Category Archives: Personal

A collection of personal thoughts and stories

In Search of Simpler Things

First published June 14, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Live with yourself long enough, and you learn a few things. For instance, I learned that I like digging holes.

One of the most satisfying jobs I ever had was a summer back when I was in college. My job was digging holes so someone (who was paid a lot more than me) could inspect a gas pipeline. Every morning, my supervisor would drop me off in the middle of a farmer’s field with nothing but a shovel and a lunch kit. My instructions were simple:

1.     Find where the pipeline was buried (which I did by witching, if you’re really interested. And yes, it worked for me.)

2.     Dig a hole big enough that a section of the pipeline (which was generally four to six feet underground) was exposed with 12 inches of clearance all the way around.

3.     Try to keep the farmer’s cows from falling in the hole.

That was it. There was no number 4 on the list. Even number 3 was optional, depending on the prevalence of cattle in the vicinity.  At the end of the day, my supervisor would pick me up and I’d go home.

I loved it. And I loved it because:

–       You can only dig one hole at a time. This essentially eliminated workplace stress.

–       Cows are a good audience. I got very little negative feedback.

–       It was virtually impossible to take your work home with you.

–       Shovels need little or no IT support. They pretty much always work as expected.

–       At the end of the day, you could see what you had done and know you were entirely responsible for it. Holes typically have no project managers, key stakeholders or requirements for client input.

That was a simpler time. My current vocation shares almost nothing with digging holes. A lot of times, it feels like I cast my work to the four winds and hope that the Internet gods are smiling that day. My fate often is tied up in factors beyond my immediate control. I can do my job to the best of my ability and things can go sideways because Google tweaked an algorithm, the economy went into a tailspin, or my client’s customers just don’t feel like buying anything that day.  No matter – I still have to answer for it.

Internet marketing actually has a lot more in common with another vocation of my childhood: farming. A farmer can do everything right and still get hailed out. In these types of careers — farming, marketing, running pretty much any type of company —  you find yourself spending an inordinate amount of time worrying about crap you can do absolutely nothing about. You feel disconnected from the controls of your own destiny. I don’t much care for that feeling. That’s one reason why I never became a farmer.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever give up Internet marketing and go back to digging holes. I suspect not. For one thing, as much as my mind yearns for the simplicity of a shovel, I’m not sure my back is on board with the idea. For another, I’m pretty sure digging holes doesn’t pay very well.

But I can tell you one thing: Next to digging holes, my next favorite job is landscaping. And I’m not talking about planting flowers and pulling the odd weed. I’m talking about moving huge mounds of topsoil or crushed rocks from my driveway to the back yard by wheelbarrow. Or — my latest hobby — building retaining walls with 80-pound concrete blocks.

My neighbors think I’m absolutely mad. But concrete walls don’t much care what Google is planning for their next update or if people are in a buying mood this week. They just stay where you put them.

I like that.

Wonder What They’re Doing on Captiva?

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

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

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

Awww… I miss you too, Ken!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Has Technology Spoiled Us?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who is Joseph Kony – and Why Does it Matter?

First published March 8, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

“Do you know who Joseph Kony is?”

The question was posed to me this week by my 16-year-old daughter, Lauren. Immediately I knew something was up. Lauren delivers everything with a half smirk, which is generally followed by some sarcastic comment. But this time, she was disarmingly serious in her question.

I curbed my knee-jerk reaction, which was to respond with an equally sarcastic comeback (genetic testing not required to prove paternity in this particular case) and simply said, “No.”

“I want you to go check out this site — kony2012.com,” she said.

I did, and ran into one of the most compelling uses of digital communication I’ve ever seen. So I wanted to use this column to do two things. First, to urge you to take the time to visit the site. It’s a crash course in effective online communication that any digital marketer could learn from. But secondly — and more importantly — I want to tell you who Joseph Kony is. Learning this might be the most important thing you do today.

Let me give you a brief introduction to Mr. Kony. The International  Criminal Court in the Hague, Netherlands, compiled a list of the most wanted criminals in the world. Among better-known names like Muammar Khadafy, Joseph Kony had the unfortunate distinction of topping the list.

How do you get to the top of such a list? You form a guerilla army (The Lord’s Resistance Army) in Uganda and kidnap children to act as your foot soldiers. Not just a few children. Tens of thousands of children. You rip boys as young as eight and nine away from their homes and parents and force them to kill, torture, maim, rape and pillage, literally at gunpoint. Often, their first order is to kill their family and friends. You turn their lives into an unimaginable hell where the only avenue of escape seems to be their own death.

