Category Archives: Personal

A collection of personal thoughts and stories

The Search Insider RFP Panel: Truer than You Know

First published May 14, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Another Search Insider Summit is in the can. And one of the most interesting panels we had was the one put together by Aaron Goldman about the RFP process in search. Aaron picked up from where he, Steve Baldwin and Janel Landis left off in a string of columns talking about the frustration of RFPs and RFQs. Aaron posed the question of whether the RFP process was fundamentally broken to a balanced panel of clients (represented by  Olivier Lemaignen from Intuit and Tom Bombacino from Restaurant.com) and agencies (represented by Tom Kuthy from Resolution Media and Janel from SendTec).

It was a fascinating session. We heard from both sides about the challenge of finding the right search partner. Panel members said the RFP process was overly rigid and bureaucratic, an attempt to avoid risk that ended up putting agencies and marketers into an adversarial relationship right from the start. Tom Kuthy said he often refuses to play the game, either trying to change the rules to a more mutually enjoyable alternative or just picking up his ball and going home. On the client side, Olivier was sure that RFP stood for “Request for Pain.”  Surely, the panel agreed, there has to be a better way.

Where Have I Heard This Before?

I found the panel so enjoyable not because of Aaron’s able “steermanship” — although he was his usually engaging self — but because the stories of pain we heard rang so true to my past experience.

As luck would have it, Enquiro is midway through an extensive webinar and white paper series on organizational buying behavior. It caps off several months of research that involved talking to hundreds of B2B buyers about how they make purchase decisions. And what I heard on Friday afternoon at Captiva was exactly what we heard time after time from these people. B2B buying is a huge pain in the butt.

There’s a sales maxim that is often quoted: “People want to buy, but they don’t want to be sold.” While this is generally true, there’s an interesting variation in the B2B world, which, as vendors, we all live in: “B2B buyers definitely don’t want to be sold, they’re ambivalent about buying, and the only thing that really matters is covering their ass.”

Here’s the Rub

When we buy things for ourselves, there’s usually an element of risk, but also one of reward. Human decision-making balances the two against each other. And we do it by gut instinct. There’s often a degree of rational deliberation, but the engine that drives consumerism is emotion: the thrill of possession vs. the fear of loss. There is a yin and yang to most purchases that carry an element of pleasure. That is why we love to buy. But some purchases, like life insurance, carry no inherent reward. There’s only risk to consider. Buying life insurance is no one’s idea of fun.

Most B2B buying is like life insurance. There’s no reward side to the equation, only risk. If we make the wrong decision, we can lose our job. If we make the right decision, we don’t get a new car, or a TV, or even a new pair of shoes. We just get 10 tons of ball bearings, or a new search agency. Where the hell is the fun in that?  Avoiding risk is all there is to most B2B buying.

Buyers and Doers

Now, some people are occasionally thrilled about B2B purchases. These are the people that get to use the new equipment, or software. They’re the ones that get to work with the new search agency (fully staffed by exceptionally fun people), taking a huge burden off their shoulders. Surely there’s an element of reward in it for these people? Yes, and that’s why they almost never give the final OK to a purchase. They’re too highly motivated to buy, so somebody needs to apply the brakes. In our research, we call the people wanting to buy the “Doers” and the people applying the brakes the “Buyers.” It’s the Buyers who insist on the RFP process. As far as the Doers are concerned, RFPs are a waste of time.

Tom and Olivier were “Doers.” They had little time for the ass-covering pretense of RFPs. On the vendor side, no one likes an RFP. But what we were missing on Aaron’s panel was a “Buyer.” I’m pretty sure the procurement people at Intuit are in no great rush to scrap their RFP process.

