Category Archives: Personal

A collection of personal thoughts and stories

Reflections on Turning 400

First published January 24, 2013 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

So, this is my 400th column for Search Insider.

Of course, you’ll notice that recently, I’ve paid scant attention to the domain restrictions of the column’s title. In the past year, I’ve only written about search less than half the time.

Mediapost’s publisher, Ken Fadner, noticed this some time ago and offered me a slot on one of the other columns, like Online Spin, which is a bit more free-ranging in its topicality. But what can I say? I like my Thursday slot here on SI. I figure after nine years of writing about everything from evolutionary psychology to macroeconomics, you’ve come to expect a somewhat eclectic approach from me.

In part, I think the mix of topics you’ll find in my column is reflective of search. As I’ve always said, search acts as a connector in the online landscape. It stitches together our online experiences, as a foundational underpinning to the new digital world.

As such, I think it’s entirely appropriate that this column regularly bust out of the shackles of search marketing. The topics I’ve tackled over the past 400 columns really mark the evolution of my own personal interests, and with it, my career. This column has acted as my experimental petri dish, allowing me to incubate my little cell clusters of thoughts in the medium of public opinion.

In the next few months, that career will evolve once again. The company I started back in 1999, offering search engine optimization services, will fully transfer to a new owner. While I’ll still be involved in the world of online marketing in some form or another, I look forward to having the freedom to further develop some of the ideas that first saw the light of day in this column: from how humans have adapted to their new digital environments, to how organizations are struggling to adapt in a massively transformed marketplace, how disintermediation is stripping huge parts of our economic structure away, and how the very nature of strategic thinking is being transformed by ubiquitous data. My hope is that these ideas will eventually end up in book form.

Most of all, I have appreciated the forum this column has provided to share ideas. With the many changes the Internet has wrought, this is the most significant to me. The sharing of ideas, freely and openly, is something that can only benefit us.

For me, it’s a cycle. I seek out new ideas in the form of books I’ve read, academic studies or posts by my favorite bloggers. Then I digest them, weaving them into my own beliefs and perspective. Then, often still half-baked, I share them with you, hoping that something from this column may end up woven into your own tapestry of thought.

In that spirit, here’s the idea I would like to share with you today. I’m currently reading a fascinating book called “The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends who Transformed Science and Changed the World.” Author Laura Snyder explores the lives and careers of four friends who met at Cambridge as students in the early 1800s: Charles Babbage (inventor of the first “computer”); John Herschel (noted astronomer); William Whewell (polymath and professor); and Richard Jones (one of the creators of modern socioeconomic theory).

Jones, while one of the most original and insightful thinkers of his era, was not the most diligent of authors. Whewell would incessantly nag him to keep up with his writing. This passage came from one of Whewell’s many letters to Jones: “The only moral I can extract … is the importance of getting our speculations into such a form that not calamity nor adversity shall have the power, by putting an end to us… to destroy the chance of our beautiful theories coming before the world.”

You see, once you share your idea, it’s no longer bound by your own mortality. What better incentive could you find to keep writing every Thursday?

The Berkowitz Guide to Creating Content that Matters

First published September 6, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I made it! I got through the summer without writing too many “filler” columns triggered by the realization it was already Wednesday and my editor was expecting something in her inbox by end of day. There were no summer vacation columns, no “10 things I learned about [fill in blank],” and with the exception of one column about the joy of digging holes, no lame reminiscing about the zillion years I’ve spent doing this. Sometimes I even managed to write about search.

Of course, now that we’re safely past Labor Day, all that comes to a crashing halt. Because, yet again, it’s Wednesday (as of the time I’m writing) and, yet again, the well is dry.  So, it was sad yet somehow consoling that I read the final column of David Berkowitz, the one MediaPost writer I know who has actually logged more columns (400) than I (383 as of this one). David recapped what’s he’s learned from writing a little over 300,000 words, squeezed out every week over the past eight years. As David so astutely says, “I know not every post is amazing, but I still put in the time. It takes just as long to write an average column as it does to write a great one.”

I would urge you to take the time to read David’s column. I’ve been talking a lot lately about the importance of content creation. In the new information economy, content is currency. We all have to start thinking like publishers. And that means that many of us will have to create content. David’s lessons are valuable ones.

One of the thing’s I’ve most admired about David is his ability to write both from his heart and his head. He has a keen intellect, but he’s also a good and decent person, and both qualities shine through in his writing. Being genuine is an often-overlooked gift.

