Managing Greatness

Best of Jared Spool at UXPA Israel

2013-02-14T15:13:58Z

Was privileged to hear user experience expert Jared Spool. Here’s the best of what he said:

Best lessons

Compared best and worst UX companies. The best had three characteristics:

Shared vision of what the experience would be like in 5 years
Everybody had spent at least 2 hours watching people use the product during the last 6 weeks
Celebrated failure

Pattern of new tech: Focus on Technology (Wang word processor: $14,000) -> Features (Word Perfect: 1,700 features) -> Experience (Word: 70 features).

Shifting from features to experience is the hardest thing an organization can do. Most fail.

There were 135 music players on the market when the iPhone was launched. It had inferior technology and fewer features. You couldn’t even manage the songs from the device. But it was simple. And it revolutionalized the industry.

When somebody has a new iPhone his friends say, ooh, can I see it. If you ask your friends if they want to see your new SanDisk or Zune they’ll say no, and don’t ever ask me that again.

Mobile first: Start with the mobile experience. Then add features for the desktop. But only if you absolutely have to. Each feature or option is a lot more expensive than you think.

Most important thing a UX designer can do is remove the filters separating the decision makers from their users.

Everybody who influences the product should watch users interact with the product. So the lawyer can understand the cost of forcing the user lie about having read the terms of service.

A design principle helps you say NO to things. The difference between good companies and great companies are all the things a great company says no to.

Best lines

Self-design works under some conditions. Worked for iPhone. Most UX pros hate it because it undermines our value. [Conditions are: There have to be enough people like you, and you need to use the product many times a day].

Outsourcing your usability testing is like outsourcing your vacation. Gets the job done, but doesn’t deliver the benefits.

User experience is not rocket science. We know, because NASA is one of our clients. We asked them and they said it isn’t. They think it’s brain surgery.

The Disney breakfast is your 6-year-old’s chance to get close to a creepy guy in a suit and make the most expensive breakfast ever.

Best interaction

“You’ll tell me when to panic, right?” After a scary siren went off and the Israelis all ignored it.

Blast from the past

Last time I heard Jared he delivered this gem: “We compared successful companies with unsuccessful ones [at Web design]. The unsuccessful ones all told us “our problem is that we don’t have a good process.” But none of the successful companies used a process. The biggest problem for the unsuccessful companies was that they thought the right way to do this was through a formal process.”

Best of Dave Carroll

2013-02-12T09:33:14Z

I had the privilege of speaking at MegaComm last week, which allowed me to hear Dave Carroll of United Breaks Guitars fame. I’m ashamed to admit that my first impression was that this was a one hit wonder still barely holding on to his fifteen minutes of fame. But he quickly won me over and proved otherwise.

Back in business school we were given two case studies about Honda Motors, to highlight the difference between what Henry Mintzberg termed deliberate and emergent strategies. The first case study made Soichiro Honda seem like a proactive genius who wrote the blueprint for Honda’s successes. The other showed him not as a great deliberate planner but as a man who was very good at reacting to opportunities. I was the only one in the class who was more swayed by the latter view.

Carroll has been a master at emergent strategy. First he turned a negative experience at United into a viral video. Then he used the viral video, and the story behind it, to build a successful and lucrative career as an author and keynote speaker. He leverages the video and the speaking career to advance his music and his new customer complaint website gripevine.

The man appears to have built a lifestyle that he enjoys and in which he excels, through an impressive core skillset and successful leveraging of unexpected events. It’s somewhat reminiscent of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s ideas of building around the black swan.

Fascination with stories like Carroll’s sometimes scares me because some people draw the lesson that they should just sit back and wait for lightning to strike. That’s not the idea behind emergent strategies, and it’s not Dave’s story. First, lightning doesn’t often strike. Second, when it does, people usually fail to capitalize, often not even noticing. Dave’s hardly the first person with a bad customer support story.

Deliberate and emergent strategies have two key things in common:

They both require hard work, planning and skill.
They both depend on events that are beyond our control.

Each has its time and place, and perhaps should be thought of as two different skillsets to master.

Here’s what Dave Carroll did before his video went viral:

Before the guitar broke: Lived a good, professional life. Volunteered as a fire-fighter. Was on a paid music gig with his brothers. Built relationships. Worked on his music and story-telling skills.
First reaction to broken guitar: Was nice and polite the whole way. His wife works in customer support and used to tell him about all the abusive customers. Dave wasn’t going to be that. Also, he’s Canadian.
The video: Had the idea to create the video. Wrote the song. Wrote the video. Called friends and asked for help. Made it all happen. Smiling the whole way.

So he didn’t just sit back and wait for lightning to strike. He lived his life in a way that likely would have been very fulfilling without the video and its aftermath.

He built his skills, his character, and his relationships.

He did a great job creating a video that just worked.

Here’s what he did after the video went viral:

Got a friend to help out. Worked nearly around the clock answering almost every interview request. Was nice and friendly the whole time.
Found ways to leverage the video to better do the things he liked doing and was good at: connecting with people and telling stories through words and music.

Listening to him was fun and inspirational. Here are highlights:

We heard a woman behind us say “Oh my God, they’re throwing guitars outside.”

Well, this disturbed me a great deal

First two flight attendants he went to just passed him off and the third one flatly refused to help.

“So the real problem wasn’t that my guitar was being thrown around. It was that I was rejected by three women in five minutes.”

Favorite response was

“But hon, that’s why you signed the waiver”

After months of jumping through hoops was finally rejected by Ms Irlweg because he didn’t file his initial claim within 24 hours.

“If I were a lawyer I’d sue you. But I’m a musician. I’m going to write three songs about United and I’m going to get a million YouTube views. I’ll keep you updated and together we’ll get to a million.”

His only problem was that I couldn’t find anything that rhymed with Irlweg.

People were very helpful.

“United broke your guitar? We’ll donate our services.”

Got a one day video shoot. Made the props himself.

“That little plane you see at the beginning of the video? I made it myself. Took me four hours.

“Bought mustaches and lunch for everybody. That was the bulk of my $150 budget for this video.”

His social media strategy was

“I’ll post this on YouTube and see what happens.”

Posted it at 11:30 at night.

“At midnight I had six hits. I thought they were all mine. I figured I’d watch the video a million times myself. Sent 300 e-mails and posted to my 600 Facebook friends.”

In the morning there were 300 views. By noon there were 25,000 and by dinner 50,000.

The local paper wrote something about it which was picked up by the LA Times. He did a local radio interview the next morning. Bought a card table and a 2 line phone. Got a friend to help out. He’s still averaging about an interview a day. He’d go to sleep at midnight and wake up at 2 for European interviews.

He was driving and his friend picks up the phone and it’s Bob Taylor from Taylor Guitars.

“Bob Taylor! It’s like God calling.”

Then the friend hangs up.

