Category Archives: User Behavior

Persuasion on the Search Results Page

First published January 3, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Chris Copeland took out 2007 with one last jab at the whole “agencies getting it” thing. Much as I’m tempted to ring in the New Year by continuing to flog this particular horse, I’m going to bow to my more rational side. As Chris and Mike Margolin both rightly pointed out in their responses to my columns, we all have vested interests and biases that will inevitably cause us to see things from our own perspectives. Frankly, the perspective I’m most interested at this point in this debate is the client’s, as this will ultimately be a question the marketplace decides. So, for now, I’ll leave it there.

But Chris did take exception to one particular point that I did want to spill a little more virtual ink over; the idea of whether persuasion happens in search. Probably the cause for the confusion was my original choice of words. Rather than saying we don’t persuade people “in search” I should have said “on the search page.” Let me explain further with a quick reference to the dictionary, in this case, http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/persuadeMerriam-Webster:

Persuade: to move by argument, entreaty, or expostulation to a belief, position, or course of action.

In the definition of persuade, the idea is to move someone from their current belief, position or course of action to a new one. The search results page is not the place to do this. And the reasons why are important to understand for the search marketer.

For quick reference, here’s Chris’s counterargument: Persuasion is at the heart of everything that we do in search — from where we place an ad on a page (Hotchkiss’ golden triangle study) to how we message. The experience we drive to every step of the process is about understanding behavior and how to better optimize for the purpose of connecting consumer intent with advertiser content.
I don’t disagree with Chris in the importance of search in the decision-making process, but I do want to clarify where persuasion happens. What we’re doing on the search results page is not persuading. We’re confirming. We’re validating. In some cases, we’re introducing. But we’re not persuading.

As Chris mentioned, at Enquiro we’ve spent a lot of time mapping out what search interactions look like. And they’re quick. Very quick. About 10 seconds, looking at 4 to 5 results. That’s 2 seconds per listing. In that time, all searchers can do is scan the title and pick up a few words. From that, they make a decision to click or not to click. They’re not reading an argument, entreaty or expostulation. They’re not waiting to be persuaded. They’re making a split-second decision based on the stuff that’s already knocking around in their cortex.

Part of the problem is that we all want to think we’re rational decision-making creatures. When asked in a market research survey, we usually indicate that we think before we click (or buy). This leads to the false assumption that we can be persuaded on the search page, because our rational minds (the part that can be persuaded) are engaged. But it’s just not true. It’s similar to people looking at a shelf of options in the grocery store. In a study (Gerald Zaltman, How Customers Think, p. 124) shoppers exiting a supermarket were asked if they looked at competing brands and compared prices before making their decision. Most said yes. But observation proved differently. They spent only 5 seconds at the category location and 90% only handled their chosen product. This is very similar to responses and actual behavior we’ve seen on search pages.

Now, if someone is in satisficing mode (looking for candidates for a consideration set for further research) you can certainly introduce alternatives for consideration. But the persuasion will happen well downstream from the search results page, not on it.

Am I splitting semantic hairs here? Probably. But if we’re going to get better at search marketing, we have to be obsessed with understanding search behavior and intent. Chris and I are in agreement on that. And that demands a certain precision with the language we use. I was at fault with my original statement, but similarly, I think it’s important to clear up where we can and can’t persuade prospects.

Of course, you may disagree and if so, go ahead, persuade me I’m wrong. I’ll give you 2 seconds and 6 or 7 words. Go!

The Why’s of Buy: Soothing the Angry Customer

angerAnger is one of the less noble of human emotions. We tend to beat ourselves up when we get angry. After the emotion dies down, we feel a little foolish for losing control. As Ben Franklin said,

Anger is never without a reason, but seldom a good one.

However, Aristotle probably took a more realistic view of human nature when he said:

Anyone can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person at the right time, and for the right purpose and in the right way – that is not within everyone’s power and that is not easy.

Here, Aristotle touches on the fact that anger is part of the basic human emotional repertoire for good reason. If we didn’t get angry, we wouldn’t still be here. But rationalizing anger in a positive way is a very rare ability.

Air Rage

I’ve had lots of opportunities to contemplate the nature of anger this week. In what was supposed to be a quick 24 hour trip down to Las Vegas (which has never been on my list of favorite cities) and back, I had two flights cancelled for mysterious reasons, was bumped from a first class seat back to a jammed couch cabin next to someone who apparently thought no one would ever notice if he passed gas constantly on a 2 hour flight, had to spend an unexpected night in a dumpy hotel in Seattle with a bunch of religiously fervent believers who were up til 1 am every night speaking in tongues (which apparently needs to be done at very high volume) and was away from my family for 14 hours longer than expected. Yes, I got a little hot under the collar.

How We Get Angry

Let’s go back to the basics. Why do we get angry? First, let’s understand that anger, along with fear and physical attraction, are probably our oldest hardwired emotions. They’re an embedded part of our neural circuitry that have been hundreds of millions of years in the making. Anger makes up one half of the fight or flight mechanism.

I say this to reinforce the fact that we cannot chose whether or not we can get angry. All we can do is chose what to do with that anger. At the subconscious level, you will pick up cues and the core of your brain, the brain stem working together with the amygdala in the limbic system, will determine if anger is the right response. Remember, this is not the highly refined neocortical part of your brain. This is the part of your brain that is a legacy from our dark evolutionary past. The decision to become angry is not a delicate, deliberate and rational decision. The decision to get angry is throwing an emergency switch. Its purpose is to get you ready for a fight, literally. It happens in a few milliseconds. The reptilian brain doesn’t believe there’s time for a debate about appropriate response, so there’s no rationalization of the situation at this point. What the amygdala does is an instantaneous shuffling through of past experience to see if we’ve encountered anything similar in the past. It’s like a flash card deck of emotionally charged memories. And if we find a match, even a rudimentary one, it’s good enough for the amygdala. We use that as our plan of action.  And the rule of thumb is, the amygdala overreacts. Survival is the objective, so it calls in the big guns.

The amygdala sends out a signal that starts priming the body for a fight. A potent cocktail of chemicals are released, including adrenalin, to kick the body into gear. Blood pressure climbs, the heart starts beating faster, sending more blood to the large muscle groups to get them ready for action. Another chemical, norepineephrine, is also released. The purpose of this is to set the brain on edge, making it more alert for visual cues of danger. More about this in a bit.

Basically, our bodies operate of the premise of “shoot first, ask questions later”. This priming the body for fight happens literally in the blink of an eye. The alarm has been sounded and anger has been unleashed. For right now, at least, the reptile in us is in full control.

But at this point, the things that make us human start to kick in. Another part of the brain, the hippocampus, is the contextual yin to the amygdala’s yang. It picks up the detail to help us put things in the right context. The amygdala tells us that we see a jaguar and jaguars can kill us. The hippocampus determines whether the jaguar is in a zoo, or leaping at us from a tree. This is the first place where our anger becomes to be contextualized. The hippocampus is the brain’s Sgt. Joe Friday: “The facts ma’am, just the facts”.

