Category Archives: Online Trends

Our Indelible Lives

First published June 3, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

It’s been a fascinating week for me. First, it was off to lovely Muncie, Ind. to meet with the group at the Center for Media Design at Ball State University. Then, it was to Chicago for the National Business Marketing Association Conference, where I was fortunate enough to be on a panel about what the B2B marketplace might look like in the near future. There was plenty of column fodder from both visits, but this week, I’ll give the nod to Ball State, simply because that visit came first.

Our Digital Footprints

Mike Bloxham, Michelle Prieb and Jen Milks (the last two joined us for our most recent Search Insider Summit) were gracious hosts, and, as with last week (when I was in Germany) I had the chance to participate in a truly fascinating conversation that I wanted to share with you. We talked about the fact that this generation will be the first to leave a permanent digital footprint. Mike Bloxham called it the Indelible Generation. That title is more than just a bon mot (being British, Mike is prone to pithy observations) — it’s a telling comment about a fundament aspect of our new society.

Imagine some far-in-the-future anthropologist recreating our culture. Up to this point in our history, the recorded narrative of any society came from a small sliver of the population. Only the wealthiest or most learned received the honor of being chronicled in any way. Average folks spent their time on this planet with nary a whisper of their lives recorded for posterity. They passed on without leaving a footprint.

Explicit and Implicit Content Creation

But today — or if not today, certainly tomorrow — all of us will leave behind a rather large digital footprint. We will leave in our wake emails, tweets, blog posts and Facebook pages. And that’s just the content we knowingly create. There’s a lot of data generated by each of us that’s simply a byproduct of our online activities and intentions. Consider, for example, our search history. Search is a unique online beast because it tends to be the thread we use to stitch together our digital lives. Each of us leaves a narrative written in search interactions that provides a frighteningly revealing glimpse into our fleeting interests, needs and passions.

 Of course, not all this data gets permanently recorded. Privacy concerns mean that search logs, for example, get scrubbed at regular intervals. But even with all that, we leave behind more data about who we were, what we cared about and what thoughts passed through our minds than any previous generation. Whether it’s personally identifiable or aggregated and anonymized, we will all leave behind footprints.

 Privacy? What Privacy?

Currently we’re struggling with this paradigm shift and its implications for our privacy. I believe in time — not that much time — we’ll simply grow to accept this archiving of our lives as the new normal, and won’t give it a second thought. We will trade personal information in return for new abilities, opportunities and entertainment. We will grow more comfortable with being the Indelible Generation.

Of course, I could be wrong. Perhaps we’ll trigger a revolt against the surrender of our secrets. Either way, we live in a new world, one where we’re always being watched. The story of how we deal with that fact is still to be written.

Google vs Apple: an Open and Closed Case

First published May 27, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Yesterday, I was eavesdropping on a debate about open-source vs. closed systems. I found the debate fascinating because two of the most important contributors to what our search experience might look like live at opposite ends of this debate. Apple is adamant about locking down every aspect of the user experience. Google wants to open it up to any and all comers. The third player, Microsoft, sits somewhere in between. The debate was about who might prevail. I was uncharacteristically silent during all this, because I had to think about it before throwing in my two cents. Now, 24 hours later, it’s time to toss in my ante.

In theory, open source should win hands down. The open environment allows a cooperative ecosystem to evolve, guaranteeing a rate of innovation simply not possible in closed system. But I think it depends on where we are in the maturity of the market. Open source allows for more innovation, but it’s also an open invitation for more things to go wrong. This can be deadly as you try to push along market adoption.

Apple Closes the Loop

There is a reason why Apple is the darling of the early adopter. The company insist on things working. And you can only do this when you can lock down each and every aspect of the user experience. If there’s one thing Apple understands at its core (sorry, couldn’t resist), it’s how to make a user happy. The Jobs BHAG of creating “insanely great” products only works if all that insanity leads to an expected end result. And I challenge anyone who’s used both a Mac and a Windows box to tell me that the Apple user experience isn’t more refined, more elegant and more delightful.

