Category Archives: Digital Marketing

Will Canada Get Some Google Respect?

First published September 16, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Just in case our friends to the south haven’t driven it home to us repeatedly, Canada is inconsequential. We’re a rounding error in revenue projections. We’re a few scattered bodies somewhere north of the 49th, a far-flung geographic extension of Montana, Minnesota and other assorted northern states. We’re an inconvenient expanse of land separating the mainland from Alaska, bad news for air commuting but good news for the cruise business. In general, we often get the feeling that life would be easier for the rest of you if we just went away.

A Really Soft Launch

But haven’t you heard? Google is investing in the Canadian market! The company is ramping up its sales team here. Well, you can be forgiven if you haven’t heard, because the news was barely a drop in the PR bucket next to the roar that was the launch of Google Instant.

And that, in a nutshell, is the story of our lives up here in the Great White North. You really don’t care. I remember being in Oklahoma once the morning after the Canadian federal election. Naturally, I was somewhat curious who won. I picked up the copy of USA Today that was dropped outside my hotel room and thumbed through the entire paper to find out who the leader of Canada might be. That, by the way, would be your single largest trading partner, not to mention your primary source of oil, wood, grain and several other essential natural resources. But somehow, the vast editorial resources of USA Today couldn’t be bothered to devote even one column inch to the future of your neighbor to the north.

Canada’s Coming-Out Party

Google has had a sales office in Canada since 2002, but it hasn’t been an easy task selling to Canadians. I myself have gone on record in the past saying Canadian marketers may have a somewhat obtuse view of digital marketing, due to their contorted vantage point. We’re a Canadian company that does 85% of its business with U.S. companies because of this lag in our native marketplace.

But Google apparently believes we’re worth further attention. Maybe it’s because Google’s CFO, Patrick Pichette, is Canadian. He boasts of having a picture of a Tim Horton’s sign on his Nexus One. I haven’t had a chance to connect yet with the Canadian ex-pat, Chris O’Neill, who’s currently in transit from Mountain View to Hogtown (that would be Toronto, for you non-Canucks) to unfurl the Google banner. According to his bio, O’Neill is as Canadian as they come. He grew up working in his parent’s Canadian Tire store, for heaven’s sake. I look forward to having a polite chat and a frosty Molson’s to welcome him home. Perhaps we’ll even strike up a game of street hockey and celebrate with some poutine after. A word of advice though, Chris: Don’t forget your toque — it’s getting a little nippy up here in the evenings.

Full Speed Ahead… Maybe

Seriously though, I suspect Google’s timing might be bang-on. I think Canadian business is ready to get serious about digital. I know Canadian consumers made that decision long ago. And once Canadians get over their natural fear of just about anything involving any degree of risk, they do tend to make up for lost time. When you combine these factors, I suspect the Canadian marketplace is ripe for some serious digital revolution. But, to be on the safe side, maybe we should strike a Royal Commission on the subject and wait two or three years for their report.

In any case, it will be great to have a few more voices preaching the digital gospel in the Canadian wilderness. When you have this much room and this few people, it can get mighty lonely up here.

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.

More Ways B2B Search Marketing Differs from B2C

First published July 1, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I looked at ways that B2B search marketing is different from search campaigns aimed at consumers. I looked at how risk avoidance was an overriding concern. Also, a B2B purchase is almost always an item on someone’s to-do list, so they have little patience for being “immersed” in experiences or heading down navigational dead ends on a Web site. Today, I’ll look at two other ways that B2B buying behaviors differ from those in the consumer marketplace:

Unfamiliar Territory

In the consumer world, billions of branding dollars are spent to create a sense of familiarity not just with a product but also with a brand. Even if we’ve never bought a product before, there’s a good chance that we have some idea of the competitive landscape within the product category.  If we were looking to make a purchase for ourselves, I would venture to say there are very few things we would consider buying where we wouldn’t even know the name of the product. Yet, this is an everyday occurrence in the B2B world. Often, we’re asked to make informed purchase decisions about products and services that we hadn’t heard of yesterday.

When we strike into unfamiliar territory, we create a challenge for the B2B marketer. If we don’t even know the name of the product we’re looking to buy, how do we start looking for it? Where do we begin? It’s pretty hard to Google something when you don’t know what to call it. This makes keyword discovery one of the most challenging and important parts of any B2B search campaign.

Often B2B purchases are not only a buying decision, but also come with a steep learning curve. Buyers have to identify a potential solution, learn about the product category, identify the potential vendors, and determine decision criteria — all tasks that must be accomplished before buyers even start evaluating their alternatives.  Imagine trying to buy a car or a flat-screen TV if you had no idea what those products were — or even if they existed at all.

