Category Archives: Personal

A collection of personal thoughts and stories

Two Sides of Social: Connecting or Disrespecting

First published May 19, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Apparently I opened a can of worms in my last column. I was talking about real-time tweeting during the Search Insider Summit, lead largely by Rob Griffin, who added additional comments after the column ran.  The collective force of the Search Insider audience jumped on Rob with a pretty unanimous condemnation of tweeting during live events. Some of the snippets:

“We are not the multitaskers we’d like to think we are. If you’re tweeting instead of listening, you may as well not be there.” – David Lott

“Save the tweets for the birds. Disrespectful is not a strong enough word.” – Paula Lynn

“Encouraging the attendees to clutch their phones, feverishly pecking out the next great tweet while viable information is being presented…is yet another segmentation of our society!” – Catherine Maino

“I teach at a university – and I ban phones in the classroom. Anyone who is typing [even 140 characters] is not listening to what is being said” – Alan Charlesworth

I’m going to steer clear of the disrespect minefield, and dig a little deeper into three of the themes introduced in these comments: multitasking, segmentation of society and the visual feedback to the presenter. I think the raw nerve struck here speaks to something foundational in how we’re reimaging social connection.

First of all, David Lott is right. We’re not the multitaskers we like to think we are. Nobody is. Attentional focus is one-mindedl we can’t pay attention to two things at once. So the brain switches back and forth. This not only impacts our tweeter, but the distraction and lack of focus can spread to the entire audience. Our language processing modules, although a wonder of evolutionary design (thank youm Noam Chomsky), are products of a one-track mind. We can’t compose our pithy tweets and focus on the message of the speaker at the same time. So, as we tweet, we temporarily “tune out” the speaker, creating a task switch in the mind. Each one of these “switches” can fragment our attention. The same is true for the rest of the audience. As we are distracted by the Twitter commentary, reading the latest “Twitticism,” we have to relegate the poor schmuck on stage to background processing.

Yes, these switches are fast and, to us, almost unnoticeable, but they do happen. Nick Carr (“The Shallows”) and others worry that this new environment of constant distraction could be turning us into a society of addle-minded wool-gatherers.

But what about  Maino’s concern about the segmentation of our society? Are we being divided into the technologically elite and Luddite plebes? Does the divide run across generational lines? Possibly. Even probably.  But I think there’s something more visceral in her protest. Has technology driven a dividing wedge in our society to the point where it’s no longer possible to gather a 100 or so souls in the same room for an hour to share a common social experience? Why can’t we  resist the urge to check emails, Facebook updates, tweets or other digital distractions? In a new world of mass collaboration and creation of content, we seem to be losing the ability to digest the message of the person standing right in front of us.

Finally, we have the firsthand experience of Charlesworth, who has felt the pain of standing in front of a digitally distracted crowd. As a person who often presents in public, I share this pain. The visual feedback speakers get is important for their own self-confidence. I’ve discovered that an audience’s concept of how to show respect to the speaker varies from culture to culture. I’ve found audiences in Northern Europe to be generally more attentive than North American audiences, who often peck away at some type of keyboard.

Even within the U.S., there are regional differences. The Midwest is more polite, the East Coast more distracted, with the West Coast hopelessly connected to a digital umbilical cord (with the worst being the engineering teams in Redmond and Mountainview, who seem unable to communicate at any level without a keyboard in front of them).

Perhaps the most disconcerting experience I had was in China, where in addition to being simultaneously translated, I was taken aback when several members of the audience started talking on their mobile phones in the middle of my presentation. If not for the fact that they did this to the other presenters as well, I would have taken it personally.

Thank goodness Twitter wasn’t around then.

New Circles of Intimacy: Presenting in the Social Sphere

First published May 12, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

The recent Search Insider Summit provided me with a real-world example of how our world is connecting in new ways.