The next part of the process is where the rational part of our brains steps in and starts taking control. The signals that set the amygdala into action are then passed to the prefrontal lobes in the neocortex. Here is where the appropriate response is determined. A cascade of neural triggers is set off, determining how we should respond, given a more careful consideration of the facts. Remember, this isn’t to determine if we should get angry. That horse has already left the starting gate. This is to determine how aggressively we should override our initial reaction. The prefrontal lobes are our emotional brakes.

When it comes to the effectiveness of these brakes, all people are not created equal. Some have tremendously effective braking mechanisms. Nothing seems to perturb them. These would be the people who were smiling and joking at 10:30 at night in the Horizon Air customer service line at SeaTac airport, after we had found that none of us were getting home that night.

Some of us have much less effective braking systems. In fact, in some of us, our amygdala’s and our prefrontal lobes seem the unfortunate habit of playing a game of one upmanship, escalating the anger to a point totally inappropriate for the situation. This would be the person who was storming from gate to gate, threatening the gate agents to put him on a flight that would get him somewhere closer to home.

When it comes to our braking systems, there’s a right/left balance mechanism. It’s the left prefrontal lobe that seems to be main governor on how angry we become. The right prefrontal lobe, on the other hand, is where we harbor our negative emotions, like fear and aggression. Daniel Goleman, in his book Emotional Intelligence, tells the story of the husband who lost part of his right prefrontal lobe in a brain surgery procedure, and, to the surprise of his wife, emerged as a totally different person, more considerate, more compassionate and more affectionate. Fellow husbands, let’s hope word of this surgical procedure doesn’t get out. We’ll all sleep more soundly.

Outdated Signals

Now, obviously, in today’s world, being threatened by a hungry jaguar is probably not that common an occurrence. The threats to us are more likely to be to our personal dignity, our sense of fairness or our self esteem. But at the limbic level, our brain doesn’t really make a distinction. Remember, this mechanism has been built by millions of years of evolution. The last few thousand years of civilization hasn’t made a dent in it. It’s at the neocortical level, the highly plastic and adaptable part of our brain, where we make these distinctions and by then, we’re already angry.

This is one reason why we can feel so sheepish after an emotional outburst. Basically, our amygdala got carried away, set us up in full fight mode, and the left prefrontal lobe was napping on the job. We responded at a level that was out of proportion to what was appropriate, and it wasn’t until we cooled down a little that we realized it. This is when our wife looks at us after we lose it with the service agent at the lost baggage counter and say, “why did you get so angry?” (the “idiot” that follows this statement is usually implied, but not always) And somehow, “I was ready to fight to the death to ensure our survival as a species” just doesn’t seem like the right thing to say.

Confrontation is from Mars, Plotting is from Venus

By the way, there are gender differences in how we handle anger. Men basically have one response. We’re ready to fight. Confrontation seems to be our sole card to play. Women, on the other hand, have shown a much more varied repertoire of possible responses. They can be passively aggressive, vindictive or vengeful. They can employ much more sophisticated responses like social ostracism. Or, on the positive side, women are more likely to show compassion. But the key differentiator here is that men tend to respond to anger with a physical response, where as women tend to respond socially, either positively or negatively.

This difference makes sense when you look at our typical roles throughout evolution. Men were the physical providers and protectors. Women were the homemakers and the souls of the community. Through our history, men have been conditioned to respond in one way, and women in another. Women are equipped for their role with more empathy, the ability to better read others emotions, and a slower fuse when it comes to anger. Men are equipped for their role with a faster temper trigger, larger muscles and, it seems, a much more predictable response to threatening situations. Now, in making gender generalizations, I’m being incredibly sweeping here, but in aggregate, studies have shown this to be true. Again, I’ll come back to these differences.

The Speed of Anger

The speed of response of the amygdala is a two way street. It’s quick to be activated, but it’s also quick to shut down. The purpose of it is to get us prepared for a single burst of physical activity. Once it does its job, it moves on to the next thing. The information has been passed to the prefrontal lobe for further processing and the amygdala settles down to wait for the next threat. Total time elapsed? A few seconds.

But it’s what happens once anger is passed to the prefrontal lobe that can dictate whether this is a quickly dosed irritation or a long simmering feud. Remember, we have this chain of neural decisions that represent a balancing act between the left and right lobes. It’s the literal equivalent of the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other. And all this time, we’re scanning our environment, consciously and subconsciously, for further cues about whether we should continue to be angry or to cool down. This is where anger gets much more complex. Every person has a different balance between these governing forces, and every situation is different. How you’re handled during this critical window will determine which emotional imprints you retain. And remember, it’s this emotional memory that will be recalled the next time you’re in a similar situation. This experiential, emotionally charged imprinting is a huge part of how we create attitudes and affinities towards a brand.

Anger in the Marketplace

So, after this long anatomical examination of anger, what’s the point? Well, if you look at how and why we get angry, you start to gain some insight in how to deal with angry customers.

First of all, anger is inevitable in negative customer situations. As much as we’d like to avoid dealing with angry people, let’s accept that as a given. It’s not as if they chose to be angry, they just are. And the degree of anger will be different in each person. What needs to be done is to maximize the chances for the left prefrontal lobe to douse the anger.

By the time you have your first contact with an angry customer, the amygdala has done its job and passed the ball to the prefrontal lobes. The alarm has been raised. Remember, the cause of anger in a customer is almost never going to be physical threat, unless you run the store from hell. Most often, the injury done will be to the customers self esteem, dignity or sense of fairness. And when the customer is in front of you, they’re looking to you to see if you represent a continued threat, or an ally. This will be conveyed through words, but to a much greater extent, through your body language and tone of your voice. The first few seconds of interaction with the customer will determine whether the right or left prefrontal lobe kicks in. If you’re perceived as a continuing threat, you’ll be dealing with the right lobe, and an escalating level of aggression. If you’re perceived as an ally, the left lobe kicks in and you’ll see the anger quickly dissipate. When we’re talking about person to person touch points, the first few seconds with an angry customer have no equal in importance.

Let’s take a closer look at what’s happening here. First of all, let’s remember our brains are being doused with norepineephrine. The purpose of this is to make the brain hypersensitive to possible threats. Again, think about the environment most companies choose to put angry customers in. In my case, after being bumped from my flight I was sent to Horizon Air’s customer service counter (and yes, I’m using the name purposely, and I’ll explain that in a second as well), which is smack in the middle of the busiest part of SeaTac airport. As you line up, waiting for a customer service agent, you’re subjected to the realities of a busy airport: tired, grumpy travelers, beeping carts, annoying gate announcements, reminding you that everyone except you is going somewhere tonight. None of this is going to make you a more pleasant person when you finally get to the head of the line. By now, you’re simmering on a slow boil. In my case, an obviously unhappy toddler decided to start screaming just a few feet from where we were waiting. Now, I’m a Dad and I normally have a lot of patience with unhappy kids, but this time, the screaming was like a jackhammer in my head. The norepineephrine was turning it into a huge warning signal.