The Persuasive Power of Face to Face

First published April 30, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Think of the most persuasive person you know. The salesperson you can’t say no to, your mother (guilt always works), your spouse or your six-year-old child.  Now, imagine if you had never met the person in person and they were trying to persuade you over the phone, or by email. Would they be as persuasive? No. Persuasion just don’t work as well if you’re not face to face

Hardwired for Face to Face

Robert Cialdini wrote an entire book on the “Psychology of Persuasion.” He explains the hot buttons that get pushed, moving us toward doing something we might not otherwise have done. But if you look through all the persuasion buttons, one thing is true: they all work much better when you’re face to face.

Let’s take just one: reciprocity. Reciprocity, you scratching my back and me scratching yours, is a gut instinct for us. In fact, many of our treasured social institutions, including economic markets and the justice system, are based on our emotional connection to the concepts of reciprocity and fairness. Every single major faith has its own variation of the Golden Rule, which is reciprocity enshrined. But reciprocity is far more potent if the social conditions are set up in person. Political scientist Robert Putnam calls this “thick trust” as opposed to the “thin trust” represented by anonymous rules, law and mores. Study after study shows that even a simple act of giving makes the recipient feel indebted. Something as basic as asking how someone’s day is going makes one feel indebted and more likely to give something back. It’s one of the most powerful persuasion buttons you can push.

Another inherent human trait is empathy. We have an amazing ability to pick up on the emotions of others. We have a special type of neuron, called mirror neurons, that seem to be the seat of empathy. Mirror neurons explain why emotions can be contagious, why monkeys that see tend to be monkeys that do — and why, when you’re talking with someone, you find yourself subconsciously mimicking their actions or even their accent. Mirror neurons aren’t found in every animal. So far, they’ve been discovered in just a few primates, including us humans. Mirror neurons may be why the more you like someone, the more empathetic you are, leaving you more open to persuasion

What This Means for Selling Online

Somewhere along the line, face-to-face contact seemed to be considered superfluous in our new online world. We moved to virtual sales, commerce transacted at a distance, electronically, with nary a handshake, a wink, a smile or an eye roll to be seen. In theory, it should work, but in practice, it leaves a lot to be desired. We were not designed to communicate electronically. We can and do adapt to it, but like any instrument designed for a specific purpose, things just work better when we do what we were made to do. And we were made to connect with others in person.

We’re in the middle of an extensive research project exploring B2B buying and decision-making, and this lack of human contact in online sales strategies proved to be a huge obstacle to success. B2B buying is all about building trust and eliminating risk. It’s pretty difficult to build trust with someone you’ve never met. That’s not to say that electronic communication isn’t effective, but the social foundations have to be built in person. Research has shown that on Facebook, the vast majority of close “friends” that people keep are all people they know and have met face to face. You can find ideological common ground with someone over the Net, but the bonding happens when you can look in their eye and read their body language.

Face to Face in Florida

This is particularly timely with the Search Insider Summit coming up next week. I’ve found in my 13 years in this industry that my enduring friendships are always forged face to face. I knew of David Berkowitz or Aaron Goldman prior to meeting them, even admired their points of view, but I didn’t create a relationship with them until we spent some time together at a Summit. Many of the industry relationships that remain important to me were first forged at an event. Many of the most positive comments we consistently hear from the Summits are about the opportunities provided to bond and network.

Last week, I said one of the most important things we as search marketers could do was to focus on what happens after the click and improve the onsite experience. This week, I add to that. Also remember that trust is built face to face. Look at online as a way to extend and leverage those face to face encounters, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking a cold mouse is a substitute for a warm handshake.

The Spring Search Insider Summit and My Hidden Agenda

First published April 16, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I have an odd reaction whenever I get an email from Ken Fadner in my inbox. My face contorts in the strangest way. It’s half a bemused smile, half a wince, with a dash of anticipation thrown in. For those of you who don’t know him, Ken is the publisher of MediaPost. I’ve been working with Ken in putting the agenda together for the upcoming Search Insider Summit on Captiva Island, Fla.

You Have Mail…

Ken is remarkable in that, as far as I can tell, he reads every single post and column that goes up on the MediaPost site. In fact, Ken can remember more about my past columns than I can. “You know,” Ken will tell me as we discuss some topic, “you wrote about that last year.” Inside, I say to myself, “I did?” while on the outside I nod wisely and knowingly.