Decision by Committee

Sometime ago in my life, as I hung out my advertising consultant shingle, I was introduced to the joys and tribulations of committee-driven decision-making. I uncovered the sad truth behind the joke, “How do you determine the average IQ of committee? You take the lowest IQ in the group and divide it by the number of people in the committee.”

B2B purchases are often driven by committee. And, as we found in the BuyerSphere research, different members of the committee have different agendas. In high-risk, long-cycle purchases, the internal politics involved in a purchase can rival anything you’ll find on Wisteria Lane. These differing agendas mean that signals from committee members can seem to be at cross-purposes, making life exceeding difficult for the vendor.

Here’s the big challenge from a search marketing perspective: If different committee members are looking for different information (as determined by their own objectives) they will also expect distinctly different experiences. Your Web site and search campaign somehow has to be able to offer clear and compelling paths through this tangled knot of prospect behaviors. Clear segmentation options, relevant messaging, and highly intuitive navigation are three ways to guide different buyers with different objectives to the right destination.

B2B is different from B2C. It’s more complex, more challenging — and, in my opinion, much more interesting.

How B2B Search Marketing Differs from B2C

First published June 24, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

As I write this, I’m at the B2B Search Strategy Summit in San Francisco. Mary O’Brien, the summit organizer, told me that many potential attendees — and yes, even some panelists — questioned where B2B search marketing was really all that different from B2C. Shouldn’t the same basic practices apply?

I answer that question the same way I answer all questions about marketing: Let’s look at it through the eyes of the buyer. And when we do that, we find some significant differences as we step from the consumer side to the business side.

It’s All About Risk

When we make decisions in any part of our lives, we have a “brake” and a “gas pedal” that governs the decision-making process. Call it risk and reward, prevention and promotion, loss and gain. Whatever you call it, in most decisions, there are opposing forces, and the ultimate decision depends on the balance between the two. If reward overcomes risk, we buy. If risk rules, we don’t.

On the consumer side of our lives, there’s often a strong emotional investment in the reward part of the equation. For example, I really want a new road bike. I can’t rationalize the purchase, seeing as I have a perfectly good used road bike, but that doesn’t quell the pangs of jealousy I feel when I see someone wheeling down the road on a new Cervelo or Trek Madone. Someday, I know, reward (the joy of saying “look, me too!”) will overcome the risk (parting with a significant chunk of cash) for me.

But think about most B2B purchases. If we’re looking at buying a new rack of servers, or supply chain management software, where’s the fun in that? The only real emotion at play here is the risk of screwing up and being fired. Emotions in B2B purchases are heavily biased towards risk mitigation. And that directly impacts your search strategy. Messaging has to minimize risk in the eyes of the buyer, rather than try to build on the emotional reward side of things. I can’t say the same would be true if you were bidding on terms like “convertible roadster,” “touring motorcycle” or even “iPad.”

It’s Their Job

The second difference is directly related to the first. B2B purchases are part of someone’s job. They’re not doing it because they simply love buying enterprise software or industrial supplies. No one makes a hobby out of buying O-rings or heavy-duty water pumps.

How does this affect a search strategy? It heightens the need for efficient retrieval of information. While a consumer looking at a sports car or booking a cruise might want to get “immersed” in an “experience,” typical B2B purchasing agents want to get in and out, allowing them to put one more check mark beside their ever-growing to-do list. They will not be in a forgiving mood if you send them down dead ends or tie them up in confusing navigation. This is all about making their job easier. And that becomes crucial when you think about landing page strategies and the path that leads from them.

Next week, I’ll cover the other two ways that B2B differs from B2C: the fact that often buyers are in unfamiliar territory, and that B2B purchases are typically group decisions.

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?

A Brave New World That’s Not So New After All

First published May 20, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

What the hell is happening? Everything is changing, and it’s changing much too quickly. We keep hearing that the game has changed, that nothing we knew before is still applicable. Ironically, I’m seeing a different trend. I’m seeing a need to return to our roots. But it’s hard to see the truth of that through the technological maze we’re currently stumbling through.

There is a reason companies exist. Somewhere at their core, there is something that sets them apart. There was a reason, back in the misty recesses of their corporate history, why the founders thought they could actually make a buck at this. The older the company, the further it is from the original spark that gave birth to a new entity, but it still lies somewhere.