Where else do angry customers go? The infamous customer service help line. Again, you’re put on hold, possibly the most irritating situation in the world. Look at this from the customer’s view point. You screwed up and inconvenienced me. You forced me to take valuable time out of my day to rectify the situation. And now you don’t even acknowledge the importance of my time by forcing me to wait on hold? What you’re telling me is your time is much more valuable than mine. Is this showing me that you’re an ally, rather than a threat?

Again, let me give you an example from my personal experience with Alaska and Horizon Airlines. On the trip out (before I got stuck in Seattle), the flight to Las Vegas was cancelled for some mysterious reason. We were never really told why. Now, being a frequent flyer on Alaska (and this is another area I’ll touch on, why we tend to continually anger our most important customers) I had been bumped up to first class. With the cancellation of the flight, I was put on standby for the next flight. The gate agent who checked me in apologized and said that although she couldn’t put me in first class, she’d note down my seat number and they’d try “to make it up to me”. This was the right response. She became my ally.

But on the flight, although I was directly behind the first class cabin (constantly reminding me that I had been bumped out) no flight attendant offered to make it up in any way. After waiting for most of the flight for the offer of a free drink or even an extra bag of peanuts, to no avail, the person behind me wanted to order a drink and caught the attention of the attendant in first class. She asked for the $5 dollars, and he said he was still waiting for the change from the first drink he ordered. She asked him if he was from the bumped flight and when he said he was, she said that they were supposed to offer everyone from that flight a free drink anyway, by way of apology, so not to worry about it. But no one offered anyone else from the flight a drink. There was no apology and no consideration.

Now, let’s examine this from my perspective. First, although angry, I had been appropriately dealt with and my inconvenience had been acknowledged. My sense of self esteem (as one of Alaska’s most valuable customers) had been repaired to some extent. But then this was not followed up on while I was on the plane. Not only was my dignity and self esteem disregarded, my sense of fairness was outraged at the lack of follow through with the inconvenienced passengers.

Where’s the next place Alaska dropped the ball? I considered saying something to the attendant, but that’s not in my nature. What I did was fire off an email to Alaska’s “Customer Care” address. Again, this is a typical channel provided for angry customers. But does it hit any of the required actions to mollify an upset customer? After struggling through a complicated form, I submitted my complaint. I got an automated reply saying that my submission had been received, saying that it was important to Alaska, and that it would typically be as many as 30 days before I received any response. No personal acknowledgement of my anger and the sense that I had been dumped into a big bureaucratic bucket. Again, this is not the way to tell me you’re my ally and you want to make the situation better. This is telling me that your hope is that I’ll forget all about it in 30 days, shut up and go back to being a good, submissive customer. That’s not going to happen. Let me till you why.

The Probability of Angering Your Best Customers

Here’s the ironic thing. Odds are it will be your best customer that you cause to get angry. It’s a simple case of probability. They have more encounters with you, so the odds of something bad happening go up. If I’m going to have a bad experience on an airline, it’s likely going to be the airline I travel most often.

With these customers, it’s more important than ever to acknowledge their anger and inconvenience. First of all, they represent a much higher lifetime value than the average customer, so the loss of business is a bigger deal (I’ve probably spent over a $100,000 with Alaska Airlines in the past 3 years), but secondly, they’ve made a commitment to your business, and you have to acknowledge the importance of that commitment. In return for making that commitment, and spending a large percentage of my yearly travel budget with Alaska, I want to feel that they recognize my importance as a customer. We’re more emotionally invested with the business, so we’re more susceptible to strong feelings, including anger. It’s the difference between having a fight with a stranger and a friend. There are a lot deeper and more complex feelings at play when we fight with a friend. The residue of a fight with a stranger will fade away completely in a few hours. Chances all, we’ll barely remember it. But the consequences of a fight with a friend can last days, weeks or even years. The scars can be deep and permanent.

There’s another critical element to understand here. Because your best customers have an emotional stake in your brand, if you don’t treat them very carefully when they’re upset, they’re also the ones most likely to spread the word either in person or online. By not acknowledging their importance as a customer and the validity of their anger, you’ve kicked the right prefrontal lobe into high gear. Physical confrontation is not an option but the negative feelings need an outlet. The more emotion involved, because of the greater emotional investment, the more we need to express our disappointment and anger. All we want to be is heard. If the offending party won’t listen, I’ll find someone who will. Hence my deliberate use of the brands Alaska Air and Horizon Air in recounting my experience in this post. For what happens with negative word of mouth, see my post earlier this week.

How to Handle an Angry Customer

So, what could Alaska or Horizon Air have done better? What can any of us do better? Let’s first except the fact that bad things are going to happen to customers, that those customers are probably going to be our best customers, and that they’re going to get angry. If we start from there, we can start looking at some practical ways to diffuse anger.

Timing is Critical

Remember, the anger response is very quick. In under a second, the initial response goes from the amygdala to the prefrontal lobes. And the longer it sits there, the more it simmers. Companies need to take a triage approach to angry customers, providing an initial assessment (and acknowledgement, as below) and then routing the person to the appropriate response channel. Anger left without a response will simply lead to more anger. Long waits on a hold line or in a lineup is not what you want to do

Acknowledge the Anger

In this immediate response, it’s important to let the customer know their anger is heard and acknowledged. Make them feel you’re their ally in getting this resolved. This immediately engages the left prefrontal lobe, rather than the right, diffusing the anger rather than adding to it.

Apologize Quickly

If appropriate, apologize, but do it sincerely. Do it face to face, eye to eye. The typical “pilot apology” (this is the pilot coming on the intercom during a flight and offering the blanket, corporate apology for the delay) won’t do it. The flight attendants should be doing it with every single customer, face to face.

Remove Negative Stimuli

This is huge. All too often, the place where angry customers are dealt with represent the worst possible environment for avoiding confrontation. Waiting is the norm and there’s no thought given to how to make the slighted customer feel heard and appreciated. In fact, as we’ve seen, these environments (either physical or virtual) feed the norepineephrine doused brain more and more signals that indicate a hostile environment. Instead, deal with angry customers in a soothing and even distracting environment. If you must make somebody wait, try to do everything possible to introduce positive stimuli to lighten the mood.

Respond Appropriately

Of course, the biggest factor is the nature of the person you’re dealing with when you’re angry. When I say we’re only human, there are two sides to that. Just as we’re prone to all the hair triggers and emotional flooding that comes with anger, so are the people on the other side of the counter. This means that you need to recruit a very special type of person to deal with angry customers, and provide them with an understanding of what causes anger and how to respond appropriately. You’re looking for people who have a hyperactive left prefrontal lobe. They have to be able to convey, through their words, their body language and the tone of their voice, that they’re the customer’s friends, not their enemy and that they’re going to make it right.

By the way, you might think, given my previous observations about the emotional intelligence of men versus women, that women would be a better choice, and in some instances, you’d be right. If you are upset and have the opportunity to talk to a man or a woman at the service counter, most of us would choose the woman. But that can also be a dangerous assumption. Here’s why. Just as women are more adept at reading emotions, they also tend to be more apt to show emotion. This means that a woman who does tend to be prone to becoming upset, irritated or angry will convey this more through her body language and attitude. This is not the place for officiousness or easily rattled people. This is where you need to find the most empathetic people you have and deploy them where they can do the most good.

