Category Archives: Corporate Strategy

It’s Not about Control – It’s About Connections!

Pete Blackshaw from Nielsen Buzz Metrics wrote an interesting column this week talking about the fact that CMO’s still have control.  He railed against the absolution of responsibility on the part of marketers, using the new buzzwords of consumer empowerment to justify the fact that they can throw more spam at the average user now because, after all, the user is in control.

“First, the overheated rhetoric acts as a deceptive rationalization. Remember the theory of cognitive dissonance, that testy tension emanating from two conflicting thoughts at the same time. I worry all this talk about consumers being in control relieves dissonance. It allows us to absolve ourselves of treating consumers with respect. Hey, if they have control and, hence, the power, what possible harm could our junk mail, spam intrusiveness, and recklessness do?”

Pete touches on a very interesting point that I’ve talked about in the number of columns and post before.  It’s the idea of brand messaging going beyond the carefully manufactured advertising and marketing channels and being baked right into the DNA of the company.  Now, brand messaging is as much about customer experience and customer service as it is about the message we see in the typical 30 second television spot.  It brings up an interesting question about consumer control.  Is it so much about control as it is about the ability to connect with information in a new way?  As Pete rightly points out, marketers still have control over a number of aspects of the relationship.  It’s impossible to have a two-way relationship with one side being in total control.  The fact is that consumers control part of that relationship and marketers control part of that relationship.  The success of the relationship lies in the ability for the two sides to connect in a mutually beneficial way.  It’s not so much the consumers have taken control from marketers as it is that what was typically much more a one-way relationship has evolved into a two-way relationship.

“At the end of the day, we still control the message and the business processes that shape it, but we may need an alterative path to get there. Product quality, customer service, accurate claims, and employee empowerment are all within our control. And these are the input types that really matter, and always have.”

Let’s explore a little bit closer how this has happened.  It really comes down to the number of channels available for messaging to get from the marketer to the consumer.  It used to be that those channels were tightly controlled and there were only a handful of them.  It goes back to the idea of power constructs.  The last hundred years our society has been all about power constructs.  The paths that lead from the manufacturing of products to the consumption of the products were few and were controlled by the powerful.  This was true in virtually any market you could think of.  With consumer packaged goods the ability of those goods to flow from the manufacturer to the consumer is controlled at various points along that channel by a few powerbrokers.  The same has been true in advertising.  The paths from the advertiser to the consumer were generally controlled by a few very powerful corporations.  Look at how the power construct in advertising typically played itself out:

  • At the top we have the advertiser.
  • Below that we have the advertising agency that was responsible for crafting the message.
  • Next you have the media buyer that takes a message created by the advertising agency and determines the channels to reach the target consumer.
  • Below that you have the channels used to reach the consumer, whether they be broadcast TV, newspaper, magazine or radio stations.
  • Finally, at the bottom, you have the consumer themselves.

All the communication in this channel went one way, from the advertiser down through each of the successive layers until it reached the consumer.  There was no corresponding channel to allow communication from the consumer to flow back through all these gates to the advertiser.  In the case where an advertiser did want to get information from an individual consumer, they would employ a market research company to circumvent the entire power structure of communication and go directly to a handful of representative consumers, determine what they were thinking and report back to the advertiser (or perhaps the advertising agency).  Picture a series of locks on a canal, with all the water flowing one way and with each of the gates of the individual locks designed to let water out and not let water back in.  The only way for water to run back was a small pipeline with a pump on it and the switch to that pump was always in the hands of the advertiser.  They chose when they wanted to listen to the consumer and when they chose to ignore the consumer.  The consumer had virtually no power to push their message back to the advertiser.

