The Search Marketing Maturity Model

About a year ago, Scott Brinker from Ion Interactive (who will also be at the Summit, but that’s a different column) shared with me a Search Maturity Model he’d been working on. It was a clear mapping of where companies are on the adoption curve of search marketing, with five distinct levels: Ad Hoc, Engaged, Structured, Managed and Optimized. There are a number of insights to be gained by exploring the model, but the first thing that jumped out at me was what Scott put right at the top of each stage – the level of executive buy in. Here’s how the attitude of the C-Suite lines up with Scott’s levels of maturity:

Ad Hoc – No management structure or executive participation, with sparse3, intermittent management attention
Engaged – Executive awareness, but little formal management, with monthly to weekly attention
Structured – Executive Sponsorship, official management responsibility, with weekly to daily attention
Managed – Active executive participation, centralized search leadership, with daily management attention
Optimized – Strategic executive participation, with continuous management attention.

The C-Suite Sell Job

In looking at that, you realize that selling search to the C-Suite is not a one shot deal. It’s a continuous process, getting a level of buy in, proving the worth, building the case, and then going back for another round of persuasion. At the highest level, the executive become evangelists and keep the momentum going without constant prodding from the internal (or external champions).

There’s another thing you’ll notice if you look at Scott’s model. Moving beyond the first level is almost impossible if you don’t have some level of buy in from management. The people managing search may have the best of intentions to move to higher levels of maturity through channel integration, more sophisticated testing and a robust post-click optimization strategy (which is Scott’s particular passion), but you can’t go there until you get the executives on your side. If the C-Suite is knowingly or unknowingly keeping search in an tightly restricted sandbox (typical at the Ad Hoc and Engaged levels) you’ll never realizing the benefits of an integrated campaign. And, as I guarantee we’ll be talking about in Park City, search really belongs at the center of an intent-centric online strategy.

Mike Moran: C-Level Persuader

When I added this topic to the agenda, one name immediately sprung to mind as the ideal speaker. Mike Moran (now with Conversion) was the manager of Web Experience at IBM and daily navigated the politics inevitable in a large company. Mike was the one selling the concept of search at the highest levels of IBM. He’s also the author of two books: Search Engine Marketing, Inc (together with Bill Hunt) and Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules. Mike opens Day 2 of the Summit by sharing his experiences selling search up the ladder both at IBM and as an independent consultant. At the end of the session, we’ll share a few other war stories from the C-Suite. I’m sure conversations sparked by this session will spill over into the hallways, the lounges and the ski hills of Utah. Make sure you’re there to partake in them.

Originally published in Mediapost’s Search Insider Nov 5th 2009

We can. And we’ll do it almost for free and you get lunch.

World Usability Day is about making the world a better place for everyone, by putting the human element at the centre of technology, and this includes web sites. We want to raise the level of awareness around design and usability issues that can kill the effectiveness of a company’s web site, and we’ll be looking at some real examples to get the conversation started. We think it’s a good time to raise the issue here in Kelowna, as more and more businesses realize the necessity of interacting effectively with their customers in the online environment.

So we’re highlighting World Usability Day on November 12 with a special Lunch & Learn event at The Habitat. For $10 and two hours of your time (11am – 1pm), you’ll get lunch and a whole lot more:

• Usability 101 – an introduction to usability and user-centered design

• Case studies – we’ve already worked with a couple of local businesses to evaluate their web sites, and you get to see the results
• On-site clinic – you can offer up your site for live commentary from Enquiro’s usability staff and the other attendees

You’ll go back to work with ideas that can be immediately incorporated into creating web sites that people will love to interact with. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

If you’re a Kelowna business and this sounds like a good deal to you, register online, or call (250) 861-5252. Space is limited, and you don’t want to miss out on this.

“I think there is a tendency now for a lot of not very useful results to be dredged up that happen to be very popular, like Wikipedia and various blogs. They’re not going to be very useful or substantial to people who are trying to solve problems..”

That stuck with me. Relevancy, as determined by search algorithms, and usefulness are not the same thing. And then, John Battelle touched on the same topic in a blog post a few months back:

“So first, how would I like to decide about my quest to buy a classic car? Well, ideally, I’d have a search application that could automate and process the tedious back and forth required to truly understand what the market looks like.”

