Category Archives: Online Trends

Marissa Mayer and Yahoo’s Regression to the Mean

First published July 26, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

There is not a lot of overlap between the universes of Gord Hotchkiss and Marissa Mayer, but our orbits have intersected on a few occasions in the past. I’ve had the opportunity to talk to Mayer about various aspects of search on a handful of occasions, so it was with some interest that I watched the announcement and subsequent buzz about her appointment as Yahoo CEO.

Much has been said about Mayer’s personal qualifications for the job, and the general consensus is that this is a good thing for Yahoo. If this were a movie, I’m thinking she would score an 82% on the Tomatometer, handily qualifying as “fresh.” Personally, I would agree. Mayer has a razor-sharp (and somewhat intimidating) intellect, a core love for search and an innate sense of what’s right for the user. All of these things will be big plusses for Yahoo. What she hasn’t been tested on is her ability to run a big company. And that’s where things could get interesting.

No doubt Google still imparts its own “halo” effect on anyone who has spent time at the “Plex” in a leadership position. And few have spent as much time there as Mayer, who, as hire number 20, was Google’s first female engineer, logging 13 years with bosses (and hopefully still friends) Page and Brin.  These three tied a tight little knot in the early days of Google, but from the outside, that knot seems to have frayed just a little in the past few years. Mayer’s recent moves in the company have been more lateral than vertical, as later additions to the Google team were promoted above her. Undoubtedly, this was a contributing factor to the parting of the ways with Google.

But how much value does Mayer’s vast inside knowledge of Google and its past successes bring to Yahoo? It must have played a major role in her selection as the new chief Yahooligan. But was she instrumental in the streak of seemingly picture-perfect management calls in the early days of the Internet’s Golden Child? And, even if she were, does it really matter?

Earlier this year, I took part in an open forum on search at an industry conference. Our moderator tossed a ticking time bomb at the panel, in the form of this delicately stated question: “What the #%^&$ is Google doing lately? Have they gone insane?” We each offered our opinions, which ranged in the degree of madness ascribed to Google’s executives. I started my response with this, “I think we tend to downplay the role luck played in the early days of Google. Maybe their luck is just running out.”

There is a much fancier name for the hypothetical situation I described, which is called “regression to the mean.”  In his recent book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” (a HIGHLY recommended read) psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman explores how this can lead us to overvalue executive talent when it’s combined with the halo effect. Kahneman even uses Google as an example: “Of course there was a great deal of skill in the Google story, but luck played a more important role in the actual event than it does in the telling of it. And the more luck was involved, the less there is to be learned.”

Regression to the mean simply means that when you take a snapshot in time that represents either exceptionally good or bad performance, subsequent snapshots tend to move closer to the average. And those highs and lows generally involve luck to some extent. So you can poach talent from a company on a hot streak, only to find that it wasn’t the executives responsible for the performance, but simply the planets aligning in a favorable way.

As an ex-CEO of a company, albeit a tiny one, I find it hard to swallow that leadership might not be as important as we think in the fortunes of a company. But I generally find Kahneman to be an incredibly astute observer of human errors in judgment, so I have to resist the urge to go with my own cognitive biases here and trust Kahneman’s research.  He doesn’t say leadership is inconsequential, but he does caution against ignoring the role of timing and sheer luck.

This is also not to downplay the role Marissa Mayer will play in the future of Yahoo.  Somebody has to lead the company, and Mayer is at least as good a choice as anyone else I can think of.

Who knows? Maybe Yahoo’s luck is due to change. In their case, “regression to the mean” means there’s no place to go but up.

A Look at the Future through Google Glasses?

First published June 7, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” — Herbert Simon

Last week, I explored the dark recesses of the hyper-secret Google X project.  Two X Projects in particular seem poised to change our world in very fundamental ways: Google’s Project Glass and the “Web of Things.”

Let’s start with Project Glass. In a video entitled “One Day…,” the future seen through the rose-colored hue of Google Glasses seems utopian, to say the least. In the video, we step into the starring role, strolling through our lives while our connected Google Glasses feed us a steady stream of information and communication — a real-time connection between our physical world and the virtual one.

