Category Archives: Online Trends

SIS Sneak Peek: Looking Backward and Forward

First published November 12, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In about three weeks, we’ll be gathering in Park City, Utah for another Search Insider Summit. Between now and then, I’ll be providing a sneak peek at some of the content that will be covered. On Day 1 of the Summit, Jordan Rohan from Clearmeadow Partners and Mark Mahaney from Citi Investment Research will look both backward and  forward six months to help us get a fix on lessons learned and what we should be paying attention to. I asked both Jordan and Mark to provide some hints of what they’re seeing in their rearview mirrors and what’s coming down the road.

Mark Mahaney: The 6 Months that Was….

I’ve talked previously  about the economic belly-flop being the best thing that could have happened to digital marketing. Mark agrees: “I think that the recession accelerated the adoption of digital advertising, because it accelerated the adoption of performance-based advertising.”

In evolution, adversity speeds up the pace of change, and the past 18 months have certainly been adverse for marketers. There has been a lag between the uptake of digital advertising and its potential. Case in point, PEW estimates the average person spends almost 5 hours a day online, more than with any other medium. Yet advertisers have only allocated about 12% of their budgets to digital advertising. Print still dwarfs digital in most budgets, and we only spend a half hour a day with some type of publication in our hands.

The advertisers that move to digital are almost guaranteed some impressive “early entry” quick wins because of this adoption lag. When you start measuring and comparing performance, digital will shine. And search will shine brightest of all. I’m not sure “performance-based advertising” is an inclusive enough label, but it’s the one that’s stuck to this point. And by that measure, digital performs like a rock star.

But if the economy was the dark cloud, and the adoption of digital was the silver lining, there’s still one more nasty surprise hidden inside the silver lining for digital agencies: advertisers’ expectations are higher than ever, and in some cases, they will be impossible to meet: “It’s as if the recession taught us never to pay full retail again, and never to buy CPM again.”

The laser focus on performance may set a standard  that’s so demanding, even search might be hard-pressed to meet it. I believe this is a temporary attitude that will relax over time — but the fact is, the economy hammered several nails in the coffin of traditional advertising attitudes.

Mark Mahaney – The 6 Months to Come

Mark hedged his bets by picking two horses in the upcoming race for the hottest trend over the next 6 months, and neither come as a surprise: “The galloping market share of smart phones has to finally, perhaps, translate into the move to mobile search that we all know is coming. Certainly, the smallest hints of adoption are starting to show up in the search usage logs, but it’s still infinitesimal compared to desktop search.”

And finally, Mark urges us to pay attention to social media advertising. Again, there are a lot of questions still to be answered, but study after study (the latest being FEED 09 from Razorfish) is rolling out now talking about the importance of social in the digital marketplace.

Jordan Rohan – Don’t Look Now, But We’re Recovering…

Jordan had one theme that stretched back 6 months and projects 6 months in the future: growth returns to media (aka: what a difference a year makes). Jordan provides some supporting evidence:

  •       Ford is profitable again
  •       CBS is charging advertisers double the rates (scatter TV ads) of a year ago.
  •       Apple has its most profitable quarter ever, thanks to the sale of 7.4 million iPhones.
  •       Google buys AdMob for $750 million in stock.For more on Mark and Jordan’s crystal ball, join us for the Search Insider Summit in Park City.

Socially, We’re Suckers for a Deal

Razorfish’s new FEED 2009 report found that consumers like to spread the word digitally about great deals on brands. In fact, this far surpassed their desire to just talk about brands.

Humans are still Humans, even Online

Here’s the thing that gets me. When we talk digital channels, we seem to forget that humans are humans. We’ll still be the way we’ve always been, we’ll just do in on a new canvas. The “finding” of FEED 2009 discovered that we like to talk about deals. This has been hardwired into humans since we crawled out of caves. In a bit, I’ll share the findings of an interesting study that looked at how this social news spreads through our networks.