First, let me set the stage. In the conference room on Captiva Island, we had the actual attendees, usually averaging between 85 and 120 people. But the typical one-way exchange of information in most presentations was made a little less asymmetrical thanks to Twitter. The folks at MediaPost put a screen next to the stage where there was a live stream of Tweets with the #mpsis hashtag, giving us a real-time social commentary on what was happening at the front of the room. The vast majority of tweets came from people in the room (and the vast majority of these came from Rob Griffin – @telerob – who gained notoriety as the Joan Rivers of the summit for his acerbic commentary).

The addition of real-time tweet monitoring is fairly common at conferences now, but feedback seems to be mixed. I think speakers are fairly unanimous in detesting it (it can be incredibly distracting). That said, Craig Danuloff threw caution to the wind and pulled off the somewhat magical feat of presenting in person at the same time as he was tweeting tidbits from his presentation, with the help of an accomplice. But what about the audience? Does a social critique help or hinder a listener’s ability to get the most from the message being presented?

To answer that question, I did a little digging into the psychology of cheering and heckling and their impact on the dynamics of an audience. It’s the closest analogy I could think of.

Both ends of the audience participation spectrum, cheering and jeering, come from the same psychological need: to be part of something bigger than our selves. We cheer in recognition of talent, certainly, but just as often, we cheer because we want to be identified with what’s happening up on stage. It’s a “me too” type of emotional response. And these types of participatory experiences tend to go in waves. Cheering is contagious. So, it would seem, are laudatory tweets, based on the degree of retweeting I saw at the conference. It’s a digital way of saying, “I wish I had said that!”

Positive tweets raise the stature of the speaker in the eyes of the audience. The crowd is swayed to align with and respect the speaker’s opinion. The burden of social proof weighs heavily on us, as we’re not really built to go against the flow.

Heckling has a little different foundation, but it also comes from a need for control over the crowd. And it typically comes from a type A personality who is used to being the center of attention and is not comfortable relinquishing that control to another, even when that person has the stage. Heckling is intended to discredit the message of the presenter. It’s the human equivalent to two rams butting heads (and yes, hecklers are more often male) and the audience is asked to make a choice: do they side with the presenter or the challenger? If the challenger wins, the presenter goes down in flames.

This real-time exercise in social dynamics introduced an additional dimension of interest to the Search Insider conference stage. You could see some presenters being lifted in the audience’s opinion on a wave of positive tweets. But the occasional negative tweet introduced uncertainty.

The other dimension that was of interest was how the real-time social interaction took the conference beyond the walls of the South Seas Resort conference center. There were a handful of virtual attendees that appeared to follow the entire conference through the live video feed (including David Szetela, who did have to get off his porch to present on day one) and contributed their thoughts via Twitter. Then there were the inevitable nuggets that went viral. The winner in this category seems to go to Gian Fulgoni from comScore (@gfulgoni) who dropped this retweeted tidbit: LOL. Overheard at SIS: “A Starbucks barista gets more training than the average entry level ad agency employee”

Uncovering the “Curse of Captiva”

First published May 5, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

“May you live in interesting times….”

Just about the time you’re reading that line, I’ll be kicking off the Search Insider Summit on Captiva Island, Fla., with it.  I think those six words pretty much sum up the theme of the three-day event.

Here’s the thing about that well-known quote – it’s both a blessing and a curse. On the surface, it appears to be a benevolent wish of good will, but lurking just under the surface lays a malevolent storm that can rip organizations and institutions apart.

The origins of the so-called “Chinese Curse” are murky, but according to Wikipedia, it may be related to the Chinese proverb: “It’s better to be a dog in peaceful times than to be a man in chaotic ones;” perhaps one reason why we should let “sleeping dogs lie.” This is all well and good if we have any choice in the matter, but we really don’t. Chaos, especially in our chosen field, is the new normal. Like it or not, we live in interesting times.

Personally, I like it, even though it can get exhausting at times. I’m one of those perverse individuals who thrive on chaos and change. If things become too placid for too long, my inclination is to get a big stick and stir things up. I’m driven by the belief that there must be a better way. But I know not everyone shares that view. For many, if not most, change brings uncertainty, which usually comes knocking with its traveling companions: stress and anxiety.