In the early days of market adoption, this stuff is important. You don’t want to drop way more cash than you should on a new tech-toy only to find the interface is clunky, amateurish and full of glitches. With Apple’s meticulous attention to detail, you know that whatever is available on your new iToy will work near-flawlessly. Sure, the code-police from Cupertino are overly dictatorial, which isn’t winning them any friends in the programming community, but the apps that are the end result are ridiculously simple to use and frequently beautiful to look at.

Google’s UX Challenges

Now, look at Google. I tried to find a polite way to say this, but couldn’t, so I’ll just lay it on the table: Google sucks at interface design. For years we’ve been lauding the simple, spartan look of Google search. The fact is, simple was all we needed for an ordered list of text results. Google’s algorithm provided enough power in the backend to make up for an anemic interface. But today, now that everyone’s caught up in the algo department, Google’s interface looks like a Grade 8 coding project.  The new 3 column search format follows in the footsteps of Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendars and most other Google interfaces: it looks like it was designed by an engineer.

In my company, we tried to move to using Google’s suite of tools based on the fact that in an open-source environment, we should see more rapid innovation. Well, that and the price was hard to argue with. But the fact is, everyone on our team is completely fed up with clunky Google interfaces that seem full of quirks. It doesn’t feel like we’re using leading-edge innovation, it feels like we’re using freeware. And I, for one, expect more from Google.

Google … Give me that GUI Feeling!

That’s the problem with open source early in the market adoption model. There’s not enough maturity in the market to force developers to worry about nuance. User experience is considered the polish — the last thing to be applied. You can’t lock down all the details needed to guarantee a consistently acceptable user experience.

I still have tremendous respect for the innovation engine that sits at the heart of Google, but if I had one piece of advice to pass along, it would be this: Worry less about changing the world, and  more about polishing up the Gmail interface. You can always change the world tomorrow, but today I’d like to retrieve my email from something that doesn’t look like a dog’s breakfast.

The Human-Technology Connection: Enabling Change

First published May 6, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Aaron Goldman scooped my column on Apple, Siri and search (although, looking at the column, I think I can claim partial authorship) so I’m going to broaden the lens a little bit. This is a theme I’ve discussed in a number of recent presentations, as well as at least one prior column, and I think it touches on why the news from Apple and Siri is potentially so important.

Humans Will Be Human

I’ve said before that “technology doesn’t cause our behaviors to change, it enables our behaviors to change.” The difference is subtle but profound. Let me give you an example.

I recently moderated a panel discussion on social media in the B2B marketplace. One by one, the panelists marched out their supporting evidence (14 zillion people access Facebook every 12 seconds, that sort of thing) and their own opinions. The consensus was: things have changed. Indeed, they have. But at the top of the session, I said this wasn’t about technology, this was about people. And people are social animals. We follow the herd, and more importantly, we communicate with the herd. One could feel the “Groundswell” (a pun and plug in one!) literally surging through the room.

At the end, we turned to the audience for Q&A. A middle-aged woman, definitely falling on the Digital Immigrant side of the tech-savvy divide, stood up and called the entire panel out: “I don’t buy it. I don’t buy all this technology is making us more connected. I haven’t seen any evidence of it. In fact, I’ve seen the opposite. I’m a professional recruiter and I can’t get a candidate to pick up the phone and talk to me. I need to get to know them and I can’t do that through an email. I need to have a conversation. I think technology is isolating us, not connecting us.”

It’s All About Options

The panelists pointed out the generational differences between her and her candidates, saying that this could be the cause of the change of behavior. But I wanted to probe a little deeper, because I wasn’t so sure technology was the culprit here:  “I suspect that when you’re recruiting, your motivation to connect with a candidate is not always the same as their motivation to contact you,” I said.

“It’s your job and top of mind, but for them, you’re just an interruption in what they were already doing. They may not be ready to have a chat with you,” I continued. “Twenty-five years ago, when we were starting our careers, the phone was the only choice for instantaneous, ‘at-a-distance’ communication. But now, we have many choices, thanks to technology. So, they have options and they’re picking the one that’s appropriate. They’re time-shifting the interruption to a time more convenient, when they’re more motivated to contact you. I suspect that if we had that choice 25 years ago, we would have done the same thing. Technology hasn’t changed us, it’s just given us more options to do the things we really want to do.”