And it’s not just boys. Girls are kidnapped as well, forced to become sex slaves. Kony’s army has no cause, no goal, no reason for being. Despite its name, it’s unclear what Kony is actually resisting. The mission of the LRA has apparently gone directly from the mouth of God to the ear of Joseph Kony, but he has neglected to pass it along. The army exists, and the practice of kidnapping children continues solely because the world has allowed it to. In most cases, it’s because the world, like me, has never heard this story. It doesn’t know who Joseph Kony is.

This is where http://www.kony2012.com comes in. Started by filmmaker Jason Russell, who has been working to expose Kony for the last nine years, Kony2012 has a very clear goal: to make Kony famous by the end of this year, shining a blindingly bright light on his activities.  Russell believes that evil can’t be sustained when the world is watching you.  The Arab Spring indicates that Jason Russell is probably right.

The site has a heart-breaking 29-minute video, but that alone doesn’t really differentiate it. What is amazing is the way it uses digital communication and social media to help light the fires of fame around Joseph Kony. On the site, there are direct links to the Twitter accounts of 20 celebrities, including Oprah, Mark Zuckerberg and George Clooney, as well as social media links to 12 policy makers and political influencers including Bill Clinton, Condoleezza Rice and John Kerry. Kony 2012 knows that the world of social influence is spanned by only a few degrees of separation and that these influencers, if activated, can bring unwelcome awareness to Kony with brutal efficiency. The degree of digital savviness shown by this site and the movement in general is humbling and inspiring. Of course, it helps to have a compelling story to tell, and the story of Joseph Kony certainly qualifies.

I made my daughter a promise. I would learn who Joseph Kony was. And I would do what I could so others would know him as well. I would try to make Joseph Kony famous.

There are many less important ways to spend 29 minutes of your life.
Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/169701/who-is-joseph-kony-and-why-does-it-matter.html#ixzz2imaY0Mn2

An Introvert’s Confession

First published March 1, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I am an introvert.

Which, I guess, qualifies as an introvert’s confession — a metaphorical “coming out of the closet.” But if you were an introvert, you would know that’s the last thing you really want to do. The closet is such a non-threatening place to be.

A few columns ago I wrote about personality tests and said that, according to the Myers Briggs Personality Test, I’m usually tagged as an “INFJ” – which, according to the labels applied, means I’m an Introverted, iNtuitive, Feeling and Judging person.  Apparently that’s one of the rarest of the 16 personality types. Only 1% to 3% of the population are “INFJ”s. Depending on when I’ve taken the test, the last two letters have wavered a bit, but never that first “I.” I am, was and always will be an introvert.

I write this from TEDActive – which may just be the definition of introvert’s hell. It’s a gathering of some 600 well-meaning, gregarious TEDsters in the desert east of LAS (Palm Springs) who are prodded at every juncture to “interact” and “connect.” A good question would be, “Why the hell would you subject yourself to that?” A better question might be, “Tell me why this is this your third TEDActive.”

This year, much to my delight, one of the speakers of the first day of TED was a fellow introvert, Susan Cain, who spoke (much to her discomfort) on the TED stage about the importance of introversion. Internally I cheered, because that’s what we introverts do. Externally I stayed calm and expressionless, because that, too, is what we introverts do.

Let me tell you how an introvert negotiates the social minefield that is TEDActive. Tonight (being the night I’m writing this column) is “Free Night,” which means you’re supposed to somehow connect with a group of five to eight total strangers and invite yourself out to dinner with them at a local restaurant.

Yeah, right.

I, to the contrary, bailed out of the last session early (which was not that big a sacrifice, frankly) and snuck away to a local diner to grab a quick bite, by myself. By the time the rest of the TEDActive crowd was heading out to dinner with their new friends, to be followed, I assume, by poolside partying and midnight karaoke, I was already back, safely ensconced in my hotel room, writing this column.

If you were judging me through an extrovert’s eye, you would probably be using words like “antisocial” (you do know what “introvert” means, don’t you?) and “pathetic.” What you don’t know is the profound pleasure an introvert can get from observing life and thinking about how it all fits into the bigger picture. As I sat in that diner, I watched a four-generation family reunion unfold before my eyes. I watched a mom take her 3-year-old daughter for a walk around the restaurant so she could be the center of attention as her new shoes sparkled and lit up with each step. And I asked myself why most of us adults don’t feel the need to wear shoes that light up when we walk through a restaurant. What happens along the way that steals that wonder from us?  If I were there with a group of others that I felt compelled to socialize with, I would have never seen that sight. That’s an introvert’s modus operandi: we observe, we think and we wonder. There are worse ways to spend your life.

Now, to be clear, I don’t skulk my way through the entire TED program avoiding eye contact and sneaking back into my hotel room. I had a very enjoyable conversation at lunch about space travel, the global rebalancing of wealth, the ethical dilemma of artificial intelligence and how our sense of entitlement may kill North America. That’s why I have come back to TEDActive for three straight years. But by 6 p.m., the tank was full. I needed some solitary time to digest.