Change, in various forms, is pretty much all we’ll be talking about at Captiva. If change was a sure bet, a trading of the mediocre for the improved, there really wouldn’t be much to talk about. Change would be sought, embraced and systematically incorporated into everything we do.

The problem with change is that there are no guarantees ensuring you’ll end up in a better place. It’s tossing that which you know in the bucket and taking a chance on drawing a new lot in life that could be better, the same, or worse — perhaps much worse. And there’s the rub. Humans don’t approach such decisions rationally.

There’s a lot of unusual psychology at play here, covered by numerous economic behavioral theories like endowment effect, loss aversion, disposition effect and Kahneman and Tversky’s Prospect Theory. The long and the short of it is that most times, we believe a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. And attitudes of that sort generally freeze change right in its tracks. We have not evolved to be born risk takers. This tendency can create bizarre behaviors that defy logic: like investors being much more willing to sell stocks that have gained in value than those that have decreased. We’ve all done that, with the unshakable belief that we can recoup our losses. But a purely statistical analysis of that theory would blow it to smithereens.

Through most of our history, the genetic evidence would seem to vindicate this aversion to risk. That we’re still around points to its success as a survival strategy. But current times are not representative of our general history. There are times, this being one of them, when external factors in our environment force us to make changes and embrace risk. Those that hesitate are lost.

During these times, it’s the nimble and adaptable that thrive. Bulk and baggage are impediments. Reinvention is the name of the game. It’s the prerequisite of living in interesting times.

Seven Years as a Search Insider

First published April 14, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

“Ahh…our fledgling little industry is growing up.”

And with those words, I became a Search Insider on August 19, 2004, writing my very first column for MediaPost. Today, six years, seven months and 26 days later, I’m writing my 300th Search Insider column.  And yes, our little industry is still growing up.

As the senior Search Insider (both, I suspect, in terms of output and age) I’ve seen and written about a lot of things over the almost seven years I’ve been doing this. In that very first column, I forecast that we were a tipping point in the industry. Search was going to move from the cottage industry category to big business. Based on Google’s every-increasing balance sheet, I’d say that happened, but search is still an amazingly small world. At a recent search conference, a few of us (Bruce Clay, Chris Sherman, Danny Sullivan and some other “pioneers”) mentioned how we feel like a village elders council amongst more and more unfamiliar faces. Yet, for every new face encountered, these search events still feel a lot like a high school reunion.

I’ve been fortunate to be blessed with a lot of editorial leeway in what I choose to write about in Search Insider. Many have dealt with the world of search, but ironically, some of the most popular columns (at least, in terms of reader response) have been much more personal in nature. Columns about my family, our various family vacations and the loss of people dear to me (my wife’s grandmother and, more recently, my Uncle Jim) have all struck a chord with the Search Insider audience. For me, search has been an integral part of my life for the last decade and that has been reflected in my columns. It’s always been the human part of searching (or doing anything online) that I’ve found fascinating, and I’ve done my best to share that. I guess you could call it the recurring theme of the Thursday slot on the Search Insider line up.

For me, the fact that my daughter learned how to crochet on YouTube, or that my wife discovered that mobile computing can actually make a difference in her life, or that a long-haul truck driver that loved family embodied the very same ideals that we see in Facebook at its very best — these are the things we should care about. As I’ve said many, many times, technology is transitory, but people and their behaviors are what endure. At the end of the day, technology is just a tool.

I wanted to spend part of this milestone column thanking Ken Fadner, Phyllis Fine and the rest of the MediaPost editorial staff. Writing a weekly column can sometimes be a real pain when I hit Wednesday afternoon and come up completely dry on ideas. But I’ve also found that this forum has been tremendously rewarding for me personally. It reinforced for me that my internal thoughts and views become more valuable when they’re shared. You may not agree with me (and I can be pretty contentious at times, as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Ask and the Canadian marketing community at large can all attest to) but the discussions generated through this column have always been fascinating. And each time I’m out somewhere and someone tells me they read my column, it reinforces the value of the time I’ve spent generating some 180,000 words of content over the last seven years.