Ken also has the admirable quality of making sure the Insider Summit agenda is as fresh, relevant and insightful as possible. Hence my contorted reactions to his emails. We’re just three weeks away from the Summit. For everyone who’s programmed a three-day show, you know you pretty much want to have the agenda locked down by now. But Ken and I also decided three shows ago to make the Summit more a free-flowing conversation than a series of panel presentations. So I remain damned by that decision. How the hell do you program a free-flowing conversation? And Ken, every time he reads an interesting post or column, pings me and says, “Should we add this to the agenda?”  Hence the contorted facial expressions.

Search Touches Everything Now

What is interesting in this is the breadth of issues that are trying to vie their way onto our three day agenda: Search and the economy, search and brand relationships, search and ad exchanges, search and online experiences, search and attribution models, search and internal corporate politics.

Defining the scope of a Search Summit is not nearly as easy as it was a few years ago. Then you had two topics to choose from: organic optimization and paid search management. Sessions centered on a deeper tactical dive into one of these two areas. But now, search rides on the crest of our rapidly changing behaviors. Search seems to touch everything, including our relationships with our customers, how we navigate our online landscapes and how we create an internal and external structure to better “get” search and execute on it. These are not topics that fit nicely into a 12-minute PowerPoint Slide deck. These are big, brawling, thorny issues, going to the heart of a huge shift in how we market and conduct our businesses. These are topics that can only be dealt with in conversations, in fact; many conversations that don’t begin with the pretense that we’ll reach a neat, tidy answer at the end of them. Which all sounds good in theory, but how do you build an agenda around that?

Snippets of Random Conversations…

Let me give you one example. Gian Fulgoni from comScore and I connected on the phone to discuss the topic for his morning session: Search in a Recession. Going into the call, I though I had a pretty clear understanding of what the session would be.  Gian would share some query trends showing how people’s interests, translated into search queries, have shifted given the economic conditions. But within 10 seconds our conversation had veered down a related but different path. It was fascinating, potentially profound in its implications and well worth a discussion. But there’s only so much you can pack into a three-day schedule.

Here’s another example. One of the agency support team members at Google emailed me, saying one of her team members was looking for something on the “psychology of search.” I had done a presentation on something similar at Google a few months back, and she wanted to pass along the deck. Personally, I was thrilled. The psychology of search is something I’m intensely curious about. I just never expected anyone to ask for it by name.  And it’s certainly not something you would have seen on the agenda of a search conference in 2003.

So, if you’re making plans to come to Captiva Island, (and please do, it’s a wonderful experience) I’ll do my best to lock down the agenda long enough to actually get it printed for the handouts. But don’t be surprised if conversations veer off in unexpected directions.  It’s what makes the Search Insider Summit what it is. Meanwhile, somewhere I’m sure Ken is reading this column, going “Hmm…the psychology of search. We should add that to the agenda!”

I’m expecting the email any second now.

More on the Confluence of Spring Break

First published April 2, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Starting in the 1400s, an explosion of exploration came from Europe called the Age of Discovery. Prior to that, the world was a much smaller place. In fact, the end of the world was reckoned to be somewhere past Cape Bojador in West Africa. But during this time of exploration, the boundaries of the world were pushed back dramatically. By the end of the 15th century, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope, Vasco da Gama sailed by this route to India and Christopher Columbus had sailed to the new world. Just 20 years later, Ferdinand Magellan would become the first to circumnavigate the globe. In just over 100 years, the world as we know it was discovered. And it was all due to one person: Prince Henry the Navigator.