Navigating Complex Decisions

Again, this concept of usability comes into play. Let me give you another example. As most of you know about by now, I love to travel with my family. But the available travel sites still require the tedious back and forth that Battelle talks about. We’re not big on hotels or restaurants. We love home exchanges or renting apartments and homes directly from the owner. We tend to fly on mileage points. We don’t take bus tours but we do rent cars. We prefer staying in smaller towns rather than big cities. And our first day in a new location always involves a trip to the nearest grocery store. There is no online destination that brings all the usefulness I need together into one place. I manually pull information from VRBO.com, Homeexchange.com, TripAdvisor.com, Kayak.com and a dozen other sites. Planning a family holiday is a lot of work, but I’m willing to do it because it’s fun for me. What about tasks that aren’t as much fun? What about the planning that has no inherent reward, like a complicated purchase for your company, or a forced move to a new city? The title of Battelle’s post was “Search Frustration: It’s Still Hit or Miss on Complex Decisions.” I can relate.

This was the approach Microsoft decided to take with Bing.com, the “Decision Engine.” I think their instincts and strategy are right, but the execution is off. If I search for Bristol, England (we’re doing a home exchange there next summer) on Bing, I still see a pretty standard search results page. It’s not that useful to me. I agree completely that there’s a strong need for more usability in search. Google’s Achilles heel at this point is their focus on relevancy at the expense of usability. We need a much deeper, more useful experience. Relevancy is a poor proxy for usefulness. It still leaves all the heavy lifting up to the user.

Search or Decision Engine? Just Decide!

“Usefulness” is a difficult trick to pull off. It’s a tough road that Microsoft has chosen. But if you’re going to do it, commit fully to it. Don’t play the safe middle ground. This is not the place for half measures. Whether by design or by luck, I think Microsoft picked the one area where Google is most vulnerable, but right now there isn’t enough differentiation between the two. If Microsoft truly wants to be a “decision engine”, they have to build from the ground up to offer more usefulness. I’m now four clicks into Bing for “Bristol, England” and still haven’t found anything particularly useful to me. Four clicks are way too many. The information forager in me would have already moved on to a new destination.

The next 3 years in search will be about aggregation of information and incorporating usefulness. Search will do much more than just organize the world’s information; it will allow you to do something with it. Search will become the ultimate mash up. And increasingly, those intersections will happen on mobile devices. Microsoft is the only one of the major players to have declaratively set sail in that direction. My advice? Forget what search is today and move with all possible speed to what search needs to become tomorrow.

Originally published in Mediapost’s Search Insider October 29th 2009

I often wonder what the Web would be like if there was less emphasis on links and linking inventories?  How would the search engines define relevancy of a result without some sort of link popularity mechanism in place?  Link popularity continues to be a major factor as to why one site places in the search result over another.  While it is not the only factor, it (linking) is still a key factor as to why we see placing for a given key phrase vs. seeing “Joe-blows” website appearing for that same phrase.  According to search engines like Google link popularity has a direct correlation to relevancy.  However this is true to a point.  Just because your site may have a high number of links does not mean you will place well in the results.  Enter the battle between link quality and link quantity.

Link quantity is just that, the number of links that you have pointing to your website’s pages.  Quality on the other hand speaks to the relevancy of those links. At the end of the day it is link quality that helps promote a web property as an authority on a given topic.

For business to business (B2B) sites this is no different.  There is a need for B2B site owners to build their link inventories but prior to doing that from external sources, something that is often overlooked by many B2B sites is the importance of interlinking within your own site and web properties.

The Importance of Interlinking for B2B Websites

You may be familiar with our recent work at Enquiro with our BuyerSphere project where we discussed how businesses buy from other businesses.  Within the realm of the BuyerSphere we discussed the roles and differences between Doers and Buyers.  I wanted to touch on a very important fact with regards to buyers and doers.

While Buyers are the ones who often take control over the buying process, Doers are usually the ones who get the process going.  As a result they have a result over where this process goes.  So of course the Doer may have semantic mapped out their needs and as a result researched out or at least been pointed in the direction of a couple of “rungs on the ladder” that is potential solutions or vendors for their needs.  Doers tend to be the people in the organization who do the majority of the research for the desired solution.  As a result they may be the ones who are visiting your website looking for information to help reduce the risk or a potential purchase decision.  Here is where the importance of interlinking comes in.