Unfortunately, for most businesses, dealing with angry customers is the worst of all assignments. It can often be outsourced (talk about not being heard and acknowledged), or grudgingly done by someone who’s not equipped for the task, emotionally or with adequate training. What is the most important encounter you can ever have with a customer, and one that requires a masterful level of interpersonal skills, is done with a negative mental framework already in place (an angry person going to deal with other angry people) or, even worse, ignored, hoping the problem will go away.

Little Things Mean a Lot

The good news is, we all have very low expectations as customers when we’ve been slighted by a company. We’re used to being ignored, marginalized and put through the meat grinder. So it doesn’t take a lot for a company to really provide a positive and remarkable experience. If you can deal with the anger quickly, acknowledge it and make them feel they’ve been heard, become their ally and work towards a resolution that feels fair, then it doesn’t take much more to turn a fair response into a remarkable response.

Let’s go back to my experience with Alaska Airlines. I understand that things happen with airline schedules, and I wasn’t even that upset that I was bumped back to coach. What really irritated me was the lack of follow through on the gate agent’s promise to “make it right”. I wanted Alaska to show that my business was important to them. What would it have cost them to give me a free drink, along with a personal apology from the flight attendant? Or a small coupon for a fare reduction on a future flight. If you want to make it remarkable, get the pilot to take 5 to 10 minutes to walk through the cabin and personally apologize to every one of the 18 or 20 people who were bumped from the previous flight.

Remember, emotions permanently imprint brand attitudes. And emotions come with experiences. Good experiences create good emotions. Bad experiences create bad emotions. But you have the opportunity to determine which emotions you leave your customers with when things go wrong.

Postscript

I have to let you know that Alaska/Horizon has responded admirably to my complaint. I did receive a discount voucher as well as a very frankly written and apologetic email. They’re doing most things right, but unfortunately, timing is everything. Again, this is common in today’s world. Once you’ve discovered that you’ve upset a valuable customer, damage control is set in motion. But what I tried to outline is that the damage can be minimized dramatically if you respond promptly to become the customer’s ally and diffuse the anger before it has a chance to mount.

This has to do with more front line training and some standard procedures built on a greater awareness of the nature of anger itself.

But, the response shows that Alaska’s heart is in the right place and their intentions are good. They just have to brush up on execution at the initial point of contact.

What Makes a Rumor so Easy to Spread?

urban-legend-rumorWe all want to be part of the next viral world of mouth success story. We want our product to be at the epicenter of a “buzz” storm that spreads like wildfire across the internet. But the conditions that lead to true word of mouth viral outbreaks dictate that these outbreaks are few and far between.

Jumping the Weak Ties

First of all, let’s look at what’s required for word of mouth to spread. The trick to a true viral outbreak is finding something that will jump the “weak ties”. Mark Granovetter identified weak ties in a social network back in the 70’s. Basically, social networks are not uniform and even. They are “clumpy”. They have dense clusters, comprised of people who tend to spend a lot of time together. These are family members, co workers, close friends, members of the same church or organization. Word spreads quickly throughout these clusters, because of the frequency of communication and the nature of the relationships between the members of the cluster. There’s an inherent trust there and people talk to each other a lot. This makes the social ties within the cluster strong ties. Given this, once one person in the cluster knows something, there’s a pretty good bet that everyone in the cluster will know it in a relatively short period of time.

But the challenge comes in getting a message to make the jump from cluster to cluster. How does word of mouth spread from one group of co workers to a church group in another town? To do this, we’re relying on social ties that are much weaker than strong ties. We’re counting on an acquaintance to pass word along. And for that to happen, some conditions have to be met first.

Lowering the Drawbridge

In 1993, Jonathon Frenzen and Kent Nakamoto followed up on Granovetter’s earlier work (Frenzen, Nakamoto: “Structure, Cooperation and the Flow of Market Information,” The Journal of Consumer Research, December 1993) to see the conditions that had to be met before a message would jump across a weak tie. In their words,

“Instead of an array of islands interconnected by a network of fixed bridges, the islands are interconnected by a web of “drawbridges” that are metaphorically raised and lowered by transmitters depending on the moral hazards imposed by the information transmitted by word of mouth.

In their study, they looked at a number of factors, including the nature of the message itself, and the concept of moral hazard, or how it would impact the messenger. For the test, they used news about a sale. In one social network, they saw how fast word would spread about a 20% off sale. In the other social network, they used a sale where the discounts were a more remarkable 50 to 70% off. To introduce a moral hazard variable, they also altered the availability of sales items. In one case, quantities were very limited, and in the other, quantities were practically unlimited.

What they found was that amongst strong ties, word of the sales spread fairly quickly in most instances. But when the message wasn’t that remarkable (the 20% off example), word of mouth had difficulty jumping across weak ties. Also, when moral hazard was high (quantities were limited) again, the message tended to get stuck within a cluster and not be transmitted across the weak ties.

Mexican Vacation Sale

Let’s use an example to make this a little clearer. Let’s imagine an airline is having a seat sale to Mexico. In the first example, it’s $50 off per seat, but it applies to every seat on the plane, on every flight. There is no limit on the inventory available. In the second instance, instead of $50 off per seat, the entire cost of a return flight to Mexico is just $50. That’s much more remarkable. And in the third instance, the sale is again $50 per person, but it’s limited to 10 seats on 2 flights, for one day only. Only 20 tickets are available at this price.

In the first instance, you would probably only pass along the information if someone happened to mention to you that they were thinking of going to Mexico. The information is not that note worthy. The value of information is not that great. There’s little chance that this would ever move beyond your “strong tie” cluster. It’s not something you’d go out of your way to mention to an acquaintance.

In the second instance, a $50 flight to Mexico is big news. And we’re socially predisposed to share remarkable stories. We believe it elevates our social status within our cluster. Every one likes to be the first to tell someone about something remarkable. It’s part of human nature. So we’ll go out of our way to share this information. We don’t even wait for someone to raise the topic. This is noteworthy enough that it merits bringing up in any context. It’s worth interrupting normal conversations for. Word will spread far and wide, across strong ties and weak ties alike.

But in the third instance, even though the news is remarkable, we personally have something to lose by spreading the story. There are only 20 seats available, so if we tell too many people, we might not get a chance to take advantage of the sale ourselves. Chances are, we won’t tell anyone until our seats are booked. And even then, we’ll probably only tell those we’re closest to. After we look after ourselves, our next inclination is to make sure those that are closest to us won’t miss out on the opportunity. Again, because of this “moral hazard” there’s little likelihood that word will spread beyond our strong ties.

Rumor has it

So, now that we know the limitations of message transmission within a network, depending both on the structure of the network and the cooperativeness of it, let’s look at one type of information that always seems to spread like wildfire through any social network, regardless of the circumstance: the juicy rumor.