The Human Act of Searching

So why is that important for Siri, Apple and Search? Well, just as we had to adapt to the phone as an instant communication channel, we’ve had to adapt to the interface that search gave us to seek information. Let’s face it; typing words into a box is not the way we evolved to communicate. We talk. We touch. We listen. We see. We’ve had to adapt to a non-organic, structured format — 10 blue links in a list — because we had no choice. It was all the technology would allow at the time.

Also, separating the acts of retrieving information and doing something with the information is not natural for us either. We’re used to a tighter connection between the two. Information is seldom an end point. Doing something with the information is a much more common objective.  But up to now, search could only really act as an information retrieval tool.  It was powerful, and we adapted quickly because we recognized the power, but it wasn’t natural.

But look at what Siri and Apple are trying to do: On this platform, search is asking for something, getting it and immediately doing something with it. Sound familiar? It should. It’s what we’ve done for most of our history as humans. And that’s what technology, at it’s best, should do: give us more ways to be human.

Google and Microsoft: Signs of Hubris, Signs of Humility

GoogleVsMicrosoftFrom my admittedly limited vantage point, I’ve noticed a subtle but significant shift in what’s coming out of the respective campuses of Microsoft and Google. And it’s not so much the innovations, although it certainly resonates there. This has to do with attitude and culture. This is the touchy-feely stuff that I chalk up to gut instinct, with no empirical backing. So, take it for what it’s worth, but I will say that my gut has a pretty good track record.

The Age of Cockiness Returns

Google has come full circle. They started with a cockiness that was understandable, given their immediate success. Google was everyone’s online Golden Child. The founders (from which the brash attitude was inherited) surrounded themselves with an equally cocky, equally audacious group of young geniuses. The collective culture was bold, arrogant and had little patience for the mediocre or mundane. They also had little respect for anything beyond the bounds of “Google-world.” If it wasn’t part of Google, it somehow was less relevant, less valuable and less interesting. This was a company that fully intended to conquer the world, and it seemed that world conquest was within reach. Google was getting their fingers into everything, and it seemed that everything they touched would turn to gold.

Then, four or five years ago, Google’s attitude changed. They started reaching outside the walls of “Google-world,” sincerely looking to forge relationships with partners. Googlers developed a quieter confidence: less bold, less brash.  They actually sought others’ opinions. Now, it appeared that Google might be accepting the fact that conquering the world might be, at a minimum, a collaborative effort.

But in the last year, I’ve seen a return to Google’s original attitude. The humility is disappearing and hubris again rules the day. It’s almost as if, now that Google is the king of the hill and is drawing more than their fair share of scrutiny, much of it negative, they’ve gone into defensive mode. They’ve circled the wagons and drawn more inside. As I said, the changes are subtle, but noticeable. I believe they’ve grown up as a company and have had to face some harsh business realities. But in the process, they have responded by becoming defiantly self-confident and dismissive of dissenting views. They seem to once again be retreating into the safe and welcoming arms of “Google-world.” Somehow, though, this time the cockiness rings a little hollow.

We Really Want You to Like Us

Contrast this with Microsoft. Microsoft was the company everybody loved to hate. For years, it was the brunt of jokes in the search marketing world. The only question with Microsoft, it seemed, was which foot were they going to shoot themselves in next? Miserable failure after miserable failure exasperated everyone, both inside and outside of the Redmond mother ship. If Mack Sennett (or the Three Stooges, or Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen — pick your cultural context) ever ran a software company, surely this would be it.