Meet Prince Henry

Prince Henry was born in 1394, the third son of King John I of Portugal. At the age of 27, his father made him governor of the province of Algarve, in the south of Portugal (coincidentally, where I spent my spring break family vacation). Although he became known as Prince Henry the Navigator or Seafarer, neither is very close to the truth. Prince Henry spent little time on a boat. Henry was really more a very capable administrator. He built the foundations that would propel Portuguese explorers to explore the world, expand the empire and bring untold wealth back to Portuguese shores. Henry set in motion a chain of events that changed history.

Henry accomplished this through four tasks:

  • He convinced Portuguese patrons, primarily the very wealthy Order of Christ, to provide a consistent source of funding for discovery, allowing for ongoing exploration.
  • He ordered the development of the much lighter and faster caravel, which allowed for more precise coastal navigation and faster crossings. It became the preferred vessel for Portuguese exploration.
  • He created a center for navigational education and cartography at Sagres, where the Portuguese developed the techniques to allow them to sail much further away from land, something that almost certainly would have resulted in disaster before this.
  • He created a “revenue model” for exploration, convincing his family of the benefits of opening up the spice and incredibly lucrative slave trade (moral judgments aside), all flowing into the nearby port of Lagos (where we stayed during our vacation).

In short, Henry created the conditions for success that lead to the explosion of discovery. The desire to break the Portuguese stranglehold was why Spain financed Columbus’s journey (rumor has it that Columbus spent time at Sagres). And the later period of English discovery was also precipitated through competition with Portugal and Spain. And it all began with an effective administrator.

Taking a Lesson from History

Now, let me draw together my three disparate ideas that I started last week, (although I’m sure you’re already well ahead of me):

  • In “Outliers,” Malcolm Gladwell argues that success isn’t pure chance. It’s a combination of conditions that can be planned and set in place. Certainly, Vasco da Gama didn’t luck into his discovery of the route to India
  • Ray Kurzweil (whether or not you agree with his vision of the future) shows that technology can release us from the constraints that threaten our world, including disease, poverty, environmental damage and even death.
  • And Henry the Navigator provides historical proof of the value of a visionary and capable administration.

We who are fortunate enough to find ourselves in rich, developed countries have enjoyed a disproportionate share of success. Even during the current financial turmoil, we are still, by far, the wealthiest and most advantaged people on the face of the earth. But we cannot move forward with a misbegotten sense of entitlement or by taking our success for granted. We have to put the foundations in place that will lead to success in a new and dramatically different world. We have to follow in Henry’s footsteps, building the foundations that will lead to discovery and expansion of our world. If we don’t, someone else surely will. In fact, they already are. To the East, exactly those foundations are currently being put in place.

We need an administration that is capable of building this foundation. And here, we can learn a lesson from history. This administration must:

  • Realize that discovery is an incremental and imperfect process. For every success, there will be many more failures. But success is impossible without those failures.
  • Be bold and consistent in guaranteeing funding for technological discovery.
  • Be wise in balancing the moral dilemmas presented by technology. The good of the many must prevail against the knee-jerk reactions of the few.
  • Be prepared to completely reinvent our concept of education, because we are being quickly left behind.We have been blessed with huge advantages and the future is ours to lose, but there is nothing guaranteed here. In the 1300s, Portugal was a small and relatively insignificant player on the European landscape. But, because of one man’s vision, they ruled the world just one hundred years later. It was an era of discovery and opportunity that was unequaled in history. But it pales in comparison to what awaits us.

The Confluences of Spring Break

First published March 26, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

It’s funny. Given three disparate ideas and enough time out of the office, I can somehow manage to tie it all together into a Search Insider theme. The ingredients for this column? The two books I chose to pack to read on my Spring Break vacation, and a bit of history from Southern Portugal, where I’ve spent the past week.

Odd Man Out

The first book was Malcolm Gladwell’s latest, “Outliers” (chosen primarily because reading Gladwell doesn’t seem like work at all, a key criteria for vacation reading). In typical Gladwellian fashion, he takes a central idea — the outliers that fall beyond the bell curve aren’t there solely because they’re on the thin edge of pure statistical probability — and explores it with a mix of story telling, research and undeniably compelling writing.  If one can excuse Gladwell for his “Just So” tendencies, putting his ideas across from his single perspective, with a rather fast and loose selection of supporting arguments, it made for a painless and fascinating read.