In theory, this seems amazing. Who wouldn’t want to have the world’s sum total of information available instantly, just a flick of the eye away?

Couple this with the “Web of Things,” another project said to be in the Google X portfolio.  In the Web of Things, everything is connected digitally. Wearable technology, smart appliances, instantly findable objects — our world becomes a completely inventoried, categorized and communicative environment.

Information architecture expert Peter Morville explored this in his book “Ambient Findability.”  But he cautions that perhaps things may not be as rosy as you might think after drinking the Google X Kool-Aid. This excerpt is from a post he wrote on Ambient Findability:  “As information becomes increasingly disembodied and pervasive, we run the risk of losing our sense of wonder at the richness of human communication.”

And this brings us back to the Herbert Simon quote — knowing and thinking are not the same thing. Our brains were not built on the assumption that all the information we need is instantly accessible. And, if that does become the case through advances in technology, it’s not at all clear what the impact on our ability to think might be. Nicholas Carr, for one, believes that the Internet may have the long-term effect of actually making us less intelligent. And there’s empirical evidence he might be right.

In his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,”Noble laureate Daniel Kahneman says that while we have the ability to make intuitive decisions in milliseconds (Malcolm Gladwell explored this in “Blink”), humans also have a nasty habit of using these “fast” mental shortcuts too often, relying on gut calls that are often wrong (or, at the very least, biased) when we should be using the more effortful “slow” and rational capabilities that tend to live in the frontal part of our brain. We rely on beliefs, instincts and habits, at the expense of thinking. Call it informational instant gratification.

Kahneman recounts a seminal study in psychology, where four-year-old children were given a choice: they could have one Oreo immediately, or wait 15 minutes (in a room with the offered Oreo in front of them, with no other distractions) and have two Oreos. About half of the children managed to wait the 15 minutes. But it was the follow-up study, where the researchers followed what happened to the children 10 to 15 years later, that yielded the fascinating finding:

“A large gap had opened between those who had resisted temptation and those who had not. The resisters had higher measures of executive control in cognitive tasks, and especially the ability to reallocate their attention effectively. As young adults, they were less likely to take drugs. A significant difference in intellectual aptitude emerged: the children who had shown more self-control as four year olds had substantially higher scores on tests of intelligence.”

If this is true for Oreos, might it also be true for information? If we become a society that expects to have all things at our fingertips, will we lose the “executive control” required to actually think about things? Wouldn’t it be ironic if Google, in fulfilling its mission to “organize the world’s information” inadvertently transgressed against its other mission, “don’t be evil,” by making us all attention-deficit, intellectual-diminished, morally bankrupt dough heads?

Will Google X Get Google’s Mojo Back?

First published May 31, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

What do you do when the search engine you started up with your fellow uber-geek partner makes you fabulously wealthy, but somehow all the billions it’s raking in leaves you feeling rather empty?

What do you do when you’re no longer the darling of the mainstream press, who once enthused that no challenge was too daunting for you and your company full of exceptionally gifted and only slightly less egotistical baby geniuses?

Well, if you’re Sergey Brin, you find a new toy. You leave the mind-numbingly mundane business of running a multibillion-dollar mega-corporation to your power-tripping co-founder, and you lock yourself away in an undisclosed office somewhere in Silicon Valley, spending your day playing with robots, space elevators, virtual reality glasses and self-driving cars.

You go back to what you wanted to do in the first place, which was to “put a ding in the universe.” And it’s probably no coincidence that you’re following in the footsteps of your “love me or hate me” mentor, the late Steve Jobs.

Say what you want about Google, I don’t think there’s any doubt that Brin and Page wanted to change the world in substantial (and hopefully non-evil) ways when they started. But the business of running a business tends to make one put ideals on hold and focus on the bottom line. Taking your company public doesn’t help. Shareholders typically value revenue over revolution, profits over prophesy. “Sure, robots and space elevators are cool, but tell me how that’s going to contribute to our quarterly earnings?” Public companies, by necessity, tend to focus on the short term rather than the long.