Rumors have no moral hazard, at least, not for us. There are no limitations of quantity. We don’t stand to lose out (at least, not in a material sense. We’ll leave the ethical questions aside for now) by spreading a rumor. So that restriction is gone.
Secondly, the likelihood to spread a rumor depends on the nature of the rumor itself. First of all, does it involve people we know? Personal rumors about people we know are almost irresistible to spread. They beg to be passed on, again, because they put us in the position of “being in the know” and having access to information not available to everyone. Second to the personal rumor is the celebrity rumor. These are a little less “spreadable” because we’re not in the same privileged informant position. Also, although we know the people involved, in the public sense, we don’t really know them in the personal sense. When it comes to rumors, the closer to home they hit, the better.

Finally, we have the “juiciness” of the rumor. How sensational is the story? How remarkable is it? A rumor about your neighbor’s washing machine breaking down isn’t going to go too far. But an affair leading to a marriage break up, being fired from a job or a significant health issue, unfortunately, are stories made to spread. Because we’re human and inherently competitive, we love to spread bad news about others.

Fine Tuning the Rumor

And this brings us to an almost universal behavior seen whenever rumors tend to spread. We like to fine tune the story to make it a little more interesting. Rumors are subjected to “flattening”, “sharpening” and “assimilation”, just to make the story a little more sticky. Flattening is where we get rid of the details that get in the way of what we feel is the noteworthy aspects of the story. In some cases, the discarded details are contradictory and in some cases they’re just extraneous. Regardless, if they’re not pertinent to the main story we want to get across, or if they dilute the story, we toss them out.

Sharpening takes the remaining facts and enhances them a little (or a lot) to bring the story and it’s value as news into sharper focus.

Finally, assimilation is where we take the story and make sure it fits within our shared mental framework. We alter the story so it fits with ours (and our recipients) shared beliefs and views of the world. That’s one reason why rumors are so “spreadable”. We alter the story to ensure it’s interesting, and the further the story goes, the more irresistible it becomes.

The ultimate example of this are urban legends, where once there may have been a kernel of truth, but the stories have become so flattened, sharpened and assimilated through countless retellings that now, as intriguing as they are, they are basically manufactured fictions.

Negative Word of Mouth

We’ve always known that negative word of mouth spreads faster than positive. When we take what we now know about social networking and apply it, we begin to see why. For instance, negative word of mouth and rumors share a lot in common. There’s generally no moral hazard in play. In fact, the reverse is true. You’re actually helping people out by sharing this information, and you get a little retribution and revenge yourself. It’s a twisted win-win!

And for some reason, humans are much more likely to pass along negative information than positive. Again, it comes to our concept of social hierarchy and building ourselves up through the misfortunes of others. Admirable it’s not, but predictable? You bet!

And finally, the better known a company or brand is, the more likely negative word of mouth will spread. If there’s bad buzz circling about Nike, McDonald’s or Starbucks, we’ll all take part because all those brands are part of our shared frame of reference. We’ve already assimilated them.

By the way, remember that negative word of mouth will also be subjected to flattening and sharpening, as well as assimilation. So the negative buzz will get worse with each retelling.

Obviously, if you’re counting on word of mouth as your marketing channel, you have to take the reasons why word of mouth spreads into account. It can be made to work for you, if the conditions are right, but remember, this is not a process you have much control over. You can plant the seeds, but then human nature will take it’s course.

Why We Have to Keep Doing Market Research

Following up on my previous post about the problems with most market research, here’s a plea why we should keep trying to get it right.

At the recent London SMX show, I presented on the Ad Testing and Research panel. Like other times I’ve done this panel (this is probably the 3rd or 4th time) I hear about skillful practitioners employing various A/B and multivariate testing methodologies. Ad testing is a definite must do, but before my presentation, which came at the end of the session, I took a few minutes to provide an alternative point of view.

I asked the small crowd how many of them were doing regular campaign management, checking click through rates, conversion rates and optimizing their campaigns based on what they saw. Almost everyone put up their hand. Then I asked how many did A/B testing. This time, a little more than half put up their hands. Next, I asked how many were doing multivariate testing. This time, about one third of the crowd. Finally, I asked how many had actually sat, watched a customer interact with their site and then asked them questions. We dropped down to about 10% of the group, and most of these were in a fairly structured usability test, with limited or no opportunity for interaction with the user.

Now, campaign optimization, A/B and multivariate testing are all best practices and should be done religiously. But I urged the marketers in the room to step back from their data heavy, spreadsheet  bound view of the world and pick up a book on cognitive psychology, social science or simple usability. Better yet, spend some time just watching how real people interact with your site. Try, for a moment, to look at the world through your customer’s eyes.

The problem with the typical, quantitative methods are that they’re all lagging indicators. You don’t get an idea of what’s happening until after customers have interacted with your ads and your site. You generally get a good sense of what they did, but it’s very difficult to determine why they did it. To do that, you have to dig beyond the numbers. You have to try to get into that subconscious mind. And that’s not easy. Typical market research methodologies won’t cut it. To get some idea of what’s required, read Clotaire Rapaille’s The Culture Code, or Gerald Zaltman’s How Customer’s Think. Do some digging into the work of Herbert Simon.  It takes a deft combination of psychiatric know how and detective skills. But here’s why it’s worth it.

For the past Century, we’ve largely refined our marketing practices based on trial and error. Pretty much everything has been done through seeing what’s worked, changing something, and seeing if it worked better. That’s been okay, as long as the channels we used to reach customer’s were relatively limited. With limited channels and a certain amount of control inherent in the process, we could do this. But those days are over.

Now, rather than a few controlled channels that run pretty much straight from the advertiser to the customer, we have an explosion of information that turns the typical buying process into a Gordian knot of unbelievable complexity. We can’t control the variables anymore. When there are so many channels, so many interdependent factors and so much of it affects customers below the conscious level, trial and error is just not an effective testing methodology anymore. In fact, it was never an effective methodology, for all the reasons I stated in my previous post. It’s just the best we had.

Let me use another example. The way we did marketing was pretty much like jumping in a car, randomly making decisions whether to turn right or left, keeping track of our success rate in getting nearer to our destination, and using this method to eventually pick the right route. This method might eventually work okay in a town of a few thousand people, but try doing that to navigate through New York or Los Angeles. We don’t have enough time in our lives to leave this much to chance. A map (or better yet, a GPS) is a much better alternative.

But we’re just starting to put that map together. And it won’t come from market research. Market research, at least in it’s current incarnation, is hopelessly flawed. It will come from diving deep into the workings of our brains. And once we begin putting the map together, it will allow us to begin to measure leading indicators. It will keep us from the trap of relying on self reported rationalizations and dig deeper into all the activity that’s happening below the conscious surface of our minds. That’s where the answers will be found.

Here’s another reason. Our brains are not only complex, but they’re also highly adaptive. As we do new mental activities more often, and abandon previous ones, new routes are established through the neurons and old ones become overgrown and eventually, unused neurons are cut away. It’s called “pruning” and “neuroplasticity”. It’s probably why you’re much better at using a search engine now than you are doing the geometry you learned in grade 9. We’ve worn new paths in our brain.

