Category Archives: Personal

A collection of personal thoughts and stories

No Search is an Island

First published February 12, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Today I am plagued by ambiguity. I’m happy and scared. Relieved and cautious. Excited and apprehensive. And it all has to do with search and how we use it. On one hand, I’m relieved that search seems to be the sole marketing channel that’s actually benefiting from the crushing economic pressure. On the other hand, I’m worried that we may be short-sighted in grabbing onto search as a life preserver in raging marketing waters.

Search: The Connector

My ambiguity comes from the unique nature of search. We consider search a marketing channel, and in recent times we’re treating it as such. But it’s not. Search is glue. Search is intent expressed. Search is a mirror of our dreams, objectives and fears. To treat search as a channel divorces it from its real role as an integral connector. And, as such, search is inextricable from not just the online world, but the offline one as well. Whatever happens, whenever it happens, it shows up in the search trends.

And therein lies the source of my internal turmoil. If you look at search as a marketing channel, the current move by advertisers down the funnel, driving towards more and more accountable advertising, is predictable and a good thing. Search is certainly effective and measurable. But if we look at search as the connecter between demand and fulfillment, there’s an inherent problem looming. As budgets dry up in creating awareness and eventually demand, search inventories will ultimately dry up as well.

Obsessive Optimization

I’ve talked to a few search marketers here at SMX West who are saying their clients are pushing them to drop generic terms and stick to branded ones because they convert better. Even as effective as search is, we can’t resist trying to pump conversion numbers even higher.

If advertisers are this obsessive about cutting all the fat from their marketing, it seems they’ve backed themselves to the very brink of a dangerous precipice. One more step and they’ll have reduced their marketing efforts to managing a paid search campaign for “I want to buy an Acme Widget online today and I have my credit card out.”

Everyone is focused on the thinnest possible slice at the bottom of the funnel, without worrying about priming the pump at the top. While it may bolster search revenues in the short term as budgets migrate in from all other channels, in the long term this shortsightedness will prove disastrous.

I believe there is a tremendous amount of optimization that has to happen across all marketing channels. I’m not saying that all budgets should stay put where they are. But I do worry about an obsessive focus on capturing late-stage demand, even if it is through search.

You have to develop your market and create awareness. Search doesn’t work if nothing is creating awareness. Those branded queries won’t suddenly materialize out of the ether. Marketers seem inclined to take huge pendulum swings in their approach, one minute tossing branding money around by the bucketful, and the next clamping down on anything that isn’t a sure conversion. There has to be a happy medium.

For Every Action…

Search is the last half of a cause-and-effect chain. If you just focus on the effect, sooner or later the cause will cease to exist. As search marketers, much as we gleefully accept the new budget flowing in from other channels, we have to understand the inherent integrated nature of search. If we accept the windfall in the short term, we’ll end up paying in the long term.

I’m personally thankful that search is the boat I’ve chosen to ride out this particular economic storm. There’s no place I’d rather be. But I think it’s naïve to ignore the macro effects that will impact search behavior. As I said before, whatever happens, wherever it happens, whenever it happens, it will be reflected in search. And as all other marketing channels begin to run dry because of budgeting cutbacks, that too will show in search trends.

Tweets from the Edge

First published February 5, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’m now on Twitter (@outofmygord if you’re interested), which, to use the emerging verb of consensus, means that I tweet.  I’m not sure I’m a Twaddict (a la Todd Friesen) but I am moving through Rohit Bhargava’s 5 Stages of Twitter Acceptance

1 . Denial  — “I think Twitter sounds stupid. Why would anyone care what other people are doing right now?”

2. Presence —  “Ok, I don’t really get why people love it, but I guess I should at least create an account.”

3. Dumping –“I’m on Twitter and use it for pasting links to my blog posts and pointing people to my press releases.”

4 .Conversing — “I don’t always post useful stuff, but I do use Twitter to have authentic 1X1 conversations.”