But in the last year (roughly about the same time Google started circling the wagon) I’ve seen a different Microsoft. It’s humble, but it’s also ready to deliver. They’ve knocked the chip off their shoulder and seemed to have put the bumbling behind them. They’re executing and cranking out some pretty decent stuff. Somehow, they’ve pulled back from the brink of irrelevance and are now ready to be a contender. I’ve had varying shades of criticism of Bing, but I’ve never said it wasn’t a much-needed step forward in their search offering. It’s miles ahead of anything Microsoft had done in search previously. But it’s not this battle that interests me. It’s the next fight that Microsoft chooses to pick. Given the change in attitude, I’m not sure I would be betting against them. As one Microsofter confided to me, “We’re at our best when we’ve had the crap kicked out of us.”

I have no idea what this means in the big picture, but I do know that the tone and temper of an organization is a pretty reliable indicator of future success. Perhaps I can sum it up best in this way. It’s almost as if Google is already prepared to defend themselves against future criticism. Microsoft, on the other hand, is doing everything in their power to rebuild a broken relationship by impressing the hell out of you.

Captiva-Ting Conversations from the Search Insider Summit

First published April 22, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I promised MediaPost a wrap-up (from the programming chair’s perspective) of last week’s Search Insider Summit. Honestly, from the moment that Brett Brewer from Microsoft first fired up Pivot to the final moments of day three, when Jen Milks and Michelle Prieb from Ball State gave us a glimpse into the minds of Gen Next, I couldn’t have asked for anything more from my presenters. I’ve programmed a lot of these shows now and have never had as much positive response as I have from this one. Well-done, each and every one of you.

A lot has been said about the new TED-style format. I actually had a few TEDsters reach out to send best wishes prior to the summit. They also wanted feedback about the success of the show. I think it’s fair to say that the adopted TED format was a hit. Attendees loved the pace of the presentations, the varying perspectives presented — and, most of all, the conversations that were catalyzed by the content.

Here are a few of the many highlights from three days of SIS:

Brett Brewer from Microsoft Labs – putting Pivot through its paces and giving us some jaw-dropping visualizations of data and how we can work with it. There’s some very cool stuff coming out of MS labs.

Mark Watkins from Goby – driving home the point that every search is launched from a relevant personal context, and if engines could somehow understand that, it would be a huge leap forward for Web search.

Matt Kain from The Search Agency – making us all realize just how important really-good hair is — and also how, more and more, we’re launching our searches through apps that offer fingertip functionality.

Mike Moran from Converseon – causing us to rethink our whole approach to search optimization. Imagine, optimizing our Web sites for people rather than algorithms!

Chris Copeland from GroupM Search – asking us to imagine what the online world (and our media plans) might look like if there were no Google, and also scattering oblique mentions of Tiger Woods, Jesse James and “Brokeback Mountain.” There’s not enough therapy in the world to drive out some of the images that Chris brought to my mind.

Scott Brinker from ion Interactive – giving us the job description for a brand-new role within organizations, that of the marketing technologist. Scott made us realize the time is ripe for an individual comfortable in the worlds of marketing and technology, one who can bridge the chasm between them.

Yvette Lui from Facebook – showing us how the landscape of information dissemination is forever altered, and why we search marketers have to understand the new reality.

And, in the last session of the Summit, Michelle Prieb and Jen Milks from Ball State University, giving us a glimpse at what the ever-demanding Gen Next wants in their online search experience. Hint: everything, aimed just at me and available instantaneously! Oh, and while you’re at it, don’t be evil!

The bar was set high, with these talks being just a sample of the many presenters who took the stage. As always, though, the conversations that happened in the hallways, during the roundtable breakouts, on the golf course, beaches and during the sunset cruise somehow managed to exceed the formal presentations. This is a show about connections, community and conversations. The best part of the Summit is, was and always will be the attendees. It won’t be easy, but we will make this show even better next time. Mark it on your calendar, because you really don’t want to miss it.

The Four Horsemen of the Consumer Behavior Apocalypse

First published March 25, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Right out of the gate, let’s assume that we all agree consumer behavior is in the throes of its biggest shift in history. And the cause is generally attributed to the Internet.

While I don’t disagree with this assessment, I believe there may be some misattribution when it comes to cause and effect. Did the Internet cause our consumer behavior to change? Or did it enable it to change? The distinction may seem like mere semantics, but there’s a fundamental difference here.