The Results of FEED

But first, let’s look at the other results of the study. Despite my morning grumpiness, this is a report worth downloading:

FEED09_Chart-Q1765% of consumers have had a digital experience that either positively or negatively changed their opinion about a brand. Again, this is behavior that is common, we all have perception altering brand experiences. As we spend more time online, it’s natural that this will happen here too.

Branding is now a participatory experience. We’re no longer passive consumers of brand messaging. We now expect to roll up our sleeves, get in and muck around with the building of brands. We want to do things with the brand. We will now participate in building the aggregate story of a brand. 73% of study participants had posted a product or brand review on web sites like Amazon, Yelp, Facebook or Twitter. We now have a voice and we’re using it.

We’re becoming Brand Fans. 40% of consumers have “friended” a brand on Facebook and/or MySpace and 26% of followed a brand on Twitter. Again, this isn’t new, it’s just going digital. There are certain brands that inspire fierce loyalty: Apple, Harley Davidson, Nike. It’s natural that these Brand Fans would now be expressing themselves online. One word of caution for Brand Marketers here. People won’t suddenly become fans just because you’re on FaceBook. You have to be a brand that people care about.

FEED09_Chart-Q27Here’s the study tidbit that was “surprising”. Of those that follow brands on Twitter, 44% said access to exclusive deals is the main reason. Same is true for those that “friended” a brand on Facebook or MySpace..accounting for 37% of participants. The next highest reason for following a brand on Twitter? Being a current customer, at 23.5% And again, this would be for those brands that inspire an unusually high degree of loyalty.

Strength of Weak Ties

Sometime ago, I talked about a fascinating study by Frenzen and Nakamoto that looked at how rumors, or in this case, news of a bargain, spread through social networks. It explored the roll of Mark Granovetter’s famous “Weak Ties” in social networks. Social networks tend to be “clumpy”, rather than uniformly dense. There are dense clumps, representing our families, closest friends and co-workers that we see every day. You’re connected to these people with “Strong Ties”. But the clumps are also connected with “Weak ties” that span the gaps. These are ties between more distant family, casual friends and acquaintances. As Granovetter discovered, news spreads quickly through the strong ties within a clump, but it’s the ability to jump the weak ties that really causes word to spread throughout the network. We rely on the “connectedness” of these weak ties for things like news on potential jobs, social tidbits and yes, the scoop on a great bargain. If you look at the nature of these weak ties, you’ll realize that it’s exactly those types of ties we tend to maintain on Twitter and Facebook.

In 1993, Jonathon Frenzen and Kent Nakamoto decided to explore the conditions that had to exist for news to jump from cluster to cluster across those weak ties. They tested the nature of the message itself and also how the news would impact the person delivering the message, a condition called moral hazard. In other words, would the messenger lose something by spreading the word? The scenario they used to test the conditions for this social “viralness” was news of a sale. There were three variables built into the study: the structure of the network itself (strongly connected vs weakly connected), the attractiveness of the sale (20% off vs 50 to 70% off) and the availability of the sale item (unlimited vs very limited quantities – introducing the aspect of moral hazard).

Frenzen and Nakamoto found that in all cases, news of the sale spread quickly through the strong clusters. But when the message wasn’t that remarkable (the 20% off example), word of mouth had difficulty jumping across weak ties. Also, when moral hazard was high (quantities were limited) again, the message tended to get stuck within a cluster and not be transmitted across the weak ties. If you look back at the original post, I go into more depth about how this impacts our inclination to spread news through our networks.

Twitter: The Weak Tie Pipeline

So, let’s take this back to the Razorfish study. There needs to be a few conditions present for news to spread along weak ties: The information has to be valuable (50 to 70% off) and it can’t put the person holding the information in moral hazard (if I share this information amongst too many people, there will be nothing left for me or my family). The example given in the study, following a Brand on Twitter to get news of exclusive offers, is our “weak tie” to the brand, so we can be first to benefit. And, if the discount is substantial and there is low moral hazard, we will in turn Tweet about it ourselves.