If this Doer arrives on your site and cannot find what they are looking for, the risk in the selection your brand as a vendor automatically goes up.  While the information may be there, the Doer was unable to find it.  Effective interlinking can help reduce this risk.

5 Ways Interlinking Can Help B2B Websites

1.  Directional Navigation – effective interlinking can help reduce the amount of time a user spends trying to find items on your web site.  If the Doer is looking for product specs of for software demos, you had better make sure that these items are easily accessed from any page, preferably a minimum of one or two clicks away.  In fact, for your main web pages, you want to ensure that they are just one click away from your home page.
2. Interlinking Themed Content – from an SEO perspective creating themed content is a very important thing to do if you are to become an authority on a given topic.  If the Doer is interested in detailed product specs, it make sense to link to your product specs from your product detail page or from your product summary page.  Linking to related products or user generated reviews can also be of benefit to the user.  In the end interlinking can help direct the user to all of the information that they need to help move the process along.  As we all know B2B buying cycles can be long and are not necessarily linear.
3. B2B SEO Benefit:  Improved Link Quality – proper interlinking on B2B websites can help from an SEO perspective.  Using SEO best practices, you can effectively interlink your site’s page to improve the IBL (Inbound Linking) Quality score of the pages that are being linked to.  Think about it, you have direct control over the quality of a link from one of your pages to another page on your website.  You can have a direct impact on the all issues that affect link quality.  For example, you can link to the pages using relevant keyword rich anchor text, from a page with relevant keywords in the page title and with relevant keywords in the page copy.  This is a quality link, one that features keywords in the title, page copy and anchor text of the linking page.
4. Improve the Quantity of Links - if you are not doing so already, you should be looking at Google Webmaster Tools data for your site on a regular basis.  The linking information that Google provides is worth it.  You can use Google Webmaster Tools data to evaluate which pages on your site have sufficient “internal links” and which pages, or sections of your site need interlinking improvements.  Let’s suggest for a second that you added a new B2B product or solution to your site.  As this content is still new, you can identify existing pages that are relevant for the purpose of interlinking and improve the number of links that link to this new content.  While you do not want to go overboard, you’ll be able to drive traffic to these related pages and help boost the relevancy of this new content.
5. Interlinking of Conversion Triggers – similar to point number one, B2B site owners can use effective interlinking strategies to drive their visitors to conversion triggers throughout the site.  Whether it is to a micro or macro conversion, interlinking allows you to strategically direct your users to a conversion trigger where it make sense to do so.  In essence, you can drive the user through your desired path (i.e. to a conversion) by allowing them to set their own path by providing the relevance  and timeliness of the information that they desire.  Win-wins are always a good thing.

Interlinking your site pages can provide benefit from an SEO and more importantly user perspective.  Developing things such as an interlinking map and establishing an interlinking strategy can allow you to provide a richer and more efficient site experience.  The end result is that the Doer can find the information they seek thereby reducing the risk of making a poor contribution or ultimately poor purchase decision.

The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are – Robert Wright

If you’re on the fence about or simply do not believe in evolution (along with 50% of Americans)you probably want to stop right here. The first 3 titles in this list are by authors who together create a pantheon for evolutionary psychology and Darwinism. The first is by Robert Wright. In the Moral Animal, Wright employs an interesting literary device: exploring human behavior by referencing biographical details in Charles Darwin’s own life. He explores monogamy, child rearing, differing attitudes towards sex and self-deception, amongst many other mysteries of the human condition. A compelling and highly intelligent read.

The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins

This book was first published over 30 years ago, and somehow still manages to remain controversial. Perhaps it’s because Dawkins’ choice of assigning the human characteristic of selfishness to our genes has confused many, many readers. If you take the time to read the book, Dawkins explains at length that humans are not necessarily selfish. In fact, one chapter is titled: “Nice Guys Finish First”. Dawkins’ premise is that our genes only care about propagation. That’s it. End of story. Morality and all the ethical trappings that go with it only survive if it helps the gene meet this one objective. Fortunately, Dawkins shows that this is likely the case. A couple of other noteworthy nuggets in this book include the first introduction of memes – ideas that share the propagation directives of genes, and an exploration of phenotypes – how the impact of genes can extend into all aspects of our lives and society.