“You hung up on Bob Taylor!”

“Yeah, but I have Dave Letterman.”

Had a big New York media day planned but it fell through. Instead went to California to see Bob Taylor. After a big tour Taylor showed him a wall full of guitars.

“Pick 2,” Bob said.

One reason Dave’s story connects is that it’s the Luke Skywalker story. Or David and Goliath. The little guy penetrates through a defense system that was built on the premise that one guy can’t hurt you.

Got offered his first speaking event.

“We’d like your PowerPoint presentation.”

“I’d like to customize that for you.”

Then he called his dad.

“Dad, what’s a Power Point presentation?”

Eventually just told his story. Got great feedback.

“But Dave, you didn’t have any charts or graphs. People are going to laugh at you after you leave the room.”

“So here’s my chart,” he said to us, and showed some silly chart about how his target market was everybody who knows anybody who had a bad experience flying.

United never threatened legal action.

His lawyer friend told him that satire is your right, if it’s truthful. But you can be sure there’s a room full of United lawyers just waiting for you to screw up.

He was on the View. They showed a statement from United that said they were very sorry about what happened, and they were now using the United Breaks Guitars video as part of their customer training.

“Are they paying you a licensing fee?” Whoopi Goldberg asked.

Now they are.

–

Bought a ticket on Continental and happened to fly on the day that they merged with United.

“Are you the guy from United Breaks Guitars?” a fellow passenger asked him at security.

“Yes.”

“I was right behind you at the counter. Right after you left, the woman behind the counter told her supervisor ‘Don’t worry, I was very nice to him.’”

–

Flew United one other time. He kept his guitar close. They lost his suitcase. Became front page news on NYT biz section.

–

“Funny story, I have a great relationship with Lufthansa now. We were on our way to a concert in Siberia and Lufthansa lost our instruments, no joke. I Tweeted @lufthansa that they lost our guitars.

“Within an hour I received a response. We’re very sorry. We’re looking very hard for your instruments. We think they’re in Dusseldorf. We’ll find out and keep you updated.

They got the guitars to Moscow and on to Siberia. Dave got them just before the sound check at his concert.

They asked him if he’d like to do a speaking gig for them at a customer service event in New York. That went well, and they booked him for a bigger one in Phoenix.

–

Was flying American Airlines once. A flight attendant approached him near the gate.

“Dave Carroll? Do you know what this is? It’s my customer service pin. Do you know when I got it? After I watched your video.”

Now he’s discussing licensing rights with them.

Dave spoke for more than two hours at MegaComm. Well, for some of that time he played the guitar and sang. Not his famous song, though he opened by showing that video. The 911 song, a touching tribute to first responders. And Now, which was accompanied by a touching story about a woman whose terminally ill mother loved the song. Then one morning, she passed away while they were listening to it.

For some reason the recurring phrase of that song touches me.

“When there’s no way out, there’s still a way through.”

Stuff happens. Sometimes it can’t be undone. But there’s often a way through. It’s not usually as dramatic as turning broken guitars into personal and professional success. But happiness and success are largely dependent on developing the mindset, and the skillset, to steer your way through the unexpected crises and opportunities.

–

Dave, I hope I didn’t overstep the bounds of Fair Rights usage with all the quotes in this post. I hope you see it as a tribute. You rocked. And you were awesome. All the best.

Google, AI and the future of SEO

2013-02-09T17:57:50Z

Anybody remember Google’s first April Fool’s joke?

I’ll get to that in a second. Quick hint is Steven Levy’s observation that the real Google April Fool’s joke was that “even the scariest plans that Google joked about were the kind of thing that Google’s leaders actually dreamed about.” Google is obsessed with artificial intelligence. Giving you the web page for which you searched is only the first use-case which Google solved. They’re already past that.

Some things they already started doing, or are very close to:

Giving you information that you want even before you search for it.
Not just delivering information, but performing actions for you.
Taking inputs not just from what you type into a search box, but also from where you are, where you’re going, and what you’re doing, planning, or looking at.
Giving results not just from information published by others on the web, but from everything it learns about the world.
Gone “from strings to things.” Instead of just considering keywords, Google increasingly understands the world’s objects and the relationships between them.
Knowing you better than your mother does. And better than you know yourself.

So the people who talked about Search Engine Optimization dying were partially right. Optimizing for Google is becoming much bigger than getting a site to rank high in search results. Also, many of the older SEO tactics no longer work.

Google Glass

Google Glass is amazing. And it’s not science fiction. A developer version should ship this in about two months and next year they expect to launch to consumers.

In Google’s video presenting the product you’re trying to buy a book about playing the Ukelele.

You start walking to the 6 train and Google tells you that service is suspended. It asks if you want walking directions or public transportation directions, you choose walking directions. It even gives you directions inside the store. You find your book. Apparently in Google’s perfect future the only thing not digitized are books. My daughter learned to play the ukulele from a Google product called YouTube, but, whatever, you were wearing the futuristic glasses but feeling retro. Your glasses tell you that your friend, or your stalker, or your stalkee, is right outside the store.

A few hours later you’re playing the ukulele for the cute girl while showing her the Hudson skyline. Perfect date for geeks and Orthodox Jews, all the benefits of being with the cute girl without any of the ickiness of physical proximity. Leave it to Google to create this perfect technology and to use it to go to a bookstore instead of to your girlfriend. But I digress.

Marissa Mayer’s vision

Marissa Mayer is now CEO of Yahoo! But before she went purple she was a key figure at Google for over a decade.

I heard her at a conference and she told us that she almost missed her flight because of a traffic jam on the way to the airport. Why, she asked, didn’t her Android phone warn her? Her phone knows her schedule. It knows the current traffic and it knows when rush hour is. It can know about flight delays. Why couldn’t it tell her that there was an accident on the 101 and I should leave my house a half hour early?

Marissa was VP of Local and Maps at the time, so she wasn’t just day dreaming, she was telling us of the vision Google was pursuing.

Driverless car

Google’s vision doesn’t end with giving information. It’s also going to be powering machines. They have driverless cars. They put an engineer in the driver’s seat just in case, and to not freak anybody out. They set in on a crazy 1,000 mile obstacle course that ranged from highway driving to a one-lane road where if somebody was coming the other way you had to back into a driveway and pull back out.

It drove over 300,000 miles and the only accident was when it was rear-ended at a traffic light.

The purring test

Google also built a neural network and told it to watch YouTube videos and start classifying the world. One pattern that it noticed was cat faces. This was considered a big breakthrough because they didn’t tell it to find cat faces, just to start recognizing patterns. And it sort of discovered cat faces. Somebody called it passing the purring test.

The New York Times got snarky with a headline of “How many computers to identify a cat? 16,000.” It was actually only 1,000. So the New York Times was off by a factor of 16. Which is good for them.