With that first column, I never imagined it would continue for as long as it has. There is no contract in place to secure the relationship. I suppose if I really wanted to quit writing tomorrow, I could. But week in and week out, I have to say that Thursday has become my favorite day. In fact, this column has been the most consistent part of my entire career in search. So I’ll be back next Thursday. And, most likely, the Thursday after that.

Why stop when you’re having fun?

Vacationing “On the Grid”

First published March 31, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

It’s 5 a.m. in Kauai. I’m sitting on the lanai of our condo, writing this in the glow from my laptop. I’ll continue to work on various things until about 8 a.m., when I’ll try to swim some lengths in the pool and then see what else my wife and daughters have planned for the day. Every so often I’ll check emails to see if there’s anything urgent that has to be responded to. The rest I’ll file away until tomorrow, when again I’ll get up at 5 a.m. Also, tomorrow (your today as you read this) I’ll have a 5-hour plane ride back to the mainland that will largely be used to “catch up.” I’m not jockeying for leadership in the holiday martyr’s club (it doesn’t seem like work when you’re watching the sun rise over Poipu), I’m simply describing a typical Hotchkiss vacation. It’s been this way for the past 14 or 15 years. I’ve heard about getting “off the grid.” I’ve just never been able to do it.

Some of my colleagues rave about dropping off this proverbial grid. “It was amazing!” they enthuse. “I didn’t check one email for five days!” I wonder what weird u-turn technology has taken when we feel we’ve created this monster we have to escape from, hiding in some far-flung unwired backwater, hiding from the penetrating gaze of our Outlook inbox. A number of analogies spring to mind: the fiery eyeball of Sauron that scans the Middle Earth landscape, ready to rain down pure, malevolent evil on the unwary tourist (or hobbit). Or, perhaps more appropriately, a massive wired mesh similar to a bug zapper, ready to trap and jolt any innocent vacationer who is foolish enough to fire up his laptop.

Much as we’d love we’d love to blame technology for our digital indentureship, it’s not really the one who’s at fault here. We started going down this path the minute we decided we wanted to work with ideas rather than physical things. My first job was loading 50-pound bags of various animal feed into the back of semi trailers. Had I chosen to stick with that original career path, I would have no problem leaving my job behind. It’s hard to pack a warehouse full of pig feed and several 18-wheelers in your suitcase. Getting “off the grid” would have simply meant changing location.

But today I earn my living by constructing ideas rather than stuff, and ideas are pretty portable. They have a nasty habit of following you around the world. In fact, the whole justification of getting “off the grid” is to recharge your mental batteries so you can come up with more ideas. It may cut into your vacation time, but I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. It’s not often I gaze longingly into the back of an empty semi, wishing I had 45 tons of something to load into it. A few hours on a laptop seems like a pretty good trade-off to me.

And let’s face it. My day job has allowed me to travel to places like Kauai with my family. This grid we speak of disparagingly is the very same grid that allows me to earn my living the other 350 days of the year. It’s often frustrating, and the pressures can be downright debilitating some days, but it’s also challenging and exciting. One of the main reasons I don’t mind staying “on the grid” during my vacation times is that I find a change of scene often helps me attack problems with a new perspective.

“But what about your family?” you ask. Getting up early to spend time with my laptop almost seems like I’m conducting some illicit affair. It’s actually a topic I’ve discussed at length with my wife and daughters. We realize that this is a mixed bag, with pros and cons. But we all agree that the pros far outweigh the cons. And, besides, they all carry their own personal “grids” around as well.

Someday, perhaps, I’ll truly get “off the grid” and I’ll have a new view of things. But as for today, this column is rapidly drawing to a close, I’m seeing a faint pink glow in the sky over Kauai, and the birds are starting to sing. All in all, it’s looking like another fabulous day, thanks to the “grid.”