5. Microblogging — “I’m using Twitter to publish useful information that people read AND converse 1×1 authentically .”

My self-assessment has me currently lodged between steps 3 and 4, but with signs of promise. And so, through the phenomenon of synchronicity, it now seems that everywhere I turn I see signs of Twitter. One of the recent one’s was Kaila Colbin’s Search Insider column about Twitter’s monetization strategy, or lack of same. Twitter is not unique; virtually every social network struggles with this issue. I would like to add two observations from my perspective.

The Curse of the Early Adopter

Social networks seem to be perennially stuck on the edge of the wrong side of Geoffrey Moore’s Chasm.  They flourish with early adopters, who are by nature fickle when it comes to technology and any bright shiny object, but social networks have difficultly embedding themselves in the mainstream. I’m seeing signs that Facebook might successfully make the leap across the Chasm, based on my “Jill” litmus test. When my wife is familiar with a technology, it usually means it’s crossed the Chasm.  Jill doesn’t have a Facebook page, but she has visited it (due largely to the fact that we have teenage daughters — ’nuff said).

The problem in trying to track these things is that whatever the blogosphere is buzzing about bears little resemblance to what will actually gain traction with a mainstream market. We (and yes, I include myself) are exactly the wrong people to prognosticate about what may be the next killer app for the average Joe. We are all technology nerds. Everyone I know in this industry is a technology nerd. The ones who actually blog and emerge as thought leaders are the most hopeless of the lot. We exist in a rarified technological atmosphere and have largely lost touch with the real world. It doesn’t mean we’re inherently prone to be wrong about the marketability of new technology, but it also means we’re not inherently right. We’re guessing, and all too often we let our personal enthusiasm bias our forecasts.

Social networks are always held up to Google as the monetization baseline, and it’s an unfair and misleading comparison. There were a number of circumstances unique to Google that won’t be replicated with a social network. They include user intent, the nascent stage of the Internet during Google’s introduction, lack of visionary competition and the luxury of developing a critical mass of usage on its own real estate.  The problem with monetizing Twitter is that much of the interaction with it happens on a third-party app.

Social and Market Norms

Perhaps the biggest reason why it’s difficult to monetize social results has to do with how our online experiences are framed, and the concept of social vs. market norms.  Here’s an example. You take your family out for an Italian dinner. The meal is fabulous. The portions are huge. After one of the best meals you’ve ever had, you hand $180 to the hostess. She throws it back in your face, storms into the kitchen and you’re abruptly escorted to the door. If we were at a restaurant, this reaction would be rather surprising. But if we’re at my mother-in-law’s for Sunday dinner, it suddenly makes sense. The difference is the frame in which we view the scenario. If we look at it through a market norm, the rules that govern commerce and fair trade, it’s entirely appropriate to offer fair compensation for a meal. If we look at it through a social norm, the rules that govern our family and friend relationships, it’s an unforgivable insult.

This slippery slope between market and social norms is the treacherous one that a social network must tread. Here’s another example. You’re at a party and you’ve asked two friends about their opinions on the best car for you to buy. Another person at the party overhears this — someone who just happen to be a salesperson at the local Ford dealership. Sensing opportunity, the salesperson whips around and immediately starts telling you why the Ford Mustang is the perfect car for you. How would you feel? How would you respond to the information?  How uncomfortable would the discussion become?

The challenge is that you moved from a social norm to a market norm and you weren’t in control of the transition. The same is true when you use a social network to ask for information and suddenly the network uses that to present targeted ads to you.  Kaila was right to point to Twitter’s search functionality as its only monetization opportunity. Google has conditioned us to accept a search results page as a place we can look at through market norm eyes. Also, we’re searching all Tweets for mention of a product, not specifically asking our friends. The difference is crucial in how we accept the advertising message.

The confluence of social networking and search is exciting to contemplate, but expect a lot of trial and error in the quest to find the right business model. Personally, I don’t expect to find it any time soon, and I also expect a lot of miffed users as part of the collateral damage.

Got the UCLA Googlized Brain Study!

Thanks to UCLA, I just got a copy of the UCLA fMRI study of what happens to people’s brains when they use Google. This is fascinating..well..it is if you live in my skull.

