Category Archives: Online Trends

In Search of Simplicity

First published December 21, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

This quote, from Leonardo da Vinci, was on the original brochure for the Apple II. Throughout his life, Steve Jobs didn’t stray far from this principle. In fact, he was obnoxiously obsessive about it.

When Steve returned to Apple after his 12-year hiatus, he embraced simplicity with a vengeance. While Apple was wondering in the wilderness, they somehow managed to amass no fewer than a dozen different variations of their various computers. All were crappy (and I speak as a former owner of several of them) but at least there were a lot of different varieties of crap to choose from.

One of my favorite passages from Walt Isaacson’s book describes how Jobs quickly pruned the unwieldy product portfolio back down to size: “After a few weeks Jobs finally had enough. ‘Stop!’ he shouted at one big product strategy session. ‘This is crazy.’ He grabbed a magic marker, padded to a whiteboard, and drew a horizontal and vertical line to make a four-squared chart. ‘Here’s what we need,’ he continued. Atop the two columns he wrote ‘Consumer’ and ‘Pro’; he labeled the two rows ‘Desktop’ and ‘Portable.’ Their job, he said, was to make four great products, one for each quadrant.”

The upshot is this. It’s not worth doing something unless you know you can do it really well.  Which brings me to Google.

Google has always embraced the grass roots-definition of innovation. The principle is this: get a bunch of really smart people, let them dream up really smart things, and then figure out a way to monetize it. Google carries it even further. They have recently been on a shopping spree for other companies who are also dreaming up smart things. In theory, it sounds great. There’s only one problem: It lacks simplicity. And, by extension, it lacks focus.

Now, if you refer back to a column I wrote earlier (“Amazon = Evolution, Google = Intelligent Design”) it seems that I’m dancing on both sides of an argument. I don’t see it that way. My point in that column was that you can choose to provide platforms that enable widespread innovation, but it’s difficult to try to own that process entirely within one organization. Platforms enable innovation to play out over a larger stage.

Now, you might say (and I would say the same, being a rabid Darwinist) that nature also lacks simplicity. Evolution certainly didn’t happen through any top-down directive to be number one or number two at anything. Evolution is the biggest ongoing trial and error experiment ever conducted. Google’s approach seems to have much in common with nature in this regard.

But in fact, nature imposes the ultimate simplicity at a later stage, and it does so with relentless cruelty: successful variations survive, and unsuccessful ones die. As mercurial as Jobs was, he doesn’t hold a candle to the whims of ol’ Ma Nature.

In today’s marketplace, there seems to be an urge to try new things just because we can. The barrier to entry is lower than ever, thanks to technology. So we rush opportunity on multiple fronts, hoping one will pay off for us. Companies like Google encourage this by actively enabling their team to dabble in whatever strikes their fancy. I’m not saying this is wrong, but at some point, focus has to be brought into the equation. You need to simplify, prioritize and focus to turn out “insanely great” products. You need not only to be innovative; you also need to be a ruthless pruner of less-than-great ideas. And the culture that fosters collaborative innovation generally has a difficult time arbitrating what survives and what doesn’t. This creates confusion and mixed priorities. It saps away simplicity.

Google’s approach is to extend beta periods indefinitely, hoping that this will weed out the winners from the losers. Eventually, loser products (and there have been many) die under their own inertia. But in the meantime, this extended life-support system drains corporate resources. How many real winners have come out of Google Labs? What is the success rate of Google’s approach to innovation? What would have happened if Google Search weren’t as wildly profitable as it’s been? Would Google still be around?

Walmart vs. Amazon: A Regime Shift in Motion

First published November 17, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Financial analysts are not predicting a rosy short-term future for Amazon’s stock price.  Recent blunders with the rollout of new Kindle devices and earnings under increasing pressure have these analysts predicting a shorting of Amazon stock. In all likelihood, Amazon’s share price will tumble.

So why is Walmart so worried about Amazon?

A recent article indicates that Walmart is preparing for what could be the “retail battle of the decade.” When you match the two up on numbers alone, it seems like the “mismatch of the decade.”  Walmart is 10 times the size of Amazon in overall sales. It’s the largest retailer on the planet, by a huge margin. Amazon doesn’t even crack the top 10. In fact, Amazon sits at #44 on the list of global retailers.

But let’s flip the numbers. When it comes to online sales, Amazon outsells Walmart 10 to 1, and its topline growth is 44% while Walmart’s per location sales growth is trapped in the low single digits (if there is growth at all). So, if online retail is a game changer, and if this signals a “regime shift” in the retail landscape, then Walmart is right to worry. In fact, they should be petrified.