But Brin has never been a short-term guy. Neither has Page, for that matter. They both love to take something and spin it into a grandiose vision. For Page, he felt he could best realize that by taking over the leadership of Google. But for all the power that comes with that role, there’s also a heaping helping of compromise. Brin apparently felt more comfortable in the more idealistic environs of the Google-X Lab.

If you’re not familiar with Google X, it’s a super-secret hidden laboratory where an ultra-powerful super computer and high tech gadgets allow the billionaire to fight crime… no, wait, that’s the Bat Cave. Google X is a secret laboratory where Brin has been spending a lot of time lately. In a New York Times article from last November, it’s described as a, “clandestine lab where Google is tackling a list of 100 shoot-for-the-stars ideas. Google is so secretive about the effort that many employees do not even know the lab exists.”

What are some of these “shoot-for-the-star” ideas? There is no definitive list, given the “hush hush” nature of Google X, but third-party reports commonly mention space elevators, driverless cars, connected household appliances, and one project that is starting to see the light of day: Google Glass, wearable technology that someday could bring a Google interface to the world around us (more about this in a future column).

Google X certainly doesn’t suffer from a lack of ambition. It’s the type of thing we used to routinely expect from the Google we knew and loved.  And it’s got oodles of “cool”: robots and space elevators and driverless cars, oh my! But these types of skunk work projects are often just a way to pacify a few highly placed egos and keep them out of the way while the real work of the company gets done by those who are a little less grandiose in their ambitions.

And Google X does suffer from Google’s long-term problem of trying to do everything at once. The company has always had a problem with focus. Unlike Google X, Jobs’ lofty ambitions and breakaway projects at Apple were tied to a product that would ship sometime in the next decade. Don’t expect to see a space elevator coming to your neighborhood anytime soon.

So the question remains: Will Google X define the future of Google, or is it just a plaything to keep Sergey happy? Only time will tell.

Living Beyond Our Expectations

First published May 25, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

To my father-in-law, the Internet is a big black box that he doesn’t understand, but inside of which, all is possible. This became clear to me after the following conversation:

F-I-L: Gord?

Me: Yes?

F-I-L: Can you go on your computer and find the combination for my safe?

Me: Huh?

F-I-L: I have an old safe that I locked years ago and I can’t remember the combination. I thought you could probably find it on your computer.

Of course, by “computer,” he meant the Internet. To him, the Internet is the sum collection of all information, and in that, he’s not far wrong. Chances are, in some archive of manufacturer’s data somewhere, the lost combination probably exists. If it does, it’s just one database call away from being public. One would hope that this information would always remain private, but my point is, as naïve as my father-in-law’s question seems to be, it’s probably not that far removed from reality.

Technology and our expectations of what’s possible also seem to play a game of cat and mouse.  No matter what we dream up, it seems that it becomes reality in the blink of an eye. In fact, I suspect that technology now regularly outpaces our wildest dreams. Almost anything is possible, at least in theory. If it doesn’t exist, it’s probably just that it’s not practical. Nobody has bothered to put in the effort to make it happen.

Consider marketing intelligence, for instance. Remember the first time you encountered what John Battelle dubbed the “database of intentions”? It was Google’s query data, and Battelle had what he called a “Holy Sh*t” moment when he realized:

This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the intentions of humankind – a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, supoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends. Such a beast has never before existed in the history of culture, but is almost guaranteed to grow exponentially from this day forward. This artifact can tell us extraordinary things about who we are and what we want as a culture. And it has the potential to be abused in equally extraordinary fashion.

For marketers, Google had provided us with the biggest source of marketing intelligence ever compiled. It was the crystallization of consumer intent, in searchable form. We collectively salivated over it.

But that was a decade ago. Now, as marketers, we routinely curse the gaps in and shortcomings of Google’s query data. As powerful as it once seemed, our expectations have leapfrogged ahead of it.

Battelle has recently updated his definition of the database of intent, adding four new “fields” to it. Originally there was the search “query,” signaling “what I want.” Now, the “social graph” indicates “who I am” and “who I know.” The “status update” signals “what I’m doing” and “what’s happening.” The “check-in” signals “where I am.” And the “purchase” signals “what I’m buying.”