The View from Haleakala

First published March 24, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

On the island of Maui, Haleakala is a dormant volcano that climbs 10,000 feet above sea level. When you visit Maui (I’m writing this column from the lanai of our rented condo in Kihei) you’re told, repeatedly, that you have to see sunrise from Haleakala. This is not an undertaking for the faint of heart. It means bundling up. Hawaiian breezes become significantly colder at 10,000 ft. It also means dragging yourself out of bed at an ungodly hour to drive an hour and a half up a winding mountain road in the dark. But the view, should you make the effort, is otherworldly. There is a reason why everyone tells you that this is a must. It’s one of those moments that forever jams itself in your memory. You’ll be talking about it for the rest of your life.

The point is, the best things in life take effort. They don’t come to you like a mai tai delivered on the beach. They belong to the same category as the view from Haleakala. You have to work your butt off to achieve it, but when you do, something stirs in your soul and lifts you to a higher plain. You feel, quite literally, on top of the world.

This analogy, although it feels far from the world of search, actually bears more relevance to my day job than you might realize. I once said that search marketing was like golf: easy to do, but almost impossible to master. Anyone can throw together a search campaign, just as anyone can hack their way around 18 holes. But to take search to its full potential takes a huge amount of time, thought and effort. It means tearing apart every element of a campaign and building it back up from scratch, looking for the advantages that raises your performance to another level. Search at this level is not for everyone. It’s only for those willing to work this hard.

One of the non-vacation things I’m doing on this trip is finalizing the agenda for the Search Insider Summit on Captiva Island, Fla. The sheer complexity of search was driven home as I reviewed dozens of pitches for the available slots on the agenda. The programming committee wants to continue what we started on Captiva last year, putting together three days that challenge marketers to take search to an entirely different level. As I read through the pitches and responded with suggestions, the theme of the Summit jumped out at me: reinvention. The next stage for search requires taking nothing for granted and being willing to reimagine everything we do.

To add to the challenge, search cannot be isolated from other marketing efforts. Its very nature is to connect and leverage every marketing element that’s in play. So, as we reinvent our search strategy, we reinvent everything: our marketing program, our sales channels, our relationship with our customers, the structure of our organizations and the fabric of our marketplaces. We really have no choice. Technology is forcing our hand in this. The world is changing quickly. We may be able to survive by going through the motions (although that’s not a sure bet) but thriving is going to take some — really, a lot of — effort .

My goal for the Search Insider Summit is to create three days that cause attendees to challenge the norm and consider the possible – even the impossible. It’s not for the faint of heart or those looking for easy answers. It’s like a drive up a 10,000 foot dormant volcano at 5 in the morning to stand shivering on the edge of a crater — inconvenient as hell, but something that may forever change your view of the world.

The 1% of News that Matters

First published March 17, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider.

I first heard about the earthquake in Japan from a cab driver in Milwaukee. By the time I got to the airport, it was all over the monitors. And by the time I could find a Wi-Fi connection, the first details were just starting to emerge.

Our society digests news differently now. Electronic media paints news in broad strokes. Digital media offers a never-ending deep dive into the details. In the few days since disaster struck, the Web has already built up a vast repository of information about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. The Web stretches infinitely to accommodate new content, stretching its digital boundaries as required. The shelf life of broadcast news is much shorter. Time constrains the content. Detail has to be sacrificed for impact.

But on the Web, news is also a participatory experience. News isn’t a broadcast, it’s a conversation, guided by editors and journalists but often veering in unexpected directions as our collective voice hits its stride. We shape the coverage by voicing our opinions, our concerns and, for those who are in the middle of the news, our experiences. The world is smaller, rawer, more visceral, more vital — and, hopefully, more human.

In the convergence of these two shifts in how we digest what happens in the world, there lies something impactful. Traditionally, because news was a shifting canvas where yesterday’s events quickly faded to make room for today’s, we had no choice but to move on to the next story. But now, thanks to the Web, the content remains, if we choose to seek it out. While Japan’s pain is still horribly fresh, more than a year later the traumatic story of Haiti is still unwinding online.

