Category Archives: The New Marketplace

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?

Google’s Mission and the Economic Colonization of the Web

First published January 27, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Aaron Goldman and I agree — it’s time for Google to rethink its mission statement. But we disagree on the reason. Goldman thinks it’s time “to call a spade a spade” and for Google to come clean on their intention to grab as many ad dollars as possible. From this perspective, the change in the mission statement is really just to better align it with Google’s business.

I think “organizing the world’s information” needs to be changed for a different reason. I think there are inherent limitations in it that may seriously impact Google’s revenue stream in the future.

A Quick Update

But first, some background. Eric Schmidt has moved into that corporate limbo called “executive chairman”-ship. I don’t really know what an executive chairman does. I asked Google and it’s also pretty fuzzy on the concept. According to Schmidt, it’s to focus on external partnerships and to “advise” Larry and Sergey. To me, it sounds like a long and polite good-bye. Whatever we know about the shift, I guarantee there’s more to the story.

Also, Google rocked expectations on Q4 earnings, so all appears to be rosy in Google-world. But quarterly earnings calls are a notoriously poor indicator of the strategic health of an organization. They reflect the success of strategic decisions made a year or two ago and the ability of the organization to execute against them. They tell you nothing about the strategy today, or how the company may do in the future. Which brings us back to the mission statement.

Missionary Work

Organizing the world’s information sounds like a lofty goal, and it is. It was entirely appropriate given the “wild-west” nature of the Web when Google first appeared in 1997. But on the Web, information equals data, and data comes in two forms: structured and unstructured. Google’s mission was defined at a time when almost everything online was unstructured. It was a mess. It needed to be organized. And Google’s revenue model sprung from its ability to match consumer intent with all this unstructured content. It was a broad-based attempt to tame the Web, and it was tremendously successful.

But the success came with limitations. If you’re going to try to organize unstructured information, you have to rely on some method to interpret the meaning of the information. You need some framework to organize information into. Google, like every other engine, relied on language as a measure of relevance — specifically matching content to a query made up of keywords. But language is notoriously difficult for machines to get right, because it’s ambiguous. Consider that words like “set,” “cut” and “break” can be defined in close to 100 different ways. Google’s struggle for the past decade and a half has been dealing with the difficulties of organizing unstructured data.

Another challenge is trying to deal with all unstructured data in the same interface. Google has tried to meet the challenge by incorporating more and more content categories into the main results page. There are currently more than a dozen categories you could conduct your search in. The elegance of the one-size-fits-all engine is rapidly becoming clunky and awkward.

The Colonization of the Web

Over the same time that Google has been pursuing its mission, the Web has become economically colonized. Where there’s an opportunity to make a buck, there is motivation to move data into a more structured format. Pockets of economically viable data have become increasing structured in the past 10 years, including all travel categories, books, movies, music and many commonly purchased products. Increasingly, we’re going to see this colonization, which will organize information in a way that Google could never do “on-the-fly.” And as this data becomes more structured, it allows for a different interaction with it. Data becomes more functional and more useful. It moves from conducting a search to using an application. Think of the difference between trying to plan a trip using nothing but Google — and planning the same trip using Kayak. That’s the difference between dealing with unstructured and structured data.

This colonization will hit Google where it hurts most — the highest volume, most commercially relevant searches. At this point, Google still acts as a navigational path to these structured destinations, but this is a transitional band-aid at best. The Web is growing up and it’s being tamed in bits and pieces; not by Google’s algorithmic wizardry but by commercial opportunities.

Google is right to focus on the possibilities of mobile. More and more of our online activity will happen there. But mobile is not a new frontier, it’s simply a new view into the same landscape. It will leverage the same colonies of structured data. In fact, the mobile use-case is perfectly suited to dealing with structured data. It will accelerate the colonization.

Google’s concept of “organizing” falls short of our end goal, which is using information to do things with. If I were Google, I’d be doing some wordsmithing using words like “useful” and “functional.”

High Risk & High Reward: Fully Engaged Buying

First published January 13, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week I talked about High Risk/Low Reward purchases and said that when you’re in this quadrant, your “buying brain is driving the brake pedal through the floorboards.” True, but at least there is some consistency in the behaviors: risk trumps all.