For a marketer, this is mind-blowing stuff.  The trick, of course, is to bring this all together in a meaningful way. To do so, there are multiple technology, intellectual property and privacy hurdles to get over. But it’s all very doable. It’s administration, not technology, that’s holding us back. A big part of Facebook’s IPO valuation was based on successfully pulling this off.

Again, technology has dangled a possibility at the leading edge of our expectations. But it will happen. And when it does, it will suddenly seem ho-hum to us. Our expectations will rocket forward to another possibility.

But even as fast as our expectations move, I guarantee, somewhere, someone is already working on something that lies beyond anything we ever dreamed of. Thank goodness our expectations are as elastic as they seem to be.

The “Field of Dreams” Dilemma

First published May 3, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

There’s a chicken and an egg paradox in mobile marketing. Many mobile sites sit moldering in the online wilderness, attracting few to no visitors. The same could be said for many elaborate online customer portals, social media outposts or online communities. Somebody went to the trouble to build them, but no one came. Why?

Well, it could be because no one thinks to go to the trouble to look for them, just as no one expects to find a ball diamond in the middle of an Iowa cornfield. It wasn’t until the ghosts of eight Chicago White Sox players, banned for life from playing the game they loved, started playing on the “Field of Dreams” that anyone bothered to drive to Ray Kinsella’s farm.  There was suddenly a reason to go.

The problem with many out-of–the-way online destinations is that there is no good reason to go. Because of this, we make two assumptions:

–       If there is no good reason for a destination to exist, then the destination probably doesn’t exist. Or,

–       If it does exist, it will be a waste of time and energy to visit.

If we jump to either of these two conclusions, we don’t bother looking for the destination. We won’t make the investment required to explore and evaluate. You see, there is a built-in mechanism that makes a “Build it and they will come” strategy a risky bet.

This built-in mechanism comes from behavioral ecology and is called the “marginal value theorem.” It was first identified by Eric Charnov in 1976 and has since been borrowed to explain behaviors in online information foraging by Peter Pirolli, amongst others. The idea behind it is simple: We will only invest the time and effort to find a new “patch” of online information if we think it’s better than “patches” we already know exist and are easy to navigate to.  In other words, we’re pretty lazy and won’t make any unnecessary trips.

This cost/benefit calculation is done largely at a subconscious level and will dictate our online behaviors. It’s not that we make a conscious decision not to look for new mobile sites or social destinations. But unbeknownst to us, our brain is already passing value judgments that will tend to keep us going down well-worn paths. So, if we are looking for information or functionality that would be unlikely to find in a mobile site or app, but we know of a website that has just what we’re looking for and time is not a urgent matter, we’ll wait until we’re in front of our regular computer to do the research. We automatically disqualify the mobile opportunity because our “marginal value” threshold has not been met.

The same is true for social sites. If we believe that there is a compelling reason to seek out a Facebook page (promotional offers, information not available elsewhere) then we’ll go to the trouble to track it down. Otherwise, we’ll stick to destinations we know.

I believe the marginal value theorem plays an important role in defining the scope of our online worlds. We only explore new territory when we feel our needs won’t be met by destinations we already know and are comfortable with.  And if we rule out entire categories of content or functionality as being unlikely to adapt well to a mobile or social environment (B2B research in complex sales scenarios being one example) then we won’t go to the trouble to look for them.

I should finish off by saying that this is a moving target. Once there is enough critical mass in new online territory to reset visitor expectations, you’ve increased the “richness” of the patch to the point where the “marginal value” conditions are met and the brain decides it’s worth a small investment of time and energy.

In other words, if Shoeless Joe Jackson, Chick Gandil, Eddie Cicotte, Lefty Williams, Happy Felsch, Swede Risberg, Buck Weaver and Fred McMullin all start playing baseball in a cornfield, than it’s probably worth hopping on the tractor and head’n over to the Kinsella place!

Wonder What They’re Doing on Captiva?