The fact is that 99% of the news you hear nightly won’t really make much of a difference in your life in five years. They’re stories of passing interest, but in the big scheme of things, they’re rather inconsequential. And the things that will make a difference seldom make the news. But, on the Web, the time limitation of being “new” doesn’t artificially constrain what is news. For those who continue to care about Haiti, the information is there, living on in indelible binary bits.

It’s this concept of “caring” about news that is served so well online. Humans tend to react to our surroundings in two distinct ways. We react to the immediate and awesome (in both its negative and positive connotations) simply because we’re wired to notice dramatic and potentially harmful events in our environment. But, if it has no personal impact, we move on with our lives. We’re like a herd of sheep that goes back to its collective grazing after a loud noise startles us in our pasture. For this fleeting level of engagement, broadcast news works exceedingly well. It’s been designed to impact us at this transitory level, hammering us for maximum effect by a parade of violence, negativity and trauma.

But for the 1% of stories that do affect us, that will matter to us in a very personal way in five years, the 30-second sound bite is simply not enough. If news can affect our well-being, the second level of human engagement kicks in. Now, we are hungry for information. We need to dive deep into the details, so we can understand what the personal impact might be.

Consider the difference in how I would react to the news coming out of Japan if, rather than observing it at arm’s length as I did, I had a child who was teaching English as a second language in Sendai, the epicenter of the quake. Think about how I would voraciously devour any information I could find online, trying to determine if my child was safe.

For the 1% of news that does matter to us, online provides us something we never had before. It takes the temporal and archives it at a scale never before possible. Individual slivers of history are frozen in a digital record. It allows us to connect to information that is personally relevant, even long after it qualifies as “news.”

A Search History of TED

First published March 10, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I always find it interesting to look at a cultural phenomenon through the lens of search. Search provides a fascinating and quantitative look at the growth of interest in a particular topic. Having spent all last week immersed in the cult that is TED (I was at TEDActive in Palm Springs, Calif.) I thought that this was as good a subject as any to analyze.

TED’s Back Story

The TED story, for those of you not familiar with it, is pretty amazing. TED was originally held in Monterey, Calif. in 1984, the brainchild of Richard Saul Wurman and Harry Marks. Some of the content on that first TED stage? The unveiling of the Mac, a rep from Sony demonstrating the compact disc, Benoit Mandelbrot talking about fractals and Marvin Minsky speculating on the possibilities of artificial intelligence. Due to its proximity to Silicon Valley, the conference had a decidedly tech-heavy focus. The first one lost money, and Wurman didn’t attempt another one until 1990. It was then held annually in Monterey.

In 2001, Chris Anderson took over the show and broadened the focus, adopting a more philanthropic approach. Technology still figured prominently on the TED stage, but the conference became an intellectual smorgasbord of content, with a single session known to veer from musicians to world adventurers, scientists to CEOs.

Probably the biggest change in the fortunes of TED, however, came in 2006 when the world was invited to share what happened on the TED stage. The talks were videotaped and made freely available online. And it’s here where our search story begins.

TED:TSI (TED Search Investigation)

If you use Google Insights (as I did), you see something interesting begin to happen in the search activity surrounding TED. Through 2004, 2005 and 2006, most of the search activity for TED was about the conference. There were peaks every February when the conference took place, but other than this, the volumes were pretty consistent. There was little year-over-year growth. TED remained an exclusive club for the intellectually elite. The rest of the world had never heard of it.

In 2006, when the videos were launched, a new trend began. By the end of the year, more people were using search to find the TED talks themselves than to find out about the conference. The gap continued to widen until in 2011, the search popularity of the Talks themselves is almost 3 times as much as query volume for the conference. But volumes for both have seen impressive growth. The conference rode the wave of the popularity of the videos, with query volumes over 10 times the levels seen in 2006. The videos fueled the growth of TED, making it the must see conference of the year.