The Razorfish study indicated surprise that more people were engaging in social networks to learn about discounts and not to evangelize brands. Again, if we look at human behavior, there is no surprise here. Brand evangelization engages a completely different part of our brain, the same part, incidentally, that gets triggered when we talk about religion and other unusually strong beliefs. These are things most of us hold closer to our chest. We share them with our strong ties, but we don’t usually spread that across weak ties. There are exceptions, of course, but I think most marketers assume all of us are willing to build public shrines to their products. That’s just not how humans tick.

But, humans can’t resist spreading the word if that word has social value (a great bargain) and we don’t miss out ourselves by spreading the word. Those are the messages built to set Granovetter’s weak ties singing in a social network. We’ve been this way for a long, long time. And now that Twitter and FaceBook are here, we’ll still be that way.

The Top 10 Reasons We Love Top Ten Lists

Somedays it seems to me that the whole world has become a search results page. I fear we have become obsessed with ranked and ordered lists. I’m not sure what it is in the human psyche that loves lists conveniently numbered for our perusal, but heaven knows we’re suckers for the Top Ten.

The Internet has fed this addiction to the point that I feel like the whole world can be sorted like an Excel spread sheet. Sort my best friends by geographic proximity and likelihood to lend me a wheelbarrow. Rank all the parties my teenage daughter will be invited to this year by availability of alcohol, physical presence of dictatorial parents and incidence rate of teenage boys who think they “have a shot”. Give me a list of the 10 things my wife hates so I can create a Pivot Table of my odds of doing one of them in the foreseeable future.

As any direct marketer, blogger, magazine publisher or show organizer will tell you, slapping the “Top Ten” on the front of anything virtually guarantees you an audience: The Top Ten Hot Dog Stands in Manhattan, The Top Ten Ways to Get Rich if You Love Wearing Pajamas All Day, The Top Ten Christmas Crafts that Can Be Made From Recyclable Yard Waste..It’s like we’re being spoon fed our lives by some idiot with a ranking algorithm for everything.

Why are we like this? Well, I think it’s because thinking is hard. It’s much easier to take someone else’s opinion about something, especially when it’s offered in the irresistible format of a ranked list. We can choose to agree or disagree, but we don’t actually have to think about it too much. Someone else has done it for us. Also, we travel in social herds, so it’s really important to know what everyone else feels about anything. And finally, the world just has too much complexity now. There are too many choices to think about in every aspect of our lives, even the stupid ones. I don’t really want to spend a lot of time wondering who the Ten Sexiest Olympians are this coming February. I know somewhere some obliging magazine publisher or blogger will do that Herculean intellectual task for me.

I guess ordered lists offer us the illusion of control. If we can slow the frenetic pace of the world down by looking at a list that someone has conveniently put numbers beside, our lives seem a tiny bit more orderly and organized. Yes, I know the economy and the environment is going to hell in a handbasket, yes, I know the global forces of power and control are undergoing a fundamental shift, but right now I’m focused on the 7 Greatest Reality TV Show Moments of 2009. I’ll worry about global warming some other day.

Of course, the urge to put a numbered list in as part of this post is overwhelming (get it..irony), so, I’ll give you the “Top 8 Reasons Why I Gave In and Did It”:

  1. I have the bladder control of an 80 year old man and have already had 2 cups of coffee, so I had to finish this post somehow
  2. I really want to see just how many of you will Tweet this list because you’ve been helplessly programmed to do so
  3. I’m obsessed with PostRank and I spend way too much of each day worried about my Engagement Score
  4. Given the choice between thought provoking content and a cheap laugh, guess which way I’ll always lean
  5. I’m still figuring out how numbered lists work in my blogging platform and needed the practice
  6. I felt guilty teasing you with a title about Top Lists and felt obliged to deliver. See, I really care about you, my readers and didn’t want to disappoint you
  7. I wanted to prove to my daughters that my brain is still capable of counting up to 8. There has been some question lately
  8. I believe that children are our future (Okay, I ran out of reasons, but I felt that Whitney deserved a plug because she’s trying really, really hard)