When you’re navigating through a High Risk/High Reward purchase, you can be forgiven for appearing schizophrenic in your decision-making process. We swing back and forth from logic to what can only be described as love, with the volatility of a pendulum. If ever we were fully engaged in a buying process, this is the time. It’s all hands on deck for this purchase.

High Risk/High Reward purchases include new homes, vehicles, expensive toys and extravagant vacations. We spend a lot — but we also expect a lot. Game theorists and economists use a term called expected utility to describe our envisioned probable outcome from a decision.  It’s a pretty colorless term, and in theoretical terms, the lack of color in the label reflects the lack of emotion in the decision. Here, we weigh risk against logical outcomes — for example, the expected payoff from a wager.

Expected utility plays a major role in high reward purchases, but here, utility is dramatically colored with emotion. A car is not just about solving your transportation challenges (the expected utility). It’s about mid-life crises, keeping ahead of your brother-in-law, and the image of airing out your thinning hair on a cruise down the California coast. This, in many cases, is high-octane fantasizing, and there’s little logic to it.

Anywhere you find emotional rewards, you’ll find brands. And in these types of purchases of manufactured goods, you’ll inevitably find a brand turf war. Our complex relationships with the brands that define us are born in high-emotional-reward purchase scenarios. And in these types of purchases, the increased role of risk creates a delicious ambiguity in our rationalization of brand love.  We buy brands because of an emotional connection that comes straight from our limbic core (really, in this world of “pretty good” products, there is little to differentiate one brand from another), but our thinking brain kicks into overdrive to explain the logic behind our choice. We can’t seem to grasp the reality that logic had little to do with it.

These highly engaged purchases leave a vast and deep online footprint. We spend hours online, theoretically researching a purchase, but in many cases, we’re pre-rewarding ourselves through envisioning the acquisition of the reward. We use vehicle configurators and agonize over option packages and interior color schemes. We do endless virtual walk-throughs of homes. And we plan our dream vacation in minute detail, balancing recommendations from TripAdvisor and other sites against the limits of our budget and itinerary. Fantasizing begins online, and we have to allow for this in our marketing strategy.

When your product falls into this category, you want to support the fantasy as much as possible, utilizing digital media that encourages an emotional connection. Video and interactivity are a key part of the mix. We reach out on social media sites not just to manage risk by getting the opinions of others, but also to live vicariously through capturing the experiences of those who have bought before us.

As one would imagine, giving the depth and complexity of this online engagement, the search paths taken are equally convoluted. Search will be used repeatedly through the purchase process and for differing intents. There is no “one size fits all” approach here. In these purchase scenarios, a deep qualitative understanding of prospect behaviors will separate the great marketers from the herd.

High Risk & Low Reward: Buying with the Brakes On

First published January 6, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

After a brief detour last week (thanks for the many heartfelt messages for my Uncle Jim) I want to return to my exploration of the role of risk and reward in our online consumer behaviors.  We looked at the low risk/low reward and low risk/high reward quadrants. Today, we’ll continue by exploring the High Risk/Low Reward quadrant.

As a brief recap, our brains tend to apply brakes or step on the gas when steering through a buying decision based on the degree of risk and the promise of reward inherent in the decision. This dictates the nature of the consumer journey we take – both in terms of paths chosen and duration. I’ve talked before about the concept of bounded rationality, or the threshold of logical consideration we give to any decision. As behavioral economists have found, in almost every human decision, ration is modified by gut instinct. We call this “satisficing.” The only question, it seems, is the balance between the two. Risk and reward are hugely influential in determining our “satisficing” threshold for any purchase decision.

High Risk/Low Reward

In the last column, I described Low Risk/High Reward indulgences as “all gas and little brake.” The chocolate bar temptingly placed at the grocery store checkout aisle is just one example. High Risk/Low Reward purchases live at the opposite end of buyer behavior spectrum. Here your buying brain is driving the brake pedal through the floorboards. Consider this the consumer equivalent of teaching your teenager to drive.

In our personal lives, it includes such joyless purchases as insurance (all kinds, and the higher the premiums, the greater the perceived risk), financial planning, big-ticket home maintenance (not fun stuff like renovations, but replacing a roof, fixing a sagging foundation or getting a new furnace), car repairs and professional services such as lawyers or accountants.