“Cause” implies that an outside force, namely the Internet, pushed us in a new direction that was different from the one we would have pursued had this new force not come along. “Enable” is a different beast, the opening of a previously locked door that allows us to pursue a new path of our own volition. I believe the latter to be true. I believe we weren’t pushed anywhere. We went there of our own free will.

Free Will? Or Hardwired Human Behavior?

But, even in my last statement, language again gets us in a sticky place. “Will” assumes it was a conscious and willful decision. I’m not sure this is the case. I suspect there were subconscious, hardwired behaviors that had a natural affinity for the new opportunities presented by the online marketplace.

For most of our recorded history, we have assumed that rational consideration and conscious will forms the basis of human thought. If we did seem programmed automatically to respond to certain cues, this was as a result of being conditioned by our environment, the classic Skinner black-box approach. But when we were on top of our game, we were carefully considering pros and cons, making consciously deliberated decisions. These were the forces that drove our society and our behaviors. This theory formed the basis of economics (Adam Smith’s Invisible hand), Cartesian logic, and most market research.

But in the last few decades, this view of rationality riding triumphant over human foibles has been brought into question. In particular, there were three concepts put forward by four academics that caused us to question what drove our behaviors. These folks uncovered deeper, subconscious routines and influences that lay buried beneath the strata of rational thought. And it’s these subconscious behaviors that I believe found the new online opportunities so enticing. Let’s spend a little time today looking at these four thinkers and the new paradigms they asked us to consider.

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman – Prospect Theory

Adam Smith’s Invisible hand, driven by the wisdom of the market, has been presumed to be the ultimate economic governing factor. The assumption was that each of us, individually making rational economic decisions, would ultimately decide winners and losers and capitalism would stay alive and well.

But Tversky and Kahneman, in their paper on Prospect Theory, showed that the invisible hand might not always be guided by a decisive and logical mind. We all have significant hardwired cognitive biases that often cause us to make illogical economic choices. For example, if I offered you $1,000, with no questions asked, or a chance to win $2,500 based on a coin toss, you’d probably take the sure bet, even though mathematically, the odds for net gain are better with the coin toss.

Prospect Theory shot some holes in the previous theory of Expected Utility, a model where we carefully weighed the pros and cons of a potential purchase based on a return on investment model. Emotional framing and risk avoidance played a much bigger role than we suspected, handicapping our logic and often guiding us down non-rational paths. Tversky and Kahneman single-handedly found the new discipline of Behavioral Economics and changed our thinking in the process.

Herbert Simon – Bounded Rationality

Simon’s concept of Bounded Rationality superseded Kahneman and Tversky’s theory, but it dovetailed with it very nicely. Even if we are rationally engaged in a decision, Simon argued, we couldn’t possibly optimize it, especially in complex scenarios. There were simply too many factors to consider. So, we took “gut feeling” short cuts, which Simon called “satisficing,” a combination of satisfy and suffice. We short-listed our consideration set by using beliefs and instincts.

To make the satisficing short list is the goal of any brand campaign. At some point, logical weighing of pros and cons has to give way to calls based primarily on instinct.  And, as Kahneman and Tversky showed, those instinctive calls may well be based on irrational emotional biases.

George Akerlof – information Asymmetry

The last piece, and the one that really drove the online consumer revolution, is George Akerlof’s Information Asymmetry theory. Traditionally, there has been an imbalance of information between buyers and sellers, to the seller’s advantage. The seller always knew more about what they were selling than the buyer did. This made purchasing inherently risky.

With an absence of information, consumers created strong beliefs about brands as a way to guide their future buying decisions. Brand loyalty, whether rational or not, filled the void left by a lack of information. Manufacturers and retailers carefully controlled what information did enter the marketplace, pushing the positives and carefully suppressing the negatives.

These three concepts, intertwined, defined the psychological make-up of the market prior to the introduction of the Internet. In my next column, I’ll explore what happened when these behavioral powder kegs were exposed to the fanned flames of the digital marketplace.