The Third Chimpanzee – Jared Diamond

Diamond starts off the book by stating that we share 98% of our genes with chimpanzees, then spends the rest of the book describing how that remaining 2% can make all the difference. In that thin wedge of genetic difference lie all our culture, achievement and history. Some human achievements are admirable, even remarkable. Some are regrettably base and cruel. Diamond chronicles both the good and the bad, along with a warning – our dominance of our world may end up spelling our doom. A professor of geography who combines the eye of a naturalist, the curiosity of a sociologist and the ponderings of a philosopher, Diamond makes The Third Chimpanzee a masterful book.

The Stuff of Thought – Steven Pinker

Following in the steps of Noam Chomsky (up to a point) psychologist Steven Pinker uses language as a door to explore the shadowy recesses of how our minds work. This book is a seminal piece of work in this area. Pinker is masterful at exploring complicated concepts without “dumbing down” his commentary. Pinker has an entire library worth reading, but this is as good a place to start as any.

Descartes’ Error – Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio was introduced to the common masses in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, but Damasio’s work on somatic markers and the role of the prefrontal cortex in how we make decisions goes far further than Gladwell was able to cover. Descartes’ Error delves deep into our gut instincts and why pure rationality is an unworkable model for humans. To paraphrase Descartes’ famous quote – we feel, therefore we are.

And, to round out my 11 suggestions, here are 6 other titles worth exploring

The Mind and the Brain – Jeffrey Schwartz
Synaptic Self – Joseph LeDoux
A Whole New Mind – Daniel Pink
Mapping the Mind – Rita Carter
The Emotional Brain – Joseph LeDoux
The Female Brain – Louanne Brizendine

Originally published in Mediapost’s Search Insider October 22nd 2009

How Customers Think – Gerald Zaltman

Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman has carved out a nice little career by exploring the psychology of consumerism. The foundation of Zaltman’s approach is his metaphor elicitation technique. Metaphors are linguistic keys to some of the darker workings of our mind, and Zaltman shows how these can be used as a Rosetta stone to unlock consumer’s true feelings towards brands and products. A fascinating approach suffers a little from Zaltman’s dry and overly academic writing style, but it’s a very worthy candidate for the list.

The Culture Code – Clotaire Rapaille

If Zaltman is a little stodgy and academic, Rapaille is an unabashed French nouveau-riche pop-psychologist who has used his decidedly qualitative approach to dig down to the cultural common denominators behind our brand relationships. The Culture Code looks for those labels cultures apply to some of the best known brands in the world. Being French, Rapaille brings an occasionally charming European cultural arrogance to his subject (i.e. in France, the culture code for cheese is “alive”, but in the US it’s “dead”). The Culture Code is an easy and interesting read and while you might have some quibbles with Rapaille’s findings, he has plenty of willing customers amongst the Fortune 500.

Buy-ology – Martin Lindstrom

Lindstrom’s ego is almost matched by the insight he brings in his latest book. Lindstrom is the self-styled guru of brand perception and has written before on how our senses interpret brands. In Buy-ology, he goes one step further and launches an extensive brain scanning research project to see exactly what happens in our brains when we think about brands. For example, do the warning labels on a pack of cigarettes have any impact on our desire for a smoke? Does product placement really work? (The answer, in both cases, is no, according to Lindstrom) Don’t worry about getting caught in academic jargon here. Lindstrom keeps it light and readable.

Why Choose This Book? – Read Montague

Baylor University neurologist Montague was behind the original Pepsi Challenge fMRI test and in this book, he takes on no less a challenge than explaining how we make decisions. The writing style’s a little uneven, as Montague tries to balance his academic background with a writing style overly determined to appeal to a wider audience. That said, Montague knows his stuff and the insights here are solid and supported by both his own and other’s research.