Now let’s look at what the Internet did.  The Internet took a highly structured, albeit one way, channel and completely blew it apart.  Now water flows freely back and forth between the advertiser and the consumer.  This not so much took control way from the advertiser and gave it to the consumer as it eliminated (or is in the process of eliminating) the existing structure that information flows through.  It democratized connections.  Rather than a man-made channel with restrictive gates and locks that restrict the flow of information from one place to the other, the Internet has turned the landscape into a vast field during a rainstorm.  Water collects in a thousand tiny pools and flows according to the online landscape.  Advertisers can influence where those flows happened as much as consumers can.  The control of flow is now jointly owned by everyone.  Advertisers have not had their power taken away.  They just have to learn how to share it.  They have to live up to the responsibility that goes with a truly two-way relationship.  Because they can no longer control the channel the message goes through, they have to spend more time controlling the very message itself.  They have to make it bulletproof, capable of withstanding the BS test.  And you have to understand that that message can’t be carefully crafted, it has to be lived.  It encompasses everything they do in the day-to-day operation of their business.  It has to include all the touch points that brand has with the outside world.  Because every touch point is a small puddle in that massive field.  If they manage the information correctly it will flow in the desired direction.  If they abdicate their responsibility of meeting the customer halfway in providing a mutually beneficial proposition, then they have to bear the consequences when the flow goes in the direction they don’t want it to.  And if there is enough momentum in the opposite direction, they will get flooded by a tidal wave of consumer dissent.

All in all, it’s a healthier relationship.  One-way relationships tend not to be sustainable in the long term.  But as with any power shift, there’s a pendulum effect that will likely occur here.  As power finds its natural balancing point, it will likely swing too far in the direction of the consumers before it comes back again.

User-centricity is More than Just a Word

Ever since Time Magazine made you and I the person of the year, user experience has been the two words on the tip of everyone’s tongue. We’re all saying that the user is king and that we’re building everything around them. But I fear that user-centricity is quickly becoming one of those corporate clichés that’s easy to say, but much, much harder to do. All too often I see internal fighting in a lot of companies between those that truly get user centricity and have become the internal user champions and those that are continuing to push the corporate agenda, at the expense of the user experience. The tough part of user centricity is seeing things through the users eyes. We can do user testing but if we truly put the user first, it requires tremendous courage and fortitude to make the user the primary stakeholder. All too often, I see user considerations being one of several factors that are being balanced in the overall design. And often, it takes a backseat to other considerations, such as monetization. This is the trap that Yahoo currently finds themselves in. They talk about user experience all the time. But the fact is, over the last two years it’s really been the advertiser whose’s owned their search results page. I’ve recently seen signs of the balance tipping more towards the user’s favor with the rollout of Panama and a more judicious presentation of top sponsored ads. But I’m still not sure the user is winning the battle at Yahoo!

It’s not easy to step inside your user’s head when it comes to designing interfaces. It’s very tought to toggle the user perspective on and off when you’re going through a design cycle. The feedback we get from usability testing tends to be too far removed from the actual implementation of the design. By that time the meat of the findings has been watered down and diluted to the point where the user’s voice is barely heard. That’s why I like personas as a design vehicle. A well formulated persona keeps you on track. It keeps you in the mindset of the user. It gives you a mental framework you can step into quickly and readjust your perspective to that of the user, not the designer.

If you’re truly going to be user centric, be prepared to take a lot of flack from a lot of people. This is not a promise to be made lightly. You have to commit to it and not let anything dissuade you from delivering the best possible end-user experience, defined in the user’s own terms. This can’t be a corporate feel good thing. It has to be a corporate commitment that requires balls the size of Texas. And if you’re going to make a commitment, you better be damn sure that the entire company is also willing to make the same commitment. The user experience group can’t be a lone bastion for the user, fighting a huge sea of corporate momentum going in the opposite direction. This isn’t about balancing the user in the grand scheme of things, it’s about committing wholeheartedly to them and getting everyone else in the organization to make the same commitment. If you can do so, I think the potential wins are huge. There’s a lot of people talking about user centricity but there’s not a lot of people delivering on it consistently and wholeheartedly.

Debating with Myself about whether or not Google can Change Advertising

Ari Rosenberg, a media buying consultant, had an interesting column last week about Google’s plans to enter the cable TV market, just the same as they’ve made inroads in the radio and print markets. Google’s approach in all these markets is consistent. They will apply technology to open up the marketplace, removing the middleman and basically automating the purchase of media. Ari argues that while Google may understand technology, they have a lot to learn about how advertising works. This is a huge, complex question and there are a lot of different shades of gray to the argument. It’s not a simple yes or no argument. But there are some very interesting aspects, both pro and con, there he touches on in his column. So I’d like to present to differing viewpoints, both pro and con, about why or why not Google may actually change how advertising is done.