Larry’s obsession

Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have always been obsessed with artificial intelligence.

In 2002 he said “Google will fulfill its mission only when its search is AI complete.”
Technologist Steve Jurvetson said “Every time I talk about Google’s future with Larry Page, he argues that it will become an artificial intelligence.”
They wrote in a company memo “Google wants to be the best in search. To reach that goal Google wants to have the world’s top AI research laboratory.”

There are more Google AI quotes at Artificial Brains. And they’re building that laboratory; it’s called Google X Lab. They’re allegedly working on over 100 products, including the glasses and the driverless car and the Android Assistant that’s like Apple’s Siri and that’s supposed to be the core of that vision that Marissa Mayer articulated. They also have a Web of Things project that companies like Texas Instruments and Broadcom are allegedly signed on for where you can control all your gadgets remotely. So you can turn on your coffee machine or make sure you turned it off, or whatever. And we’re probably not far from your car can telling your air conditioner that you’ll be home in ten minutes.

Combine these and a little imagination and Marissa Mayer’s vision and it’s not just your cellphone telling you to leave early because of traffic on the way to the airport. It’s landing in a foreign city and Android taking care of your driverless rental car and knowing whether or not it should get the liability insurance and driving you to the Kosher restaurant that your friend liked and suggesting evening entertainment and then taking you there. They’re also allegedly working on some really crazy stuff involving robotics and a space elevator which all sound like science fiction but maybe isn’t any more. Sergey Brin runs the lab, with Larry Page also very involved. Two months ago they hired Ray Kurzweil, who is one of the most talented and ambitious artificial intelligence visionaries.

MentalPlex

Ok, Google’s first April Fool’s joke? The Google MentalPlex. It was developed by experts in “artificial and pseudo-intelligence, parapsychology and improbability.” You projected a mental image of what you wanted to find into the spinning spiral, and then visualized clicking on it. Unfortunately you’d always get an error message like

Error 5: Insufficient conviction.
Error 666: Multiple transmitters detected. Silence voices in your head and try again.

And these were the days of Who wants to be a millionaire so they had

Error: MentalPlex(tm) has determined that this is not your final answer. Please try again.

Here’s the full list of Mental Plex error messages. The MentalPlex FAQ page was even funnier, if you’re into geek humor. They warn you that “users unaccustomed to concentrated thought may experience side effects such as headaches, dizziness or flashes of brilliance” but they reassure you that “these will quickly pass.” They also reassures you that even though “MentalPlex does have the potential of probing your deepest darkest secrets and desires,” the information is “rarely sold to advertisers unless they ask very, very nicely.”

But I think the funniest and scariest FAQ was

3. Does MentalPlex search read minds? Don’t be ridiculous. Mind-reading is impossible. MentalPlex technology senses electronic field variations created by concentrated thought and can interpret those field variations as broad categories of content. Mind-reading? Really now. We’re talking about science here.

I love that one because it’s thirteen years later and I’m a little lost about the boundary between fiction and reality. Google can’t read my mind. But it knows an awful lot about my thoughts and desires. Google Glass will see what I see, and hear what I say. Pretty soon Google will know my schedule, my search history, my browsing history, where I am, where I’ve been, where I’m going, who my friends are, what I like, and whether or not my coffee is ready.

Oh, and by the way according to the patent application filed two weeks ago Google Glass will transmit sounds through bone conduction rather than speakers. So they’re already messing directly with your skull, but for now only to implant sounds.

“The vibration transducer is configured such that when the head-mounted display is worn, the vibration transducer vibrates the head-mounted display without directly vibrating a wearer.” So that’s good, it doesn’t have to vibrate you, it just “couples to” your bone structure. This isn’t just a Google thing, BTW, it’s the hot new technology. It sits near your ear, couples to your bone, and it doesn’t block out ambient noise. Which is a good thing if you’re crossing the street. Won’t catch on with everyone. For my kids, still being able to hear me would kind of ruin the whole point of wearing headphones.

My point is that Google knows a hell of a lot more about me than I do, and it’s going to be directly messing with my brain. So they can’t read my mind. At least not yet. But they seem to have worked around that.

BTW, I’d be remiss if I discussed the future of Google without linking to this great post by AJ Kohn about Google’s not so evil plan to get people to use the internet for everything all the time.

SEO

Let’s go through some of the things that are changing, and their implications.

Calling all data

Only three years ago if you asked Google questions like “do your search ranking algorithms consider social signals” they would tell you no. Certain signals were just too easy to spam, had too much noise, weren’t reliable. Google now uses everything. The biggest breakthrough of the Panda and Penguin updates, in my opinion, was that Google for the first time said “OK, we’re smart enough, we’re going to look at everything.” Google decided they had enough knowledge to take all the signals they could and mash them together and decide which signals seemed phony and which seemed real. Matt Cutts advised webmasters that “it’s much easier to be natural than to fake natural” and most of the former black hat SEOs are agreeing. SEOs who made their living using clever tricks to fool Google have generally turned away from the dark side. Unless they’re really, really good.

User engagement

One thing that matters a lot more than it used to is user engagement. We were working with a site that had a projection of Bill Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention.

After the speech, we noticed in Google Analytics that we were getting a lot of search traffic for “Clinton DNC speech.” I should have anticipated that, but I didn’t. That’s why we look at Analytics.

The people searching for Clinton’s DNC speech were probably looking what he actually said, not to what somebody thought he was going to say. We were probably dissatisfying a lot of users, who were going back to Google and clicking on a different result from the same search results page, implicitly telling Google that we failed them.

Now this was an easy problem to fix. We updated the entry, by embedding the YouTube video of the speech, a link to the transcript, and links to reviews from a liberal who loved it and a conservative who hated it. Took maybe five minutes. Turned the page from being yesterday’s news to an evergreen snapshot of a historic event, with the original content still there but below the fold. In the old days, I might have just said “our page isn’t satisfying the user? Fine. Let’s monetize him. Or try to get some other benefit from him. Get him to sign up for a newsletter or click on a different link. Or we can ignore it and focus on our other opportunities.” But not any more. Google cares very much about “pogo sticking,” the people who bounce back to the SERPs and try a different link. First step now is to prevent a dissatisfied user from pogo sticking.

Fix or kill your worst pages

Mahalo used to prominently promote their page on how to get coupons from McDonalds. They ranked #1 for it for a while. The extra beauty of the page was that it had all the right keywords but was completely worthless so you had to click through on the AdSense ads if you still had hope for a coupon. Those kinds of strategies worked for a while. Now they’re poison. Mahalo got crushed by Panda.

Document classifier

Google is now using something called a document classifier to help determine which sites are better than others. Basically you look at everything you can about web sites, and you ask which attributes correlate with user satisfaction.