The study was done by Dr. Gary Small, Dr. Susan Bookheimer and Dr. Teena Moody. Just got it so I haven’t had a chance to read through it, but I’m looking forward to it. As chance would have it, I just finished Gary Small’s book – iBrain – last night. The most interesting part of the book was references to several fMRI studies done around the world, showing what parts of the brain fire in given situations and while we’re undertaking different tasks. When it comes to searching, I have my own theories..which I talked about here and in my Search Insider Column. I’d like to see if the UCLA results match up.

Small’s discussion of Digital Natives vs Digital Immigrants is really interesting as well, and something I want to take a much deeper dive on in future posts and articles. Briefly, natives grew up with technology, so their brain basically molded itself with hard wired capabilities, while immigrants learned their tech skills after the brain had largely formed itself. Think of the difference between growing up with a language and learning it as an adult. Digital natives are fluent in technology..for the rest of us, it will never be our native tongue. Small does make one serious transgression in the discussion which drove me nuts. He keeps swapping out neuroplasticity for the word “evolution”, giving the impression (which he never bothers to clear up) that genetic evolution can happen in one generation. It just doesn’t work that way.

That said, it’s pretty fascinating research and a question that seems to be of interest to many. I did a Search Engine Land article on it called “Are Our Brains Becoming Googlized” which picked up a healthy number of Diggs and became one of Search Engine Land’s most read articles. I’m trying to land an interview with one of the researchers. If successful, I’ll let you know how to access.

I’m very happy in my own nerdy little neuro-world!

Apple Should Build a Search Engine

As I mentioned..got my iPhone late last week. What’s amazed me most is the attention to detail in the user experience. Every little thing has been thought through and integrated into the experience. As opposed to Windows Mobile..where every little thing seems to be developed seperately and then the whole ungainly mess is bound together with chewing gum and scotch tape. Can’t speak to the other mobile OS’s..but the iPhone amazes me.

There’s a philosophy here that seems to be recurring. You can throw brute force innovation at a problem, trying to overwhelm it by a sheer show of power. Or, you can create innovation around the needs of the user, making sure your solutions contribute to an amazing user experience. Microsoft seems to be in the first camp (where much of the ad hoc innovation ends up being dropped, just because it can’t be integrated in a useful manner) and Apple is in the second camp. You’ll see this in other industries. I’m thinking GM and Toyota’s approach to the driver experience.  I don’t think anyone on the planet has more respect for the user than Apple.

This is the thinking that’s desperately needed in Search. Google comes the closest, but even they don’t have the Zen-like holistic user experience that Apple seems to bring. It would be amazing to see these two colloborate on next generation search..with Google’s immense respect for relevant information, defined by the user, and Apple’s ability to weave it into a seamless and amazing experience.

Were the Good Old Days Really So Good?

Why are we in such a rush to return to the way things were?

Most reports I’m reading say that it will take years for the economy to recover to where it was. Why have we set this as our baseline for success? Who says the way we’ve behaved in the past 5 decades (especially the last 15 to 20 years) is the way we should behave in the future? Certainly not the rest of the world. Certainly not the environment.

I was reading an article in Adweek that said Boomers are now saving rather than spending, and it was put across as bad news (at least for marketers). Isn’t it about frigging time we started doing that?

I think we have to accept that as much fun as the party has been, it can’t keep going on. Urging us to get back to where we were is like curing a hangover with another drink. We’ve been irresponsible, greedy, short sighted and consumed by consumption. And what we’re going through is directly attributable to that behavior. A change in behavior is absolutely essential for survival. It won’t be fun, but a future, any future, is a lot more likely if we go through the pain now than if we continue to get back on what Michael Eysenck calls the hedonic treadmill, chasing some misbegotten ideal of happiness.

Thank goodness Boomers are saving. Thank goodness Detroit is seriously looking at more environmental vehicles. Thank goodness we’re starting to realize there’s more to life than a big screen TV. It’s about time.

The Importance of Touchpoints – every Touchpoint

I got an iPhone on Thursday.