The Pro Side: Making the Marketplace More Efficient

There is no doubt that there’s a lot of room for efficiency in most media buying markets. There is a layer upon layer of friction in the marketplace, caused by entrenched consultants, reps and buyers and other “filler” between the ultimate buyer and seller. This is where Google can excel. Their theory is that they can remove the friction by using their technology to enable marketplaces where buyers and sellers can connect directly. More than this, they introduce the notion of relevancy. Ultimately, Google wants to achieve their end marketing goal of always showing the right ad to the right person at the right time. They would take the idea of keyword relevancy, pioneered so effectively on the Web, and apply it to other channels. Of course this depends on a more interactive version of print, radio, or cable than we currently see. But as all media converge, Google’s initial inroads into each of these channels will secure them a foothold at the time when relevancy starts to matter.

In this regard, Google is definitely dealing from two areas of strength. They understand technology and have been successful in developing clean, efficient interfaces to help streamline the flow of commerce. There is definitely a change that is needed in the media buying marketplace and Google has the engineering chops to clean it up dramatically. Also, they have a clear and deep understanding of consumer intent, expressed in the consumer’s own terms. And as it begins to matter more in advertising, Google is well-placed to make those consumer initiated connections happen.

The Con Side: Understanding Marketing

In last few years, I’ve had enough interaction with Google to understand that for them, marketing is considered a necessary evil. There’s a lot of “soft”, undefinable aspects to marketing, that can’t be distilled into a simple, clean algorithm. This is thinking that is largely foreign to the Google frame of mind. Google loves mathematical simplicity and definition. Two plus two should always equal four. The question shouldn’t be up for debate. But marketing is not that simple, not that clean, not that black-and-white. There’s a lot of gray in marketing.

Ari makes the point that Google doesn’t understand advertising. This is largely right. Google is an engineering company. It exists to apply technology to solve problems. If you look at the makeup of the Google organization, their own marketing department is a small, under resourced afterthought. Because they didn’t need to use advertising, the philosophy is that really is not necessary for anyone. As Google steps into advertising, think of them as Mr. Spock, reluctantly doing a stint as a Madison Avenue ad exec (now that’s an idea for a sitcom).

The Wild Card: the Consumer

Ultimately, it’s not Google or Madison Avenue that will have the last word in this debate. It’s you and me and 6 billion (and counting) other consumers. There is an old world and the new world in marketing. And the former is rapidly giving way to the latter. The wild card in all this is the changing game of marketing. Sure, Google may not understand the “warm fuzzies” of marketing, those undefinable aspects of brand engagement, but what Google does understand is connecting users with what they’re looking for. And do we really need advertising that hits us at a visceral and an emotional level, when it’s exactly the advertising we’re looking for anyway? It doesn’t have to hammer us over the head with its message, because we’re openly receptive to that message, we’re seeking it. As Google moves into print, cable, and radio it may not be that their lack of understanding of the current reality of marketing that will hold them back for making it successful. It may be the fact that those channels just don’t lend themselves very well to this new idea of consumer empowerment. Consumer empowerment is expressed much more easily over the interactive platform of the Internet. The Internet is the next evolution of marketing. The question will be more if Google can make a significant inroad into these more traditional channels before the channels become integrated within interactive, Web driven platform. Or will there be just too much friction to overcome?

Getting the Brand Point Across, One Touch Point at a Time

First published February 8, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

One of the great ironies of marketing is that we’re in the communication business, but many of us aren’t that good at it. And I’m not talking about broadcasting to a million people, I’m talking one-to-one, get-your-point-across communication. We tend to hide our real meaning under reams of spun language, taking the core of the message and wrapping it in the cotton batting of “marketspeak.”

We’ve come to believe that to make a brand message successful, you have to create mental pictures that tie the brand to vague and hopefully attractive emotions. But when it comes down to saying why you should buy something, in a way that hits home with a consumer who’s ready to buy, we’re at a loss for words.

Talking the Talk, Not Walking the Walk

Evidence of this was so painfully and clearly pointed out in a recent study by the Louws Management Corporation, where 80% of 711 advertising and marketing professionals surveyed said they are strongly aware of their company’s brand positioning, but only one fourth of them “can clearly articulate (their) company’s brand position to… clients, customers or prospective clients.”