Ironically, each of these types of purchases is usually triggered by either legislation  (car insurance), a non-negotiable need (a leaking roof) or the greater perceived risk of doing nothing (not having a lawyer in a divorce). If there wasn’t some impending reason to buy, we never would. There are no positive emotions at play here, only negative ones.

There is another type of purchase that falls into this quadrant that impacts many of our clients – bigger ticket B2B purchases. Indeed, I wrote an entire book on the subject : “The BuyerSphere Project.”

The lack of positive reward means our consumer research is all aimed at one thing and one thing only: the elimination of risk. In this scenario, risk has several dimensions: price, reliability and, because many of these purchases are predicated on avoiding future risk, balancing current risk against future risk. There is another aspect of risk, which is not commonly identified in these types of purchases: the risk of change. Often, big-ticket purchases require you to make changes in your routine, which involves change management.

When we look at what online behaviors might be for a High Risk/Low Reward purchase, we see risk mitigation as the key factor. Sites that allow buyers to compare several alternatives tend to be very popular, especially if they offer some type of rating. Online aggregators and directories tend to thrive in this quadrant, as they focus on quantifying pricing-based risk.

Because there is little or no emotional reward in these purchases, there is little in the way of positive emotional engagement.  As somebody once told me, nobody ever threw a party to buy car insurance.  Social media engagement is restricted to verifying you don’t get burned in the purchase. Rich-media demonstrations will be passed over in favor of quick comparison charts. And if you are engaging the senses, you’ll be capitalizing on fear of risk rather than a promise of reward.

Next week, we’ll make our way to the last quadrant of the matrix: High Risk/High Reward.

Baring Your Corporate Soul Online

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

Web presence is taking on a whole new meaning. I’m having more and more conversations with companies that are in the middle of redefining who they are online. In that process, they’re just not sure what they expose and what they keep hidden behind the kimono. Their website started as a marketing channel, but the explosion of potential customer touch points online makes the whole idea of a website seem hopelessly antiquated. Yet, there’s a limit in scope and complexity that makes websites an easily grasped online concept.

Here are some selected snippets from those conversations:

1.  “Is blogging really worthwhile? It’s a pretty high investment for the low traffic that blogs get.”

2.  “Yeah, we don’t really talk about that on our website. Would anyone be interested in that?”

3.  We launched our Facebook page and we have 170,000 fans already. Other than a potential audience to advertise too, we’re just not sure what that means.”

Here, then, is the business reality that lives on the other side of all these comments:

1.  The company in question is literally creating a paradigm shift by introducing new workflow management platforms in a very traditional industry. They succeed by convincing companies that technology can dramatically improve performance and profitability. Yet, despite the urging of their digital marketing department, they’re reluctant to embrace digital content generation channels (such as blogs) to spread this message.

2.  This company is a North American toy manufacturer that is evangelical in their mission to empower creative development in children. They employ one of the largest internal design teams in the industry outside of electronic gaming. And, the design team sits directly above the manufacturing floor (they’ve resisted the industry tide to move all their manufacturing offshore by dramatically improving efficiencies through technology) so they can follow their designs from inception right through to realization.

3.  A clothing retailer based in Montreal is going head-to-head with much larger American competitors and stealing significant market share in key entry markets because of the coolness of being “French.”The strength of the Quebecois culture shines through in the retailer’s promotional materials despite the fact that there has been no overt intent on the part of the retailer to capitalize on it.

Three different stories, but they all have one thing in common. As they consider their next steps in creating an online presence, they’ll all drawing closer and closer to the very essence of their companies. In the past decade and a half, we all rushed to create a website because it seemed to be the price of entry to play in the online marketplace. But since then, that online ecosystem has exploded along multiple dimensions. It’s much richer than it used to be.

At one time, a website was the only conceivable way to play, and those websites were all considered sales or marketing channels. But today, our customers expect to engage with us in an authentic and compelling way online. There is a reason why they’re intrigued by our products or services. And often, the answer to why that is can be found in the core of who we are. It lives in our mission, our core values and our people. Yet we almost never expose that online. What makes us different is infused into our corporate culture and may be taken from granted by those of us who live and work on the inside. We never think about exposing that side of us online. Yet it’s exactly those inside stories that set us apart. And yes, people are interested in that stuff. People care about how fanatical Zappos is about customer service. People respond to the obsessive worship of design that typifies Apple. And not all the drinkers of the Google Kool-Aid live and work within the Google Empire.