For example, do you know how the New York Times usually refers to the former first lady, senator, and secretary of state? Hillary Rodham Clinton. Ten years ago already the Google News team noticed that the better news sites usually included her maiden name when referring to her. Does using her maiden name make you a better site? I don’t think so. But Google’s document classifier might. Do the things that good sites do, and avoid the things that bad sites do. Whether those things are objectively good, bad, or neutral. If I were running a site with user generated content, for example, I would strongly encourage correct spelling, capitalization and punctuation. Because the New York Times doesn’t have comments that are all misspelled and in lowercase.

Google gave the examples of New York Times, Wikipedia and the IRS as sites that you should emulate. When is the last time you heard the IRS mentioned as a company to emulate?

If it scales, be very afraid

I was at a conference and an audience member asked “Should I buy links?” My co-panelist and the moderator laughed and said no. I always get suspicious when the answer is too simple that maybe we’re over-simplifying. Here’s the thing. Buying a link can be great. If you buy one. From a trusted site in your niche that can really bestow authority upon you. And preferably not a straight purchase, and definitely not one that leaves a paper trail. But something indirect, or barter, for example a charitable donation, or some other thing you can do for them that might persuade them to link to you. The general rule here is that any tactic that can easily scale has probably been ruined by aggressive SEOs. And Google’s getting smart enough and aggressive enough that tactics that scale easily usually backfire. So don’t buy thousands of links. Intelligently acquire one or two. And whenever you see somebody doing something in bulk, it’s probably a bad idea.

Thinking outside of the box

Those are ways that Google’s increasing intelligence is changing the game, and those lessons definitely apply today. But let’s go outside the search box, back to the things we were talking about before. Here’s a mental experiment. You sell something to do with Orlando vacations. Flights, rental cars, hotel, entertainment, apartment rentals, souvenirs, emergency dental service. Whatever. How is your job different when instead of typing “Orlando nightlife” in a search box, your potential customer just says “what can we do tonight?” So a few things are important here:

In addition to optimizing for keywords, we’re now optimizing for concepts. We need to somehow tell Google what we are, not just what keywords we match.
Similarly, Orlando isn’t just a word any more, it’s an entity with a specific longitude and latitude.
Google knows our potential customers’ friends and what they liked.
The ultimate decision may sometimes be made by an automated agent like Siri or Android Assistant.

So we’re going to be more focused on:

Feeding the Google Knowledge Graph

As we move from strings to things, we’re going to be using things like

FreeBase

Freebase is a large, collaborative database that Google now owns and uses for its Knowledge Graph. It gets information from Wikipedia, IMDB and many other sources. They have APIs so you can write to it directly. You also influence it when you fix something on Wikipedia, especially in an InfoBox.

Schema.org

Schema.org gives you another way to give Google structured data. For example, we’re selling Naïve Art at Naïve Art Online – they make great Valentine’s Day presents, by the way – so we marked up the paintings using schema.org.

Google Places

Google has been somewhat confused with Google Places and Google+ Local. I don’t know exactly where they’re going. But if you want people coming to a certain physical location, it’s critical to get yourself listed with them.

Social graph

The social graph is very important. If somebody comes to your business, try to find a way for them to recommend it. Get their e-mail address and find excuses to send them an e-mail, with a special offer or something. Or appointment reminders. And include a link to like you or recommend you. This isn’t just important for Google, it’s also important for Facebook which is releasing their social search. Find ways to get your customers to like you in social media.

Author graph

Eric Schmidt wrote in his upcoming book that

“Information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification … The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”

The Future According To Google’s Eric Schmidt: 7 Points

The internet was once a tool of anonymity, a place where nobody knew you were a dog. It’s going the other way. The web is about identity and relationships now, not anonymity. The internet is not where you live your second, virtual life. You need to establish your identity.

Is search dead?

Every year somebody declares that search is dead. Search may be decreasing in importance. That is, Google and SEO are becoming about a lot more than performing a search. Google is going to be getting a lot more proactive, and it is going to be using far more inputs than just text in a search box. Search isn’t going to die, but other things are becoming more important. And Google and SEO are in my opinion going to continue growing for the foreseeable future.

The fundamental things apply

A tremendous amount is changing as Google is acquiring science-fiction like knowledge and power. And yet, and yet. Remember the Flintstones and the Jetsons? Two TV shows set millions of years apart. But they were pretty much the same show with different gags. Yes, there are things that are plenty of things that change in SEO, but most of the fundamentals remain the same, and indeed many of the principles of marketing have remained the same since Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble tried their first money-making scheme.

Build relationships
Engage your users and partners
Figure out what your potential customers are looking for
Create what your customers want
Tell Google what you’re offering

I don’t mean to overstate this point, because, yes, you should be paying attention to how a lot of important things change. But a kiss is still a kiss. Unless it’s on a virtual date using Google Glass.

–

Note: This is a presentation I gave at SMX Israel (lightning version) and at MegaComm. Here’s the video and the Slideshare.

Best of SMX Israel 2013

2013-01-27T09:16:59Z

Best lines and lessons

Roi Ben Ami:

Females always win. [Discussing A/B test results regarding male vs female faces on landing pages]
Successful landing pages help the user paint the picture of what happens after the conversion.

Uri Breitman: If you delete a site, you have to shift delete it. You can’t redirect its pages to a new domain. [Asked about deleting a site hit by Penguin and redirecting the pages].

Shira Abel:

It takes about ten times of hearing about a brand till you trust it. That’s why social works and why it’s so hard to track.
Long term sales require long term relationships.

Eli Feldblum: Don’t use WordPress category or tag pages. Create static pages with in-context links to the pages in the category.

Kelli Brown: Fans brought in because you offered a free iPad are as bad as bought likes. Fans not engaging prevent real fans from seeing content.

Jon Burg: Start with business objectives, not social objectives. For $5 you can get 1,000 Twitter followers and it’s a really bad idea and it will hurt you in the end. Follower count is just a number. What are your business objectives?

Gil Reich: So Google’s demo for Google Glass has the perfect date for geeks or Orthodox Jews. The guy gets to play the ukulele for the cute girl and show her the sunset over the Hudson River through his glasses. All the benefits of dating a cute girl without any of the ickiness involved with physical proximity.

Best stats

Paul Vesely: 1 in 5 users bought something using a smartphone over Thanksgiving 2012.

Kalman Labovitch: 8 of 10 schema.org implementations we saw from our client were wrong. And they still brought a significant increase in search traffic.

Ophir Cohen: Our schema.org implementations brought a 50% increase in traffic.

Best unrelated tip

Eli Feldblum and an unidentified audience member saved a presenter by telling him that Ctrl+Shift+T reopens your last closed tabs in Google Chrome. Who knew?