First published April 26, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I kind of feel like a kid that stayed home while the rest of his friends headed off to summer camp at Lake Winnigapahaha. I just know they’re having more fun than I am.

To really drive it home, my friend Ken Fadner, the publisher of MediaPost, sent me a picture the other day of the launch of the Search Insider Summit on wonderful Captiva Island. “Missing you” was Ken’s postscript.

Awww… I miss you too, Ken!

You’ll forgive me if I feel rather possessive of the Search Insider Summit. For the last several of them, I’ve been the programming chair and emcee. Last year, I handed the reins over to the very capable team at MediaPost, but I still feel like I’m missing my left arm. In the past few weeks, as the event was drawing nearer, I even had “phantom” pains. I’d jolt upright, worrying about a keynote canceling or irresolvable scheduling conflicts, only to remember that it’s now someone else’s worry.

I had to give this year’s event a miss due to scheduling conflicts, but I also felt that for myself, and the event, it was probably time to explore new territory. I was proud of what we had accomplished the Summit. I still believe it is a one-of-a-kind search event: smart, strategic and small enough to be intimately social. The MediaPost team always does an incredible job matching the onstage content with plenty of opportunities to have fun and meet other attendees.

I also loved the event because for two weeks each year, it plugged me into the industry in a way that I just haven’t found elsewhere. I could reconnect with people who are just damned smart and spend a good amount of time thinking about where we’re going and how we’re going to get there.  That, perhaps more than anything else, is what I miss the most.

I’ve had the opportunity in the last year or so to start thinking about what my life will be “post-search.” That was another reason why I decided to step down from the Summit stage. I was recently at a conference where a speaker asked everyone who’d been in this industry for “at least a year” to raise their hands. Almost every hand when up.

Then he said, “At least three years.” Several hands went down.

“At least five years.” About a third of the hands stayed up.

“At least 10 years.” I was one of three hands that stayed up.  The speaker mercifully stopped there, but it was at that point I realized I’ve been doing this for almost 20 years.  Yeesh! Twenty years is a long time to be doing anything, let alone something as dynamic and exhausting as search. I’ve loved every minute of it, but still, that’s a hell of a lot of minutes — somewhere around 6 million by my reckoning, allowing a little down time for sleeping.

So, I’ll be thinking of you all in Captiva. I’ll be wondering what you’re talking about, over the refreshments consumed on Sunset Beach. I’ll miss the insights, both professional and otherwise, that seemed to happen on the dolphin & dinner cruise. And I’ll miss connecting with the smartest group of Search Insiders I know.

Search and the Age of “Usefulness”

First published April 19, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

There has been a lot of digital ink spilled over the recent changes to Google’s algorithm and what it means for the SEO industry. This is not the first time the death knell has been rung for SEO. It seems to have more lives than your average barnyard cat. But there’s no doubt that Google’s recent changes throws a rather large wrench in the industry as a whole. In my view, that’s a good thing.

First of all, from the perspective of the user, Google’s changes mark an evolution of search beyond a tool used to search for information to one used by us to do the things we want to do. It’s moving from using relevance as the sole measure of success to incorporating usefulness.

The algorithm is changing to keep pace with the changes in the Web as a whole. No longer is it just the world’s biggest repository of text-based information; it’s now a living, interactive, functional network of apps, data and information, extending our capabilities through a variety of connected devices.

Google had to introduce these back-end changes. Not to do so would have guaranteed the company would have soon become irrelevant in the online world.

As Google succeeds in consistently interpreting more and more signals of user intent, it can become more confident in presenting a differentiated user experience. It can serve a different type of results set to a query that’s obviously initiated by someone looking for information than it does to the user who’s looking to do something online.

We’ve been talking about the death of the monolithic set of search results for years now. In truth, it never died; it just faded away, pixel by pixel. The change has been gradual, but for the first time in several years of observing search, I can truthfully say that my search experience (whether on Google, Bing or the other competitors) looks significantly different today than it did three years ago.