In “Outliers,” Gladwell looked at statistical oddballs as diverse as Bill Gates (in terms of success), The Beatles (again, success),  Chris Langan (a genius with an IQ of 195 who never made it through university), Korean Airlines (for the frequency of crashes in the ’80s and early ’90s), a small town called Roseto in Pennsylvania (where everybody lives longer than they’re supposed to, statistically speaking) and the hockey players that make it to the WHL (Western Hockey League) and eventually, the NHL (like me, Gladwell also grew up in Canada).

Luck is What You Make It

Gladwell’s point, which he makes persuasively, is that these things are not simply a matter of odds or blind luck. There are distinct patterns of influence that tend to create outliers. They include your socioeconomic status, your culture, your upbringing and even your birthday. Here is a smattering of Gladwell’s reasonings:

·     NHL hockey players make the big leagues because they’re born early in the year, physically dominating their age groupings in minor hockey, advancing to rep teams, thereby getting more coaching and ice time.

·     Bill Gates, through a series of lucky occurrences, managed to amass 10,000 hours of programming experience as a child and teen at a time where access to computers was very hard to come by.

·     The Beatles jumped ahead of their contemporary competition because the 8-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week performing schedule in Hamburg ground down their rough edges and smoothed out their act.

·     Korean Airlines had an abysmal safety record because Korean culture made it taboo to question the wisdom of the pilot, even if he had the plane heading directly into a mountain

·     Chris Langan was born with one of the highest measured IQs in America, but was also born poor and disadvantaged, leaving him without the social skills required to successfully navigate through university and on to adult success.

Gladwell’s conclusion Luck, either good or bad, isn’t simply left to chance.  And even inherent gifts, like Langan’s IQ, aren’t a guarantee of success. Luck can be manufactured. The conditions for success can be consciously put in place in a system where the desired outcomes are known. So, what are those outcomes? That brings me to the second book I brought on vacation.

Welcome to Kurzweil’s Singularity

Ray Kurzweil is definitely out there. This is a man who takes 250 nutritional supplements every day and gets seven blood transfusions every week so he can re-engineer his body to live longer. He believes humans and computers will merge in the next few decades, vastly pushing back the known limits of human intelligence, an event he calls the Singularity.

My other book was Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near” — a book chosen primarily for its heft of over 600 pages. I knew it would keep my busy through to the end of my two- week vacation. A quick summary of Kurzweil’s predictions from the book might lead one to question his mental stability:

–       Physical bodies will become essentially meaningless in the next century, as we will live in a virtual world with physical representations of our own design.

–       Table top “nanofactories” will create everything we’ll need, atom by atom, from a lump of raw materials.

–       We will upload our personalities to a computer, thereby living forever.

–       Technological evolution has taken over from biological evolution, giving humans the freedom to design our future.

–       Aging and disease are a few decades away from being conquered forever.

–       Nanobots will allow us to control every element of our environment,  eliminating pollution.

Kurzweil is manically optimistic about our future, and that future is not hundreds of years away. Most of Kurzweil’s seminal events happen before 2050. As the title of the book says, the merging of biology and technology is near (starting in 2030).

Just Crazy Enough to be Right

But Kurzweil is far from a quack. The reason for the imminent horizon is the rapid, exponential increase in the rate of technological advancement. Kurzweil is meticulous in pulling together the current state of affairs in areas including nanotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering and neuroscience to build a rock-solid foundation for his predictions.

Kurzweil’s view of the future is positively blinding in its enthusiastic brilliance. He is adamant that there is no problem that can’t be overcome with enough intelligence, a resource that will explode in abundance thanks to the Singularity.  And his track record is sound. Kurzweil’s predictions have been remarkably accurate in the past. It’s hard not to get caught up in his optimism. Even if it all doesn’t come to pass, Kurzweil paints a picture of a future worth striving for.