My career has forced me to take on some extroverted characteristics. I’ve had to learn to speak in public. And owning your own business dictates that you become a salesperson. But I can’t live on a steady diet of that. At the many search conferences I attend, I usually stay at a different hotel than the “official venue.” It just makes life easier. And my longtime industry friends can tell you that I’m much more comfortable with a quiet dinner and engaging conversation than the more gregarious gatherings around the hotel bar.  That’s just how I roll.

As an introvert, you get used to living in a world that’s largely defined and judged by extroverts. As Susan Cain pointed out today in her talk, somewhere in the 20th century, the value of character somehow slipped and gave way to the cult of personality. We introverts are constantly made to feel that we should be more “outgoing.” Perhaps, though, the rest of the world should become more “thoughtful.” Would that be such a bad thing?

All of this has little to do with search engines or digital marketing. But I do think that our newfound digital connections may actually turn the tables on the imbalance between the introverts and extroverts of the world.  It seems to be less of a social stigma to spend time by yourself. And thanks to online connections, we can now connect on an “as required” basis.  Perhaps, as a society, we’re beginning to put more importance on the value of individual contribution.

Maybe, just maybe, the introvert’s time has come.

Behind Every Search There’s a Story

First published February 23, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This week, I was reminded why I got into this business. The timing was good, because to be honest, after being involved in too many discussions revolving around search budgets and cross-channel attribution models, I had lost touch with what I’d found so magical about online marketing in the first place. But Tim and Daniel reminded me. It’s a story worth repeating.

About a week ago, I was sitting in a boardroom trying to find an “apples-to-apples” comparison for a CMO of a huge company to help validate moving money from traditional brand-building channels into search. We had run dozens of models, compiled multiple spreadsheets, and put together at least six different slide decks. In the process we did our level best to suck all the life out of the exercise, reducing it to a colorless discussion based solely on numbers. We were trying to find that elusive formula that would allow us to compare the impact of a dollar spent on search vs. a dollar spent on TV.

This was a variation of a conversation that I’m sure we’ve all had multiple times in the last year. I guess it was a sign that digital has come of age. We were trying to subject it to the same BS that had propped up TV and print for decades.

However, in the process, we were missing something critical. And I found that something critical on the streets of San Francisco.

When I started in search, I used to get a kick from the fact that thanks to what we did, a small Mustang after-market parts retailer could outrank Ford for keywords like “Mustang parts” and increase its online business by 10 times in under a year, eventually outstripping its traditional brick- and-mortar business, which had been around for decades. Or that a small boat manufacturer in Kelowna, B.C. could rank No. 1 for “boats” and suddenly start getting inquiries from around the world. Online made things possible that had never been possible before. And that was pretty cool.

Those stories are still happening and being talked about. It’s just that they’re not happening at the boardroom tables where I’ve been hanging out lately. But then I ran into Tim and Daniel, and their story restored my faith in online marketing.

Tim and Daniel are just a couple of guys who happen to love their city (San Francisco) and wanted to find a way to afford their sky-rocketing rent so they could continue to live there.  A little over a year ago, they started a bike tour company that takes tourists through the streets of San Francisco, pointing out the little nooks and crannies that give the city its color. They’re both pretty personable guys and the tours benefit from their obvious passion for their subject. They can bring Haight-Ashbury or the Castro to life in a way that no tour book or bus tour ever could. They reduce San Francisco to a street-level, intimate love affair, exactly the way the city should be seen.

Now, as cool as that is, the story wouldn’t be worth telling unless people actually discovered the tour, allowing Tim and Daniel to keep their jobs as guides.

And that’s where the Internet comes in. Right now, their tour is the No. 1 ranked tour on Trip Advisor, with 145 reviews, all of them “excellent.” And so, because of this feedback, they top a very long list of things to do in San Francisco. They probably won’t get rich, but they will keep the business rolling and keep paying the rent. And that’s not a bad outcome for being able to do the thing you love.

I asked Daniel what the impact of the positive ranking on Trip Advisor had been, and he was positive but realistic, “It’s been pretty awesome, but as I keep telling my mom, it’s an algorithm and it might be gone tomorrow. But we’re enjoying it while we can.”

Excellent advice. Enjoy it while you can. And when the big business of search seems to suck all the fun out of life, remember that guys like Tim and Daniel are still stoked about what it can do for them.

That’s why I got into the biz.

Ramblings of a Feverish Mind

First published February 16, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’ve had the flu for going on a week now. My head hurts and my tongue feels like a terrycloth towel. My voice sounds like a cross between Satan and a barking seal. Any lucid thoughts I may have had have long been beaten into submission by repeated doses of NyQuil. And now I have a column to write.

