Category Archives: Online Trends

A Look at What Might Have Been

First published December 17, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’ve stated before in this column that “It’s a Wonderful Life” is perhaps my favorite holiday movie.  Yesterday, as I was having lunch, I had my own George Bailey moment. I had a chance to see what my life might have been like had I not made the decision to go into search 14 years ago.  I was thumbing through the local newspaper (yes, I still do that on occasion) and the lead story in the business section caught my eye. The title was: “Ad Agencies adjusting to the new economy.”

Kelowna, B.C.  is a small town (although larger than Bedford Falls). It supports three full-service ad agencies. I know the founders of each of them fairly well. A long time ago, in another life, I was one of these agencies, working with a handful of clients, many of which were in real estate.  In 1996, frustrated with the challenges of dealing with small-town budgets and attitudes, I decided to move into the online space, which subsequently took me into the world of search. That allowed me to work with clients outside my market.

I guess, given what’s happened to these three agencies, my decision to move online proved to be the right one. In the last year, one agency has gone from 12 full-time people to just the founder, who has become an independent consultant. Two of the agencies saw a split between two long-term partners and a drastic reduction both in clients and staff.

These are the facts. One can read between the line to get a glimpse of the heartache and soul-searching that came with these very difficult business decisions. At least two of the agency founders said they were going through a personal discovery journey and were looking at pursuing other “more rewarding” professional endeavors in the future. Not to be overly cynical, but I find the frequency of these voyages of “self discovery” are usually inversely related to the success of your business. With a few notable exceptions, not many people reevaluate their professional lives when their businesses are rocking.

Suddenly, Search Seems Rosy

2009 wasn’t a banner year for my company, but compared to these stories, it was a skip down the Yellow Brick Road. We grew top-line revenues by 14%, added nine new jobs, opened a new sales office, maintained or increased client satisfaction levels, gave our employees healthy pay raises and managed to stay on the right side of the ledger sheet.

I paint these contrasts not so much to say how great we are in search, but because they present a microcosmic view of the shift in marketing. While traditional budgets were being ruthlessly slashed throughout 2009, digital and search budgets bounced along and managed to keep from being swamped by the economic storm. I certainly have talked to several search marketers who had a tough year (some of whom are also looking at their own personal “voyages of discovery”) but I would guess that the incidence rate is far less than you would find on the other side of the digital divide.

All Aboard!

The other interesting thing I gleaned from the story in my local newspaper is that all of the agency founders are paying more attention to what’s happening in the digital domain. As the demand for real estate brochures and print ads dries up, they’re only now realizing that something surprisingly robust and healthy appears to be happening online.  Suddenly, strategies including Facebook and Twitter are starting to show up in their pitches to local clients.

Having made my decision to move online almost a decade and a half ago, I would caution these people that becoming a digital “guru” may not be quite as easy as it appears to be. As became abundantly clear at the Search Insider Summit a few weeks ago, we’ve still got a long way to go before we understand the various online gears and levers of a truly integrated campaign. You’re more than welcome to jump on the digital bandwagon, but be prepared — it’s moving a lot faster than you might think!

Could Intel Hardwire Your Brain for Google?

Last week, Roger Dooley had an interesting post on his Neuromarketing Blog (great blog, by the way) about Intel’s efforts to implant a computer chip directly into our brains, essentially allowing us to interface directly with computers. Roger ponders whether this will, in fact, become a wired “buy button”. I wonder, instead, if this is the ultimate Google search appliance? The idea was floated, somewhat facetiously, by Eric Schmidt, in an interview with Michael Arrington on Tech Crunch this year:

Now, Sergey argues that the correct thing to do is to just connect it straight to your brain. In other words, you know, wire it into your head. And so we joke about this and said, we have not quite figured out what that problem looks like…But that would solve the problem. In other words, if we just – if you had the thought and we knew what you meant, we could run it and we could run it in parallel.