So, those are the first two ideas that converged over my Spring Break. Luck doesn’t just happen. We’re not held prisoner by some probabilistic crapshoot. And for the first time in memory, I saw a vision of the future that wasn’t predominantly pessimistic. I’ll leave it there for now. Next week, I’ll tell you the story of Portugal’s Henry the Navigator.

Looking for the Future? Look for Chaos, not Stability

First published March 19, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This week, someone asked me about sustainable business models in the Internet.  Earlier the same day, another person asked me about defensible models. Both questions left me perplexed. I wasn’t trying to avoid them. I just didn’t know how to answer. So, some 48 hours later, I offer this column as a somewhat belated response. It isn’t an answer, as I’m still just as perplexed. But now at least I know why.

So why are people asking about defensible and sustainable business models on the Internet? Well, if there’s one thing the Internet has done, it’s brought sky-high valuations back to earth. So, investors doing what investors do, they’re suddenly looking for “bargain” companies that have mature business models and trial-tested management.  Hence the quest for sustainability and defensibility. Reasonable, right? It certainly makes sense if you’re going shopping for a private equity fund. But in the last two days, I’ve decided it’s almost exactly the wrong question to ask. It’s like looking for dry ground in a tsunami: it may give you some temporary peace of mind, but don’t count on it to last long.

The Quarter Century Electric Switch

Nicholas Carr’s book, “The Big Switch,”  ties the development of the Internet to a previous discontinuous innovation, the electrification of America. In it, he provides a fascinating recount of the unsung visionary who laid the foundations of the power grid we take for granted today, Samuel Insull.  Insull started as Thomas Edison’s clerk, but soon split with his mentor in his vision of the future of electricity. Edison, for all his brilliance, was thinking too small. He was concentrated on building individual DC generators for industrial applications. Insull saw the promise of a ubiquitous power supply, centrally generated and then distributed. It is Insull, not Edison, who is responsible for the power receptacle that probably sits no more than 10 feet away from you right now.

In the very earliest days of electricity, one would have been a fool not to choose Edison as the forerunner, the candidate most likely to carve a business out of the new frontier. His innovations harnessed electricity and made it usable.

But if you had bet on Edison to provide a sustainable model, you would have lost. It was Tesla’s AC standard, not Edison’s DC, that proved to be the one adopted. And it was Insull’s vision of electricity as a utility that changed our world.

The idea was simply too big for one man. And it was bringing all the implications of that idea together that proved to be the true agent of change. It launched a shift in American (and global) lifestyles that Edison never envisioned.  But from the initial stages in the final years of the 19th century, that shift took three decades to be fully realized. It took the building of new infrastructure, the development of new industries and the adoption of certain ways of doing things. It took thousands of visionaries, not one, to realize the significance of harnessing electricity.  Imagine then the impossible task of finding a defensible, sustainable business model for electricity in 1895. In hindsight, it’s clearly laughable to even attempt such a thing. But today, we’re trying to do exactly that with the Internet.

Fragmented Functionality

There is one big difference between the Internet and electricity. An electrical appliance is an electrical appliance. Its functionality is usually independent. A blender doesn’t become more useful if you also plug in a toaster. But the Internet lives on mashups and APIs. Apps can become exponentially more powerful if they plug into other apps.

Today, the Internet is a fragmented place. Functionality lies across the grid in a million different shards and chunks. Some of these are larger than others. Search is a particularly large one. And today, we’re just beginning to explore how all this functionality can come together.  The infrastructure has been laid. The grid has been built. Now it’s time to start plugging in apps and see how they can work together. If you think the last decade brought discontinuous change, wait til you see what the next decade has in store. We’re just getting ready to take the Net for a spin and see what it can do.