Two Different Views of Tweeting

DigitalNativeComparison2Last week in San Jose, I was talking to a group of marketers about how digital natives and digital immigrants use social networking. Inevitably, the subject of Twitter came up. In our recent BuyerSphere research, we found that Digital Natives (the younger generation that grew up with technology) use Twitter or microblogging platforms more than Digital Immigrants (the older generation that adopted technology as adults). Someone in the audience said that he thought it was common knowledge that younger people don’t “tweet” but older people do, running counter to our research. The following chart shows the percentage of difference in time spend each week between the Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants in our sample:

As you can see, Digital Natives spend significantly more time on social networks and Twitter..almost 50% more time than Digital Immigrants. Yet, Twitter is labeled as an older person’s platform. Today, from the PEW Internet group, new numbers came out on Twitter usage that seem aligned with our findings:

emarketertwitterThe core audience for Twitter is squarely in the Digital Native age group. I think the answer lies in how the respective groups use Twitter. And this difference in usage and attitude extends beyond Twitter to almost any social networking platform.

The Digital Immigrant views Twitter as a tool. It’s a way to get information out, build traffic to a blog, connect with someone. We treat it as technology that offers us another way to get things done.

But for the Digital Native, Twitter is just part of the world they live in..like air or water. They don’t treat it as technology. It simply is. This attitude towards technology as not being technology is common amongst Natives. They don’t have the same “Gee Whiz” awe of technology. They’re not constantly comparing Twitter or Facebook against the good old days. Why should they? For them, this is just part of the world they live it..there is no reference point in the past. That’s why Natives spend substantially more of each week interacting with technology that connects them with their lives and social circle. For myself, FaceBook is a destination, as is Linked In or Twitter. I only go there when I need to do something. But for the Native, it’s just part of their environment.

Finally, I want to share the view of another Digital Immigrant, Comedian C.K. Louis, who ranted about the Native lack of appreciation for technology.

The Cult of Technology

We held our B2B Expert Face-to-Face event yesterday in Redwood Shores, CA. Yes, we asked people to drive to the west side of the bay the same day the Bay Bridge was closed. Needless to say, it impacted our attendance somewhat. But it was also a smaller, more intimate opportunity to really talk about the challenges common in B2B digital marketing. The common themes that emerged what a tendency to “peg” search as direct response marketing, the realization that B2B is slower to adopt digital than B2C, the difficulties presented by the fragmentation of the B2B marketplace and why we’ve tended to silo off our digital strategies from the rest of our marketing. Most of the discussion came from the findings of the BuyerSphere Project, the extensive research we conducting into B2B buying behaviors.

Every timeI talk to a group of assembled search marketers, I can’t help but feel the palpable frustration in the air. The gulf between those that understand digital (particularly search) and those that don’t can seem impossible to bridge. We feel tied down by those within our organization that seem mired in the old way of doing things. Why the hell can’t everyone see the world as clearly as we can. Also, I mentioned that as marketers, we tend to focus too much on technology and not enough on the people that interact with that technology. Few companies invest in qualitative research As we chatted at the Hotel Sofitel In Redwood Shores, a thought struck me. One on the problems may be that we’re all too much alike. We’re suffering from cultural homogeneity.

If you look at most elements of human nature, there it a typical normal distribution curve, otherwise known as the Bell Curve. The majority of the population clusters around the mean, at the center of the curve. As you move further out, you have more deviation from the mean. The diversity of us humans: whether it be intelligence, wealth, behaviors, physical abilities or size, tends to spread out on this curve.

bell_curve

The same is true, as Everett Rogers discovered, about how quickly we adopt technology or (one supposes) adapts to change. His technology diffusion curve followed the typical Bell Curve model. A few of us adopt technology almost as soon as it becomes available. A few of us avoid adopting technology until it becomes common place for everyone else. The vast majority of us fall somewhere in the middle.

technology diffusion
But what happens when you’re constantly surrounded by people at one spot on the curve? What if everyone you knew had an IQ of 123, or you lived in a town where everyone was 6 feet 3 inches tall? Soon, you’d fall into the trap of thinking this represented the norm. If you never saw diversity, you’d start to forget that it exists.