As search changes, so do the expectations of users. And that affects the “use case” of search. In its previous incarnation, we accepted that search was one of a number of necessary intermediate steps between our intent and our ultimate action. If we wanted to do something, we accepted the fact that we would search for information, find the information, evaluate the information and then, eventually, take the information and do something with it. The limitations of the Web forced us to take several steps to get us where we wanted to go.

But now, as we can do more of what we want to online, the steps are being eliminated. Information and functionality are often seamlessly integrated in a single destination. So we have less patience with seemingly superfluous steps between us and our destination. That includes search.

Soon, we will no longer be content with considering the search results page as a sort of index to online content. We will want the functionality we know exists served to us via the shortest possible path. We see this beginning as answers to common information requests are pushed to the top of the search results page.

What this does, in terms of user experience, is make the transition from search page to destination more critical than ever. As long as search was a reference index, the user expected to bounce back and forth between potential destinations, deciding which was the best match. But as search gets better at unearthing useful destinations, our “post-click” expectations will rise accordingly.  Whatever lies on the other side of that search click better be good. The changes in Google’s algorithm are the first step (of several yet to come) to ensure that it is.

What this does for SEO specialists is to suddenly push them toward considering a much bigger picture than they previously had to worry about. They have to think in terms of a search user’s unique intent and expectations. They have to understand the importance of the transition from a search page to a landing page and the functionality that has to offer. And, most of all, they have to counsel their clients on the increasing importance of “usefulness” — and how potential customers will use online to seek and connect to that usefulness.  If the SEO community can transition to that role, there will always be a need for them.

The SEO industry and the Google search quality team have been playing a game of cat and mouse for several years now. It’s been more “hacking” than “marketing” as SEO practitioners prod for loopholes in the Google algorithm. All too often, a top ranking was the end goal, with no thought to what that actually meant for true connections with prospects.

In my mind, if that changes, it’s perhaps the best thing to ever happen in the SEO business.

Has Technology Spoiled Us?

First published March 15, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

“We live in an amazing, amazing world, and it’s wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots.” — Louis C.K.

If you want to see “amazing” as it emerges onto our collective radar, your best seat is in front of the TED stage. It’s like a candy store of jaw-dropping technology. This year’s edition was no exception. We saw flying robots, virtual cadavers (to train new surgeons) and enough other techno-goodies to keep the TED audience in a digitally enhanced state of rapture.

One that stood out for me doesn’t exist yet, but Peter Diamandis and his “X Prize” have placed their bets on something called the Qualcomm Tricorder Challenger. Remember the Tricorder from the original “Star Trek “ — a nifty little piece of hardware that could instantly diagnose Star Fleet crew members and other assorted alien life forms? Well, the X Prize foundation thinks we’re at a point where we could turn that particular piece of science fiction into science fact. They’ve put $10 million up for grabs for whoever can create a handheld device that will be “a tool capable of capturing key health metrics and diagnosing a set of 15 diseases. Metrics for health could include such elements as blood pressure, respiratory rate, and temperature. Ultimately, this tool will collect large volumes of data from ongoing measurement of health states through a combination of wireless sensors, imaging technologies, and portable, non-invasive laboratory replacements.”  The TED community collectively started salivating at the possibilities.

But as most of us had our attention focused on the amazing glimpses of our own cleverness on stage, I couldn’t help scanning the audience around me at TEDActive. Here we were, a group of privileged (and mainly well-to-do) Westerners, and most of us had technology in our hands that would have blown away the TED audience of 2002, just 10 short years ago. Imagine demoing the iPhone or iPad then. A standing “O” would have been guaranteed (not that that’s too stringent a bar to get over at TED).

It made me realizing how fickle we are when it comes to technology. What amazes us today is expected tomorrow and becomes boring the day after. We chew up innovation at an ever-increasing pace and seem to grow annoyed if we’re not constantly fed a diet of “wow.”

I started with a quote from comedian Louis C.K.  In his routine, he talks about a flight he was recently on where the airline announced that you could access WiFi while in the air.  Partway through the flight, the system went down and the flight attendants came on the system and apologized.