I’ve come to realize that there’s no such thing as revolutionary change. It only appears so when you look at it in a historical perspective. Instead, there  are tipping points of incremental change. Every supposedly revolutionary development was built on the back of hundreds of other developments. Cumulatively, they indeed change everything, but each development could never have happened without its supporting cast. It wasn’t Edison’s development of the incandescent light bulb that lit up America. It was a thousand developments, by Faraday, Golvani, Ohm, Volta and many others. Each one pushed us closer to the tipping point. When we reach it, we step forward, never to look back.

Back to the Original Question

To return to the beginning: What is a sustainable, defensible business strategy online? I have no idea. I don’t think such a thing exists. For all the excitement, for all the promise, there are no sure bets. The two concepts are incompatible. You’ll have to pay your money and take your chances. To cause investors even more discomfort, almost all innovation comes from small start-ups. They far outpace the level of innovation coming out of corporate America. So if you’re looking to capitalize on the growth of the Internet, don’t look for stability. It’s the wrong place to look.

Google: Bad Behavior?

It seems that every time I’m getting ready to go on a family holiday, Google decides to up the game with personalization. Two years ago on the cusp of a spring getaway they announced default opt ins for search and web history. This time, they’re siddling up to behavioral targeting, courtesy of that same personal information. In the process, they’ve recanted much of what they’ve said about behavioral targeting over the past 2 years. I have always said that of course Google was going to go down the behavioral targeting road. Why else would they be collecting the data? The official line of making your search experience better didn’t hold much water.

I’m torn on the whole question of behavioral targeting. As a marketer, I appreciate the potential. BT was the tactic that marketers were most interested in according to the latest SEMPO Search Market Survey. But as a user, I’m profoundly disappointed in Google’s tip toeing around the issue. I think it shows a more fundamental issue at the heart of Google’s culture, which has been rearing it’s head more often as of late.

The disastrous economy has created a split personality within Google.It seems that Google, once the brash, idealistic young university student out to change the world is now being severely schooled in the more pragmatic ways of that world. Google is growing up, and I’m not sure we’ll like what it turns into. It’s double talking, pulling the bait and switch, sacrificing ideals for cash and sometimes outright lying. In short, it’s becoming just like every other company in the world. The company John Battelle wrote about in The Search is rapidly disappearing. In it’s place is an online juggernaut that seems intent on keeping advertisers happy. The one thing that always set Google apart was it’s respect for the user. If you read the official Google press release on this, the carrot for the user is more relevant ads. Okay,that’s a stretch of epic proportions. You’re tracking everything I do, based on a promise to make my search experience more useful. You know what? My search experience hasn’t changed too much in the last 2 years. I haven’t noticed a huge increase in relevancy. But now you’re using the information I volunteered, giving it to marketers so they can serve me more ads? That wasn’t part of the original bargain Google. You violated my trust. And you did it to keep more revenue rolling in.

Behavioral targeting of ads was inevitable. Everyone knew Google was going there. So why were they so righteous (and so dismissive of other BT providers) in saying that it just wasn’t a targeting approach they were going to take? Not cool, Google, not cool.

Don’t Think Recession, Think Resetting

I was listening to an interview the other day and heard the best piece of economic news I’ve heard in over 2 years. The person being interviewed was talking about changes in urbanization in North America and he said he doesn’t think of the current economic situation as a recession, he thinks about it as a resetting of the economy. That got me thinking.

His point was that in the two most dramatic economic pull backs in the last two centuries, there was a corresponding seismic shift in how we worked and how and where we lived. And after the pain of resetting, the world emerged and prospered for a significant period of time.

Consider the economic turmoil of the 1870’s. By all accounts the world was in economic ruin. The colonial empires of Europe were beginning their long, slow decline. The largest bank in the US, Jay Cooke and Company, failed. The speculative bubble after the civil war burst. Labor unrest was epidemic, leading to riots in Chicago, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and New York.

Or the Great Depression of the 30’s, the economic disaster that’s still only a generation or two away for most of us. A stock market collapse, followed by a banking collapse, followed by massive business closures and unemployment.