The Singularity and Hardwired Brains

Okay, this crosses all kinds of boundaries of “creepy”, but if we stop to seriously consider this, it’s not as outlandish as it seems. Ray Kurzweil has been predicting just this for over two decades now..the merging of computing power and human thought, an event he calls the Singularity. Kurzweil even set the date: 2045 (by the way, the target date for the Intel implant is 2020, giving us 25 years to “get it right” after the first implant). Kurzweil’s predictions seem somehow apocalyptic, or, at the least, scary, but his logic is compelling. Computers can, even today, do some types of mental tasks far faster and more efficiently than the human brain. The brain excels at computations that tie into the intuition and experience of our lives – the softer, less rational types of mental activity. It the brain was simply a huge data cruncher, computers would already be kicking our butts. But there are leaps of insight and intuition that we regularly take as humans that have never been replicated in a digital circuit yet. Kurzweil predicts that, with the exponential increase of computing power, it will only be a matter of time until computers match and exceed the capabilities of human intuition.

Google’s Brain Wave

But Intel’s efforts bring up another possibility, the one posited by Google’s Sergey Brin – what if a chip can connect our human needs, intuitions and hunches with the data and processing power available through the grid of the Internet? What if we don’t have to go through the messy and wasteful effort of formulating all those neuronal flashes into language that then can be typed into a query box because there’s a direct pipeline that takes our thoughts and ports them directly to Google? What if the universe of data was “always on”, plugged directly into our brains? Now, that’s a fascinating, if somewhat scary, concept to contemplate.

Let’s explore this a little further. John Battelle, in a series of posts some time ago, asked why conversations were so much more helpful than web searching.  Battelle said that it’s because conversations are simply a much bigger communication pipeline and that’s essential if we’re talking about complex decisions.

What is it about a conversation? Why can we, in 30 minutes or less, boil down what otherwise might be a multi-day quest into an answer that addresses nearly all our concerns? And what might that process teach us about what the Web lacks today and might bring us tomorrow?

Well the answer is at once simple and maddeningly complex. Our ability to communicate using language is the result of millions of years of physical and cultural evolution, capped off by 15-25 years of personal childhood and early adult experience. But it comes so naturally, we forget how extraordinary this simple act really is.

Talking (or Better Yet – Thinking) to a Search Engine

As Battelle said, conversations are a deceptively rich communication medium. And it’s because they evolve on both sides to allow the conversant to quickly veer and refine the dialogue to keep up with our own mental processes. Conversations come closer to keeping up with our brains. And, if those conversations are held face-to-face, not only do we have our highly evolved language abilities, we also have the full power of body language. Harvard professors Nitin Nohria and Robert Eccles said in their book Networks and Organizations: Structure, Form and Action:

In contrast to interactions that are largely sequential, face-to-face interaction makes it possible for two people to be sending nod delivering messages simultaneously. The cycle of interruption, feed-back and repair possible in face-to-face interaction is so quick that it is virtually instantaneous. As (sociologist Erving) Goffman notes, “a speaker can see how others are responding to her message even before it is done and alter it midstream to elicit a different response’.”

The idea of a conversation as a digital assistance medium is interesting. It allows us to shape our queries and speak more intuitively and less literally. It allows us to interface and communicate the way we were intended to. In his post, Battelle despaired of an engine ever being this smart and suggested instead that the engine act as a matchmaker with a knowledgeable human on the other site, the Wikia/Mahalo approach. I can’t see this as a viable solution, because it lacks the scale necessary.

This is not about finding one piece of information, like a phone number or an address, but helping us through buying a house or a car. Search still fall far short here, something I touched on in my last Just Behave column on Search Engine Land. In those situations, we need more than a tool that relies on us feeding it a few words at a time and then doing its best to guess what we need. We need something similar to a conversation, in a form that can instantly scale to meet demand. Google, for all it’s limitations in a complex scenario, still has build the expectation of getting information just in time. And the bottle neck in these complex situations is the language interface and the communication process. Even if we’re talking to another person, with all the richness of communication that brings, we still have to transfer the ideas that sit in our head to their head.

So, back to Intel’s brain chip. What if our thoughts, in their entirety, could instantly be communicated to Google, or Bing, or what ever flavor of search assistant you want to imagine? What if refining all the  information that was presented was a split second closing of a synapse, rather than a laborious application of filters that sit on the interface?  Faster and far more efficiently than talking to another human, we could quickly sift through all the information and functionality available to mankind to tailor it specifically to what we needed at that time. That starts to boggle the imagination. But, is it feasible?