Whatever forms your content takes, make sure you’re creating it for the right reasons. Speak because you have something to say, not just to fill a room (or blog post) with noise. I especially liked David’s Lesson #2: “Big ideas matter, even if they don’t spread.” The columns I’m most proud of are often the ones that got the fewest retweets or comments.

Long ago, when I started writing and speaking, I had to come to terms with the fact that I will seldom go “viral.” I don’t seem to have a flair for creating memes.

But after watching other speakers who are more “meme”-worthy get swarmed after a presentation while I stood quietly to the side, I began to notice a pattern. Often, someone would come up and say, “Thank you so much for what you talked about. It was a different angle and it gave me something to think about.” I decided then and there that it was these individuals I was writing and presenting for. There may be only a handful of them in the room, or reading my column on any given week, but if I can pass along something that causes them to adjust their perspective and see something that was previously undiscovered, it’s been worth it. Retweets are not always the best measure of importance.

Writing should never be a “to-do” task. Yes, the weekly rhythm of this column can frankly be a pain in the butt some days when my to-do list overflows —  but that feeling always goes away when I start writing. As David said, “Each column is a learning experience, starting with a thesis, or a hypothesis, or a half-decent idea for the middle of a nonexistent story.”

Yes, writing is a learning experience, forcing you to put some semblance on structure to half-formed thoughts, but it’s also a chance each week to learn a little bit more about yourself. I like to think of writing as sharing little shards of your soul. You put yourself out there in a way that few others do.

At least, you do if you write as well as Mr. Berkowitz does.

A Cyclist’s Farewell

First published July 12, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This past Sunday, I spent the day riding a bike 100 miles through searing 95-degree heat in Canada’s only desert. Bet you didn’t even realize Canada has a desert, did you? Well, we do. Trust me. And it’s freaking hot. After about 60 miles, I was ready to pack it in and grab a beer. But I gutted it out for another 40 miles, because that’s what cycling is about: gutting it out.

Just to put my accomplishment in humbling perspective, in the Tour de France, cyclists cover over 2,200 miles in 21 days, averaging somewhere around 110 miles a day. And they do it over some of the toughest climbs on the European continent and still have enough left to attack at the end.

If you’ve never ridden a long distance, you can’t fully appreciate how mind-boggling it is that these guys have enough left in their legs to sprint across the finish line. You can’t win the Tour without gutting it out. Luck plays a huge role, both positively and negatively (just ask Giro d’Italia champion Ryder Hesjedal, who got caught in a crash and had to withdraw), but at the end of tour, it’s the gutsiest performer who will prevail. I love cycling because it matches my personality: putting your head down and slogging it through to the finish line.

I give you this preamble because last week, the world of search marketing lost a very gutsy guy who also happened to be a cyclist.

I met Ron Jones when we both served on the board of SEMPO. I never really knew Ron that well, but within moments of meeting, we were both talking about cycling. That’s another thing you’ll learn about cyclists. It’s kind of like a secret handshake. We recognize each other immediately and then bore everyone else to tears talking about our favorite bikes (I ride a Trek, but damn those Pinarellos look fine), our favorite ride (aforesaid ride through the desert with none other than the incomparable Eddy Merckx), our own near-death experience (every cyclist has one) or our preferred brand of chamois butter (don’t ask).

Ron had all the earmarks of a serious cyclist: quiet determination, passion, drive and a ready smile. Ron had guts. He could go the distance — and he did, in pretty much every aspect of his life. He was a driving force in the world of search, founding his own successful agency, writing a book and always giving back to the greater SEM community. He was a consummate family man. I never met his family, but you couldn’t talk to Ron long before the subject of his wife Tracey and his four kids came up.  He was a mainstay in his church and community.

Yep, Ron knew how to gut it out and get it done.

But as I said, luck has a big part to play here as well. In Ron’s case, it was luck of the worst kind: a diagnosis of cancer. I haven’t seen Ron for a few years, so I learned about his passing from an email that went out to past members of the SEMPO board who were fortunate enough to have served with Ron.

I was devastated.

Ron was vital and alive and vibrant. He was a contributor. He was one of the great guys that cause you to smile automatically when you mention his name, because you hold the memory so fondly. It’s circumstances like this that cause you to say, “@#$%#, that’s not fair!”

I don’t know how Ron’s battle went. I wasn’t there for the climbs and descents. I don’t know how often he “bonked” on the way to the finish line. But I do know this. Ron gutted it out. He finished like the champion he was. And now, he’s got the wind at his back.

As part of this weekend’s ride, I got a souvenir shirt. I’m actually wearing it right now. On the front it says, “Ride Hard. Smile Often.”

That pretty much describes Ron Jones. He will be missed.

 

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.