Best Tweets

Yuval Wirzberger ‏@GrooveInfoTech: Psyched for #smxisrael … hmmm what to wear? Just kidding, im a guy. See u there :)

Sara ‏@sarabcole: Gotta check that none of the speakers or their methods are messing with my site. [After the 'Aggressive SEO' session]

Hat tips

Special thanks to Hadassah Levy for her SMX Tweets and Kahena Digital for their SMX live blog.

Also see …

Great round up by Ronit Epstein at 3 Door Digital: 121 tips from #SMX Israel 2013

The best of other great search conferences.

How the Margin of Error Skews Our Perception of Risk

2012-11-01T15:36:26Z

“Like Virginia, Florida remains too close to call. There Obama leads Mitt Romney at just 48 to 47 percent–less than the polls margin of error of plus or minus 3 percent.”

Virginia race too close to call, CBS Virginia

If you’re following the election polls, you’re accustomed to hearing a reporter announce the poll results along with a margin of error, and then telling you whether or not the results are statistically significant.

Their use of the phrases margin of error and statistically significant is mathematically accurate but highly misleading.

Margin of error measures one very specific type of risk: the chance that my poll sample is inaccurate assuming that I succeeded in:

Accurately measuring
A randomly selected
Representative sample
Of actual voters

In that case, the margin of error tells me I have 95% confidence that the actual result falls within the margin of error.

We focus on margin of error for the same reason the drunk in the joke looks for his keys under the lamppost. Because it’s easier than looking where the keys are likely to be. It’s an easy number to calculate. But it’s not where the main risk is. And citing the margin of error glosses over the bigger sources of risk, and gives us false confidence in the result.

Let’s take each part:

Accurate measurement & the social desirability bias: If a priest told you that he polled his parishioners and they all give charity and none use contraceptives, would you believe him? Some people skew their answers to what they think the asker will like and respect. That’s why gay marriage usually wins in polls even though it has yet to pass in an election. The demonization of the right is unusually strong this year. How many people are telling the pollsters that they’ll vote for one candidate and then either not vote, or vote for the other guy?
Random, representative sample: The art and science of gathering a representative sample contains the following potential sources of error:
- Initial sample: Pollsters used to randomly select from a list of registered voters. Now they call people and ask if they’re registered. Cellphone only voters have introduced a more recent complication. The New York Times quoted an expert who said “Anyone who claims there’s a best practice doesn’t know what they’re talking about. We as an industry don’t know.”
- Sub-sample: Over 90% of people called refuse to participate. Are the fewer than 10% who do participate representative of those who refuse?
- Weighting the results. Pollsters then try to weigh the results to match their expectations of the turnout. For example, a few weeks ago the Gallup poll gave a few points bump to the president when they decided to decrease the weighting on white voters. How accurate is their projection for turnout model by demographic?
Actual voters: Only about 56% of American adults vote. The 44% of adults who don’t vote are predominantly Democrat. What percentage of them pass through the polls’ likely voter screens? Jay Cost calculated that the last Washington Post poll included 73% of adults as likely voters. Does that skew the results?
Statistical variance (aka margin of error): Even when I accurately measure a perfectly random and representative sample, I can be off by a few percent.

Margin of error refers only to that last point. We can argue about the details. The point is that the statistical margin of error is a drop in the bucket compared to all the other potential sources of error. It’s conventional wisdom to say that we know that this election will be close. I know no such thing. I will not be shocked by either candidate clearing 300 electoral votes. I strongly suspect that if there is a large gap between reality and the polls, the media and pollsters will defend their honor by blaming the gap on either fraud or on some late breaking phenomenon, like the hurricane fallout or the Benghazi investigation.

Corporate context

“What looks like tomorrow’s problem is rarely the real problem when tomorrow rolls around.”

James Fallows, Future Babble

One way companies deal with risk is on disclosure documents to investors. They often list every imaginable risk. Something like: if a nuclear holocaust exterminates humanity, our quarterly revenue may be adversely affected. I’m guessing that most of these statements are seen only by the lawyers who draft them and the auditors who review them.

Some companies list risk factors on internal strategic documents that are treated much the same way. Some managers like them because they give hard numbers, and the illusion of knowledge and control. These numbers are often not actually used for anything, or believed by anybody making operational decisions.

Then there are the factors that we actually concern ourselves with.

In measuring risk:

Think outside of the box with a people from different departments and with different experience to consider where the serious risks actually are.
Don’t worry at first about how you’re going to quantify the risk. Focus on quantification may bias you to focus on the risks that you can most easily quantify instead of the ones most likely to destroy your business.
Don’t get lost in the science and math, or fooled by descriptive names. Margin of error is a mathematically precise phrase, but it ignores most of the actual sources of error. Pay close attention to all the sources of risk and error that your measurements don’t consider.

This is the part of a series of posts about management lessons from the US elections.
Previous: Only 3% of Obama Supporters or 17% of Romney Supporters Are Right, Reputation Management Lessons from You Didn’t Build That

Only 3% of Obama Supporters or 17% of Romney Supporters Are Right

2012-11-01T15:34:49Z

The latest Pew Poll shows that only 64% of Governor Romney’s supporters expect their man to win, and only 17% expect their man to lose. 82% of President Obama’s supporters expect their man to win, with only 3% expecting him to lose.

In theory, the question of who should win and who will win are independent. In practice they’re not.

Four factors contribute to this:

We like thinking our side is going to win. [Our preference affects our expectations]
We tend to support the candidate we expect to win. [Our expectation affects our preferences.]
The information sources we listen to and believe shape the narratives of who should win and who is winning in the same direction. If you’re hearing about Benghazi, you’re also hearing about the Rasmussen and Gallup polls. If you’re hearing about Governor Romney’s flaws and gaffes, you’re also hearing Nate Silver projections and specific reports about Ohio early voting. It’s actually quite jarring to wade into your opponent’s blogosphere and realize you’re in an alternate reality with not just different opinions but entirely different news stories. [The same external event influences our expectations and preferences in the same direction]
We often assume that our understandings are self-evident and that others will ultimately understand things the way we do. We downplay how much we and others are influenced by different mental frameworks, as well as exposure to different stories.

Corporate context

The same dynamics are in play when evaluating potential business strategies. We tend to overestimate the likelihood of success of our own projects and underestimate the likelihoods of other people’s projects.

More generally, we don’t form an independent opinion on specific issues; our expectations are greatly influenced by context.

How do I get my people to see things more objectively?

The first step in getting other people to see things more objectively: acknowledge and consider your own biases. Strive for greater objectivity but never fool yourself into believing that you’ve reached it.

And don’t think that as an intelligent and informed manager you’re more immune. As Dan Gardner points out in (the excellent) Future Babble, the more you understand and care about an issue, the more likely you are to be deceived by your biases.

The more your teammates believe that you’re aware of your own biases and fallibility, the better the odds that they’ll admit to theirs. When the biases are open and acknowledged you have a better chance of mitigating their effects.