The article steps through Walmart’s strategy for ramping up e-commerce, but one line in particular raises a huge red flag: “Walmart would love Amazon’s top-line growth, but isn’t about to settle for its profits.”

Walmart has built its empire on incredibly precise supply chain management, obsessing over the details of physical fulfillment. Company strategists hope to use this to their advantage in their war on Amazon. Fair enough. But when it comes to the tough calls required to fully embrace digital (and they will come), Walmart will be hampered by the need to protect an existing model that relies on bricks and mortar. This mixed set of priorities will virtually ensure Walmart will move slower than Amazon, who has no option but to excel when it comes to e-com. This is a classic “regime shift” scenario, and history is not on Walmart’s side. The fact that its e-com head office is pretty far removed, philosophically and physically, from the head office in Bentonville, Ark. speaks to the challenges that Walmart has ahead of it.

It’s Amazon’s move into CPG that has raised the ire of the giant from Bentonville. Soap, diapers and other consumer staples are the essentials that drive Walmart’s revenues, and these are areas that Amazon is aggressively expanding into. But it’s not just consumer packaged goods that Amazon has set its sights on; it’s also going after the industrial and B2B market. In fact, Amazon is attacking the established marketplace on all fronts, with the full intention of smashing the current model and replacing it with one that takes full advantage of online efficiencies. In short, if we remember the stages of a Kondratieff wave, Amazon is building the foundations of the reconstruction phase.

Amazon’s plans go far beyond the Kindle sales and struggles with profit margins currently beleaguering its stock price. This is a massive long-term play, and one that I would be hesitant to bet against. The act of shopping is about to change forever. In my previous column on this topic, many commented that for some things, the ability to touch and feel a product is essential. That may be true, but there are many, many more things where we could care less about the need for physical evaluation. Also, this divide between online and physical shopping tends to be a shifting one. Things we couldn’t imagine buying sight unseen just a few years ago are now purchased online without a second thought.

I’m not sure what lies ahead for retail in general, or the battle between Walmart and Amazon specifically. But I do know the retail landscape of the future will bear little resemblance to the one we know today. And I also know that the battlefield will be littered with causalities. It’s not beyond reason (or historical evidence) to suspect that the world’s biggest retailer may well be one of them.

The View Above the “Weeds”

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

Yesterday was not a good day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bye Bye Big Box, Hello Digital

First published November 3, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

My friend Mikey (whom you may remember from the “Mikey Mobile Adoption Test”) and I were recently driving through our hometown, past a long row of new big-box retail locations that have recently sprung up.

I, somewhat exasperatedly, said, “Who the hell is going to buy all this stuff?”

Our town’s population is only 120,000 but we seem to have a huge overcapacity of retail space, with more going up all the time, thanks in part to a development-hungry First Nations band with plenty of available real estate.

Mikey replied, “Well, the town isn’t getting any smaller and people need to shop somewhere.”

That, and a recent article by MediaPost reporter Laurie Sullivan, got me thinking. Do we? I mean, do we need to shop “somewhere,” as in a physical store location?

I paused, and then replied, “I’m not so sure. I buy a lot more things online.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

A few days later, I was in a presentation where someone showed digital marketing growth projections for local advertisers on a slide. The growth over the next few years was relatively moderate: about 5% to 6% year over year. This despite the fact that the current penetration rates were well short of 50%.

Put it all together and I can’t help wondering whether we, collectively, are “sandbagging” our local digital growth potential. Modest growth projections assume fairly linear trends in the future. We use past adoption and extrapolate these into the future. Statistically, it’s probably the rational thing to do, but it doesn’t take into account the possibility of a dramatic shift in behavior. For example, what if we’ve reaching a tipping point where, as Sullivan notes, it’s just a lot easier to shop online than to actually hop in your car, drive across town and then try to navigate through a 25,000-square-foot massive retail location?

That’s the way things tend to go in real life. We don’t incrementally change behaviors, we change en masse. And when we do, we trigger massive waves of change that deconstruct and reconstruct the marketplace. I suspect we’re getting close to that tipping point.

Personally I, like Sullivan, find the physical act of shopping a royal pain in the tuchus.  Recently, my wife and I decided to go buy some coasters, those little squares that go under cups on your coffee table. Indiana Jones has embarked on less daunting quests. When we finally found them I reckon that, accounting for my wife’s and my time at fair market value, those coasters cost somewhere around a thousand dollars. All this for a six-dollar set of coasters that I don’t even particularly like (don’t tell my wife)!