This is also true of how we’re buying. The way we buy now is bearing little resemblance to the way we bought in 1975. As time goes on and we rely on the Internet more and more, the paths that we used to use for our consumer decisions will become overgrown and we’ll clear new ones. This will happen not only at the conscious level, but also the sub conscious level. We will literally rewire how our brains decide what to buy. So the body of market research that has laboriously been gathered over the past several decades will become obsolete. And to discover those again through trial and error will be an long and potentially impossibly task.

So, a word of advice. Step back from the spread sheet now and again. Take a break from looking at “what” and start to explore “why”. Dig into things like the triune brain, selective perception, bounded rationality, working memory and some other basic cognitive concepts. It will be time well spent.

Satisficing, Bounded Rationality and Search

150px-HerbertSimonHerbert Simon came up with some pretty interesting concepts, among them satisficing, bounded rationality and chunking.

Before Simon, we commonly believed that humans came to optimal decisions in a rational manner, based on the information provided. We took all the data that was accessible, weighed pros and cons and used our cortexes to come to the best possible outcome.

Simon, in effect, said that this placed to high a load on us cognitively. In many cases, there was simply too much information available, so we had to make choices based more on heuristics, cutting the available information down to a more manageable level. He called this “satisficing”, a blend of satisfy and suffice. And Simon started saying this a half century ago. Imagine how this translates to the present time.

We have never had more information available. At the click of a mouse, we can access huge amounts of information. There’s simply no way we can process it all and come to rational decisions. And this brings us to another concept, that of bounded rationality. We’re more rational about some decisions than others. It depends on a number of factors, including risk, emotional enjoyment and brand self identification. Think of it as a chart with three axes. One axis is risk. We put more rational thought into decisions that expose us to greater risk. In consumer decisions, risk usually equates with cost, but in B to B decisions, it could also include professional reputation (related to but not always directly tied to cost). We’re going to put a lot more thought into the purchase of a car or house than that of a candy bar. Another axis is emotional enjoyment. This is a risk/reward mechanism to most decisions, and if the reward is one that is particularly appealing to us, we tend to be swayed more by emotion than rational decision. If we’re planning a holiday, we may make some irrational decisions (or at least, they might appear that way to an outsider) based on a sense of rewarding ourselves. We’ll treat ourselves to a few nights in a 5 star resort, when the 3 star resort would offer greater overall value. The final factor, and one that is usually buried somewhere in our subconscious, is how we use brands or products to define who we are. Now, no one usually admits to being defined by a brand, but we all are, to some extent. This touches on the cult-like devotees that some brands develop. Harley Davidson, Rolex, BMW, Apple and Nike all come to mind. Is a Rolex a rational choice? No. But a Rolex defines, to some extent, the person wearing it. It says something about the person.

Bounded rationality says that there are boundaries to the amount of rational thought that we can and we want to put into decisions. The amount we decide is sufficient depends on the three facts discussed.

Now, the use of Search tends to plot somewhere along this 3 dimensional chart. If risk is high and brand identification is low (buying software for the company), there is a high likelihood that search will be used extensively. If risk is low and brand identification is high (i.e. buying a soft drink or a beer) there is almost no likelihood that search will be used. In this case, the two factors usually work inversely to each other. Emotional enjoyment isn’t as directly tied to search activity. We will do as much (or as little) searching for a purchase that will give us great enjoyment as for those that won’t.

It’s interesting to watch how these factors impact search intent and behavior. Satisficing leads to a classic sort of search behavior, what I call I category search, where we use fairly generic, non branded queries that broadly define the category we’re looking at. Let me give you an example. Tomorrow my wife and I are headed to Europe for a week. We’re going to spend a few days in Portugal, then fly up to London for SMX (where I’ll be talking more about these ideas in some of my sessions). We’re flying into Lisbon, then renting a car and driving down to the Algarve region. I have GPS navigation software for my PDA, but only for North America. I wanted to get European software, but because of the limited use of it, I didn’t want to spend too much. The developer of my North American software didn’t make a EU version, so I turned to search to find a suitable candidate. Here there was no brand identification, some degree of risk (if it didn’t work in Europe, I’d be lost, literally) and no emotional enjoyment factor. My first search was what I call a “landmark” search. I wanted to find some sites to plot the landscape. Sites that listed and compared my alternatives would be ideal matches to my intent.

I searched for “pocket pc gps software”, knowing that “gps software” would be too broad. I soon found the sites were pretty much all about North American versions. Few of them offered or reviewed European versions. I spent several minutes on the TomTom site trying to order a European version from Canada but to no avail. Apparently TomTom doesn’t believe people in North America would ever choose to drive in Europe.

In classic “satisficing” behavior, I wanted to cut my research workload by setting some basic eligibility criteria: it had to work on a Pocket PC, it had to be reasonably priced (under $100 preferably) and it had to offer coverage for all of Europe (we’re going back to France and Italy next year and I’d like to use it then as well). My next search was for “pocket pc gps software europe”. This gave me what I needed to begin to create my satisficed list. Ideally, we want 3 or 4 alternatives to compare. I did find the TomTom choice, but I was already frustrated with this, and the price was over my threshold. Destinator also offered an alternative that seemed to be a little better match. It matched all the criteria, appeared to have some decent reviews and was available on eBay for about $75, including shipping. Sold! Was it the optimal choice? Maybe not. If I had spent hours more doing research, I could have probably found a better package or a better value. But it was good enough.

Chunking has to do with cognitive channel capacity, and the amount of information we can store in our heads, accessible for use. Again, we tend to maximize the available slots by creating chunks of information, grouping similar types of information together.

When you look at Simon’s work, even though the majority of it far preceded search engines, it sheds a lot of light on how we use search in a number of cases. If you want to tap into user intent, I would recommend finding out more about bounded rationality and satisficing. Chunking is probably worth a look as well.

Interfaces are only Skin Deep

Steve Haar had a great comment on my post about Ask breaking through in the search market share battle:

I agree about the interface being much better with Ask. But, what about the search results? I took a look at them compared to the others and, between sites for adsense and dead links, the results were so poor I was embarrassed for them. I wonder how many of the searches were from repeat users vs once and gone?

I think Steve points out a fundamental concept that we might tend to forget from time to time. The best interface on a piece of garbage just gives you nice looking garbage. Now, I’m not saying that Ask is garbage. But I’ve seen some cases (and heard anecdotally many more) of some issues with spam and I do think they have some work to do. Ultimately, it’s the quality of the results that will determine marketshare. In fact, a nice interface on top of poor results will kill Ask quicker than ever, as it draws more trial users (as Steve alludes to) and generates more negative word of mouth. This is exactly what Ask doesn’t want to happen.

I’m the first to speak up about the importance of the user experience, but it’s important to remember that the interface is only one small part of that. Ultimately, there needs to be enough under the hood to meet and exceed the user’s expectations. Steve (and others) are indicating that Ask might be falling short in the relevancy horsepower department.