The Global Mapping of TED

Another interesting trend has been to see how TED has become a global phenomenon. TED talks are most popular in Canada, followed by New Zealand, the U.S. and South Africa. They’ve also shown impressive growth in South Africa, Singapore, Australia and India. And it’s this global popularity that led TED to announce TEDx, in 2009. These are independently organized shows held around the world, with some mentorship and guidance from the TED mother ship. They have been tremendously popular — and now search volumes for TEDx have surpassed queries for the main conference.  Epicenters of the TEDx tidal wave include the Netherlands, Portugal, Finland, India and Argentina.

If we drill down to the U.S., we find the greatest concentration of TEDsters (the official moniker of members of the TED community) in Oregon, Washington and Vermont. Surprisingly, California, where the conference is held, doesn’t even make the list of top TED states. Massachusetts, New York and Hawaii all beat it out. The top 10 TED states are all solidly blue (based on the last presidential election) — except for Montana.

And because Canada is such a TED hotbed (TED has an office in Vancouver) I’m proud to say that my home province of B.C. has perhaps the greatest concentration of TED fans in the world, followed by Manitoba, Alberta (which would be the Canadian equivalent of Montana) and Saskatchewan. According to Google, the TED world capital should be Victoria, B.C, which has the highest concentration of TED-related searches of any city, anywhere. The U.S. Capital? Portland, Ore. For some reason, TEDmania is very much alive and well here in the Pacific Northwest.

TED has legs!

Finally, you may ask if the wave of TED popularity is sustainable. I had this very conversation last week with another TEDster in Palm Springs. If you look at the growth of all search volumes so far in 2011, I would say the TED wave has barely begun. Volumes have skyrocketed this year in every category I looked at.  If you compare the query volume graphs to a typical S-shaped adoption curve, you would conclude that TED is just beginning a massive growth spurt.  Get used to hearing about TED, because that will be happening a lot in the future — especially if you’re visiting Victoria or Portland.

The Paradox of Social Media: The More Social It Gets, The Less Social We Become

First published February 24, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I have teenage daughters. At least, I assume they’re still my daughters. They hang around our house and eat our food. But, to be honest, it’s been a while since we identified ourselves to each other. Between Angry Birds, SMS and Facebook, there’s precious little actual conversing going on in the Hotchkiss household. I barely recognize their faces, lit up as they are by the cool blue digital light of an iPhone screen. I assume that, at times, there’s a living being at the other end of their multi-texting, but I’m not really sure.

Yesterday, I overheard this in our lunch room: “I went for dinner the other night but have no idea how it was. Between tweeting my location, updating my status and posting a review to Yelp, I never actually ate anything.”

I’m guessing this comment was made in jest, but you never know. I remember one after-conference party held under the bridge in Sydney’s magnificent harbor, watching one very well-known search guru tweet his way through the entire evening. I don’t think he even noticed the Opera House on the other side of the bay. He was so busy tweeting his experience; he overlooked the actual “experiencing” part.

It seems to me that the more we engage in social media, the less social we actually become. The world in front of our noses is increasing being obstructed by one type of screen or another. The more we live in our new digital communities, the less we live in our real-life, flesh and blood ones. I can’t remember my neighbor’s name, but I can track the minute-by-minute location of people I’ve never met and probably never will. And by the way, congats on becoming Mayor of the Beans n’ Buns coffee shop on the corner of “LOL” and “OMG” in a city I’ll never set foot in. I’m not sure why that’s important to me, but all the “in” people assure me it is.

Humans were built to be social, but I’m not sure we were designed for social media. For one thing, research has proven that multitasking is a myth. We can’t do it. Our kids can’t do it. Nobody can do it. Much as we think we’re keeping all our digital balls in the air, eyes darting back and forth from screen to screen, it’s all a self-perpetuated ruse. Attention was designed to work with a single focus. You can switch it from target to target, but you can’t split it. If you try, you’ll just end up doing everything poorly.

Secondly, we’re built to communicate with the person in front of our nose. We pick up the vast majority of a conversation through body language and visual cues. Try as technology might, there’s just no way a virtual experience can match the bandwidth or depth of engagement you’ll find in a real face-to-face conversation. Yet, we continually pass up the opportunity to have these, opting instead to stare at a little screen and text our thumbs off.

