Out of My Gord

Twitter Declining? I Don't Think So...

2009-11-20T09:49:13-08:00:00

One item in this morning's in box caused me to look twice - eMarketer, using numbers from Nielsen, stated that "Data on Twitter Decline Stacks Up."

Turns out it caught the eye of Jim Jansen at Penn State as well. After a quick and flurried Twit-Talk with my friend Jim, we both agreed the title's misleading.

If you continue to read down to the fourth paragraph, you start to find the article begins to refute itself:

"The decrease in visitors could mean either falling interest in Twitter or simply migration to other platforms, such as third-party applications and mobile access. "

Well..duh! Through the rest of the post, eMarketer starts to show just how much Twitter traffic has migrated to 3rd party platforms. As Jim said in a tweet "Don't even know why they are reporting it like this." Why indeed? This is just sloppy and misleading. It's one thing to attract eyeballs from the email in box (worked with me) but it's another to falsely or misleadingly report research and drop the real picture down to the bottom of the post. I've seen enough eye tracking to know that the majority of readers would never get past the first paragraph or two.

Shame on you eMarketer!

Predicting Innovation

2009-11-20T08:56:43-08:00:00

Isaac Asimov once said "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but rather, "hmm.... that's funny….". Based on a 30 year study across 300 product categories and 225 countries, the phrase might actually be "Hmmm…. that's what I thought."

A new whitepaper from Phillip Roos from GFK sums up 30 years of findings started by product guru Robert McMath. The paper deserves a deeper dive - (which will be coming in some form or another) but I'll try to share the highlights with you at least:

The Chord of Familiarity - Great innovation builds on what comes before it. This lines up with something I have long believed – there is no such thing as revolutionary innovation, just a series of incremental evolutionary innovations that at some point reaches a tipping point and appears to be revolutionary. I've used the iPhone as an example before.

Great Innovation does not require people to make radical changes in beliefs or behavior - Again, with incremental innovation, the market must understand the innovation and relate it to something they're used to. The iPhone made smartphones smarter, more fun and more useful. It didn't require us to make a great leap of understanding (unlike Apple's ill fated Newton, which was too far ahead of it's time).

Consumer Needs evolve in predictable ways - Innovation tends to mirror a natural evolution in consumer needs.

Innovation "news" that addresses consumer needs gets adopted in predictable ways - Smaller players generally lead the way (as they naturally are more innovative), as competition picks up others build on the original innovation (witness what's currently happening in mobile technology with Android, the Palm Pre and others) and then finally we reach the tipping point of mass adoption (we're getting very close to this cusp with mobile technology).

Roos also shares some drivers of winning innovation:

Business Dynamics - Supporting innovation with strong business practices and process. A.G. Lafley built a culture of innovation at the core of P&G. 3M, Apple and Google are other corporate cultures that have injected systemically into their core.

Consumer Dynamics and Insights - It's essential for innovative companies to consistently maintain the customer's perspective and approach product development from this frame of reference. Again, Apple is brilliant at this, due in no small part to Steve Jobs amazing intuition about what Apple's customers want. Intuit and P&G have robust customer insight programs that bring them to where the customer works and lives, outside of the market research lab.

Creativity and Design - Innovation specialists tend to be creative and design enthusiasts. They typically have a great ethnography process that keeps them squarely aligned with their customers and then excellent design teams that can translate this understanding into innovative products....

BUT

Roos says even if you do all these things well, it may still not be enough. Apple gets check points beside each of these prerequisites, but they still turn out clunkers. In the end, innovation in product design is a bit of a crap shoot and the trick is to stack the odds in your favor. Innovative technology, even if it's superbly designed, is a failure if no one uses it. And it's this last point that Roos says is critical. You have to understand the patterns of innovation adoption. You have to find the right place on Everett Roger's Technology Diffusion curve. And it's here where the same patterns have emerged with successful innovations over the past decades. Here are the steps Roos recommends:

To understand the patterns, you have to understand the drivers of the product category. Historically, why have customers come to this category. This will boil down to some primary human drivers: safety, convenience, gratification, productivity & well being/wellness. These needs don't change. They represent the first wave. Example: The telephone introduced instant voice communication, offering convenience, gratification and safety. It wasn't an "out of the blue" innovation, as it built on the consumers understanding of telegraph communication.