Perhaps those of us in search have a unique perspective on this. After all, there’s not a lot of room in the few dozen words typically found in a search listing to expound on the warm fuzzies. You’d better get the point across, and fast, because the typical searcher is only going to “engage” with your listing for a few seconds at best before exercising his control and clicking through to your site, or not. You become a marketer of few words, nailing the “hot buttons” quickly and precisely. In fact, we’ve gone too far the other way, convinced that everyone who is searching is also buying immediately, an assumption that’s at least 85% wrong, according to past research we’ve done.

Brand = Experience

But I think there’s something more fundamental and troubling in these survey results. Jakob Nielsen once said that on the Web, branding is much more about experience than exposure. This is true to a profound level that escapes many marketers. In the new world of empowered buyers, they engage with a brand at a thousand different touch points, and every one of those touch points builds a brand “mosaic” — an image of the brand that the buyers participate in building because the Web has empowered them to do so.  Every single member of the company that consumers connect with also helps build this collective brand picture.

And that’s why the findings of this study are so deeply troubling. If 75% of the people who are the marketing stewards of the brand message can’t express it in simple language, what hope is there for the customer service person, in a contracted call center, who, for one customer at one particular point of time, is the entire brand? In this new reality, where brand is built on the front lines, through real contact with real customers, rather than in carefully controlled messaging that comes through a handful of advertising channels, crystal-clear communication within an organization becomes an imperative.

Cult-Like Marketing

In this new definition of marketing, cult-like cultures, an obsessive focus on corporate purpose and company-wide alignment are the prerequisites for success. Brand messaging has to be more than marketspeak, it has to be a mantra, the cornerstone of a strategy that is communicated to every member of the company repeatedly, clearly and fervently. It has to be a concept so crystal clear, so absolutely unambiguous, that there can be no questioning what it means. Every single member of the company has to have it on the tip of their tongue – and, infinitely more important, embedded deep within their beliefs. That’s the only way it can be consistently spread through the thousands and millions of interactions and conversations that make up the new brand mosaic.

Digital Voyeurism: The New Reality

I remember the first time I went to my local gym and saw a new sign, hastily hand drawn and posted, announcing that cell phones were no longer allowed in the change rooms. It took me a minute or two to get it, but I finally figured it out. Ahh..they come with cameras now.

There are two dimensions to this that I wanted to briefly explore. First of all, with digital cameras everywhere, businesses have to be more careful about the face they show to the public, because it’s likely that if their bad side is showing, there’ll be someone there to snap a picture. Consider the example of one Kohl’s store in Dallas.

kohls5_2A shopper visited the store in the post Christmas season, found a store that looked like a tornado just ripped through it and just happened to have a cell phone with a camera and a fairly well read blog. It gets worse. His post happened to catch the eye of Seth Godin, who has one of the most read blogs on the Web. The result? A PR nightmare for Kohl’s. And this can happen anywhere. The next time a character at Disneyworld alledgedly sucker punches a guest, you can count on a camera being nearby. It’s enough to make your average PR Director retire to a remote Caribbean isle, one without internet connections.

The second implication has to do with personal privacy. If there are pictures snapped of us, and they get posted to the web without our knowing, or our permission, what will the fall out be? They’re there for the whole world to see, through any one of a number of image search engines. Fellow SearchInsider David Berkowitz explores that in his column today:

“The overarching issue, the one that’s most likely to keep me up at night, is, “Do we have to entirely relinquish our right to privacy?” If the answer is yes, then it simplifies the issue. We press forward with every technological innovation, privacy be damned. We accept that everything we say can be recorded, and it’s not just to improve customer service.”

Smile..you’re on Candid Camera!

Over 50% of CMOs aren’t looking for Big Agencies for Online

A new study has reaffirmed something I’m hearing more and more. Big agencies don’t get online.

Sapient, through Evalueserve, surveyed a number of CMO’s, and just over half of them believe that traditional, large ad agencies are “ill-suited to meet online marketing needs”. They believe that there’s too much invested in traditional models, and that agencies can’t think beyond these constraints.