We’re to the point now where shopping should be painless — a search, click and buy, then relax and wait for FedEx to deliver. Even local shopping can become massively more efficient through mobile technology. At some point, we have to realize that going to huge retail stores that are built to maximize per visit sales rather than enable you to find what you’re looking for is a horribly inefficient use of our time. And when we do, the current retail paradigm is flipped on its pointy little head. The net impact? Those modest growth curves suddenly shoot for the sky!

And all those big-box stores that Mikey and I drove by?

Perhaps bowling will make a sudden comeback. I know several great locations for an alley.

Why Google has to “Get” Platforms: It’s the Future of Search

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

Last week, I shared portions of Steve Yegge’s post (from inside Google) about how Google doesn’t “get” platforms. But why, you may ask, does Google have to get better at platforms? Certainly, open platforms open greater levels of innovation, one reason why Facebook gained the critical mass needed to dominate social networking. That is certainly applicable given Google’s forays into the social space. But there’s another reason, one very germane to Google’s core business. Becoming a platform provider is likely the only way Google can compete in a new search ecosystem.

Consider this recent shot across the bow from Microsoft, which is opening the Bing backend as a service to be integrated into third-party apps. The company is making its search engine a platform. And, according to Yegge, Microsoft does “get” platforms:

“(Microsoft) understands platforms as a purely accidental outgrowth of having started life in the business of providing platforms. So they have thirty-plus years of learning in this space. And if you go to msdn.com, and spend some time browsing, and you’ve never seen it before, prepare to be amazed. Because it’s staggeringly huge. They have thousands, and thousands, and THOUSANDS of API calls. They have a HUGE platform.”

Now, by all competitive measures, Google is beating the Bejezus out of Bing, but pay close attention to this move, because it likely marks the future of Web search. Increasingly, we’re going to see a wider and wider gap between the back end algorithms and index of a search engine and the actual search interface. The days of a search engine being a destination are numbered. In this scenario, search becomes a utility, providing a portion of the functional underpinnings of thousands of specialized apps.  The search provider of the future will have to excel at three things:

A)   Indexing increasingly complex forms of content;

B)   Interpreting a user’s interests and intent — and then

C)   Delivering the best results given the optimum intersection between A and B.

The third part is critical, as the actual delivery point of the results moves outside the scope of the search provider and into the domain of independent developers, who will rely on robust platforms to accommodate this.

Google is the current leader in A and B, although recent work by Microsoft shows it closing the gap. But C may prove to be Google’s Achilles heel. Google will be reluctant to share its user’s eyeballs with third-party developers, because those eyeballs represent the vast majority of the company’s current revenue stream. There will be all kinds of internal pressure at Google not to head down this road. By contrast, Microsoft has nothing to lose by doing this. As Steve Yegge rightly points out, this strategy is actually a better fit for Microsoft’s corporate DNA, as the development of platforms is familiar territory for them. Being the end destination for users has never been Microsoft’s strong suit.  And Microsoft still has reams of cash coming in from other revenue channels, so it will be more likely to share the search revenue pie with other parties than will Google.

Some time ago, Steve Ballmer signaled the possibility of this shift of revenue streams coming from search.  Google was able to capitalize on a perfect storm of revenue opportunity, by tapping into the single biggest concentration of consumer demand in history. But the window of opportunity that has fueled Google’s growth to this point is rapidly closing. The new models will require search providers to slice up the revenue pie with an increasing number of partners.

It will also require those partners to wholeheartedly embrace platforms. Let’s see if Google can “get” that.

Amazon = Evolution, Google = Intelligent Design?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google +1 Goes Critical, But Not in a Good Way

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

I was in Minneapolis’ Mall of America and happened to wander by the new Microsoft store. The layout, the look and the feel were a near-exact clone of the very popular Apple Stores, one of which just happened to be directly across the concourse. Here, in the largest mall in the world, I had the opportunity to compare and contrast the physical embodiments of two of the most ubiquitous brands in the world.

If not for the several floor staffers in the Microsoft store, it would have been almost empty. Only one person was wandering through the aisles showcasing the latest from Redmond, significantly outnumbered by the two staffers glued to his side, as well as two more looking on over the potential buyer’s shoulder — and still one more, whom I took to be the manager, overseeing the scene from a more discreet distance.

I then swiveled 180 degrees and saw how the Apple store stacked up against the Microsoft challenger. To be fair, the store wasn’t nearly as busy as most locations I’ve been to, but even a conservative estimate would put the customer count at 15 to 20 times the sole Microsoft customer.

