the US. If you go beyond hockey and Tim Hortons, there are precious few cultural threads to stitch our nation together (and we refuse to believe that our precious Timmie’s is now owned by a US corporation – PepsiCo). Before the US, we imported our culture from our British and French founders. As Helen Gordon McPherson said, Canadians have been so busy explaining to the Americans that we aren’t British, and to the British that we aren’t Americans that we haven’t had time to become Canadians.

Carry No Assumptions

My point in this rather long aside is that the less preoccupied you are with spreading your own culture, the more observant you can be with others. Canadians seem naturally suited to this. If you are going to become an effective observer, try to go in without assumptions.

These tendencies also speak to the role of past success in clouding our judgment of the present. It has seemed to me that the more successful an organization has been in the past, the more internally myopic they are now. Indeed, internal focusing of resources is one of the contributing factors to success, but that inward focusing often comes at the expense of an external perspective. Success entrenches group “in thinking” and even when marketplace dynamics cause the once successful company to begin to struggle, the thoroughly homogenized views within the company struggle to identify the problems. They can’t objectively benchmark against the outside world because they’re blind to their own blemishes.

IDEO and Organizational Observation

IDEO actually has a few processes that rely on an outside view. Here are some examples for the IDEO Method Cards:

Rapid Ethnography: Spend as much time as you can with people relevant to the design topic. Establish their trust in order to visit and/or participate in their natural habitat and witness specific activities.

Extreme User Interviews: Identify individuals who are extremely familiar or (for my point) completely unfamiliar with the product and ask them to evaluate their experience using it.

Unfocus Group: Assemble a diverse group of individuals in a workshop to use a stimulating range of materials and create things that are relevant to your project.

These are just a few of the ways that IDEO helps companies gain an outside perspective. My suggestion would be to develop this discipline, and, as your looking for outsiders to help identify your own reality, consider hiring a Canadian. It comes naturally to us!