The person in the next seat responded with an exasperated, “This is complete B.S.!”

How, wondered C.K., could you possible feel entitled to something you didn’t even know existed five minutes ago?

Look, I love my gadgets as much as the next guy. More, in fact. But at that moment, sitting in that darkened auditorium, I couldn’t help but wonder if our own insatiability for innovation is setting off a technological arms race with social implications we can’t possibly foresee. Are we becoming spoiled idiots? Are we so blinded by our own sense of entitlement that we fail to appreciate just how amazing the world is today? And, more disturbingly, as we underutilizing the tools that technology is giving us, going for the easy distraction rather than the earth-shaking potential of innovation?Do we push technology down the path of least resistance, rather than directing it where it can do the most good for the world, collectively?

Of course, applying technology for the betterment of mankind is right in TED’s wheelhouse, so my fears are not so much aimed at what I saw during TED, but rather to the deluge of technical innovation whose only purpose seems to be to make us fatter, stupider and lazier.

Among the nobler pursuits of innovation is Segway inventor Dean Kamen’s Stirling Water still, a box about the size of a large camping cooler that allows you to “stick a hose into anything that looks wet…and it comes out…as perfect distilled water.” The box can supply a village with 1,000 liters of clean water a day.  Peter Diamandis gave us an update on the still, saying that hopes are high that it will soon go into widespread production, making a massive difference in the health and well-being of many third-world countries. It all sounds great until we remember that Kamen first introduced it on the TED stage in (you guessed it) 2002.

I wonder. If Steve Jobs had teased us with the capabilities of the iPhone in 2002, would we have waited patiently for a decade to get our hands on it? Or would we have whined like a bunch of “spoiled idiots” until it shipped? We’ve now had four version of the iPhone ship since it was introduced give years ago, so I suspect the latter is more likely.

Considering that the majority of the world still can’t get a glass of clean drinking water, it does give one pause for thought, doesn’t it?

The Facebook Personality Test

First published February 2, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’ve always believed that you could learn everything you needed to know about a person by asking them who their favorite Beatle was. To back up the efficacy of this bulletproof psychological profiling tool, there are several online Beatle personality tests.  I mean really, if you can’t build an online quiz from it, how valid can a psychological tool be? I, personally, am primarily a John Lennon, with George Harrison undertones. But for the test to work, you actually have to know the Beatles on a fairly intimate level, and their status as a cultural baseline is regrettably eroding.

Now, you could use a more standard but much less interesting approach; say a Myers-Briggs personality sorter, or the “colors” test. I seem to bounce back and forth between “INFJ” and an “INTJ.”

But a recent paper by Ashwini Nadkarni and Stefan Hofman (both from Boston University) in the Journal of Personality and Individual Differences offered a more timely way to sort out the extroverts from the introverts (and the neurotics from the narcissists). It seems our usage of Facebook may provide a remarkably accurate glimpse into who we are.

For example, in their review of previous studies, Nadkarni and Hoffman found that people with neurotic tendencies like Facebook’s Wall, while those less neurotic prefer photos.

Several columns back I bemoaned the fact that the more we use social networking, the less social we seem to become. It appears that wasn’t just my perception. A 2009 study by E.S. Orr et al discovered that shy people love Facebook and spend way more time on it than non-shy people.  Ironically, for all the time they spend Facebooking, their friend networks are much smaller than their more gregarious but less-Facebook-engaged counterparts.

Narcissists also spend a higher-than-average amount of time on Facebook — over an hour a day.  They use the social site to promote themselves through profiles and photos. Conversely, multiple studies have shown than many Facebook fans use it to pump up low self-esteem. Through self-promotion and validation through virtual connections, they’ve found a kinder, gentle and more accepting world than the one that lies outside their bedroom door.

Studies have found that more socially awkward Facebook users have found that the less intense and demanding connections formed online can actually help them expose more of their personalities than they can in a more typical social environment. Some are more themselves on Facebook than they are in the real world. It’s not really creating a new persona, but rather exposing the one you’ve always possessed but felt too fragile to put out there in your day-to-day interactions.