Believing your own hype

There are benefits to believing your own hype. The old adage “if you think you can or if you think you can’t, you’re right” contains some truth.

But willpower and self-confidence will get you only so far. At some point self-confidence turns into hubris and optimism turns into destructive delusion. Sometimes you really do need to see the world the way it is and not the way you hope to make it.

Solutions

I know one CEO who exudes confidence, but makes sure to complement himself with some naysayers. Makes for conflict, but the conflict is unavoidable, and it’s often better to have it between people than within an individual. And ultimately that CEO does recognize his fallibility and generally refrains from major decisions to which his naysayers oppose.

Another approach is to embrace your fallibility. George Soros wrote “I know that I am bound to be wrong, and therefore am more likely to correct my own mistakes.” It’s hard to maintain enthusiasm while combating our bias for optimism. Which is probably why we have the optimism bias in the first place.

A third approach is to embrace the optimism bias. Sometimes believing does make it so.

In many ways the ideal is to have an environment where failure are quick, cheap, and survivable, and then let the optimists try to fly within that framework. But that still may involve somebody with power not drinking the Kool Aid.

You can find your own strategy for maximizing the benefits of an optimism bias while minimizing the costs. I think acknowledging our own bias and fallibility should usually be the first step.

Election Day

On Election Day, only 3% or 17% of the defeated candidate’s supporters will have correctly called the election. The scariest thing is that even as I write this post I’m quite certain my guy has it in the bag, and that the other side’s analysts and partisans are delusional. Our biases run deep. And it’s far easier to acknowledge that they affect others than to acknowledge that we’re not immune. Next Wednesday, I may learn this post’s lesson the hard way. But I doubt it.

This is the part of a series of posts about management lessons from the US elections.
Next: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics: How the margin of error skews our perception of risk.
Previous: Reputation Management Lessons from You Didn’t Build That

Best of Pubcon 2012

2012-10-25T21:29:39Z

Pubcon was great! Here’s the best from the conference:

Best lines

Jerry West: SEO will never be dead until Matt Cutts says the new algorithm is paid search. [On the one year anniversary of Leo Laporte’s PubCon keynote prediction that SEO would likely be dead in six months]

Matt Cutts: Think of the link disavowal tool as like a chainsaw. Respect the tool.

Sanjay Sabnani: Some of you already noticed the slides have nothing to do with what I’m saying. For the rest of you, you can look at me now.

Ruth Burr:

We make big Excel spreadsheets where we track people. Not in a creepy stalker way, in a sweet we love our friends way.
Some people are not going to link to you no matter how hard you try. It’s OK, you’re still a beautiful flower
Content is King, but it’s not like Field of Dreams. It’s not if you build it they will come.

Best tips

Mona Elesseily: Have the people on your page look at your call to action, NOT right at the viewer.

Marty Weintraub:

When you like a brand, your friends can see that Page Like ad forever.
Post with the picture optimized for Facebook. You can change the pic on your post later.

Jim Boykin: If you’re not going to write great content, don’t write at all.

Ruth Burr:

Your reports to your clients should be simple. Tell them what you did, and exactly what results that accomplished.
Google+ in 15 minute increments, once or twice a day. Five minutes each for Reply / Engage, Share / RT, Post Your Own Stuff.

Dennis Yu: Facebook doesn’t do a good job estimating CTR, so rather than bid on a CPC basis, use a super high CPM and you will get better results at cheaper rates.

Shakil Khan:

The worst thing someone can say to you is “no”. Once you can handle that “no”, life becomes so much easier. Most people go through life not wanting to get out of their comfort zone.
When people tell me they have a 3% conversion rate, I tell them to figure out what the other 97% are doing.

David Klein: Every link is a bought link. People link because they get something from you. Usually they link only if linking to you will make them look cool or helpful.

Duane Forrester: Attach a dollar figure to everything you measure. Everything.

Tim Ash: Number one driver or conversion is matching the visitor’s intent.

Bill Hartzer: You have a 2 hour window to get fresh content shared.

Sanjay Sabnani: Whatever the higher purpose of your community is: have one.

Best warnings

Alan Bleiweiss: Avoid fake reviews – there is a $500k fine & permanent listening on .gov site for infraction.

Best interactions

Ryan Jones

How many of you were hit by Penguin? (Lots of hands)

How many have already recovered by using the Disavow Links tool? (laughter)

Best stats

Eric Enge: When you have a picture next to your article on SERPs, the click-through-rate goes up by 30%.

David Mink: Images are shared ten times more than video.

Ryan Jones: Every month 750 million people Google “How do you Google”

Matt Siltala: StumbleUpon traffic avg “time on site” is about 10 seconds, Pinterest traffic = avg time on page of 10 minutes

Robert Cialdini:

Reciprocity: When waiters put a mint with the bill, tips went up 3%. 2 mints: 14%.
Liking: Deadlocked negotiations dropped from 30% to 6% when participants were first asked to share a little personal info about themselves.
Commitment and consistency: Reduced no shows at restaurant from 32% to 10% by changing from request “please call if you have to change or cancel” to question “will you please call if you have to change or cancel?” Users made commitment, then followed through.
Loss aversion: Insulation company got 150% better results from “this will will stop you from losing $1 a day” than from “this will make you $1 a day.”
New and improved: Calling something New attracts the 3% of the population that is early adopters, but scares too many others. New and improved works for everybody.

Best Tweets

Ben Cook (@Skitzzo): Crowd goes wild when @mattcutts announces a link disavowal tool. Related news: SEOs about to screw themselves w/link disavow tool.

Best presentation titles

Marty Weintraub: Social PR: Go badass or go home.

Best announcements

Brett Tabke: Sold WebmasterWorld.com to Jim Boykin

Matt Cutts: Launched “New and Improved” disavow links tool. It’s really a new tool, but Robert Cialdini’s keynote convinced him that he should announce it as New and Improved.

Dixon Jones: Majestic SEO index now updating hourly.

Hat tips

Thanks for your help compiling this list through your Tweets and posts:

Dana Lookadoo, Ben Cook, Ash Buckles, Lyena Solomon, Alan K’necht, Jabez Lebret, David Carrillo, Lisa Barone, Ryan Fontana, Michael King, and Manny Rivas.

See the best moments from other great search conferences.

Reputation Management Lessons from You Didn’t Build That

2012-09-04T10:52:44Z

On July 13, in making the point that other people contribute to our success, President Obama uttered the phrase “You didn’t build that.”

It was immediately clear that the Republicans would – fairly or unfairly – attempt to build their central narrative around those words.

InTrade and Nate Silver project that the president will win re-election. If he doesn’t, we may be wondering whether or not his reaction to the Republican “We did build that” response cost him the election.

Here are the keys to recovering from a reputation management crisis.