The second wave is when innovation allows these drivers to be satisfied in new and better ways.Typically, innovation is fragmented at this step. Single innovations drive forward one aspect of the product and yields a temporary competitive advantage. Example: The introduction of the mobile phone took all the drivers satisfied by the telephone and suddenly unanchored it. We could take those advantages with us anywhere.

The third wave is fusion of the drivers. Single point innovation is no longer enough. We want the advantages to merge into a more holistic experience. Example: The SmartPhone. Mobile voice communication was now supplemented by texting, web access, digital cameras and PDA functionality.

The fourth wave is where secondary needs come it. We extend the functionality of the innovation. Example: The mobile device, and the iPhone in particular, is suddenly become core to our lives. It ceases to be a single purpose product and becomes a personal platform. Computers have also gone to this level.

The fifth wave is addressing new targets in new occasions. Taking the innovation and extending it into all parts of our lives. Example: The iPhone becomes a GPS device. It becomes a shopping assistant.

All too often, I think we regard innovation as something magical and mysterious. Innovation is something predictable and replicable. It can be planned for, encouraged and fostered.

In Search of Usefulness

2009-11-20T07:07:43-08:00:00

Originally published in MediaPost's Search Insider, October 29, 2009.

A few years ago, I interviewed usability expert Jakob Nielsen about where search might go in the future. He shared an interesting insight:"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. Relevance, 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 my regular readers know, 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.

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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 its focus on relevance at the expense of usability. We need a much deeper, more useful experience. Relevance 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," its strategists 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 three 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.

Search Insider Sneak Peek: The Three-For-One Keynote

2009-11-19T08:41:50-08:00:00

Originally published today, November 19, 2009 in MediaPost's Search Insider.

Avinash Kaushik, Google's Analytics Evangelist, will be kicking off the Search Insider Summit in just two weeks. I had the opportunity to chat with Avinash last week about what might be in store. As anyone who has heard him before would agree, it won't be-sugar coated, it will be colorful and it will probably wrench your perspective on things you took for granted at least 180 degrees. Here are the three basic themes he'll be covering:

The Gold in the Long Tail

Avinash believers there is unmined search gold lying in the long tail of many campaigns. The secret is how to find it in an effective manner. I've talked before about how longtail strategies must factor in the cost of administering the campaign, which can be a challenge as you expand into large numbers of low-traffic phrases. Chris Anderson's Long Tail theory assumes frictionless markets where there is no or very low "inventory management" costs, such as digital music (iTunes) or print on demand bookstores (Amazon). In theory, this should apply to search but, in practice, effective management of search campaigns requires significant investments of time. You have to create copy, manage bid caps and, optimally, tweak landing pages, all of which quickly erode the ROI of long-tail phrases, so I'll be very interested to see how Avinash recommends getting around this challenge. I'm sure if anyone can find the efficiencies of long tail management, Avinash Kaushik can.

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Attribution Redefined

For the past three Search Insider Summits, attribution has been high on the list of discussion topics. Avinash thinks much of the thinking around attribution is askew (his term was not nearly as polite). All search marketers are struggling with attribution models for clients with longer sales cycles; often these models are little more than a marginally educated guess. I believe simply crunching numbers cannot solve the convoluted challenge of attribution. The solution lies in a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches. This, by the way, is the topic for another panel later in the day, "Balancing Hard Data & Real People." Avinash, despite his reputation as the analytics expert, always drops the numbers into a context that keeps human behavior firmly in focus.

Search Data Insights

The third topic that Avinash will be covering is how to take the massive set of consumer intent signals that lie within the search data and leverage it to not only improve your search strategies, but every aspect of your business. We chatted briefly on the phone about how unfortunate it is that search teams are often separated from much of the day-to-day running of a company. Typically, search marketers and their vast resources of campaign and competitive intelligence are not even connected to the other marketing teams. Avinash will show how the "database of intentions" can be effectively mined to provide unprecedented insight into the hearts, minds and needs of your market.

Any one of these topics is worthy of a keynote slot, but at the Search Insider Summit, you'll be getting all three! See you there in just two weeks!

The Twitter Follower Personality Sorter

2009-11-19T08:14:04-08:00:00

I had a friend in college who said he could tell everything he needed to know about a person by asking them who their favorite Beatle was. The frustrating thing was, he was usually right. For the record, mine was John Lennon. His was George Harrison. I miss them both.