This post has nothing to do with the iPhone..everything to do with where I got it. Being in Canada, Roger’s is the only carrier that has the iPhone. Roger’s is particularly clueless when it comes to brand integrity (perhaps rivaled only by Air Canada in my home and native land). And this was made abundantly clear to me.

I went to a local mobile store. While the store is run by a licensee, the branding is all Roger’s. For all intents and purposes, it’s a Roger’s store. I walked up to the counter and what appeared to be a 13 year old with a five o’clock shadow who managed the store siddled over to wait on me. His assistant, a petulant female, rolled her eyes and went in the back.

I currently have a Roger’s plan, put in place almost 4 years ago. At the time, I put a plan in place that would cover my somewhat limited data needs. To be honest, I don’t really monitor the bills and my assistant finally showed me one. I hit the roof. Because my device now syncs with our mail server while I’m in Canada (I’m on another plan when I’m in the US) my data traffic has increased substantially. Here’s the details of the plan I was on..get this..25 Megs per month for $25 bucks..and 5 cents a kilobyte for overages! 5 cents a kilobyte! My relatively modest data needs were racking up hundreds of dollars in charges. Was I stupid for letting it go? Absolutely. But obviously Roger’s was perfectly happy to leave me on the stupidest plan in the world and rake in the money. That’s their bad.

So, after hitting the roof, I decided to change the plan. Roger’s plans are still highway robbery, but at least Apple forced them to ease the data plan usury in order to get exclusives on the iPhone. Now..I could get 1 GB of data monthly, plus a limited voice plan, for about $70 a month..all in. I could get an iPhone (which I’ve been salivating over for some time) and still save hundreds a month. I still had to deal with Roger’s, but to be honest, their competition is no better (Twitter recently had to discontinue SMS notifications in Canada because our mobile carriers are uniformly stupid). So, hence my visit to the local store.

I informed Skippy, the wonder manager, of all this and he said, “Well, I can get you set up with the iPhone dude, but I can’t change your plan. You need to call Roger’s to do that”.

“Why?”

The answer was painfully incoherent, but it came down to Roger’s not trusting their licensees (remember, this is Skippy’s take on the situation) and trying to lock me into a package that maximized profit for them and minimized usability for me. Skippy walked me through the routine (with many interjections of “Sorry dude, Roger’s makes us do this”) and, as we were wrapping up, pulled out the check lists to make sure he had done all the things he was supposed to. By this time, I was looking for the nearest exit to escape. Yes..you had shown me how the iPhone works. Yes, you explained all the nickle and dime charges imposed on me. Yes, you explained how Roger’s repossesses my home if I cancel early. Yes, you explained why the writing on the contract might not be what I actually get. Just let me go home.

And then, the final straw.

“Okay..you’re probably going to get a call from Roger’s to make sure I did my job right. I only get my points if you answer that you were ‘definitely satisfied'”

“Sure”

“No..I mean it. That’s the only answer that will give me the score I need. Will you answer that.” At this point, I swear to God, he gives me a photocopied sheet of paper with the right answer printed on it, circled with a check mark beside, just to jog my memory for the call. “You will say ‘Definitely Satisfied’, right?”

At this point, I was either ready to beat my self to death with my shiny new iPhone, or burst out laughing. Skippy was on the verge of tears. I could have launched into an explanation of how this was not the way to ensure customer satisfaction (but the irony is, he does this with every customer and it probably works most of the time. Whoever thought up this approach had done their psychological homework) but that would have cost me more precious hours of my life. I smiled my best paternal, sympathetic older dude to younger dude smile and said, “Sure man.”

Obviously, Roger’s is trying to police the quality of these licensee touchpoints through these ridiculous QA checklists and follow up phone calls, but it made the entire experience bizarre. I think a better approach would be to create reasonable plans, be proactive with existing customers in moving them into the right plans, be more transparent and fair with promotional deals, insist on better hiring practices and provide more value to customers. If they did all these things, their brand integrity could survive the odd fumble in the hands of a Skippy.