Understand the other side

Even if we’re to accept that Republicans are just evil and dishonest people looking to spin the president’s words against him because they’re racists, the president needs to stop and consider what some people might be hearing.

Here are the two paragraphs that Republicans kept replaying [emphasis mine]:

“Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. [Audience: Right!] You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. [Derisive laughter] There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. [Applause]

“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. [Audience: Right!] Somebody else made that happen.“

What many people heard is that the president:

Is derisive towards those who succeed and think it’s at least partially because of their own talent and hard work.
Is rallying up a base of angry people who resent my success and think they’re the rightful owners of whatever I have.
Doesn’t even recognize that the “somebody” who invested in roads and bridges are the very same people who built their businesses and pay most of the country’s taxes.

It felt to some that the president was building a narrative of two Americas:

The public sector and the angry crowd that builds roads and bridges.
A separate group of business people that exploits good people’s efforts and keeps all the money.

Take responsibility and address the key issues

The president could have said the following:

“I misspoke yesterday, and I’m sorry. Of course Americans build their own businesses … “

At most I would have included a subtle reminder of the central point, by saying something like we’re in this together. But no more, because the goal is put the episode behind us, not engage in debate. The unfortunate phrase, video, and transcript are not in the president’s favor.

This should have been an easy apology, because he didn’t have to apologize for policy. He could just apologize for misspeaking. Supporters could think the apology is only for saying “that” to refer to the business instead of “those” to refer to roads and bridges. Others may think the apology is for the whole mocking tone. He didn’t have to specify. Just apologize for misspeaking, celebrate business people, and move on.

Instead the president did this.

The middle part was good. The rest wasn’t:

The worst parts were:

Those ads, taking my words about small business out of context, they’re flat out wrong.
What I said was, that we need to stand behind them.”

What?! “When did he say we need to stand behind them?!”

Blaming this all on those evil people who took his words out of context was another mistake. It just invited Republicans to put out more ads with more context, which was not helpful for the president.

It also reinforced the Republican narrative that the president is incapable of taking responsibility for his own actions. It made every other time he blamed his opponents less credible.

Make the issue go away

An additional mistake in the above video was continuing the original argument about government and the private sector. The president’s goal here was to make the issue go away, not to engage in debate.

In such a case, do NOT say or do anything that invites a response.

Instead he added fuel to the fire, inviting responses by:

Accusing the other side of taking his words out of context.
Asserting that he said something that he didn’t.
Continuing his original point (businesses need to pay a lot of taxes so that government can do things for them).

The president lobbed his own head as a softball and invited his opponents to swing away. Accusing them of taking his words out of context allowed them to get more attention by showing his words in the context of a derisive attack on successful people. This did not help the president.

The Other POV

It’s possible that this was all calculated, and that the president can win by keeping this meme alive. The president is painting the Republicans as people who think successful people deserve all the credit for their own success, while the Democrats believe that we’re in this together.

Perhaps under other circumstances the Democrats could score points in this debate.

But I find it unlikely that they can win that debate in this context. “If you have a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen” is too devastating, whether or not it’s out of context. The video with the preceding paragraphs — which the president asks people to watch by claiming he was quoted out of context — makes things even worse. And the Republicans are intelligently using the phrase “We built this,” not “I built this,” which weakens their vulnerability to the Democrats’ charging them with arrogance and egomania.

Summary

When you say something that you probably shouldn’t have, you need to quickly respond in a manner that:

Shows regret.
Clearly states appreciation for the people you are alleged to have offended.
Doesn’t blame others.
Puts the issue to bed.

If possible, move on to a new and more exciting issue shortly after the apology.

Do not:

Avoid responsibility.
Blame others.
Give your opponents something to reply to.

Maybe the president will win anyway, or would have lost anyway. We’ll never really know how this affected the race. But when you have your next reputation management crisis, I recommend not following the president’s example.

Answers and About.com

2012-08-27T06:32:15Z

[Update: In a repeat of the Dictionary.com acquisition five years ago, Answers.com was the first to reach a tentative agreement, but Ask.com closed the deal.]

I have fond memories of the Mining Company, which changed its name to About.com. They may have been the first big quality reference site on the web. They also may have been among the first to really understand how Google was changing the web.

Pre-Google, most of us used search engines to find a web site. So we’d search for a site about Health. Once on the health site, we’d look for the information we needed. But Google was very good at finding web pages, so we’d type in a specific phrase and Google would send us directly to the page that had the information we needed. A colleague once talked to About.com’s CEO about how neglected their home page seemed. About’s CEO mentioned that the vast majority of their visitors never hit the home page, they went directly from Google to a results page. Sure, we all know this now, but back then it was a shift.

At the time, Answers.com (where I worked) was still GuruNet, a subscription-based client application. Our marketing pitch had been focused on how hard it was to find information on the Web, and how long it took. You had to open your browser, go to your search engine, wait for it to load, type in your search query, hit enter, wait for the results, choose a result, wait for it to load, look for your information on that site, and then usually go back to the search results and try again.

Free, quality sites like About, faster internet connections, and Google destroyed our old model. We followed About’s lead and became a free destination site. We understood that people just Googled for information, and that essentially we were serving Google’s users. It was a good, though highly vulnerable business. It relied on Google organic search for traffic, and on Google AdSense for revenue. There were rumors that other search engines and other pay per click advertising providers existed. We had little evidence to back that up. A month later (February 2005) the New York Times purchased About for $410 million.

About continued growing, but the model was vulnerable. Wikipedia was growing and ranking very high on Google for most reference terms. Wikipedia’s site was clean and fast. And their content was excellent. I have to admit that I didn’t see that coming. We would start viewing Wikipedia, not About, as our model when we started growing our Q&A site, WikiAnswers.

Companies kept creating new niche sites targeted at the most lucrative topics, leaving broad reference sites with the least valuable traffic. Click through rates throughout the AdSense network dropped.

Google’s Panda update didn’t help. Too many sites had adopted About’s basic model but were putting out crap, and Google responded. I still think About got a raw deal there. Some well connected interested parties who were threatened by eHow did a good job demonizing “content farms.” So About, which had been lifting New York Times’ numbers for a while, was now dragging them down.

Meanwhile, Answers was bought by Announce Media last year, and Announce then changed its name to Answers.

And now the story just took a new twist. Answers apparently just signed a term sheet to acquire About.com from The New York Times for $270 million. The combination should make Answers a top-15 site.

It’s been an interesting journey for Answers.com. We started as GuruNet, a small pop-up window that displayed quick information about a word or name. Then we went enterprise, providing large businesses quick access to their internal info. Then we went back to being GuruNet, but in a larger window, and with more info, and you had to buy the application. Then we gave the application away but you had to subscribe to the content. Then we became a free web site, rebranded Answers.com. Then we acquired a Q&A site that justified our name. The Q&A site was wildly successful. Then we were bought, but our acquirer took on Answers’ name for the whole business. Now they acquired About.