The upshot? Fewer than 10% of those polled seek to partner with large agencies for online marketing. They instead look for partners with roots in technology, a high degree of creativity and traditional print expertise, or, even more common, to use multiple agencies.

It’s not that large agencies don’t have people capable of getting online. In many cases, they do. But they’re trapped in a rigid and bureaucratic structure that sucks the lifeblood out of the bold thinking and initiative essential for online. They spend more time fighting turf wars than they do providing value to clients, and it seems that the clients are getting tired of it.

Increasingly, large agencies are struggling to understand the shifting marketplace. They are fighting the idea of a participatory approach to branding, with a community of consumers at least as important in the process as the actual brand itself. They are far more comfortable with the more traditional, and much more profitable, command and controlled channel form of marketing that has been built over the last several decades. They’re struggling to win in a new game where they don’t know the rules, largely because they haven’t been written yet.

The big agencies are out there shopping right now. They’re looking to buy expertise needed. I wonder how successful this will be. It’s not just the expertise they’re lacking. It’s the environment needed to let their experts do their job. You can buy all the roses you want, but if you lock them in a dark basement, you’re not going to see much blooming.

Most Shoppers Don’t “Shop Around,” at least Physically

A new study from the Grizzard Performance Group found that US Shoppers don’t have time to “shop around”, with 62% not bothering to compare prices at even two stores. However, they’re very open to saving money, right up to the time of purchase. It’s just that they don’t have the time.

This ties in with my previous post about real time inventory and e-shopping, currently being tested by a a few online services at malls and major chain stores. When we can quickly and conveniently check prices at a number of stores in our area through our handheld devices, trust me, shopping will change forever. And then, a whole new dimension of direct response marketing comes into play. Last minute pushes of discounts at the point of purchase, delivered through your mobile device. As the study by Grizzard indicates, consumers are very open to saving money on a comparable product, even if it wasn’t previously in your consideration set. So consider this. The shopping engine knows what you’re looking for, knows where you are, and knows what comparable products are in stock in the same store. The advertiser can purchase the right to push a message to you right at the point of purchase, offering you 15% off their product, or even offering an automated “match and beat” deal, where it automatically matches the price of whatever you’re buying, and takes a further 10% off. A store around the corner could do the same thing, making it worth your while to check out at least one more store. All these things could easily be handled by algorithms and pre-set pricing thresholds.

And what if we take the Priceline approach? You’re ready to buy, but before you do, you send an offer to stores in your area with what you’re willing to pay for a particular product. The store in question can then decide whether to accept your offer or not. It would be true consumer control. And the really ironic thing? It’s a whole bunch of sophisticated technology, but it brings us right back to old fashioned haggling over the price. Isn’t it fascinating that the more sophisticated the technology, the closer we get to how we used to shop a century ago?

Should Google Stick to the Knitting or See What Works?

I was just doing some year end cleaning of my “to be blogged about” folder and found a couple of lingering items from a few months back. While most of that time, that would make them hopelessly outdated, these two touch on a bigger theme that is still relevant, and is aligned strategically to a book I just finished re-reading.

First, the here-to-fore neglected articles. Did-It’s Bill Wise wrote a Search Insider column on how Google wins by losing, and John Markoff at the NY Times talked about the concern over “Google Sprawl”.  Both talk about Google’s strategy of pushing into new businesses at a frantic rate, seemingly trying to reinvent everything at the same time. But they take slightly different approaches. Bill’s opinion is that the strategy works because the string of new challenges, and the many subsequent failures, continually generates buzz for Google that keeps driving it’s main revenue channel, search. The NY Times reports on recently voiced Google concerns that the myriad of new initiatives will confuse users and impact the user trust in the Google brand. It also touches on the implied conundrum that comes with Google’s goal to integrate functionality into a simple and elegant interface, making it the online Swiss Army Knife, and it’s desire to keep user data open, steering away from the Microsoft approach that landed them in hot water with the Department of Justice. The timing of both pieces was right around the Google acquisition of Youtube.