I believe so. Look again at the brain activity charts generated by the UCLA – Irvine research team that tracked people using a Google like web search interface, particularly the image in the lower right.

googlebrains

Let’s dig a little deeper into what is actually happening in the brain when we Google something. The image below is from the Internet Savvy group in the UC study (sorry about the fuzziness).

Brainactivity

The front section of the brain (A) shows the engagement of the frontal lobes, indicating decision making and reasoning. This is where we render judgment and make decisions in a rational, conscious way. The section along the left side of the brain (B) is our language centers, where we translate thought to words and vice versa. The structures in the centre part of the brain, hidden beneath the cortex are the sub-cortical structures (C), the autopilot of the brain, including the basal ganglia, hippocampus and hypothalamus. I touched on how these structures dictate what much of our online activity looks like in a post last week. Finally, the area right at the back of the brain indicates activation of the visual cortex, used both to translate input from our eyes and also to visualize something “in our mind’s eye”.  As shown by the strong activation of the language center, much of the heavy lifting of our brains when we’re Googling involves translation of thoughts to words.

Knowing that these are the parts of the brain activated, would it be possible to provide some neural short cuts? From example, what if you could take memories being drawn forward (activating both the hippocampus and the frontal lobes) and translate this directly into directives to retrieve information, without trying to translate into words? This “brain on Google” approach could be efficient at a degree several magnitudes greater than anything we can imagine currently.

By the way, this interface can work both ways. Not only could it feed our thoughts to the online grid. It can also take the results and information and receives and pipe it directly to the relevant parts of our brains. Images could be rendered instantly in our visual cortex, sounds in our audio cortex, facts and figures could pass directly to the prefrontal cortex. Call it the Matrix, call it virtual reality, call it what you want. The fact is, somewhere in an Intel research lab, they’re already working on it!

Twitter Declining? I Don’t Think So…

One item in this morning’s in box caused me to look twice – eMarketer, using numbers from Nielsen, stated that “Data on Twitter Decline Stacks Up.”

twittergraph

Turns out it caught the eye of Jim Jansen at Penn State as well. After a quick and flurried Twit-Talk with my friend Jim, we both agreed the title’s misleading.

If you continue to read down to the fourth paragraph, you start to find the article begins to refute itself:

“The decrease in visitors could mean either falling interest in Twitter or simply migration to other platforms, such as third-party applications and mobile access. ”

Well..duh! Through the rest of the post, eMarketer starts to show just how much Twitter traffic has migrated to 3rd party platforms. As Jim said in a tweet “Don’t even know why they are reporting it like this.” Why indeed? This is just sloppy and misleading. It’s one thing to attract eyeballs from the email in box (worked with me) but it’s another to falsely or misleadingly report research and drop the real picture down to the bottom of the post. I’ve seen enough eye tracking to know that the majority of readers would never get past the first paragraph or two.

Shame on you eMarketer!

The Twitter Follower Personality Sorter

I had a friend in college who said he could tell everything he needed to know about a person by asking them who their favorite Beatle was. The frustrating thing was, he was usually right. For the record, mine was John Lennon. His was George Harrison. I miss them both.

I was just thinking that you can also get a great glimpse inside someone’s psyche by checking out their Twitter follow list – published there for everyone to see. For example:

I just started following Marissa Mayer. I don’t know Marissa very well and the extent of our acquaintance stretches to a few telephone interviews, but I do know what makes it to the popular press, and we share a passion for user experience. But I found it interesting to find in her list fairly slim list of Twitter follows a rather eclectic collection including Ivanka Trump, Ballet Russe, SF MOMA and Al Gore. Of course, there’s a fairly healthy dose of Google and tech based follows as well, but these others may provide some bearing points for Marissa’s personality.

Of course, you’re now going to wonder who I’m following. Well, in addition to the typical industry folks, my bearing points include Jack Welch, John Cleese and NASA.

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.