Predictably Irrational – Dan Ariely

Dan Ariely follows in the footsteps of Behavioral Economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and looks at some of the common irrational biases of humans. For example, why does a 50-cent aspirin eliminate a headache better than a 5-cent generic brand, even though the pills are identical? And why would offering your mother-in-law 300 dollars for a fabulous meal be an unforgivable social transgression, yet be expected in a restaurant? The territory has been covered been covered before, but Ariely deals with a highly interesting topic with a nice, light touch.

The Mind of the Market – Michael Shermer

Last but not least, Michael Shermer delivers what I consider to be a tour-de-force on this topic. Shermer’s approach is well grounded in evolutionary psychology (he labels it evolutionary economics) so he and I share a common approach to understanding consumer behavior. He strikes the right balance in his writing, delivering solid information with worrying too much about how it might play for a wider audience. This is probably my favorite on this list.

If these 6 titles whet your appetite, here are some other titles you might consider:
Driven by Paul Lawrence and Nitin Nohria
Why We Buy by Paco Underhill
The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz
The Advertised Mind by Erik Du Plessis
Brain Rules by John Medina

Next week I’ll share another 11 books, as well as some reader suggestions. Feel free to keep the suggestions coming!

Originally published in Mediapost’s Search Insider October 15th 2009

Flying Rumors

There were a number of interesting things that came up in the panel. Presenters used a few recent examples to show how stories broke online: the death of Michael Jackson, the elections in Iran and an emergency landing of a United flight in Iceland. It was fascinating to see where people turned as news broke. Not surprisingly, behaviors followed age-old grooves, but now those behaviors played out over a brand new landscape, the digital one.

For example, Jeremy Crane from Compete showed how, as we learned the news of MJ’s death, we first turned to Google and news sources for confirmation. But as time went on, we took new online paths. We turned to Twitter, to real time search engines, to YouTube and other richer media sources as we worked our way through the process. If you were to look at how humans deal with loss, these paths really aren’t surprising. First we want confirmation from an authoritative source, and then we have to participate in our own ways. We need to talk about it (Twitter) and we need to reminisce (watching old videos on YouTube). We need to participate in some way in the experience to reach our own measure of closure. Funerals are never really for the departed; they’re for the ones left behind.

If It’s Not New, Is It News?

But the most interesting question came from out of the audience, right at the end of the session. The internal SEO manager for ABC asked a huge question: As news increasingly breaks online, how do traditional news publishers stay nimble and relevant? How do the New York Times and ABC News keep up in a world that includes Twitter and TMZ? That, indeed, is the question.

A few columns back, I gave my own example of real time search, as forest fires encroached on my home town of Kelowna, BC. There I touched on the new speed of news. But the ABC’s staffer’s question brings up some added dimensions to that. The answer is not as cut and dried as it used to be.

Traditional news channels, with their journalistic checks and balances, can never be as nimble as rumor. It’s a game they can’t play; yet they feel they must. They have a decades old tradition of being not only the official and credible source of the news, but also the first place most people hear news as it breaks. Now, however, we often hear about the news while it’s still a rumor, perhaps several rumors, as they bounce around the internet.

The New Regime?

What we have here is a discontinuous shift in the industry. As one of the presenters quipped, Public Relations is now really about the public. News spreads through millions of instantaneous connections, rather than tightly controlled and edited channels. Often, the traditional news publishers are relegated to a role of listening and verifying to online buzz, trying to sort what is true from what is social gossip. It’s a middle ground they’re having a difficult time adjusting to. The news industry is in the middle of what Christopher Freeman and Carlota Perez called a Regime Transition. When technology shakes the very foundations of society and its supporting institutions, there is usually a resulting passing of the torch from what was to what will be. My suspicion is that what we were talking about in that session is pointing to a regime transition of epic proportions. We are defining the new reality of news by where we turn to be informed. The traditional players have no choice but to see if there will be a place for them here when the dust settles.

Originally published in Mediapost’s Search Insider October 8th 2009

The True Meaning of Customer-Centricity

I’ve been criticized in the past for using the term “customer-centric” (the practical application of studying human nature), but I suspect it’s because the term has lost its original meaning as it’s been adopted into the lexicon of “Dilbert-speak”. Customer-centric is one of those terms bandied about in board meetings and corporate retreats, along with “synergistic” and “holistic”.