As we spend more time with our digital connections, it’s inevitable that we’ll have less satisfying engagements with the people who share our physical space and time. The disturbing part about that is we may not realize the price we’re paying until it’s too late. Social media has slyly incorporated many elements from online gaming to make using it treacherously addictive. I suspect if we wired up the average teen while she was using Facebook or Foursquare, we’d find a hyperactive pleasure center, bathing her brain in dopamine. We’re forgoing the real pleasures of bonding to pursue an artificially wired short-cut.

The ironic part of all this is that I wrote this column on a four-hour flight, spending most of it staring at some kind of screen or another. The person sitting next to me on the plane? I don’t think we spoke more than four words to each other.

A “Page” from Google’s PR Book

First published February 10, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Somehow, I’ve gotten myself squarely in the middle of Bing and Google again. Sometimes I should just keep my big mouth shut. The latest brouhaha is Google calling Microsoft a bunch of “cheaters” for copying search results. I called it “silly.”And it is. Pretty much everyone in the search universe (outside Mountain View) agrees that this is much more about Google trying to give Bing a black eye in the media than any serious threat to intellectual property. But somehow, as Google was swinging, it’s the one that ended up with the shiner.

If this were a one-off incident, I’d put it down to some misplaced indignation and bad PR “spin” advice. Google is within its rights to bring it to Bing’s attention. I just think Google didn’t have to be so pissy about it.

A New Attitude (and it ain’t pretty)…

But I don’t think this was a misstep. I think it’s all part of a new attitude, and a sad one at that, for Google. I wrote about this almost a year ago, in April, when I found Google becoming increasingly brittle and defensive in its public face:  “The humility is disappearing and hubris again rules the day. It’s almost as if, now that Google is the king of the hill and is drawing more than their fair share of scrutiny, much of it negative, they’ve gone into defensive mode. They’ve circled the wagons and drawn more inside.”

Apparently I’m not the only one who’s noticed that. Kara Swisher, in a post titled “Google’s Bing Attack Has Larry Page Written All Over It,” says Google’s new attitude comes right from its new CEO: “I would wager that we’re about to see a lot more of this pugnacious, in-your-face tone from Google under Page’s leadership, which could have far-reaching implications for the company.

While I have no idea if it was his decision to let loose the dogs of algo-war on Microsoft, many with knowledge of how Google manages its public persona observed to me this week that this was just the kind of popping off that the outgoing Schmidt often tried to mitigate and soften.

Google on a Ram-Page…

I now suspect that Google’s increased hubris (that I mentioned in last year’s column) was caused by Page flexing his influence within the organization. I trust Swisher’s take on the mood at Google. I’ve heard similar stories of Page’s “nerdily indignant voice” from others unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of a tirade. Now, however, it’s permeating the company, and that’s sad.  Recently, I did a pretty extensive series of posts on where search might be heading. I had open and free- ranging conversations with Microsoft and Yahoo, but Google was “too busy” to have a real interview. I had to submit my questions by email and Google choose simply to ignore some of them because the company disagreed with my premise. Undertones of “how dare you question us?” rang clearly through my communications with the Big G.

I miss the days when Google was much more open-minded and accessible. I actually could get Marissa Mayer on the phone to talk about Google’s search interface. I could pick Peter Norvig’s brain about the future of the industry. Once I even had Eric Schmidt ask me “what [he] needed to know.” But that was then, and this is now.

I suspect there is much we don’t know about the transition from Schmidt to Page. The cracks are beginning to show in the Googleplex. I would guess the brittle bravado we’re seeing on the outside is masking a very un-Googlelike nervousness in Mountain View. Aaron Goldman nailed some of the symptoms in yesterday’s Search Insider.  Last April, I said, “I have no idea what this means in the big picture, but I do know that the tone and temper of an organization is a pretty reliable indicator of future success.” The signals I’m seeing with increased frequency indicate trouble ahead, and quite possibly, the most spectacular flame-out in high-tech history.