This is almost never a healthy state of an affairs. A common ideology amongst the heads of Nazi Germany lead to a drive for cultural homogeneity. The unbelievable wealth that surrounded the French aristocracy (or the Russian, for that matter) led to revolts of the masses. History has not proved to be kind to groups that are too much alike in one aspect. At best, this homogeneity gives you a skewed view of the world that may cause you to make decisions that don’t map well to the general population.

And that, I realized on Wednesday morning, may be exactly what is happening to us digital marketers. We are in this business because we all love technology. We are all classic early adopters, lying at least one (and I suspect closer to two) standard deviations from the norm, here at the thin leading edge of the Bell curve. And because we are surrounded by others like us, we start to lose sight of what the large bulge in the middle is doing. We chase technology with an obsession worth of sex starved teenagers. Every digital marketer I know has a smart phone. More than half the digital marketers I know have iPhones. If you travel in the same circles as I, you would soon think that everyone has an iPhone. Yet the iPhone market share in the US is  still only 11% (although it’s growing quickly). Like I said, we live on thin edge of the curve.

I think this skewed view of the world makes us exactly the wrong people to be planning digital marketing strategies aimed at the general public. We live in a cult of technology. We’ve forgotten how the common person lives with their hopelessly antiquated mobile phone and without a Linked In profile that includes at least 500 connections. There are many, many people out there who have never Tweeted, don’t have a blog and are unsure what RSS means. They include almost all my relatives. Yet we never seem to take them into account where we’re salivating over the latest strategy for generating buzz on social networks.

So, how does a digital marketer keep their perspective when they’re so far removed from normality? They have to become digital anthropologists. They have to live with their prospects, watching them in their daily routines. They have to discover the way we were meant to discover, by watching other people, helping us to understand and empathasize with them. Evolution has equipped us with some very subtle tools for understanding other people when we’re face-to-face with them. To my knowledge, however, it hasn’t given us an inherent ability to generate pivot tables in Excel. Maybe we should spend more time doing what we were meant to do: hang around with real humans instead of technology.

In Search of Usefulness

First published October 29, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

A few years ago, I interviewed usability expert Jakob Nielsen about where search might go in the future. He shared an interesting insight:“I think there is a tendency now for a lot of not very useful results to be dredged up that happen to be very popular, like Wikipedia and various blogs. They’re not going to be very useful or substantial to people who are trying to solve problems.”

That stuck with me. Relevance, as determined by search algorithms, and usefulness are not the same thing. And then, John Battelle touched on the same topic in a blog post a few months back:  “So first, how would I like to decide about my quest to buy a classic car? Well, ideally, I’d have a search application that could automate and process the tedious back and forth required to truly understand what the market looks like.”

Navigating Complex Decisions

Again, this concept of usability comes into play. Let me give you another example. As my regular readers know, I love to travel with my family. But the available travel sites still require the tedious back and forth that Battelle talks about.

We’re not big on hotels or restaurants. We love home exchanges or renting apartments and homes directly from the owner.  We tend to fly on mileage points. We don’t take bus tours, but we do rent cars. We prefer staying in smaller towns rather than big cities. And our first day in a new location always involves a trip to the nearest grocery store.

There is no online destination that brings all the usefulness I need together into one place. I manually pull information from VRBO.com, Homeexchange.com, TripAdvisor.com, Kayak.com and a dozen other sites.

Planning a family holiday is a lot of work, but I’m willing to do it because it’s fun for me. What about tasks that aren’t as much fun? What about the planning that has no inherent reward, like a complicated purchase for your company, or a forced move to a new city? The title of Battelle’s post was “Search Frustration: It’s Still Hit or Miss on Complex Decisions.” I can relate.

This was the approach Microsoft decided to take with Bing.com, the “Decision Engine.” I think their instincts and strategy are right, but the execution is off. If I search for Bristol, England (we’re doing a home exchange there next summer) on Bing, I still see a pretty standard search results page. It’s not that useful to me.

I agree completely that there’s a strong need for more usability in search. Google’s Achilles heel at this point is its focus on relevance at the expense of usability.  We need a much deeper, more useful experience. Relevance is a poor proxy for usefulness. It still leaves all the heavy lifting up to the user.