To Look Forward, Look Back

As companies struggle to adapt to the digital marketplace, they tend to look forward, which is a really scary view of things. Everything is uncharted, unknowable and uncertain. There is a sense that we don’t know what lurks around the next corner. This also makes it seem that it’s imperative to figure out what’s changed. “What,” I hear repeatedly, “is the thing I need to know about how the world is changing?” The answer, I suspect, is not so much what you need to know, but what you may have forgotten because you were distracted by the onslaught of change.

Let me get less cryptic. There is a company that sells technical innovation. It has been doing this for over a century. That original spark, way back when, was to take its understanding of its core technologies and apply them in new ways to solve customer problems. The entire company was built around that core.

Bigger was Better…

Today, the company is struggling with change. The marketplace is shifting. It seems that it must be time to grasp onto something new. At the very least, the company must be open to trying many new things, and trying them quickly. Like many manufacturers, over time those direct ties to the ultimate consumer of their products have had more and more links forcefully jammed into the supply chain, leaving the manufacturer several steps removed. Size and success used to dictate the creation of a distribution network, because physical proximity to the customer was required. Technology is sending that requirement into oblivion, industry by industry. At a minimum, it’s severely altering the importance of the middle links in the chain. Technology is allowing customers to get closer to manufacturers, and vice versa.

This is certainly a change in the way the company has done business over the past few decades, but if we look further back, the company gets back on familiar ground. Technology is bringing it closer to that original founding spark, and I have to believe that’s a good thing. This company became successful by having discussions on the shop floor with the people that were doing the job and struggling with a problem. They identified the need because they could see it. It was right in front of their nose. Innovation came from observation. The spark of success was alive and well and could be found in that small gap between the company and the customer. The 20th century need for infrastructural support stretched the gap, forcing the spark of innovation to become systemic and scalable. And in that, something important was lost.

…But it’s a More Intimate World Now.

But technology is closing the gap once again. And, in the process, as it brings the potential to relight all those sparks, it’s also bringing the opportunity to have those shop-room-floor discussions in millions of locations simultaneously. If the company looks back to the core reason it exists, and understands why that’s important to customers, it will know what to do with technology.  The answer isn’t in the sea of change that’s descending on it – but from remembering why the company’s founders decided this was something worthwhile, something that would make it worth coming to work each day, and turbo-charging that purpose with technology.

The Great Debate about the Value of Content

Rand Fishkin posted a fascinating email thread that documents an online debate about the value of content for SEO. Participating in the debate were some of the best thinkers in the biz..period – Rand, Stephan Spencer, Thad Kahlow, Eric Enge, Chris Baggott, Richard Zwicky, Lawrence Coburn, Will Critchlow and yours truly. Read through for a illuminating glimpse at the role content might play in search algos….

The SEO industry, like many others, has private forums, chat threads and groups of connected individuals whose interactions happen largely behind closed doors. Today, I’d like to pull back a curtain and share a debate that occurred between a number of CEOs in the search marketing industry over the last few days that I think you’ll find both fascinating, and hopefully, valuable, too. – more

What’s a Marketer’s Biggest Problem? So Much Technology – so Little Time!

pprogtechmstitleIn the past year or so, I’ve been at a number of technology platform user summits and at some point on the agenda, there is always the product feature enhancement announcements. With much fanfare I listen as they roll out enhancement after enhancement, and I can’t  help thinking: do people really use all these features?

Functional Dysfunction

I suspect every platform, whether it be sales automation, marketing automation, paid search management, website analytics or testing and optimization platforms all suffer from the same under utilization. When it comes to technology, there always seems to be an arms race between the product development people and the users…and at first glance, the user always loses. They always have far more functionality thrown at them than they can possibly use. Function turns into performance dysfunction. But ultimately, the users will have the last word. Stuff that doesn’t get used eventually doesn’t get renewed. It becomes fat that gets trimmed from the operational budget.

At Enquiro, we’re going through this right now. Several months ago, we decided we needed some new project management infrastructure software, so we compiled our list of wants and started shopping. We made our choice, based largely on the fact that the winner seemed to be able to do everything we wanted and some stuff we hadn’t even thought of. But all this functionality came at a price. We have been struggling to implement and even with our limited implementation, our team members are finding the overly complex interface a pain-in-the-ass to use. The technical assessment gave our final choice flying colors. The real world assessment is much less rosy.

Tools that Don’t Get Used Aren’t Tools, They’re Ballast

It’s like I’ve said before: technology is simply a tool. And a tool only has value if it’s used. It has to feel comfortable, familiar and useful. It has to match the way we work. And often, too many features jam up the interface, getting in the way of the user. Elegance is sacrificed for a grocery list of customer wishes.