Chasing Digital Fluff – Who Cares about What’s Hot?

Marketers are falling over themselves in their rush to the digital landscape. Social media is SO hot! But not as hot as behavioral targeting. And if you think that’s hot, wait till you see what you can do with mobile!

The Digital Dogpile

blow-dandelionMarketers desperately scramble over each other, grasping for a tenuous handhold on some emerging tactic that gives them, however briefly, a fraction of an inch advantage over the competition. New digital marketing directors prove their worth through their savvy of online technology. They cut their teeth on Facebook advertising and put Powerpoints (or, because they’re uber-cool – Keynote presentations) together on the immense potential of the social graph.

Churn is the norm in digital marketing. And marketers are the worst, whipping the industry into a froth because they get all breathless about the latest thing. My inbox gets a hundred emails every single day talking about how freaking cool everything is and how we’re stumbling to figure out the importance of everything. If you’re not an early adopter…scratch that…if you’re not a bleeding edge pioneer, you’re a hopeless loser. The pace of marketing testing and adoptions just keeps spinning faster and faster.

Step Away from the iPhone

Stop! Take a breath. Relax for a few minutes. Get outside and breath some honest to God fresh air. And don’t take your iPhone with you. Because here’s the scoop Kemosabe, all the technology in the world is useless until your audience figures out how to use it. And here’s the nasty little secret. Humans love bright shiny objects but we’re pretty slow when it comes to figuring out how to jam it into our already busy lives. Until that happens, your nifty online strategies will never be anymore than a pointless treadmill jammed on overdrive. You can run as fast as you want, but you’ll never get anywhere.

I do financial analyst calls every quarter and the last question on the call is always the same: anything else we should be looking at? Apparently, technologiosis (or technitis, or technophilia, take your pick) is contagious. My answer is usually the same..wait till people figure out how to use it.

Think about the buzz that’s been devoted to social networks and, more recently, real time search, in the last 2 years. That’s 2 years of foaming-at-the-mouth marketing buzz about how this channel is:

A) the savior of marketing
B) most effective connection with consumers
C) coolest technology without an identifiable purpose
D) biggest waste of time on God’s green earth
E) all of the above

The Geekiest Guy on my Block

Now, I’ll be the first to admit I don’t have a clue how to use social media in a meaningful way in my life. I have a Facebook page, I tweet, I have a Linked In profile, a Trip-It network, just to name a few, making me the geekiest guy I know. Maybe not at an online marketing show, but if you ever visit Kelowna, take a walk with me down my block and I’ll prove my techno-geek status is several Trekkie parsecs ahead of anyone else. I suspect the same is true for you. And you know what? I have no frigging idea why Facebook is important or why I should log into my profile today. It’s cool, but it’s not useful in an every day kind of way. And if I, who spend over 10 hours a day online and have a network of friends and colleagues that span the globe, can’t jam Facebook into my life in a useful way, how is the average techno-pleb going to?

As far as I can see, most of things marketers salivate over fall into the same category..digital candy that tweaks our dopamine supplying pleasure centre but serves no real, sustainable purpose in our lives. This puts it in the same category as 95% of my iPhone apps, 99% of the computer games on my laptop and the Wii my nephew got last Christmas – an obsession for approximately 27 hours, an occasional pastime for another 36 hours, then something we ignore for the rest of our lives.

The one difference, at least in my experience, seems to be teenagers. Most of things that seem to be passing fancies to us do seem to become useful in the lives of the average 15 – 23 year old. But, as I said in a previous post, when you look at what the live of a high school or university student looks like and what they want to do, a Facebook suddenly makes sense. For me, not so much.

An Eyeball is an Eyeball, Right?

So, even given this notorious degree of fickleness, why should marketer’s care? Eyeballs are still eyeballs, right? Even if the eyeballs we’re capturing this week will be completely different than the eyeballs we capture next week. This approach only works if you consider your market a faceless blob of unleashed consumer potential. If you actually want to get relevant messages to real people with real needs, the logic starts to break down immediately.