Search and the Digital CPG Shelf

First published October 25, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last April, James Lamberti from comScore, Randy Peterson from Procter and Gamble and I (representing SEMPO) grabbed a relatively quiet corner at the New York Hilton to talk about a potential research project. Here was our wish list:

–    A study that tied together online activity to offline purchase behavior
–    A study that identified the impact of search in a category not typically one that would be identified with search marketing
–    A study that would attempt to quantify the leveraged impact of search with brand advocates

Search and CPG: Are You Kidding?

As you can see, these were pretty lofty targets to shoot for. Choosing the product category was done at that table. What is the last category you would think of as generating significant search activity? Consumer packaged goods. After all, aren’t these either replenishment purchases, where we keep buying the same brand over and over, or a non-considered purchase, where we’re not really concerned with doing much research? Why would we need to turn to a search engine to figure out which toothpaste to buy, or which would be the right chips for Sunday’s ball game? We reasoned that CPG had the “Sinatra” Factor going for it: If search can make it here, it can make it anywhere.

To be honest, we really didn’t know what to expect, but comScore, together with a lot of help from Yahoo and Procter and Gamble, managed to come up with a workable study design. SEMPO jumped on board as a co-sponsor and we put the study out in the field. This week, with numbers crunched and charts drawn, the results were released in a study labeled The Digital Shelf. After several months of holding our collective breaths, we were about to see if people had already locked CPG brands into their brains, eliminating the need to search for product information.

Apparently not.

People went online for CPG information — in fact, to a significantly higher degree than even our most optimistic predictions.  Over a 3-month period, comScore recorded over 150 million visits to CPG websites in four categories: Food Products, Personal Care Products, Baby Products and Household Products. Those are numbers no marketer should ignore. But even more significantly, search drove significant portions of that traffic, from 23% of all visits in Household Products to 60% in Baby Products.

It’s not just automotive or travel that drive search traffic. We search for recipes, how to get the stains out of carpets, the most eco-friendly disposable diaper and yes, even the nutritional information for potato chips. We search, a lot!

And our searching sets us apart as a consumer segment. Searchers tend to be more interested in product information, comparing against competitors and what they need to make a purchase decision. Non-searchers are more interested in special offers and coupons.

Searchers spend more, about 20% more  — in all the categories in the study. In fact, in the Baby Care Category alone, people searching for information and eventually purchasing could result in almost $12 billion in sales.

Search = Opportunity

But perhaps the most compelling finding was this: People search because they’re comparing alternatives. This means they’re not locked into a brand. They could very well be your competitor’s customer right now. Non-searchers are more likely to go directly to a site because they do have a brand preference. They’re just looking for a bargain on that brand. The study found that 36% of searchers had recently switched their brand, compared to 29% of non-searchers. And, interestingly, searchers are less motivated by price. Only 27% of searchers switched because of price, compared to 38% of non-searchers.

So, the study delivered on our original wish list, and then some. It showed that search is a significant influencing factor in the most unlikely product category of all, the stuff on your pantry shelf or under the sink in your bathroom. In fact, I have yet to see a study done on any product category where search didn’t blow the doors off the competition in its effectiveness in connecting with customers. So perhaps the biggest question left unanswered by the study is this: Why are all those branding dollars still going everywhere but search?

The Wisdom of Consumer Crowds?

Following up on the theme of the rewiring of our brains, is the internet making us smarter consumers as well? There certainly seems to be evidence pointing in that direction.

A study by ScanAlert  found that the average online shopper in 2005 took 19 hours between first visiting a store and completing a transaction. In 2007, that jumped almost 79% to 34 hours. We’re taking longer to make up our minds. And we’re also doing our homework. Deloitte’s Consumer Products group recently released research saying 62 percent of consumers read consumer written product reviews on the Internet, and of those, more than 8 in 10 are directly influenced by the reviews.

In James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds, he believes that large groups, thinking independently with access to a diversity of information, will always make a better collective decision than the smartest individual in the group. Isn’t the Internet wiring this wisdom into more and more purchases? When we access these online reviews, we’re in fact coming to collective decisions about a product, built on hundreds or thousands of individual experiences. As the network expands, we benefit from the diversity of all those opinions and probably get a much more accurate picture of the quality of a product than we ever could from vendor supplied information alone. The marketplace votes for their choice, and the best product should theoretically emerge as the winner.

Of course, nothing works perfectly all of the time. As Surowiecki points out, communication can be an inexact and imperfect process, and information cascades based on faulty inputs can spread faster than ever online. But it’s also true that if a cascade leads to rapid adoption of an inferior product, we’ll discover we’ve been “had” faster and this news can also spread quicker. The connections of online make for a much faster dissemination of information based on experience than ever before, ensuring that the self correcting mechanisms of the marketplace kick into gear faster.

There’s a pass along effect happening here as well. For social networking buffs, you’ve probably heard of Granovetter’s “Weak Ties”. Social networks are made up of dense, highly connected clusters, i.e. families, close friends, co-workers. The social ties within these clusters are strong ties. But spanning the clusters are “weak ties” between more distant acquaintances. The ability for word to spread depends on these weak ties. What the internet does is exponentially increase the number of weak ties, wiring thousands of clusters together into much bigger networks than were ever possible before. This allows word of mouth to travel not only in the physical world but also in the virtual. I looked at a fascinating follow up study to Granovetter’s where Jonathan Frenzen and Kent Nakamoto also looked at the value of the information and the self interest of the individual and their “strong ties” within a cluster as a factor in how quickly word of mouth passes through a network.

Deloitte’s study graphically illustrates the weak tie/strong tie effect. 7 out of 10 of the consumers who read reviews share them with friends, family or colleagues, moving the information that comes through the weak ties of the internet into each cluster, where it spreads rapidly thanks to the efficiency of strong ties. This effect pumps up the power of word of mouth by several orders of magnitude.

But are we also becoming more socially aware in our shopping? The research by Deloitte also seems to indicate this. 4 out of 10 consumers said they were swayed by “better for you” ingredients or components, eco-friendly usage and sourcing, and eco-friendly production or packaging. The internet wires us into communities, so it’s not surprising that we become more sensitive to the collective health of those communities in the process.

What all these leads to is a better informed consumer, who’s not reliant on marketing messaging coming from the manufacturer or the retailer. And that should make us all smarter.

On Your Search Menu Tonight

First published October 4, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This week Yahoo unveiled a new feature. It doesn’t really change the search game that much in terms of competitive functionality. If anything, it’s another case of Yahoo catching up with the competition. But it may have dramatic implications from a user’s point of view. To illustrate that point further I’d like to share a couple of stories with you.

The feature is called Search Assist. You type your query in, and Yahoo provides a list under the query box with a number of possible ways you could complete the query. This follows in the footsteps of Google’s search suggestions in its toolbar. Currently, Google doesn’t offer this functionality within the standard Google query box, at least in North America. Ask also offers this feature.

Because Yahoo is late to the game, the company had the opportunity to up the functionality a little bit. For example, the suggestions that come from Yahoo can include the word you’re typing anywhere in the suggested query phrase. Google uses straight stemming, so the word you’re typing is always at the beginning of the suggested phrases. Yahoo also seems to be pulling from a larger inventory of suggested phrases. The few test queries I did brought back substantially more suggestions than did Google.