Answers has come a long way. I wonder what’s next.

Protocols of the Elders of Google

2012-07-25T13:27:56Z

I did an informal survey of the young managers [in Google’s Associate Product Manager program] and asked each to guess if he or she would be working for Google in five years. Not a single one answered in the affirmative. When I reported this to Mayer, she was unruffled. Actually, she told me, it would be a positive thing, because Google DNA would be spread throughout Silicon Valley, to the benefit of all.

Steven Levy, Why the Ultimate Googler Makes Sense for Yahoo

If Google had a goal of spreading its DNA through the industry, Marissa Mayer taking the helm at Yahoo was quite a milestone. Mayer joins Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg COO and AOL CEO Tim Armstrong as the most prominent of a long list of executives, investors and entrepreneurs who have left the Googleverse to play in the larger tech world. Or perhaps said differently, who have left Google Inc. to play elsewhere in the larger Googleverse.

Google chronicler Steven Levy paints Mayer as the central figure in the keeping, spreading, and articulating of Google’s culture and values. While others obsessed over the technology and (to a lesser extent) the business, she obsessed over the people, principles, and culture. That includes the design principles that we associate with Google: simplicity, minimalism, speed, user-focus, and metric-driven decision making.

I haven’t seen an explanation of why Mayer thought spreading the Google DNA would help Google. I suspect she’s right, though. Google is the world’s most successful middle man. It sits in the center of a tremendous network. Its growth relies on others continuing to build their business models in ways that keep Google in the center.

There are also issues of loyalty, networks, and public opinion. It matters a great deal whether the people who leave Google want to destroy Google or to help it. The internet industry now contains a loose but powerful network of internet professionals who feel some allegiance to Google.

More importantly, there are now many powerful individuals who see the Googleverse through certain paradigms, and are committed to certain values and principles. Those values and principles coincide well with Google’s business interests. These principles support publishers creating fast web sites that create unique content that satisfies (Google’s) users. They favor free content, monetized by contextual text ads. They share Google’s views regarding the cultural and legal environment on issues including content ownership and distribution, privacy, anti-trust law, net neutrality (good) and search neutrality (bad).

Ex-Googlers are not working in concert. They’re not directed by some central leadership council. They’re not trying to support Google Inc. But by individually pursuing the values and principles they shared at Google, they are supporting the Google-centered universe.

Generally speaking, this is good. The Googleverse is a remarkable place where consumers can learn about almost anything instantaneously, where people can get their ideas out, and where many companies are doing good things and making money. It’s good for Google, good for ex-Googlers, good for other companies in the industry, and good for the consumers.

But is it good for Yahoo? That’s a question that Marissa Mayer must explicitly ask herself. She should ask this about each individual value and principle that she taught at Google.

Having articulated and given conscious thought to these principles gives her a big advantage over other executives in similar circumstances, who may be less aware of the implicit assumptions driving their thoughts and actions.

Here’s some unsolicited advice for Ms Mayer

Write down all the principles that drove you at Google. You can start with existing values documents. Actively consider not only how the principle relates to Yahoo, but whether or not the reverse is now true.

For example, Google declares that one of the things it “knows to be true” is “It’s best to do one thing really, really well.” What would the one thing be for Yahoo? How would the opposite apply? Are there two or three things that can be combined for strategic advantage?

“Democracy on the Web works.” Maybe. Can that work for Yahoo? What about the reverse? Is there an opening on the web for an authoritative destination site? The brand dissonance of an elitist site named Yahoo may be too great. But yesterday’s rebel is tomorrow’s establishment. Sometimes democracy on the web creates mediocrity and worse, as is sometimes true on Yahoo Answers.

Ethical values like “you can make money without doing evil” don’t require reevaluation. But rethink tactical implications like “we firmly believe that ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find.” It’s curious to believe such things so firmly. Where did Google get this firm belief? Is it possible that an ad can provide useful information even if it doesn’t relate to something you’re currently seeking? Is it possible that there are circumstances where it makes sense to run an ad that doesn’t provide useful information. These are the kinds of limiting beliefs you should consciously reevaluate.

Talk to other exGooglers. What struck them most when joining a new company? What parts of their worldview changed? Learning their lessons can give you a headstart and critical insights.

I’m hesitant to raise my last point. It’s none of my business, but none of this is. Many understandably find it offensive when a man gives a woman personal advice. I’ll do it anyway. Take care of yourself, Marissa. One of the many implicit values I ask you to question is that young professionals should work hundred hour weeks. Maybe that’s still right for you. Or maybe you can remain the image of professional commitment, intensity, joy, and fulfillment without, you know, killing yourself.

Good luck, Marissa. I’m rooting for you.

More about Marissa Mayer here:

Managing Greatness

Best of Jared Spool at UXPA Israel

Best lessons

Best lines

Best interaction

Blast from the past

Best of Dave Carroll

Google, AI and the future of SEO

Google Glass

Marissa Mayer’s vision

Driverless car

The purring test

Larry’s obsession

MentalPlex

SEO

Calling all data

User engagement

Fix or kill your worst pages

Document classifier

If it scales, be very afraid

Thinking outside of the box

Feeding the Google Knowledge Graph

FreeBase

Schema.org

Google Places

Social graph

Author graph

Is search dead?

The fundamental things apply

Best of SMX Israel 2013

Best lines and lessons

Best stats

Best unrelated tip

Best Tweets

Hat tips

Also see …

How the Margin of Error Skews Our Perception of Risk

Corporate context

This is the part of a series of posts about management lessons from the US elections. Previous: Only 3% of Obama Supporters or 17% of Romney Supporters Are Right, Reputation Management Lessons from You Didn’t Build That

Only 3% of Obama Supporters or 17% of Romney Supporters Are Right

Corporate context

How do I get my people to see things more objectively?

Believing your own hype

Solutions

Election Day

This is the part of a series of posts about management lessons from the US elections. Next: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics: How the margin of error skews our perception of risk. Previous: Reputation Management Lessons from You Didn’t Build That

Best of Pubcon 2012

Best lines

Best tips

Best warnings

Best interactions

Best stats

Best Tweets

Best presentation titles

Best announcements

Hat tips

Reputation Management Lessons from You Didn’t Build That

Understand the other side

Take responsibility and address the key issues

Make the issue go away

The Other POV

Summary

Answers and About.com

Protocols of the Elders of Google

This is the part of a series of posts about management lessons from the US elections.
Previous: Only 3% of Obama Supporters or 17% of Romney Supporters Are Right, Reputation Management Lessons from You Didn’t Build That

This is the part of a series of posts about management lessons from the US elections.
Next: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics: How the margin of error skews our perception of risk.
Previous: Reputation Management Lessons from You Didn’t Build That