There’s a bigger piece here that seems to be missing from both viewpoints. Let’s look at Wise’s assertion first:

“By continually announcing that it’s expanding beyond search, Google gains tremendous buzz, which translates into higher stock prices, which translates into still more buzz. All that attention keeps Google top-of-mind; by being top-of-mind, Google draws more users and more loyalty towards the Google brand–which means more searchers flock to Google Search, and more searchers stick with it. And it’s through Google Search that Google actually makes its money.

All that buzz is only beneficial if the new launches don’t succeed. If Google were to successfully expand past search, users would mistrust it as a corporate giant bent on empire-building–a problem that’s certainly familiar to Microsoft. Because Google fails at really getting a hold beyond search, users don’t see any effects of Google’s empire-building, and instead only see Google as a company that’s continually on the rise.”

The problem here is that Wise is confusing strategy and a by product of an approach that’s baked right into Google’s corporate DNA. I really don’t believe Google is purposely trying to fuel the buzz machine by venturing into areas with low odds for success. I believe Google does this because they don’t know any other way. It’s part of their genetic code.

Next, John Markoff starts to uncover the clues that point to the bigger picture:

“Google executives generally answer questions about acquisitions by saying that the company is still experimenting with business plans, or by arguing that a program like Sketch-Up — a simple computer-aided design program — will have an indirect revenue impact by making the entire Google service more valuable.”

To be sure, the culture of grass roots innovation that has been scrupulously nurtured at Google is at the same time it’s greatest strength and it’s greatest challenge. And despite the fact that Google is being hailed as a pioneer, it’s ground that has been trodden before. Google is hardly the first to go down this path. Which brings me to my renewed acquaintance with Jim Collin’s and Jerry Porras’s book Built to Last.

The Google mandate that a percentage of their engineer’s time be set aside to work on new, cool and cutting edge products is a chapter that was stolen right out of 3M’s playbook. And 3M, like HP, like Sony, like Motorola and like many of the other visionary companies profiled in Built to Last, started without a business plan. These companies worried first about the who, and then worried about the what. Google is clearly following in the same footsteps.

In fact, in the book, Collins and Porras show how visionary companies often “try a lot of stuff and keep what works”. Here is a pertinent quote from the book:

“Visionary companies make some of their best moves by experimentation, trial and error, opportunism, and – quite literally – accident. What looks in retrospect like brilliant foresight and preplanning was often the result of “Let’s just try a lot of stuff and keep what works.”

Collins and Porras devote a whole chapter to the topic. They show how many iconic corporations struggled, often for years, before they found the right business model. Google has a leg up on these, as they already have a very successful cash cow that’s driving their ability to “try a lot of stuff”. And it’s one notable area where Collins and Porras offer a different viewpoint from previous seminal works, including Tom Peters’ and Bob Waterman’s In Search of Excellence. Peters and Waterman advocate “Sticking to the knitting”, warning “the odds for excellent performance seems strongly to favor those companies that stay reasonably close to the businesses they know.”  Collins and Porras counter that if that were always the case, 3M would still be trying to run mines in Minnesota, HP would be selling nothing but audio oscillators and American Express would still be a delivery service.

The challenge for Google comes in not impacting the user, as Markoff identified in his article. Ironically, it comes from Google’s initial success in search. If Google search wasn’t as successful as it is, Google would have free reign to experiment. But they have to pay scrupulous attention to the user experience. I’ve commented before that Google’s biggest obstacle as a visionary company is it’s early success.

Here, Google is faced with the Yin and Yang challenge that faces all visionary companies. How to preserve the core while at the same time stimulate progress? And this gets down to a fundamental place where Google might be veering off track. Google’s core purpose, and the one that Google search succeeds very well at, is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.  This should be what the company scrupulously protects. All of Google’s free time initiatives should be aligned to that core purpose. But Google seems to be trying to pursue a number of core items at the same time. Redefining how advertising is bought and sold (recent forays into print and radio) seems to have little to do with Google’s stated core purpose. Controlling the main intersections of the new online global community (the purchase of YouTube) might be tangentially related, but clear alignment is not apparent. If Google stuck to their initial core purpose, that gives them scads of room for growth and innovation.