It’s not so much the functionality of this feature that intrigues me; it’s how it could affect the way we search. I personally have found that I come to rely on this feature in the Google toolbar more and more. Rather than structuring a complete query in my mind, I type the first few letters of the root word in and see what Google offers me. It leads me to select query phrases that I probably never would have thought of myself.

Some time ago I wrote that contrary to popular belief, we’ve actually become quite adept at paring our queries down to the essential words. It’s not that we don’t know how to launch an advanced query; it’s that most times, we don’t need to. This becomes even truer with search suggestions. All we have to do is think of one word, and the search engine will serve us a menu of potential queries. It reduces the effort required from the searcher, but let me tell you a story about how this might impact a company’s reputation online.

I Wouldn’t Recommend That Choice

Some time ago I got a voicemail from an equity firm. The woman who left a message was brash, a little abrasive and left a rather cryptic message, insisting that I had to phone her right back. Now, since I’m in the search game, getting calls from venture capitalists and investment bankers is nothing really new. But I’d never quite heard this tone from one of these prospecting calls before. So, I did as I usually do in these cases and decided to do a little more research on the search engines to determine whether I was actually going to return this call or not. I did my quick 30-second reputation check.

Normally, I would just type in the name of the firm and see what came up in the top 10 results. Usually, if there’s strong negative content out there, it’s worth paying attention to and it tends to collect enough search equity to break the top 10. This time, I didn’t even have to get as far as the results page. The minute I started typing the company name into my Google toolbar, the suggestions Google was providing me told the entire story: “company” scam, “company” fraud and “company” lawsuits. Of the top eight suggestions, over half of them were negative in nature. Not great odds for success. Needless to say, I never returned the call.

If these search suggestions are going to significantly alter our search patterns, we should be aware of what’s coming up in those suggestions for our branded terms. Type your company name into Yahoo or Google’s toolbar and see what variations are being served to you. Some of them may not be that appetizing.

Would You Prefer Szechuan?

My belief is that users are increasingly going to use this to structure their queries. It moves search one step closer to be coming a true discovery engine. One of the overwhelming characteristics of search user behavior is that we’re basically lazy. We want to expand a minimal amount of effort but in return, we expect a significant degree of relevance. Search suggestions allow us to enter a minimum of keystrokes and the search engine obliges us with a full menu of options.

This brings me to my other story. Earlier this year we did some eye-tracking research on how Chinese citizens interact with the search engines Baidu and Google China. After we released the preliminary results of the study, I had a chance to talk to a Google engineer who worked on the search engine. In China, Google does provide real-time search suggestions right from the query box. The company found that it’s significantly more work to type a query in Mandarin than it is in most Western languages. Using a keyboard for input in China is, at best, a compromise. So Google found that because of the amount of work required to enter a query, the average query length was quite short in China, giving a substantially reduced degree of relevancy. In fact, many Chinese users would type in the bare minimum required and then would scroll to the bottom of the page, where Google showed other suggested queries. Then, the user would just click on one of these links. Hardly the efficient searching behavior Google was shooting for. After introducing real-time search suggestions for the query box, Google found the average length of query increased dramatically and supposedly, so did the level of user satisfaction.

Search query suggestions are just one additional way we’ll see our search behavior change significantly over the next year or two. Little changes, like a list of suggested queries or the inclusion of more types of content in our results pages, will have some profound effects. And when search is the ubiquitous online activity it is, it doesn’t take a very big rock to create some significant and far-reaching ripples.

Personalization Catches the User’s Eye

First published September 13, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I looked at the impact the inclusion of graphics on the search results page might have on user behavior, based on our most recent eye tracking report. This week, we look at the impact that personalization might bring.

One of the biggest hurdles is that personalization, as currently implemented by Google, is a pretty tentative representation of what personalization will become. It only impacts a few listings on a few searches, and the signals driving personalization are limited at this point. Personalization is currently a test bed that Google is working on, but Sep Kamvar and his team have the full weight of Google behind them, so expect some significant advances in a hurry. In fact, my suspicion is that there’s a lot being held in reserve by Google, waiting for user sensitivity around the privacy issue to lessen a bit. We didn’t really expect to see the current flavor of personalization alter user behavior that much, because it’s not really making that much of a difference on the relevancy of the results for most users.

But if we look forward a year or so, it’s safe to assume that personalization would become a more powerful influencer of user behavior. So, for our test, we manually pushed the envelope of personalization a bit. We divided up the study into two separate sessions around one task (an unrestricted opportunity to find out more about the iPhone) and used the click data from the first session to help us personalize the data for the search experience in the second session. We used past sites visited to help us first of all determine what the intent of the user might be (research, looking for news, looking to buy) and secondly to tailor the personalized results to provide the natural next step in their online research. We showed these results in organic positions 3, 4 and 5 on the page, leaving base Google results in the top two organic spots so we could compare.

Stronger Scent

The results were quite interesting. In the nonpersonalized results pages, taken straight from Google (in signed out mode) we saw 18.91% of the time spent looking at the page happened in these three results, 20.57% of the eye fixations happened here, and 15% of the clicks were on Organic listings 3, 4 and 5. The majority of the activity was much further up the page, in the typical top heavy Golden Triangle configuration.

But on our personalized results, participants spent 40.4% of their time on these three results, 40.95% of the fixations were on them, and they captured a full 55.56% of the clicks. Obviously, from the user’s point of view, we did a successful job of connecting intent and content with these listings, providing greater relevance and stronger information scent. We manually accomplished exactly what Google wants to do with the personalization algorithm.

Scanning Heading South

Something else happened that was quite interesting. Last week I shared how the inclusion of a graphic changed our “F” shaped scanning patterns into more of an “E” shape, with the middle arm of the “E” aligned with the graphic. We scan that first, and then scan above and below. When we created our personalized test results pages, we (being unaware of this behavioral variation at the time) coincidentally included a universal graphic result in the number 2 organic position, as this is what we were finding on Google.

When we combined the fact that users started scanning on the graphic, then looked above and below to see where they wanted to scan next with the greater relevance and information scent of the personalized results, we saw a very significant relocation of scanning activity, moving down from the top of the Golden Triangle.

One of the things that distinguished Google in our previous eye tracking comparisons with Yahoo and Microsoft was its success of keeping the majority of scanning activity high on the page, whether those top results were organic or sponsored.

Top of page relevance has been a religion at Google. More aggressive presentation of sponsored ads (Yahoo) or lower quality and relevance thresholds of those ads (Microsoft) meant that on these engines (at least as of early 2006) users scanned deeper and were more likely to move past the top of the page in their quest for the most relevant results. Google always kept scan activity high and to the left.

But ironically, as Google experiments with improving the organic results set, both through the inclusion of universal results and more personalization, their biggest challenge may be in making sure sponsored results aren’t left in the dust. Top of page scanning is ideal user behavior that also happens to offer a big win for advertisers. As results pages are increasingly in flux, it will be important to ensure that scanning doesn’t move too far from the upper left corner, at least as long as we still have a linear, 1 dimensional top to bottom list of results.