Part of the blame lies with the developers, but honestly, most of it lies with the users. We ask for the stuff, so they give it to us. With our project management platform, they simply gave us everything we were asking for. Granted, they could have made it easier to use and integrated functionality a little more holistically, but developers have every right to defend themselves by saying, “hey, we’re just responding to our customer’s requests”.

So, where does the blame ultimately lie? Well, I think we marketers are focused on exactly the wrong thing. We keep looking at technology and asking for features without really understanding how we’ll use those features. There is no integrated strategic flow for us to follow, so there is no way for developers to build elegance into their interface. They have to give us access to every lever and button, bloating the user experience hopelessly, because we want everything but we’re not exactly sure what we want to do with it.

We fall into this trap because we’re focused on technology, not on end goals. We got mired in the minutiae without knowing our ultimate destination.

Objectives First, Strategy Second…then Technology

Let me give you an example. Let’s say a business objective of yours is to convince sales managers of mid sized companies selling to other businesses that your solution will allow each of their sales reps to sell 20 to 30% more. That’s a pretty simple objective. If you start by understanding what it would take to reach that objective, you begin to understand all the steps along the way. You begin to identify the desired inputs and outputs on the persuasion path and how they relate to each other. You map the journey your prospects have to take. And then, finally, you can see how tools can help you maximize your potential at each step of that journey. Suddenly, you’ve put your objective first, your strategy second and only then do you worry about the technology. Prospect behavior drives technical requirements and dictates the features you’ll used. In the optimal situation, you would come out of it with a buyer-centric strategy that pieces of technology can plug into seamlessly, with no wasted functionality.

Well, you say, that’s exactly what we do! Hooey, I say. I’ve yet to see a company pull that off successfully or consistently. First of all, ownership of that prospect path is brutally sliced up and scattered across your corporate org chart. No one owns it from start to finish. So, you look at your slice, along with your accompanying success metrics (which are at least 2 or 3 steps removed from the ultimate business objective) and you start looking for the tool to optimize that slice. There’s no one to connect all the technical pieces.

Meet the MT

Enter the Marketing Technologist. This is a brilliant concept from my friend Scott Brinker (who is the Chief Marketing Technologist) at ion Interactive. This is someone who can bridge the gap between marketing objectives, at a very high level, and the technology needed to execute against those objectives in a more integrated way. They own the entire process, beginning to end, and understand the end goals. They stitch together the distributed pieces of the campaign with the right features and the right tools, determined not by isolated wish lists but rather real marketing objectives and a deep understanding of prospect behavior.

Everybody Wins

If we keep people at the front of the process, where they belong, and technology at the end, everyone benefits. We can give clearer direction to tool developers about what we really need. If they understand ultimate requirements, rather than proximate ones, they can start to streamline the interface by building intelligence into it, doing some steps in the background and simplifying the interface by only including controls we really need to change. The customers benefit because our wooing of them becomes more integrated, smoother and much less irritating. And the marketers can focus on what they need to focus on, persuading people rather than trying to wade through complex technology.

Next Week in Captiva: Shaking Things Up, TED-style

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

Today you sit there, an audience spread across the digital marketing landscape, scraping together a few precious moments on your daily calendar to read this column. Next week I hope you’ll all be basking in the sunshine of Captiva Island, Fla., your cranium brimming over with tidbits and brain-bombs about search and the industry we toil in. The Google-gods willing and major algorithmic overhauls aside, we can all get away from the daily grind long enough to step back and take a look at where this whole thing might be going.

A Summit Three Years in the Making

I’ve been fortunate to work with MediaPost to help program the Search Insider Summit for the past five shows (I think, the brain’s a little numb at this point). Over time we’ve refined and tweaked to the point where we had a pretty smooth-running operation. This time, however, I decided to change all that. I’ve never been a particularly loyal adherent to the maxim: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I believe in mixing stuff up on a pretty regular basis. In this case, the catalyst for change was a chance to attend the TEDActive conference this spring.

I loved how TED managed to lodge particularly toothsome concepts in my brain (at a breathlessly unrelenting pace, to be honest) and then throw me loose amongst the TED-sters (yes, it is a little cult-like) to try to digest in my limited downtime.