Search and Our Online “Set Point”

First published March 18, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Derek Gordon’s piece on Siri this week gave concrete proof of what I’ve been saying about the transition of search from a destination to a utility. Consider the example Derek gave of Siri’s functionality:

make action-oriented queries into your iPhone like “find me a good French restaurant for two tonight.”  Using your iPhone’s location coordinates, it will search Yelp for positive reviews of restaurants in your area, find a reservation for the most popular one via OpenTable and ask if you’d like to confirm a reservation.  Once you’ve confirmed the time, Siri will book the reservation for you. 

Notice the words Derek uses: “search” Yelp, “find” a reservation, both as intermediate steps to the end goal, allowing you to take action. And the Siri interface sits between you and the sources of the information. It’s exactly this interposing of a layer of functionality between the information and the user that I was talking about two weeks ago when I said that Steve Ballmer was thinking about the future of the search revenue model.

An application like Siri is only as good as the number of things it can do. Functionality, not information, is the new promise of the Internet. As John Battelle said in a recent chat with me, we quickly adjusted to the fact that the Internet could make us smarter. Now we expect it to let us do things better and faster. Information is only a means to an end.

Our Online ‘Set Point’

University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman believes that we have a happiness “set point.” For example, winning a lottery doesn’t really make us happier in the long run. We just ratchet up our level of expectation to accommodate our new circumstance. I believe the same is true about our feelings towards advanced technology.

In the early days of the Internet, we were consistently amazed when we found information “out there.”  It seemed that no matter what we were looking for, with enough diligence, we could find some source for it. The Internet was one big information archive, and search was the key we used to unlock it. But as with happiness , we’re very quick to reset our expectations. Amazement quickly gives way to a sense of entitlement. We now accept the fact that the information is out there somewhere.  We now expect applications to gather it for us and present us with an opportunity to act on it.

The Road Ahead for Search

In a few short weeks, we’ll be gathering on Captiva Island in Florida to discuss where search is going. I believe a central theme will be this idea of search as a step towards usefulness.  We have reset our expectations and we need more from search. And this raises an interesting possibility. I have talked before about how Google became a habit for us. But habits only remain stable as long as they produce the expected results. Once we stop getting what we expect, we ready ourselves to break the habit and build a new one. It’s hard cognitive work, but we will undertake it if the payoff is worth it in terms of expected utility. As our expectations, fueled by glimpses of potential functionality through apps like Siri, are raised to a new set point, we will be less satisfied with the vanilla search experience offered by Google. This means, finally, we may be ready to break the Google Habit.

Google’s counter to that will be that Siri benefits from having a very focused purpose, supported through a dedicated interface and structured data. It’s impossible to match that functionality across all categories and use cases. Very true and very rational — but it doesn’t matter. If our online “set point” gets reset, our loyalty to Google will suffer. Suddenly, we won’t be satisfied anymore, because we believe something better is out there.

The Spring Search Insider Summit: Where is Search Going?

First published March 11, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In my last column, I talked about Steve Ballmer ruminating about the future of search. Steve isn’t the only guy thinking about this. A number of people I’ve talked to in the last few months have been pulling their crystal balls out and doing a little prognosticating about where searching as we know it might go in the future.

I think we (and by we, I mean anyone remotely connected to the search industry) all agree that we’re at the cusp of a sea-change in our world. Most everything we know will get swept along with this change: revenue models, our search experience, marketing strategies, the role of search agencies, the tools we use — and even the very platforms we use to launch our search.
One simply can’t overstate the importance of this. So, with another Search Insider Summit rapidly approaching, the folks at MediaPost and I have decided to turn the entire summit over to that one central question: Where is search going?

Those of you who have ever attended a Search Insider Summit know the basic premise: spirit a number of the smartest minds in search away to a fabulous location and let them share ideas for three-and-a-half packed days of brainstorming. This time around, on lovely Captiva Island in Florida, I want the future of search to be on the tips of everyone’s tongues.