This brought to my mind the importance of critical mass. We humans are notoriously impressionable — especially so when being asked to adopt new things. On the average, we have more in common with sheep (or lemmings) than “lone” wolves. So critical mass becomes well, critical in determining the success of new things.  It’s called social proof, and it makes or breaks markets. All things being equal, I’m going to choose Apple over Microsoft just because I have proof than other people have done the same. Then, this movement becomes self-perpetuating. The more people who follow the herd, the more that others want to join it. It’s how we’re wired, and all the Kinect games in the world won’t be enough to fight it.

Critical mass is also vital in social networks. In fact, the concept is central to the health and continued viability of any online community. When the momentum drops, the community is on its way to being a ghost town. When’s the last time you logged onto MySpace? Or Friendster? Or, unless you live in Brazil, Orkut?

Which brings me to Google’s+1. Just a few weeks ago, Rob Garner, one of my fellow Search Insiders, was pondering what Google’s new social offering might do for search.  Millions signed onto Google’s service as soon as it went public. Critical mass seemed well on its way. If the trends held up, this could change everything.

And then it died.

It’s been 2 weeks since I received a Google+1 invite, and that came from a Google employee. There has been no reason to check my +1 circles. I really haven’t given it a thought prior to writing this column. Each and every day, I receive one or two LinkedIn invites in my inbox. I generally receive 4 to 5 Facebook invitations a week. But Google+1? Crickets.

Apparently the only ones using +1 are Google employees who are forced to if they want their bonus, wannabe programmers from India and journalists who are researching the Google+1 obituary they’re writing.

The rapid demise of Google+1 is not new in the world of social media. Other networks have followed a similar path into oblivion, although perhaps not with the same speed. It’s the dilemma of social networks, managing to get beyond the predictable burst of the early adopters and cross the chasm to mainstream usage. To date, Facebook, LinkedIn and perhaps Twitter are the only ones to have managed the chasm crossing successfully. Google+1 sputtered before it even got to the precipice.

What this means is that Google doesn’t have the critical mass of social usage to provide a signal to noise ratio clean enough to impact search rankings. Both the reach and frequency of usage is simply not high enough to make a credible social graph. Eric Schmidt tried to say that there was more than enough online social activity for everyone, but it seems we simply don’t have the patience or free time to maintain multiple social destinations. We’ll kick the tires of a newcomer, but unless it offers something substantially better than the competition, we won’t come back with any regularity.

Google desperately needed a win with +1. But based on current traffic, it seems doomed.

Just like that Microsoft store stuck across the concourse from Apple.

Is it Time to Relabel ” Marketing?

First published September 15, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I asked the question, “Is the word ‘search’ the right label for what we do on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other engines?” When Internet search debuted in the early 90s, it was probably pretty accurate. But today, the concept may have passed the label by.

And, if that is true, then the same is probably true for “search marketing.” The main gist of my argument last week was that the word “search” implies the expenditure of a significant effort with no guarantee of a successful outcome. But today, more than ever, we look to these engines to connect us with information and functionality. We want to “do” things when we click through to the other side of the search results.

I also said that it was difficult to find any one label that covers all our intentions when we turn to a “search” engine. In the beginning, when the Web was one large bucket of ill-formed data, “search” worked as a universal label. But that’s not true today. Now, the Web is becoming increasingly structured, and a search engine that excels at bringing order to unstructured data often falls disappointingly short when it comes to actually getting stuff done. In trying to be the universal Swiss Army Knife of the Web for many common tasks, Google (or Bing) doesn’t do any of them particularly well, we’re starting to find.  For many tasks, a dedicated and specialized app often does a far better job of meeting our expectations.

Again, this starts to define the conundrum currently facing search marketers. When the label we used was “search,” our job was simply to make sure our sites were “found.” Within the parameters defined by “searching” (to explore in order to discover), our job was straightforward: reduce the exploration effort required on the part of the searcher by moving our sites into a more “discoverable” position.

But what if we substitute some of the other labels I suggested last week for the word “search”? Suddenly, our job becomes much more complex.

Let’s start with “connection.” In this case, buyer s already have an idea that the right online destination exists, so they also have a preconceived notion of what they would find there. In game theory, this is called “expected utility.” In this case, our job is not simply to make the site easy to find, but also to make sure it’s a relevant match for our prospect’s expectations. If it isn’t, we may capture the click but miss the conversion. And that puts a whole new spin on search marketing. To understand how to create a “connection,” we have to understand what happens on both sides of the click: pre-connection and post-connection.