Effective marketing depends on reliable targeting. And reliable targeting depends on established patterns. And established patterns depend on sustained behaviors. And sustained behaviors depend on things we find useful. Otherwise, we’re marketing via fad, condemning ourselves to spending our professional lives and our client’s ad dollars chasing fluff in a hurricane. Our audience will always be “just passing through” on the way to the next thing.

I Miss Frank Cannon, PI

movies_070708_cannonMarkets have to stabilize in order for us to understand the individuals that make up that market. Also, brand relationships need a stable environment, allowing them to germinate and flourish.

When I was a kid, Kraft always sponsored Cannon. When you tuned in to see William Conrad somehow roll his fat old carcass out of his Lincoln Continental and pick off a sniper 3 miles away on a mountain top with his trusty .38 revolver, you could depend on Kraft telling you how to cook Mac & Cheese in every commercial break. Much as the entertainment value may have sucked (beggars with 2 channels in the Canadian prairies can’t be choosers) you knew Kraft would be there and Kraft knew who they were talking to. The audience had stabilized.

Until things pass through the temporary obsession phase to something that adds real value to our lives, we can’t consider advertising on these channels as anything more than an experiment. The trick in picking the right digital channels is not to look at the eyeballs they’re attracting today, but in how these things might be used in real, practical ways. That will give you an idea of how real people might be using these things next week or next month, when the technoratti have moved on to the latest bright shiny object.

To Google’s Competitors: Please, This Year, Do Something Amazing!

First published January 8, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

A month ago yesterday, I was on stage in Park City, Utah at the Search Insider Summit with Danny Sullivan, Jeff Pruitt (SEMPO President/iCrossing) and John Tawadros (iProspect) talking about Google’s domination of the search space. Both Danny and I took Microsoft and Yahoo to task for not mounting a more significant challenge to Google’s dominance. It could be my imagination, but it seemed that for the rest of the Summit, I felt a bit of a chill in the air between myself and the Yahoo and Microsoft reps that ventured to Park City. I suspect the feeling was that as the emcee and moderator, I should have been less opinionated and more neutral. Fair enough, I guess, considering the root of the word moderator. But, with my first column of the new year, I felt I should clear the air a little bit.

I Like You, I Really Like You…

Really, Microsoft and Yahoo, I don’t hate you. You frustrate the hell out of me, but I certainly don’t hate you. I root for you constantly. I’ve always been an “underdog” kind of guy. Anything I mentioned on stage in Park City I’ve said directly to your respective development teams in Sunnyvale (Yahoo) and Redmond (Microsoft). I’ll tell anyone that listens. Ad nauseam, so I’ve been told. In a recent post, Danny Sullivan called it tough love. Danny and I have talked about this and we both really, really want you to succeed. But as much as I’ve tried to give helpful advice, the right people don’t seem to be listening.

Here’s the thing. I love search. I love its potential. I love the way it makes me more functional and sound smarter and better informed. Yet I know we’ve barely scratched the surface. There is so much more to come, but we need to get there as fast as possible. The only way to do that is to have a more competitive market. Google needs to have someone constantly breathing down its neck. The current market domination isn’t good for anyone, especially not the user. I suspect the engineers (not the bean counters) at Google even feel the same way. We need an arms race in search. Right now, it’s like the U.S. taking on Canada and Iceland (as a Canadian, I can say that). So when I say pull up your socks and take search seriously, I mean it with love.

Bottom Up is the Way to Go

In Danny’s post, he nicely outlines the symptoms of malaise at Microsoft. And lord knows everyone and their dog has been piling on the bash-Yahoo bandwagon in the last few months, so I won’t go there. The problem, as I see it, is that there’s a gap a mile wide between the top and bottom in both organizations. The result is a dysfunctional culture. The front lines at both organizations desperately want to do something significant in search, but they’re hamstrung by a lack of clear strategic focus from the top. Microsoft is locked in a product development mindset that squeezes anything amazing out before it can even make it to beta. Yahoo is trying to walk an impossible tight rope, tweaking the user experience while at the same time squeezing as much money as possible out of the search page.