And that’s where I need some help. I need passionate and compelling presenters who can “Captiva-te” our audience with their vision of where search is going. I’m looking for pitches around the central question. I’ve switched it up a little this time, dividing the primary question into six different sessions:

Where is the Core Technology Going? The engine that drives search is undergoing some significant tweaking, both in the labs of Microsoft and Google and in countless start-ups around the globe. How is the fundamental function of indexing and organizing information evolving?

Where is the User Interface Going? What will our search engines of the future look like? What is the next flavor of the 10 blue links? How will we query — and when we do, what will the results look like?

Where is the Search Experience Going? Already, we launch our searches from more and more places: mobile devices, entertainment screens, tablets and desktops. And the explosion of screens means the diversity will only continue to grow. How will the very act of searching change for us? And what will it mean for those of us doing the searching?

Where is Search Marketing Going? As search changes, the ways we use it as a marketing channel must also change. How will we adapt to the changing user experience and interface? What will our touch points with prospects who are searching for information look like in the future?

Where is the Search Marketing Industry Going? At past summits, we’ve talked a lot about how the search marketing industry has to change and adapt. Despite its rapid adoption and tremendous success, the search marketing industry is still in its relative infancy. Will stand-alone search agencies be part of the future marketing landscape? And if they are, what do we have to start learning to do — and what should we stop doing?

Where are Search Marketing Tools Going? One of the knocks against search is its lack of scalability. Tools have consistently scrambled to keep up with the changes and have made great strides in assisting the search marketer in keeping track of what is, by necessity, a tremendously granular management task. But what will those tools look like in the future?

If any of the above topics strike your passion, let us know. Send us a speaking pitch in the following format:

Introduction: One (short) sentence summarizing your pitch, along with the session you believe it fits into.

Description: No more than 300 words giving us more detail about what you want to speak about.

About Yourself: A little bit about you and why you’d make a compelling presenter on the Search Insider Summit stage.

Send all this along to my email: gord@enquiro.com and please cc my assistant: denise@enquiro.com. Time is short, so if you’re interested, please get your pitches in by next Tuesday.

Steve Ballmer and the Future of Search Revenues

First published March 4, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Steve Ballmer is an enthusiastic guy. As he climbed on stage with Danny Sullivan at SMX West, everyone was wondering how long it would be before he cranked up the volume and slipped into his typical Ballmeresque bombastic delivery. Steve didn’t disappoint. A few minutes into the interview, with Sullivan probing about Microsoft’s aspirations around search, Ballmer was yelling “Sell, Danny, don’t yell!” (ironic in the extreme) and roughhousing with poor Danny like a good-natured football coach having a little fun with the class math geek. I half expected Steve to give Sullivan a noogie.

I suspect there will be no shortage of coverage on the keynote and the areas explored. Ballmer was careful to tone down his enthusiasm about Bing with a realistic nod to Google’s current dominance. But there was one comment in particular that I want to explore a little further today. Ballmer made all the obligatory comments about us being very early in the game a search, an observation that has become rote in search interviews. And usually, that observation refers to the user experience, the functionality or the platform from which we search.  But Ballmer purposely singled out one area that is not generally talked about when we discuss the nascence of search — the revenue model.

The Crystallization of a Revenue Model

Search as it exists today proved to be the perfect crystallization of a revenue model, a beautifully simple evolution that had all the right pieces falling into place at just the right time. It was a rare occurrence in the messy and organic online world, one that Google capitalized on to the tune of several billion dollars. But it’s unrealistic to think that this crystallization of revenue opportunity can survive for long or morph into something equally universal, simple and effective.

Here’s what happened: Search solved a fundamental human need  — the need to access information. Google did search better than anyone else. All this searching happened in a small handful of places, with Google as the dominant destination. Much of this searching was for information that came from consumer intent.  And, because consumers were searching for information, sponsored messages could be informational in tone rather than overtly promotional. Search was a “click,” the natural and simple connection of burgeoning need with marketing opportunity.

It’s Not That Simple Anymore

But here’s what’s happening now: Search is not as simple as it was. Increasingly, our search activity is splintering over more platforms and through more interface layers. Search is going “under the hood,”  powering a number of different apps for a number of different needs. This means the ubiquitous and universal intersection point for search is going away. We’re demanding more from search — more functionality, more integration, more understanding of how we intend to use the information we seek. This raising of the bar of our expectations means it will become increasingly difficult for one interface to serve all those needs.