This requires us to delve into our prospect’s “frame of mind.” Again, the words used here provide a clue for what’s required as a marketer. A “frame” colors our entire view of things. There’s even a term for it in psychology: the “framing effect.” It’s categorized as a cognitive bias, which means that our frames determine our reality. To be successful “connection” marketers, we have to be familiar with our prospect’s “frame” of reference. When we are, we can provide a relevant and persuasive post-click path.

But “connection” wasn’t the only alternative label I proposed. What about “action” or “fulfillment?” Again, both ask us to substantially stretch our horizons as a marketer.

“Action” is an even more determinant label than connection. If we’re looking to take “action,” each step interposed between the end goal and the prospect is another level of frustration. Here, our job as “action” marketers is to remove as many of the steps as possible between intent and action. Actions are usually well defined and specific. We should be equally as specific in the alternatives we provide our prospects. Our calls to action should be a clear invitation to “do” things.

“Fulfillment” is a little tougher nut to crack. To be “fulfilled” can take several forms. Is there an emotional component? How would the prospect define “fulfillment”? Is the post-click result a step towards fulfillment, or does it take a prospect all the way there? A successful “fulfillment” marketer should be part psychologist and part clairvoyant.

Given the challenge we have in even attaching a label to what it is we do, it’s no wonder that recent analyst reports are all reporting a common theme: the best search marketers are expanding into other services. We’re expanding beyond “search” into “social,” “mobile,” “local,” “display” and other channels. It’s not so much that “search” is passé, rather it’s that “search” isn’t really the right label anymore. I’m not sure that “social” or “local” are any better. Personally, I think the perfect word, whatever it turns out to be, should clearly identify “why” people are online rather than “what” they’re doing online.

What’s in a Word?

First published September 8, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I served for six years as a director of the Search Engine Marketers Professional Organization. Every six months or so, we’d get together to talk about the future of the organization. As you can imagine, the future of an organization catering to industry professionals is inextricably linked to the future of the industry itself. So, our conversations weren’t so much about the future of SEMPO as they were about the future of search — and by extension, the future of search marketing.

Every time we embarked on this task of joint navel and crystal-ball gazing, we ran smack dab into the same dilemma: How do you define search? What is search? Should it even be called search any more? Esther Dyson, among others, thinks the term “search” may have outlived its usefulness. Perhaps “connection,” “fulfillment” or “action” has a better connotation. At least these words imply there’s something of substance on the other end of the search. They hint at successful outcomes. When Microsoft debuted Bing, the company sought to differentiate the product by calling it the “Decision” engine – “Bing is a search engine that finds and organizes the answers you need so you can make faster, more informed decisions.”

For me, words are important, so in trying to define the future of our industry, the words we choose to represent the concept tell us something about our feelings towards it.

Let’s start with “search,” the generic label we currently use: to “search” is to attempt to discover something. We search for a needle in a haystack. We search for a missing child or a runaway fugitive. We search for the truth. All seem to indicate an expenditure of significant effort but no guarantee of success. Given the state of the Internet when search engines debuted, it was an apt moniker. But today, that’s no longer the case. Today, I suspect, we launch almost every search with a clear expectation that somewhere out there, the information we seek exists. All we need is the right connection to it.

Given that, perhaps a “connection” engine is a better choice. To “connect” is to link known entities. Unlike with “search,” when we use the term “connect” we know our objective exists and we’re just trying to find the shortest path between points A and B.  The word better captures the navigational usage of search, which accounts for a huge percentage of total queries. I’ve used the term myself in the past when I’ve said that search is the “connection” between intent and content.

But even “connection” implies a certain statelessness. While it better captures our intent than does the verb search, I don’t know if it adequately represents the dynamic and participatory nature of our online activities. Whereas the verbs we used to use to define what we did online implied passive observance — “look,” “browse” and “surf” (I never did get that one, but at one time using it made you sound uber-cool) —  we now “book,” “post,” “comment,” “”tweet,” “buy” and participate in dozens of much more active ways, using more active verbs. Where once we went online to seek and consume information, we now want to “do” things.  We expect to do things. And so we use Google or Bing to find the right tool to allow us to do those things. That’s the rationale behind suggestions like “fulfillment” (to carry out, to satisfy or to develop to full potential) and “action” (something done or performed). Certainly, for some search tasks, calling Google or Bing an “action” engine would be a more appropriate description.