But customer-centricity represents much more than a quick paragraph in the annual report. It’s the core you build a company around. It’s a commitment that lays the foundation for everything an organization does: the people it hires, the way it develops products, the way it formulates business processes, the way it markets and even the way who sits beside whom in the office gets decided. Customer-centricity is a religion, not a corporate fad.

There Aren’t Any Shortcuts

As I found out, if you are going to commit to learning more about human behavior in the goal of becoming a better marketer, don’t be surprised when you discover that this commitment can’t be met in a one-hour session or by reading a book. Humans are a lot more complex than that. There’s a lot of weird and wonderfully quirky machinery jammed in our skulls.

I was humbled to learn that people devote their entire lives to exploring just one tiny part of why we humans do what we do. Joseph LeDoux, one of the world’s foremost neuroscientists, has spent years exploring how fear is triggered in rats.
Ann Graybiel at MIT has made a similar commitment to exploring the role of the basal ganglia in how habits form and play out. Antonio Damasio’s extensive work with patients with pre-frontal cortical lesions led to his somatic marker theory, foundational insight into the area of human behavior Malcolm Gladwell explored and popularized in his book “Blink”. These are all tiny little pieces in the overall puzzle that is human behavior, yet each of these is integrally important in understanding how we respond to marketing messages.

Beyond the Cocktail Party Quip

Today, several years after I started down this road, I hope people find my insights on human behavior interesting. There’s that brief light bulb moment that happens when “what” is matched with a plausible “why” – when a psychological or neurological trigger for a puzzling human trait is identified. “Hmm – that’s really interesting,” is the common response, and then it’s on to the next thing (possibly mumbling something about me being a “pedantic bore”). Yes, it is really interesting, but it wasn’t a quick or easy path to get here.

Sometime ago I decided a quick primer in human behavior would be interesting. I started with the more accessible books (such as Gladwell’s) and was instantly hooked. I next moved to books by academics doing the actual research that provided the fodder for Gladwell and other’s popularizations: LeDoux, Damasio, Edelman, Rose, Pinker, Chomsky and others. Before I knew it, I was wading through academic papers. Today, the bookshelf in my home office is packed with fairly hefty tomes on everything from evolutionary psychology to the social patterns of the 20th Century. My wife and kids can’t remember the last time I read a book that didn’t have a brain on the cover.

I share this as a warning. I discovered developing even a basic understanding of human behavior is at least a multi-year commitment. I’ve never regretted it, but I also know that this is not everyone’s cup of tea. But here’s what I also discovered along the way. Even a basic understanding will give you a whole new perspective on pretty much everything, including marketing. The one common denominator in all marketing is that it’s aimed at people. If you’re ready to start the journey, I’m sure you won’t regret it.

Originally published in Mediapost’s Search Insider October 1st 2009

The reason neuromarketing is important for giving us insight into how buyers decide is because just asking them, through interviews and surveys, doesn’t necessarily provide the real answers. There is both an art and a science to building surveys or polls that reliably produce statistically valid quantifiable data, and the qualitative information that interviews can yield can be difficult to match up with the quantifiable data. In other words we can observe that people say one thing, but do another. It’s enough to drive a marketer wild, and as a research analyst, I’m ever on the alert to the meaning behind the numbers.

For online experiences, different methods of usability testing can help peel back the mysterious layers of why people do what they do. The insights can be surprising, and are a good reminder what happens when we assume we know how people will interact with a web site.

Having said that, I’m going to go out on a limb and tell a story about a cross-channel media experience I had that resulted in no sale. The reason I think it’s interesting is because it brings marketing back to some fairly fundamental principles, as in ‘don’t make me think’.

I was watching TV and saw an ad for a new vehicle, an SUV from Government, er, General Motors. It caught my attention for two reasons – my wife commented that it was a nice looking vehicle, and she rarely pays any attention to autos, and secondly the ad made some very surprising claims about the vehicle’s fuel efficiency.