To do something amazing in search, both organizations have to start at the foundation, the user, and rebuild from the ground up. What I would like to see is an approach taken by Intel and Apple in the past, leapfrog development. Let one team work on tweaking the existing product, and lock another team away somewhere to reinvent the future. Throw the rule book away and start over. Take your brightest rebels, remove them from the distractions of mind-numbing bureaucracy and panicked financial analyst reports, and let them do what they long to do: beat Google. Let them do something amazing.

Let People Be Amazing, Then Keep Your Hands Off

But please, if someone at Microsoft or Yahoo is listening, don’t make the same mistake GM did with Saturn. The launch of Saturn in 1983 redefined how a North American car company could be. Many of the legacy issues that plagued GM (confrontational union relationships, overly complacent dealer networks, quality control issues) were left behind with Saturn, creating an exceptional degree of loyalty and pride of ownership. In fact, Saturn became so successful that GM just couldn’t keep its hands off it, gradually bringing Saturn more and more into the GM corporate fold and, in the process, squeezing much of the life out of the brand.

Amazing things wither and die in an atmosphere of corporate bureaucracy, visionless management and political infighting. Search is too important and too vibrant to leave it to this fate. Let 2009 be the year to do something remarkable.

Fear, Greed and the Google Parallax View

First published December 18, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Greed is right.

Greed works.

Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.

Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind.

— Gordon Gekko, “Wall Street”

Yesterday, I listened to an interview with Canadian businessman Stephen Jarislowsky. Jarislowsky is one of Canada’s richest men, our version of Warren Buffet. And he said something simple but profoundly important in the interview: Greed is strong, but fear is stronger.

Gekko is right. Greed does drive us. It is evolutionary. It’s hardwired into us. Harvard professors Nitin Nohria and Paul Lawrence identified the drive to acquire as one of the four primary drives of humans But as Abraham Maslow pointed out, there is a hierarchy of human needs and drives, and fear will always trump greed.

Our society has been defined by greed but I don’t agree that greed is right. It forces a zero-sum mentality, which, due to the blessings of fate, has resulted in a inequitable division of resources for us here in North America. The world’s possessions are seriously out of balance, and there is no way to redistribute without severe pain for those that currently have the possessions. Bill Clinton has been warning us about this for years, and it’s now beginning to happen. That is the pain we’re just beginning to feel, and we’re afraid. So, our evolutionary transmission has geared down into the first gear of survival: fear.

The interesting thing about this, from our own little slice of the world, is that we see our collective human consciousness captured in the query logs of Google. As we switch from greed to fear, we see search volumes reflect that. That’s why, in the past year, we’ve seen number of searches for “recession” catch and surpass the number of searches for “mortgages.” We’ve gone from dreaming about acquiring to worrying about defending, and whatever we’re thinking about, we search for.

This is a powerful demonstration of the power of search. It shows just how accurate a barometer it is of our collective mood. And mood determines reality. Our emotions are the jet fuel of our drives. They are our internal guidance systems that keep us on track to realize our goals. Our emotions, in aggregate, swing the economy, and the nation with it, from boom to bust. And there’s no better indicator of that then the searches we do on Google. John Battelle had it right. Google is the database of our intentions.

There has been endless speculation about whether search will weather the financial crisis. The question is really not worth asking. The fact that search has so accurately reflected the shift of our confidence shows how essential it is. Yes, people will use it less to search for things to buy and use it more to search for ways to survive, which will impact advertising revenues and cause pain (and hence, fear). But it is what it is. The search patterns show who we are and what’s on our mind.

But there will also be an interesting side effect that search marketers will have to adjust for. Kevin Lee called it aspirational searches. Just because we go into defend mode doesn’t mean we stop dreaming. Greed can be pushed out of the driver’s seat temporarily by fear, but soon we start planning our escape. Fantasy is a favorite activity of ours. Look at the boom of the movie industry through the depths of the Great Depression. Even though we can’t afford a new car or a trip to Mexico, we can still pretend that we can, and this ersatz consumer activity will also show up on Google’s query logs, causing much head-scratching about the sudden drop in conversions.