Search or Decision Engine? Just Decide!

“Usefulness” is a difficult trick to pull off. It’s a tough road that Microsoft has chosen. But if you’re going to do it, commit fully to it. Don’t play the safe middle ground. This is not the place for half measures.

Whether by design or by luck, I think Microsoft picked the one area where Google is most vulnerable, but right now there isn’t enough differentiation between the two. If Microsoft truly wants to be a “decision engine,” its strategists have to build from the ground up to offer more usefulness.  I’m now four clicks into Bing for “Bristol, England” and still haven’t found anything particularly useful to me. Four clicks are way too many. The information forager in me would have already moved on to a new destination.

The next three years in search will be about aggregation of information and incorporating usefulness. Search will do much more than just organize the world’s information; it will allow you to do something with it. Search will become the ultimate mash-up. And increasingly, those intersections will happen on mobile devices. Microsoft is the only one of the major players to have declaratively set sail in that direction. My advice? Forget what search is today and move with all possible speed to what search needs to become tomorrow.

Print or Screen: The Zen of Reading

A very interesting post landed in my in-box yesterday. It came from The Chronicle of Higher Education and it looked at a recent paper by Anne Mangen in the journal of Research in Reading (2008, pp. 404 – 419), titled “Hypertext fiction reading: haptics and immersion.” (I know..absolutely gripping title)

Mangen touches on a fascinating aspect of reading, specifically, the tangibility of reading. The look, feel, heft and smell of a book vs. the disembodied experience of reading from an electronic screen: “Unlike print texts, digital texts are ontologically intangible and detached from the physical and mechanical dimension of their material support, namely, their computer or e-book (or other devices, such as the PDA, the iPod or the mobile phone”

I’ve always disliked reading from a screen. Often, I even print off documents so I can review the old fashioned way. And I love books. If you want to want me to crack like a cheap plastic wine glass at a family reunion, put me in a room for an hour with no reading materials. I’ll be pacing in a cold sweat in a matter of minutes. I have multiple screens I can read from, and have read a few e-books, but the experience for me is a mere shadow of that feeling of turning a physical page (this, by the way, is what Mangen means by “haptics”).

Mangen says that the technology that enables digital reading actually gets in the way of a pure imaginative rendering of a fictional world. A print book has no distracting technology. A Kindle or iPhone does. These are some pretty heady concepts, but they touch on that vague feeling of dissatisfaction I have whenever I read something in digital form. I just don’t like it as much as a book, so while the rationality of keeping hundreds or thousands of books on my iPhone appeals to me, I still have several bookshelves and cardboard boxes full of books at home. Amazon loves me..a lot!

This whole topic becomes more material to me as I’m getting ready to self-publish my own book. Amazon will be producing the print version, but there will also be an electronic version. I wonder if my preference for paper is a generational thing. One of the topics I explore in the book is the difference between Digital Natives (people born after 1985 who grew up with digital technology) and Digital Immigrants (people born before 1985 who adopted digital technology as adults). Or is it deeper than that? Do we have some inherent bond with books? Do women feel differently than men?

I’ve launched a quick survey to explore this further. It’s only three questions long, so will take you about 40 seconds. I’ll share the results in a future post.

Marissa Mayer: Digital Promiscuity and Digital Loyalty

It was a one minute exchange (via the Valleywag) at the San Francisco Web Summit between Google’s Marissa Mayer and managing WSJ editor Robert Thomson..but it spoke volumes

Thomson accused Google of promoting “digital promiscuity” by devaluing “digital loyalty”. The bone of contention? Google’s font size for quote attributions. People get the info they’re looking for and may never see the contributing source. Moderator John Battelle quipped that he never thought he’d be moderating a panel where the debate was about font size – “Can we reach detente at 7 points?”

One might think that a quibble about font size seems inconsequential, but there’s a lot at play here. First of all, let’s explore this from the user side.