The resulting conversations were nothing short of amazing. The first day at lunch, I was sharing a picnic basket with five other strangers and eavesdropping on a conversation happening beside me. The topic? The role of mirror neurons in determining the vicarious enjoyment on thrill rides at an amusement park. I didn’t catch names at first, but one speaker owned an amusement part in New Jersey, and the other was a professor of neuroscience at UC Irvine.

This past week, as I was zipping past TV channels, I saw a familiar face. There was my neuroscience prof! He was appearing as himself on the crime drama “Criminal Minds.” He just happens to be one Dr. James Fallon, a world-renowned expert on the psychology and neurology of psychopaths! Now, where else could you just happen on a conversation like that?

The Convergence of Conversations

That was the spirit I wanted to create at Captiva (minus the psychopathic stuff).  Like TED, we have an atmosphere that invites conversations. The informal and intimate atmosphere is conducive to brainstorming. And this time, I wanted to borrow from the TED concept and transition what happens up on stage to be more forward-looking and strategic in nature. I wanted to give more people a chance to share their thoughts, so I borrowed the TED format of a mix of 18-minute and five-minute (TED actually limits to three-minutes) talks. Plus, we retained unique Search Insider traditions like our roundtable break-out sessions.

The challenge I threw at presenters was to crystal-ball the question: Where is search going from here? I divided the question into five parts: the core technology, the user experience, the marketing strategies, the search marketing industry and the data and tools. Then, with the help of our advisory board (Gian Fulgoni – Comscore, John Nicoletti – Google, Stefan Weitz – Microsoft, Chris Copeland – GroupM and Frank Lee – The Search Agency) we created a 3-day agenda from the pitches we received. It’s promising to be a fascinating summit. And for good measure, we’re bringing Ball State University back to re-envision Google through Gen-Next eyes.

It was a little hairy, taking a tried-and-true format and reinventing it, but I think you’ll be pleased with the results. See you soon in Captiva!

Search May Not be Sexy Anymore, But It Pays the Bills

First published August 5, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Is it just me, or is search getting boring? It’s been months since we’ve had a good, ruckus-raising tidbit to get our teeth into. The Bing-Yahoo integration? That’s the best you can do? Yawn.

Is it me…

I suspect that it is, in part anyway, me. To be honest, I haven’t been much of a “Search Insider” lately. In the past few months, precious little of my time has been spent pondering the industry. I’m way behind on industry news and haven’t attended a search conference or event for a few months. My days have been full with the busy-ness of running a business. I’ve had other things on my mind.

My first Search Insider column ran six years ago and since then, I’ve written 276 columns, counting this one.  That’s a little over 220,000 words — most of them at least tangentially relevant to search. Perhaps the well has just run dry.

Or is it search?

But then again, perhaps it’s the industry.  Maybe search just isn’t that sexy anymore. Remember the day when Google was going to change the world? Remember how marketers just couldn’t wrap their heads around this “search” thing? Back then, I could get righteously indignant and bang out a column wondering when the world would “get” how important this it. But now, they’ve got it. It seems silly to proselytize search now that Google has become a verb. Search has come, has conquered, and we’ve all moved on. Again…yawn.

Sure, there are always new search entries in the marketplace, but when’s the last time somebody used the words Google Killer? Is it because Google is invincible, or is it just that we really don’t care anymore? Even Aaron Goldman, who surely has squatter’s rights on “Google Killer,” hasn’t squeezed it into a column since last May. In the last year, only three Search Insider columns have used the term. When we Insiders stop caring about the world after Google, imagine how disinterested the rest of the population must be.

Search and the Oxygen Cycle

As I watch my family’s day-to-day routines unwind, I realize that search is like air. We use it without thinking about it. We just accept it. And so, the industry that lies behind the query box falls into the same category as the biochemical process that ensures we have oxygen. I don’t care how it works, as long as it does work.

So, maybe search is boring. Maybe it’s lost its luster, ceasing to be a bright shiny object. Maybe the cool people have all moved on to social media and mobile, where they attend conferences wearing block logoed T-shirts, sipping free mimosas and talking about how no one gets Foursquare. It’s the same group you used to see at the search shows, waiting to board the bus to the Google Dance.

But I can’t help thinking that perhaps this is a good thing. You can only be cool for so long. Sooner or later, you have to grow up and do some real business. It’s the difference between a bar pick-up and a marriage. Social might be sexy, but search pays the bills and puts food on the table.

On second thought, maybe a little diversion is just what the doctor ordered. Look over here, all you journalists and financial analysts! Look at what’s happening where the really cool people play. Ooh and aah at these social widgets and nifty apps. Meanwhile, we search people will drudge along, cranking out a few more billion in search revenues.