As we start doing more online — finding the functionality we need to take us not just from point A to B, but allowing us to continue on to C, D and even Z, with digital servants assisting with, or even allowing us to completely ignore, the interim steps — search will just be another piece of that functionality. This “usefulness” explosion is very unlikely to happen in one place. It will happen in thousands or millions of places. And search will be relegated from being an online destination to an online utility.

Google, Microsoft, and any other search provider, will lose the critical revenue-producing high ground, the touch point with the consumer, at least in the form it currently exists. This will require a rapid shift in revenue models, and I suspect it’s this impending shift that Ballmer was alluding to in his keynote. There will be revenue to be made — far more revenue, in fact. But Google and Microsoft may find themselves in the position of taking a much smaller slice of a much larger pie.

Maximizers vs. Satisficers: Why It’s Tough to Decide

First published February 18, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In last week’s column, I introduced the study from Wesleyan University about how decisiveness played out for a group of 54 university students as they chose their courses.  The student’s eye movements were tracked as they looked at a course comparison matrix.

Weighing all the Options vs Saying No

In the previous column, I talked about two different strategies: the compensatory one, where we weigh all the options, and the non-compensatory one, where we start eliminating candidates based on the criterion most important to us. Indecisive people tend to start with the compensatory strategy and decisive people go right for the linear approach.  I also talked about Barry Schwartz’s theory (in his book “The Paradox of Choice”) that indecisiveness can lead to a lot of anxiety and stress.

The biggest factor for indecisive people seems to be a fear of lost opportunity. They hate to turn away from any option for fear that something truly valuable lies down that path. Again, this is territory well explored in Tversky and Kahnemann’s famous Prospect Theory.

The Curse of the Maximizer

Part of the problem is perfectionism, identified by Schwartz as a strong corollary to anxiety caused by impending decisions. The Wesleyan research cites previous work that shows indecisive people tend to want a lot more information at hand before making any decisions. And, once they’ve gone to the trouble to gather that information, they feel compelled to use it. Not only do they use it, they try to use it all at once.

The Wesleyan eye tracking showed that the more indecisive participants went back and forth between the five different course attributes fairly evenly, apparently trying to weigh them all at the same time.  Not only that, they spent more time staring at the blank parts of the page. This indicated that they were trying to crunch the data, literally staring into space.  The maximizing approach to decision-making places a high cognitive load on the brain. The brain has to juggle a lot more information to try to come to an optimal decision.

Decisive people embrace the promise of “good enough,” known as satisficing. They are less afraid to eliminate options for consideration because the remaining choices are adequate (the word satisficing is a portmanteau of “satisfy” and “suffice”) to meet their requirements. They are quicker to turn away from lost opportunity. For them, decision-making is much easier. Rather than trying to juggle multiple attributes, they go sequentially down the list, starting with the attribute that is most important to them.

In the case of this study, this became clear in looking at the spread of fixations spread amongst the five attributes: time of the class, the instructor, the work load, the person’s own goals and the level of interest. For decisive people, the most important thing was the time of class. This makes sense. If you don’t have the time available, why even consider what the course has to offer? If the time didn’t work, the decisive group eliminated it from consideration. They then moved onto the instructor, the next most important criterion. And so on down the list.

Tick…Tick…Tick…

Another interesting finding was that even though indecisive people start by trying to weigh all the options to look for the optimal solution, if the clock is ticking, they often become overwhelmed by the decision and shift to a non-compensatory strategy by starting to eliminate candidates for consideration. The difference is that for the indecisive maximizers, this feels like surrender, or, at best, a compromise. For the decisive satisficers, it’s simply the way they operate. If the indecisive people are given the choice between delaying the decision and being forced to eliminate promising alternatives, they’ll choose to delay.

This sets up a fascinating question for search engine behavior: do satisficers search differently than maximizers? I suspect so. We’ll dive deeper into this question next week.