The user is looking for information and they go to Google, because that’s what they always do. They take the fastest and most reliable route to information. In the results, they see what they’re looking for. Now, one of two things is going to happen. Either they’re satisfied with the information they received on the Google results page, or they need more information and they’ll choose the best link. Thomson’s contention is that the font size is too small to allow users familiar and loyal to the WSJ brand to quickly identify the source and to weigh that in their decision. Fair enough, I guess. See for yourself. Here is a screen shot of Google News for the query “Sri Lanka”:

Screen shot 2009-10-23 at 3.09.07 PM

So, here’s where the digital promiscuity charge comes in. Each story has many potential paths to go down, most or all of them away from the original source. The user is free to choose where they go..and I suspect putting the attribution quote in 12 point type won’t really change that. I’ve looked at enough eye tracking to know that. The user is going to follow the strongest information scent, the link best aligned with what they were looking for. Google actually does the contributing source a big favor by putting that link top and in the most popular eye scan path. Mayer would know far more so than Thomson the significant advantage this gives the official source. We’re incredibly lazy when we make our online choices. A .5 inch move of the cursor is a wall too great for many users to bother climbing over.

Also, what is Google doing wrong here? Google’s job is to provide the best information source alternatives for the user. Period. Google is doing the WSJ or any other traditional publication a tremendous favor by indexing their content and introducing that content to the huge number of people that use Google every day. Yes, they get the content, but the WSJ gets the opportunity to grab the eyeballs. Obviously, traditional journalism hasn’t figured out how digital information seeking works in the 21st century.

Which brings me to why Thomson has his knickers in a knot. It’s a elephant sized case of not “Getting It”. This isn’t about digital loyalty. This is about looking for information. This is a transition of power into the hands of the user. The WSJ or any other paper no longer has sole control over a loyal readership, giving it license to push its editorial viewpoint as in days past. It’s not promiscuity..it’s freedom. Freedom to choose the path that suits the user best. Google is simply playing the role of the emancipator here. Here’s something else to ponder. Google would not be in the position to threaten anyone if we had not already made the decision that it is the place we will go for our information. And that includes all those “loyal” readers.

Thomson is in a snit because the WSJ’s revenue models are seriously out of sync with their readership’s preferences. That’s not Google’s fault. I’m guessing the blame lies in the failure of publishing to realize their day in the sun is over. And the only one to blame for that is the public. We’ve moved on. Get used to it.

The iPhone and Apple’s Lessons Learned

Never let it be said that Steve Jobs isn’t a pretty smart dude. With the iPhone, Jobs took a massive lesson delivered to him at the hands of Bill Gates and delivered back to Microsoft a complete coup d’etat.

Step back a little over 25 years. The first Mac is introduced to Apple’s board of directors. What it represented was the most advanced personal computer in the world. It felt better. It looked better. It performed better. There was just one problem. You couldn’t find any software to use on it. It was Guy Kawasaki’s job to convince software developers to develop programs for the Mac. That was a tough sell, because Mac’s market share was meager compared to the huge slice owned by clunky MS-DOS boxes. WYSIWYG bought Mac loyalty amongst the graphic design and education communities, but Apple couldn’t never overcome the Microsoft juggernaut and remained relegated to the side lines. Eventually Windows brought most of the advantages of Mac to the PC world, although in an arguably significantly watered down version.

Fast forward to 2007. The first iPhone is introduced to the world. What it represented was the most advanced mobile device in the world. It felt better. It looked better. It performed better. And this time, Jobs eliminated the problem that sunk the early Mac. He insured that there was tons of things you could do on it. Apple was so successful in encouraging development of iPhone Apps that today they have just nudged over the 100,000 mark, according to 148apps.biz. In June of 2009, when Apple announced they were at the 50,000 mark (that’s 50,000 new apps in just 5 months!), VP Phil Schiller showed a bar chart with the number of available apps dwarfing the competition, including Google (just under 5000), Nokia (just over a 1000), Blackberry (also just over a 1000) and Palm (a meager 18). Ironically, Windows Mobile didn’t even get included on the graph, showing how they have completely missed the boat in the mobile space.