For some tasks — but not all. And that’s the problem we kept running into when we tried to define what search is. It’s tough to keep in any one box. It tends to be squishy and amorphous. And it has the habit of expanding into the ever-developing niches and crevasses of the online landscape.

So, was Bing right to call itself a “decision” engine? Is that the missing label that encapsulates all we look for in an engine? Do we need something to help us make better decisions (to compare and choose between alternatives)? It’s at least as good as “search”, and probably better, because it takes it one step further. It makes the assumption that the information about the best alternatives will be served to us by the engine.

While you might think this is just a frivolous exercise in semantics, I disagree. I think this question speaks to something fundamental in the evolution of search. We use words to label concepts — and when the labels no longer fit, it’s because the concept itself has changed. If we have trouble applying a word to something, it’s probably because we think of it in a different way than we used to. I believe this is true of search. And if we think of “search” differently, it means we must also think of “search marketing” differently.

Until next week…

A Peek “In the Plex,” by Steven Levy

First published September 1, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

As promised, this week I’ll be doing a quick review of Steven Levy’s book “In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives.”

As a tech journalist, Levy had a perspective on Google that few others have enjoyed. John Battelle, who previous tackled Google in his book “The Search,” said, “I had limited access to folks at Google, and *really* limited access to Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Levy had the opposite, spending more than two years inside the company and seeing any number of things that journalists would have killed to see in years past.”

Levy was first introduced to Page and Brin in 1999, when Google was just another Silicon Valley start-up, albeit one that was creating a ton of industry buzz. Because of that early advantage, Levy was able to observe Google’s subsequent stages of evolution — from start-up to search dominance, from an atmosphere that seemed more of a religious  “cause” than “company,” from “don’t be evil” to “evil may be in the eye of the beholder.”

Given the intimate viewpoint afforded Levy, I couldn’t help coming away somewhat disappointed with the end result. Levy approached this as a journalist, resisting  the temptation to put Google’s story in a larger context. In his book, Battelle did a much better job of pinpointing Google’s place in the social fabric of our lives.

One could argue that they’re two different books, with two different objectives, but Levy’s subtitle, “How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives” seems to promise more. The book does a good job delivering on the first two promises, but falls short on the third. Battelle managed to step back and give us a view of Google that, while admittedly awestruck, also intimated that we were on the cusp of a social change of immense importance that might not be positive in every way.  Battelle seemed much more comfortable with the bigger picture than Levy does, and the latter’s book suffers from this limited view.

The first half of “In the Plex” treads the same “Gee whiz, isn’t Google brilliant!” path that is rapidly becoming wearisome. We gain inside perspectives from some early Google employees, but find nothing that really adds to the Google canon here. I don’t disagree that Google was brilliant, especially in the early days, but that’s not particularly news to anyone at this point.

The book does begin to hit its stride in the second half when the shine wears off Google and it faces the bumps of dealing with a real world that doesn’t always align with Google’s admittedly naïve view of how things should be. The unexpected privacy backlash to Google’s attempt to monetize Gmail, the copyright battle sparked by Google Books, and the entire Google China debacle all paint a picture of a company that seems to shoot itself in the foot just as often as it shoots for the stars.

Levy also hints at some internal tension between Google’s triumvirate of Page, Brin and Eric Schmidt, or “LSE,” as Levy collectively refers to them. Page, in particular, never seemed to fully overcome his resentment of  the “adult supervision” forced upon Google in its formative years by early VC investors. Due to the timing of the book, we gain no insights into the behind-the-scenes story that led to Schmidt’s replacement as CEO by Page late last year. It seems there’s much more to the story than what we currently know, but you won’t be any the wiser by reading Levy’s book.

I also got the sense that just when things could have really become interesting, Levy stepped back. As Battelle noted in his review, “I was a bit disappointed with the book in that Steven didn’t take all that new knowledge and pull back to give us his own analysis of what it all meant. I asked him about this, and he said he made the conscious decision to not editorialize, but rather lay it all out there and let the reader draw his or her own conclusions.”

In my opinion, Levy’s decision not to editorialize diminishes the importance of the book. If you chart the tone of Google through Levy’s reportage, there is a definite arc, from naïve brilliance through world-dominating arrogance and back down to shock and disbelief that everything doesn’t always work out the way Google thinks it should.

I can’t help thinking that Google is at a critical point in its evolution, wondering what it will become in the future. As Levy states, Google is currently wrestling with “how it hopes to maintain its soul.” Levy could have provided unique insight into possible answers to that question, but he chose instead to leave it up to us.