If Google is going to pursue a grassroots culture of innovation, that’s admirable. If they want to try experimenting in a number of areas and see what succeeds, while at the same time pruning out the failures, they can take comfort in knowing that strategy worked well in the past, notably for 3M. But to go down this path, it’s essential that an overarching core purpose be defined and communicated clearly to each and every Google employee. Innovation has to be aligned with a common goal. And when companies try to identify more than one core purpose, they can lose direction. Google might be well advised to see how other trailblazers have handled this in the past. For example, the core purpose of 3M is to solve problems through technology. While it’s broad and all encompassing, it does provide a sense of direction for 3M employees.

If I was to identify one challenge for Google to face in 2007, it would not be the fragmenting their business model, or even defining one. It would not be nailing another surefire revenue channel. It would be deciding, clearly and unequivocally, what they want to do, communicating the hell out of that internally and by doing that, point all that formidable brainpower in one direction.

Finding Fame Online – and Fame Finding You

First published August 17, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Gassime would never consider himself famous. He’s a very gentle, very kind man who happens to run a small hotel in Florence, Italy called Hotel Europa. He quietly goes about his business, welcoming guests, making sure rooms are clean and ready, and ushering people to tables in the small breakfast room.

There’s really nothing unique about the Hotel Europa, either. It’s probably similar to many small hotels in Florence and throughout Italy. It boasts just two stars out of five, is in a converted convent that’s hundreds of years old, and has a handful of modest but clean rooms.

But if there is anything unique about the Hotel Europa, it’s Gassime himself. In our brief stay in Florence, he charmed our socks off. First, he made a potentially frustrating experience–a miscommunication about our reservation that left us roomless on the first night–into a minor road bump and a memorable moment in our trip. He found two empty rooms, had them made up immediately while we waited, and constantly checked in to let us know the hotel’s staffers “were working for us.”

Over the next three days, we watched him say a cheerful good morning in at least four different languages to the various guests. Gassime personified graciousness. By the time we checked out, we felt like we were leaving family behind. We left him with a small gift, a thank-you card and the promise that if he ever comes to Canada, we’d love to return the hospitality. He thanked us, but said he’s too busy catering to tourists to do any touring himself.

Apparently, our experience at the Hotel Europa is not unique. We picked it because of similar testimonials on sites like TripAdvisor. In fact, if you search for Hotel Europa online, you’ll find a litany of kudos for Gassime. As we were checking in, a lady from the States asked me if we’d picked the hotel because of TripAdvisor. When I said yes, she said she had as well. She was traveling with a fairly large group. Although Gassime has never sought fame, by quietly doing his job and providing exceptional service, fame has found him.

And there you have an essential quality of the Internet. As we define community around topics of common interest, in this case trips to Florence, we join together to create our own celebrities. We make the Gassimes of the world heroes, and lay a trail so that others can follow in our footsteps. Through travel sites like TripAdvisor and others, we create our own recommendations.

Search acts as the connector to these nuggets of information. We gain the benefit of others that have been there and done that. The good is separated from the bad in a way that defies gaming the system and keeps everyone honest. I picked every place we stayed through the recommendations of others online, and we didn’t hit one dud. But better than just finding clean rooms, we found new friends, like Gassime.

Across Europe and around the world, diligent travelers are now finding these hidden heroes. They’re the people that run the kind of places you used to have to know a local to find–and even then, you could never be sure if you were getting a bum steer to a cousin or friend.

Another hidden hero was the family that runs the Donna Rosa Ristorante in Montepertuso, high up the mountain above Positano on the Amalfi Coast in Italy. This little gem of a restaurant is run by the energetic and talented Raffaella family, a wife and husband who drew their two grown-up children back from successful careers in various parts of Italy so they could do something together. How do I know this? I found it online. Donna Rosa has also found a measure of fame online, including being one of the favorite haunts of Diane Lane when she was filming “Under the Tuscan Sun.”

I like to think that I’m somewhat unique in the amount of online research I do prior to a trip. But the number is growing, and I’m sure that people like Gassime are starting to notice their small but increasing online fame. I hope that Gassime’s hotel continues to thrive, and that Donna Rosa’s reservation book stays full. These are rewards that come from a job well done, and I for one think it’s a very good thing that the Internet can make down-to-earth, gracious people like Gassime and the Raffaella family heroes. All too often we make our heroes from less worthy stuff.