A while ago in my company we made a decision. We are a service company —  our product is our people. So we pushed them front and center on our website. We wanted prospects to learn a little bit about the team they’d be working with. Also, within our company, music was a big part of our culture. We had a number of employees who were also musicians. As almost an afterthought, we asked all our employees to submit their top-10 music lists and published them on our site. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve met someone for the first time and they’ve told me that they also love the Eagle’s “Hotel California,” or that “Bohemian Rhapsody” still sets their head bobbing a la Wayne’s World. Our top-10 lists are consistently one of the most popular sections of our site.

It may not be part of the marketing plan, but don’t be afraid to bare a bit of your soul through online channels. It makes us human, and being human is a great foundation on which to build a relationship!

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.

Thoughts from a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey

First published August 12, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Funny, how our brains make us hang on to things that make little sense in the new scheme of things. For as plastic as the brain is, there are worn grooves that cannot be denied. We are creatures of habit and those habits comfort us, making us feel in control of our environment. Even when there is no rationale for our recurring behaviors, habits keep things plowing along, giving us a sense of equilibrium.

Every time I cross the Atlantic, where history is the natural state of things, I gain a new appreciation for this clash of the new and the old. It creates a fascinating juxtaposition of digital efficiency and deeply carved human habits. Europe is steeped in this paradox, but somehow it seems to keep wobbling along. Traditions don’t die here; they just lift one foot and plant them on the speeding express train that is technology, hoping to maintain a tentative balance as the other foot drags along the accumulated baggage of the centuries.

Hotchkisses in the ‘Hood

Today my family and I returned to my ancestral homeland, in the shadow of the Wye Valley, a picturesque vale that separates Wales from England. This area could quite justifiably be called the cradle of tourism. When the industrial revolution created a leisure class in England, they started getting cabin fever and itchy feet. Their leisure travels started fairly close to home and the picturesque Wye Valley was an early destination. Writers, poets and painters including William Wordsworth, Robert Bloomfield, Thomas Gray, William Thackeray, Alexander Pope, Samuel Coleridge, and J.M. Turner visited the area and effectively created the very first tourism ads.

The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which, at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Among the woods and copses lose themselves,
Nor, with their green and simple hue, disturb
The wild green landscape.

From “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” by William Wordsworth

The Jury-Rigging of a Continent

Fast forward to today. I sit in a 200-year-old cottage a mere stone’s throw from the Abbey that inspired Wordsworth’s idyllic reverie. In fact, the cottage was probably built during Wordsworth’s lifetime. I like to think that his carriage could have passed it by on the way to his vantage point above the Abbey the day he wrote his poem. Today, the cottage has been retrofitted to keep up with the times, with a satellite dish tacked onto the front and a digital lifeline from British Telecom snaking up the outside of the white plastered walls.

This cottage isn’t the only thing that’s been jury-rigged for the future here. The Welsh Tourism Board is no stranger to the benefits of technology. They were early adopters of the Web, putting together one of the better online tourism resources and being early believers in the power of search marketing. It’s appropriate that the originators of the modern tourism industry should be one of the first to recognize the rational beauty of digital information. No wasteful resources required, global accessibility and the ability for the user to find and interact with specific information. Even a Luddite (a movement, interestingly enough, that started not too far from here about the same time Wordsworth was penning his poem) would have to grudgingly concede the benefits of virtual tourism brochures.

Old Habits Die Hard

Yet today, in the shadow of Chepstow Castle (close to the Abbey and the oldest surviving stone fortification in Britain, dating from William the Conqueror) I went to the visitor information office and left toting at least two pounds of anachronistic, impractical, highly irrational literature. Somehow, even though my family travels with a digital inventory rivaling that of the average Apple store, I felt more comfortable with a good old printed piece of paper, or rather, several hundred pieces of paper. I, of all people, should realize how stupidly wasteful this is, but I couldn’t help myself. It just felt right. And somehow, it felt even more right with the accumulated weight of the ages pressing down on me.

But all is not lost. Tomorrow night, I’ll be taking my family to see an outdoor production of “Romeo and Juliet,” which will be held at the Abbey under the stars (the Abbey has been roofless for centuries). And I’ll be booking my tickets online. As I said, clashes between old and new abound here.

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.