Finally, what does it say about you if you use Facebook only sparingly or not at all? Are you hopelessly disconnected? Not at all. The more individualistic you are, the more goal-oriented you are and the more disciplined you are, the less you tend to use Facebook. Ironically, if this matches your personality type and you do use Facebook at all, you probably have a very healthy network of friends. I don’t know where I fall on the scale, but I probably spend less than an hour a month on Facebook — and for some reason, I seem to have a network of close to 400 friends.

Maybe it’s my irresistible INFJ/John Lennon-like qualities. I hope that doesn’t sound too narcissistic.

 

 

Look at the Big Picture in 2012

First published December 29, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Another year’s pretty much in the can. And because I’m working on idle this week, trying to catch my breath with my family before plunging headlong into 2012, search marketing falls somewhere behind the recent releases on Netflix and trying out the new Wii game on the list of things preoccupying my mind. So, don’t expect any salient and timely search news from me!

When I look back on what has preoccupied me over the last 12 months, I will say that much of it has been spent “stepping back” and trying to look at the bigger picture. As online interactions have taken a bigger and bigger chunk of our lives (you’ll notice that both of the recreational options I mentioned have online components woven into them), trying to understand how our actions play out against a broader online backdrop has been the thing I think about most often.

We digital marketers tend to take that “bigger picture” and break it into pieces, trying to make sense of it by focusing on one small piece. Digital marketing lends itself to this minute focal depth because of the richness of each piece. Even the smallest chunk of an online interaction has a lot to explore, with a corresponding mound of data to analyze. We could spend hours drilling into how people use Linked In, or Twitter, or Google+ or Facebook.  We could dig into the depths of the Panda update or how local results show up on Bing and never come up for air.

But think back to what, at one time, was another holiday season pastime. Some of us remember when we used to get a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas. You’d dump out all 5,000 of those little photographic morsels and then begin to piece it together into a coherent image of something (usually a landscape involving a barn or a covered bridge). Success came not only from examining each piece, but also in using the image on the boxtop to help understand how each piece fit into the bigger picture. Without understanding what that bigger picture was supposed to look like, you could examine each piece until the cows came home (again, often a topic for jigsaw art).

So, much of my 2011 was spent trying to understand what the picture on the top of the puzzle box was supposed to look like. What would ultimately tie all the pieces together?  In physics terms, I guess you could say I’m been looking for the Unified Field Theory of online marketing. And you know what I realized? You won’t find it by focusing on technology, no matter how cool it is. Foursquare marketing or search retargeting or hyperlocal optimization are all just pieces of a much bigger puzzle. The real picture emerges when you look at how people navigate the events of their lives and the decisions they must make. It’s there where the big picture emerges.

A few weeks ago I was speaking to a group of marketers about the emerging role of mobile.  This was no group of digital slouches. They knew their mobile stuff. They had tested various campaign approaches and honed their tactics. But the results were uneven. Some were hits, but more were misses. They knew a lot about the pieces, but didn’t have the boxtop picture to guide them.

My message (for those who know me) was not a surprising one: understand how to leverage mobile by first understanding how people use mobile to do they things they intend to do.  Don’t jump on a QR code campaign simply because you read somewhere that QR codes are a red-hot marketing tool. First see if QR codes fit into the big picture in any possible way. If you do that, you might find that QR codes are a puzzle piece that actually belongs in another box.

After delivering my sermon about the importance of understanding their respective big pictures, I asked my favorite question: “How many of you have done any substantial qualitative research with your customers in the past year?” Not one hand went up. This was a group of puzzle assemblers working without any boxtop picture to guide them.

If you want to sum up my past year and fit it into one final paragraph for 2011, it’s this: Understand your customers! Spend a good part of 2012 digging deep into their decision process and their online paths. Make it personal. Stalk if necessary. Ask questions that start with “why.” Observe. Make notes. Broaden your online reading list to include blogs like Science Daily, Futurity, Neuroscience Marketing and Homo Consumericus. At some point, the bigger picture will begin to emerge. And I bet it will be much more interesting than a landscape with a barn and some cows in it.