We’ll adapt to the new reality and we’ll survive. That’s why fear exists. It allows us to marshall our resources and focus on the threat. And eventually, greed will once again turn on the tap. The balance between these two forces has been swinging back and forth for hundreds of thousands of years. But never before have we had such a clear view of how it happens, thanks to search.

P.S. Just realized, because of the way the holidays stack up on the calendar, that this is my last column for 2008. It’s been a true pleasure spending each Thursday with you talking about search, branding, the brain and anything else that crossed my mind. Thank you for listening (and responding). I look forward to picking up the conversation again in 2009!

Google’s Death Grip and Search Snapshots

First published December 11, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Considering that I’ve devoted the last six months to exploring the impact of brand in search in this column, I do have a bit of a backlog of other things to deal with, so today I’d like to clear the decks on at least two issues. Last week, I was in Park City, Utah for the Search Insider Summit. As usual, a number of insight comments bubbled to the top over the three and a half days. This time, many of them were centered on the Google hegemony. In fact, on Day 2, we tackled that very question with Danny Sullivan, Jeff Pruitt, President of SEMPO (day job: iCrossing) and John Tawardros from iProspect. What did we resolve? Not very much, but that didn’t make the conversation any less interesting.

Google is Looking Good by Comparison

When it comes to search as it’s currently defined (we’ll get to that definition in a minute), Google is in a league of its own. But I think the panel agreed that it’s not so much that Google is doing exceptionally well as that the competition is either standing still or going backwards. Yahoo is struggling on many fronts and its search experience is drifting without direction (other than bolstering the sagging bottom line). And Microsoft not only isn’t in the race, its strategists can’t seem to agree amongst themselves where the starting line is. Right now Google’s algorithm could be powered by beer, darts and a frat house and it would still outperform the competition. I’ve talked before about the Google Habit”(a term that came up again in the discussion) and right now, there’s no compelling reason to even think about breaking it.

Will the Threat Come From Below, If Not Above?

So, if the big players aren’t threatening Google, how about a start-up company? Several have stepped up to the challenge recently, as detailed in Aaron Goldman’s “Not so Natural Born Google Killers” series. But so far, it seems that they’ve all come to a gun fight armed with a jack knife. I get an invitation every week or two to look at the next “revolution in search.” As I’ve ranted about at length in the past, most of these starts-ups are based on some founder’s idea of what should be revolutionary, without really considering whether it helped the user. Cuill was particularly abysmal in this regard. And, if a start-up did somehow significantly up the ante for the search user, I’m guessing Google’s radar would pick it up and it would be quickly gobbled up. The three conditions that allowed Google’s emergence — a truly better algorithm, founders naïve yet capable of inventing a new kind of company, and competition too stupid to realize it — are unlikely to happen again.

One other point on this issue. If innovation comes from another player, it has to benefit the user. Google has always had a clear prioritization of goals. The user always comes first, monetization after. Yahoo and Microsoft don’t share this same philosophy, trying to juggle the goals of advertisers and users. Because of this, if something that revolutionizes search for the user comes from a start-up, Google will be looking at it through the right lens and will be more likely to recognize it for what it is. It could pass right under Yahoo and Microsoft’s nose without them realizing it.

Hint: Look Outside the Box

Given the factors above, the outlook is not good for easing Google’s death grip on search. But the fact is, we’re assuming search will remain as it is. As someone in the audience reminded us, search takes many forms in the digital world: looking for people, searching maps, scanning videos, etc. Much that is search happens outside the world we currently define as “search.” It’s from here that Google’s challenger might potentially come.

Search Snapshot

Now to the other piece of business I wanted to clear up this week. Obviously the world of search has changed a lot in the past 12 months. Google’s increasing domination is only one aspect. The global financial meltdown has turned everything upside down. So, with all the forces at play, what is the impact on search? Well, SEMPO is currently asking you just that in its annual State of Search survey. Please take a few minutes to share the view from your particular part of the search world.