What strikes me the most about my current state of mind is how little tolerance I have for the stuff that normally makes up my life.  The saying “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff” must have an illness-triggered corollary: “Fever-induced sweat seems to wash away all the little crap.” Before I got sick, I had a mountain of stuff that was all vitally important. Then I lost two-and-a-half days because I simply couldn’t raise my head from my pillow. Something had to give. Actually, several things had to give. And you know what? The world didn’t end. Life went on.

It’s a revelation of much less significance than Steve Job’s more eloquent version in his 2005 Stanford commencement speech: “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.” But you get the gist. We fill up our lives with little crap, and it drowns out the significant stuff we should be focused on. Steven Covey calls them our “rocks.” But why do we need something like a death sentence or being waylaid by a particularly virulent flu virus to remember it? Why can’t we keep focused on the big stuff every day of our lives?

The ironic thing is that most of the stuff we do in a day, we do for others, not ourselves. We don’t want to drop the ball, leave someone hanging or let something fall between the cracks. Delivering on these multiple imperatives is the price we pay for being social animals. We want to keep the acceptance of the herd, so we’re hardwired to make other’s priorities our priorities. And, in the process, we keep shuffling the stuff that’s truly important to us to the back shelf. The only way to avoid molding your life around someone else’s priorities is to be a narcissistic jerk — like Mr. Jobs, or yours truly when spiking a fever.

This got me to wondering. Don’t these selfsame jerks have a natural advantage over the rest of us “nice guys”? The fact that they don’t care about other’s priorities and naturally advance their own agendas, expecting others to adopt them as their own, seems to indicate that they’ll actually get the stuff done they care about.

After three decades in the business world, I’ve come to the sad and wearied conclusion that to be wildly successful in business, you have to be an asshole. Nice guys may not always finish last, but they seldom take home the gold.  The most successful CEOs typically have a Machiavellian side, ideally buffered by some social skills.

By next week the flu will be gone, I hope. But part of me is also hoping that the forced perspective it gave me lingers a bit longer.  Maybe a little flu-induced “dickishness” wouldn’t be a bad thing the carry through 2012 and beyond.

The Facebook Personality Test

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Look at the Big Picture in 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is There a Search Marketer in the House?

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

Once, just once, I’d love to hear an announcement come over the PA system in some public venue: “Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please. Is there a search marketer in the house?”

Let me explain. Recently, a friend of mine was at a soccer tournament with our school team. One of the other parents had a sudden heart attack. My friend, who is in the medical field, swung into action and applied CPR. When the first response unit took over, one of the attendants told my friend that he had saved the parent’s life.

Longtime readers will know I’ve had a long-running identity crisis about my choice of career. This recent incident led me to wonder if there will ever come a time when my knowledge and experience will be considered critical. Will I ever save a life?

It doesn’t even have to be that dramatic. If you’re a mechanic and see a stranded motorist on the side of the road, chances are you can help. All I could do is pull over, gaze in confusion under the hood, kick a tire and explain why you should really optimize your landing pages to get the most from your search marketing campaign.

My father-in-law, who has been a carpenter all his life, can walk into most any home and fix the drawer that sticks, or put up a set of shelves. That same father-in-law can’t help a sharp and panicked intake of breathe every time he sees me pick up a power tool. My wife has acquired the same habit. Neither can explain exactly what I do, and they’ve both known me for a quarter century.

Even an accountant will constantly be asked for tax advice, a lawyer about a particularly sticky divorce, or a veterinarian about Pookie’s unfortunate habit of passing noxious gas when company’s over (and yes, Pookie is a dog). Each of these careers contributes something to the greater good of mankind. But a search marketer? We’re just not in hot demand to make the world a better place.

In my fantasy, after the aforementioned announcement, I raise my hand and confidently stride forward: “I’m a trained search marketer. What’s the problem?”

“Thank God you’re here,” says the announcer, pointing to an obviously troubled man staring at a laptop. “This gentlemen here is extremely upset.”

Beaming with quiet confidence, I gently sit down beside the man and say, “Sir, I’ve been a search marketer for almost 20 years. How can I help you?”

Through his tears, I can see a small twinkle in his eye that indicates that he’s dared to hope again. “I don’t understand it. I just can’t get this damned site to rank.”

“Well, here’s your problem — your title tags aren’t optimized. And your incoming links have no anchor text. I can fix that.”

As I take the laptop from his trembling hands, a single person in the circle of onlookers who have been drawn by the scene starts clapping. Slowing, it spreads around the circle. In minutes, uproarious cheering and clapping surround me. Outwardly, I respond with gracious humility, but inside, I’m high-fiving myself and saying, “Yah..who’s da man? I’m da man!”

Maybe there should be a medal for search marketing bravery.