So, what are the lessons learned for Jobs?

  • It doesn’t matter how cool your hardware is. All that matters is what you can do on it.
  • Don’t rely on “build it and they will develop”. Prime the app development pump so you come out of the gate with a clear advantage
  • Turn development into a democracy. Establish an app development ecosystem (in all fairness to Apple, this is possible today where as in 1984, software development relied on a handful of companies)
  • Don’t worry that the vast majority of iPhone apps gather dust. It’s the perception of choice that’s important. How many Windows programs have you ever used?
  • The competitive advantages of hardware will only work for so long. The competition will catch up, and may even pass you. But the sheer bulk of functionality offered by being the runaway leader in available software is a much more difficult thing to overcome.

This time around, Apple has done everything right with the iPhone. in fact, the biggest challenge they have now is being a victim of their own success. They’ve created an Innovator’s Dilemma for themselves. Because they have become the de facto standard for mobile, they have to consider things like backwards compatibility and offering innovation without alienating their existing users. Still, that’s not a bad problem to have!

And Now: The New News Regime

First published October 8, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This week, I moderated a session at SMX about real-time search. Personally, I find the convergence of social and search to be perhaps the most significant trend of 2009. Social adds an entirely new dimension to search. Traditionally search has been used to find “what” you wanted to know more about. Social adds the dimension of time. Suddenly, relevance isn’t the only measure. Search now needs a “stale date,” a measure of the freshness of the results.

Flying Rumors

There were a number of interesting things that came up in the panel. Presenters used a few recent examples to show how stories broke online: the death of Michael Jackson, the elections in Iran and the emergency landing of a United flight in Iceland.  It was fascinating to see where people turned as news broke. Not surprisingly, behaviors followed age-old grooves, but now those behaviors played out over a brand new landscape, the digital one.

For example, Jeremy Crane from Compete showed how, as we learned the news of MJ’s death, we first turned to Google and news sources for confirmation. But as time went on, we took new online paths. We turned to Twitter, to real-time search engines, to YouTube and other richer media sources as we worked our way through the process. If you were to look at how humans deal with loss, these paths really aren’t surprising. First we want confirmation from an authoritative source, and then we have to participate in our own ways. We need to talk about it (Twitter) and we need to reminisce (watching old videos on YouTube). We need to participate in some way in the experience to reach our own measure of closure. Funerals are never really for the departed; they’re for the ones left behind.

If It’s Not New, Is It News?

But the most interesting question came from out of the audience, right at the end of the session. The internal SEO manager for ABC asked a huge question: As news increasingly breaks online, how do traditional news publishers stay nimble and relevant? How do the New York Times and ABC News keep up in a world that includes Twitter and TMZ? That, indeed, is the question.

A few columns back, I gave my own example of real-time search, as forest fires encroached on my home town of Kelowna, BC. There I touched on the new speed of news. But the ABC’s staffer’s question brings up some added dimensions to that. The answer is not as cut-and-dried as it used to be.

Traditional news channels, with their journalistic checks and balances, can never be as nimble as rumor. It’s a game they can’t play; yet they feel they must. They have a decades-old tradition of being not only the official and credible source of the news, but also the first place most people hear news as it breaks. Now, however, we often hear about the news while it’s still a rumor, perhaps several rumors, as they bounce around the Internet.

The New Regime?

What we have here is a discontinuous shift in the industry. As one of the presenters quipped, public relations is now really about the public. News spreads through millions of instaneous connections, rather than tightly controlled and edited channels. Often, the traditional news publishers are relegated to a role of listening to and verifying online buzz, trying to sort what is true from what is social gossip. It’s a middle ground they’re having a difficult time adjusting to.

The news industry is in the middle of what Christopher Freeman and Carlota Perez  called a Regime Transition. When technology shakes the very foundations of society and its supporting institutions, there is usually a resulting passing of the torch from what was to what will be. My suspicion is that what we were talking about in that session is pointing to a regime transition of epic proportions. We are defining the new reality of news by where we turn to be informed. The traditional players have no choice but to see if there will be a place for them here — when the dust settles.