After the show, I went online and looked up said vehicle on GM’s Canadian web site. Yes, the fuel efficiency numbers were impressive. Further investigation revealed a satisfactory list of standard safety features. OK, I’m interested now, so how much? Digging around on the site, it looked as though there could be manufacturer incentives available, possibly as much as $8500(!). Next I used the ‘Build It Price It’ function and when I got to the summary, the bottom line, there was no mention of any deals, paybacks, or incentives. So are there incentives or not? Now they were making me work. I gave up on the web site revealing more information. I could go onto some forums and try to find out more, but I don’t feel like working that hard to give them my money.

I could email a dealer, but my previous experience emailing dealers is that too many (about half in my experience), never reply. I could phone, but again, my experience is I end up talking to someone who doesn’t know anything and won’t make any effort to find out, or if they promise to find out, never call me back. I’m bored playing that game. That leaves showing up in person, but I don’t have enough information to be confident I’m not wasting my time, because if the payments are more than I can handle, I’ve got better things to do with my time.

Now here’s the thing: the vehicle looks like it would meet my needs, if only I could afford it. If I could land it for $8500 less than the web site sticker price, we could have a deal. But I don’t know if that’s a possibility. I went from TV exposure to web exposure to oblivion. And you don’t need a neuroscientist to tell you what went on in my head.

I wonder if the team that put together the compelling TV ad talk to the team that handle that web site, and just how much they both talk to their dealer network. They took me cross-channel, but I fell between the gaps.

Recent tumultuous challenges and strategic planning sessions brought something to mind. Business is just business, and digital media, however much it’s changing and how quickly, is just media, just business. Complex, fast moving, and difficult to keep a hold of the pulse of things? Sure.  More challenging than ever. But it still generally follows general business principles. The challenges are principally the same.

A decade ago I was facing challenges of leveraging technology for business efficiency and improved customer (reader) satisfaction. I was designing and implementing programs that made processes easier, helped employees press buttons to do things faster and easier, and reduce operating costs. Subsequently, margins were being squeezed, there were intense downward pressures and increasing competition meant having to get the very best from every resource to deliver value. Trying to upskill, cross train, integrate, and motivate a team was difficult as expectations increased and there was a need to do more, with less. Attracting great people both from within the industry and from outside it was a constant challenge. The “production process” of the work we did back then was a stubborn logjam mess of issues, frustrations, and complexities, so trying to organize and streamline this became a core focus. That’s just as true in search marketing now as it was a decade ago in print media. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

In the late 90’s a tidal wave of competition from free Metro publications and every local printing house producing an in-house real estate, auto or general classified free inky mag meant possible death by a thousand cuts.  It was clear then as it is now that only the very best would survive. In many sectors businesses coast on, deluded by this fact or sleepily oblivious to it, but it’s there all the same. The demise of the print version of Seattle’s Intelligencer newspaper shows that to be true. Business, or should we say the market, has little favor for misty memorabilia, historical sentimentality, and the quaint romanticism of the US’s oldest newspaper. 146 years old and done with like yesterdays hamburger wrapper. The brutal onrush of progress continues unabashed, crushing everything in its way whether we like it or not. So I guess we’d better like it. So adopt, or die.

The search marketing industry is seeing commoditized offerings from every basement-run two-bit SEO company with a fancy website, cool brand imagery and a stainless steel and glass office table and a couple of shiny MacBooks to impress clients. The key players in search need to aim for the continued demonstration of real value and ROI. And let’s be very clear about that. Let’s make it even more transparent than it is. Show our depth of knowledge and connectivity, our insight, and embrace all the new platforms that throw themselves in front of us disguised as challenges, by which I mean social media, web 3.0, the semantic web, and the ramp up of mobile search. Key players need to show their strengths and do whatever they choose to do well, with passion, genuine interest, and with an approach that’s based on solid information, backed by research, and by leveraging the use of external resources. When we hear from clients and prospects about their stories of broken promises from agencies, and the failed delivery of guaranteed ROI, or a shoddy end deliverable we know we need to stay true to our goal of delighting the client.

So all of the challenges that we see now in the search marketing biz is actually old news repackaged. By staying true to proven approaches and trusted methods, the best players win through the challenges we face. Key players need to use their core values, strong guiding principles, beacons of inspiration, and by referencing proven best practice upon which to make good business decisions.  The cream always rises to the surface, so be sure your client offering is thick, creamy and well produced – something of substance and proven value, with great packaging. A good client feedback loop helps too. 

 Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.