But the fact is, significant change and yes, advancement, came from both these periods. In the 1870’s, an agrigarian society moved to an industrial one, significantly increasing our production capabilities, creating the huge factories and huge relocation from rural areas to the dense urban centers. Immigration swelled North America with millions determined to create a better life. There was massive change, which always brings pain and unrest, but also advancement. One can’t seperate the two. They come as a package.

As the world emerged from the Great Depression and the Second World War, we began the move to the suburbs and the Great American Dream, brought to you by Kelvinator, Pontiac, Maytag and hundreds of other bread and butter brands. A second wave of immigration brought new dreams and aspirations to our borders.

Techonology always moves faster than humans. And, in the shift, entire societal frameworks have to be reinvented. This never happens incrementally or smoothly. History has shown us that existing infrastructures have to be torn down and new ones erected. Through the process, human emotions run rampant, which flood our ever so fragile economy. This has always been the way, and it will always be the way, because we are who we are. Our mental hardware hasn’t changed in thousands of years.

But in this reinvention, this resetting, we build the foundations for the next stage of our ongoing story. And in this regard, there are tremendous reasons for economic hope. If you rise above the micro view and look at the macro picture, the efficiency of the digital marketplace is extraordinary and will provide the greatest boost to our productivity in history. Forces of globalization are leveling wealth distribution and the tide is raising all boats. Science is on the verge of hundreds of life altering breakthroughs on almost every front. The global standard of living has never been higher, along with life expectancies and levels of education and health care. The challenges are not so much economic. There we just have to rebuild sustainable infrastructures to accommodate the new realities of enhanced potential and get rid of some nasty habits of over consumption. And while we’re working through the process we have to make sure we don’t rape our planet beyond repair.

The world is not in bad shape. We just have some significant house cleaning to do. This will not be fast (we’re in the middle of a huge transition shift, so think decades, not years) nor will it be painless. But if we handle it correctly, it could be the biggest jump forward in history.

Belief in Evolution still 50/50 in the US

It’s amazed me how slow the US has been to accept Evolution. It’s been 150 years since the publication of Darwin’s theory and as I said in a previous post, more people in the US believe in angels than Evolution. I ran across an interesting chart in The Economist that showed the acceptance of Evolution in different countries around the world. Guess what? Of the countries shown, only Turkey comes in below the US.

acceptance

Happy Birthday – Charles Darwin!

darwinToday’s the day. Charles Darwin’s 200th Birthday. And this year also marks the 150th Anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. It’s an interesting comment on Darwin’s personality that although he formulated the theory in his twenties aboard the HMS Beagle, it took him another 2 decades to screw up the courage to publish it. And, in the end, it was only competitive pressure from Alfred Wallace and a not insignificant amount of urging from Darwin’s contemporaries that pushed him to go public with the Theory of Natural Selection. Darwin knew it would be a conceptual bombshell of epic proportions in Victorian England. He wasn’t wrong. Repercussions are still felt today.

But it also marked one of the most significant shifts of scientific thinking in history. As Theodosius Dobzhansky said in 1973, “Nothing in Biology makes sense but in the light of Evolution“. Since the publication, Darwinian thinking has been applied to everything from Artificial Intelligence to Civic Planning to Neural Development to Computer Games. The concept of emergence in complex systems is simple and elegant yet vast in it’s implications. It could well mark the most important  and change inducing conceptual framework for this century.

I find it amazing that today in America, more people believe in the Devil and angels than in the theory of Evolution, according to a recent Harris poll. One of those American’s was recently running for Vice President. According to the same poll, Evolution does now edge out Creationism (47% vs 42%) but is not that far ahead of belief in ghosts (44%) and UFOs (36%). It just shows how beliefs will trump rationalism. Darwin’s theory is a classic example of parsimony: a simple idea that is breathtakingly profound.

So, I offer a sincere Thank You and Happy Birthday to the quiet and gentile biologist that was born 200 years ago today in Shrewsbury, England. Well done Charles, well done.