I was just thinking that you can also get a great glimpse inside someone's psyche by checking out their Twitter follow list - published there for everyone to see. For example:

I just started following Marissa Mayer. I don't know Marissa very well and the extent of our acquaintance stretches to a few telephone interviews, but I do know what makes it to the popular press, and we share a passion for user experience. But I found it interesting to find in her list fairly slim list of Twitter follows a rather eclectic collection including Ivanka Trump, Ballet Russe, SF MOMA and Al Gore. Of course, there's a fairly healthy dose of Google and tech based follows as well, but these others may provide some bearing points for Marissa's personality.

Of course, you're now going to wonder who I'm following. Well, in addition to the typical industry folks, my bearing points include Jack Welch, John Cleese and NASA.

The Library Of Human Behavior: 11 More Titles For Your Reading List

2009-11-19T07:39:42-08:00:00

Originally published October 22nd in MediaPost's Search Insider. This is Part Two of my reading list.

Last week, I shared 11 titles that explore the intersection between marketing, psychology and neurology. In retrospect, though, I think I approached this backwards. While the titles I discussed are all interesting (and fairly easy reads), they are somewhat dependent on a fundamental understanding of why humans do what we do. So this week, I'll share a good starting library of human behavior, which can then be applied more generally.

"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 three titles in this list are by authors who together create a pantheon for evolutionary psychology and Darwinism. In the first, "The Moral Animal," Wright employs an interesting literary device: exploring human behavior by referencing biographical details in Charles Darwin's own life. He discusses monogamy, child rearing, differing attitudes towards sex and self-deception, among 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' 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 they help the gene meet this one objective. 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 how the impact of genes can extend into all aspects of our lives and society.

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"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. He has written an entire library of books worth reading, but this is as good a place to start as any.

"Descartes' Error" -- Antonio Damasio. 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 much further than Gladwell was able to cover. "Descartes' Error" delves deep into our gut instincts, explaining why pure rationality is an unworkable model for humans. To paraphrase Descartes' famous quote: We feel, therefore we are.

To round out my 11 suggestions, here are six 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

The Meeting Of Mind And Marketing: 11 Books To Read

2009-11-18T09:37:57-08:00:00

Originally published in MediaPost's Search Insider on October 15, 2009. I celebrated becoming the offical Search Insider (225 columns, beating David Berkowitz's record of 224) by sharing my reading list.

It's official! With this column, I break David Berkowitz's Search Insider column count record, with 225 of my own. And to commemorate the occasion, I wanted to follow up on a request that came in response to my column two weeks ago. I had warned any would-be students of human nature that this wasn't a quest to be taken lightly. A few readers responded by asking for a recommended reading list.

So this week, I went through my bookshelf at home and jotted down a list of titles that I found particularly insightful or interesting in understanding the human condition. Today, I offer them as suggestions for some fall or winter reading. I came up with 22 titles, so I've broken them into two groups. This week, all the titles are specifically for those who want to explore the intersection between marketing and the way our minds work.

"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 consumers' 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.

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"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. This book 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 U.S. it's "dead"). This is an easy and interesting read; while you might have some quibbles with Rapaille's findings, he has plenty of willing customers among 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 style overly determined to appeal to a wider audience. That said, Montague knows his stuff and the insights here are solid, supported by both his own and others' research.

"Predictably Irrational" -- Dan Ariely. Ariely follows in the footsteps of behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky by looking 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 for a fabulous meal be an unforgivable social transgression, yet be expected in a restaurant? The territory has 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 without worrying too much about how it might play for a wider audience. This is probably my favorite on this list.

If these six 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!

A Lesson in Social Media from Glee

2009-11-18T09:12:15-08:00:00

My kids are hopeless Gleeks, and after watching last week's episode, I might just be too.

Glee may just be the most perfectly designed social entertainment experiment of this year. I'm not sure if the producers of Fox's runaway hit did this by intention or dumb luck, but they're providing a textbook example of how old media can leverage new media.

Fans of Glee (Gleeks) are driving tons of traffic online, and the end of every road seems to be an opportunity for deeper engagement with the show, most with a small price tag attached. Let's sum up the lessons Glee could teach us about how to leverage online.

Package for YouTube

Each episode of Glee contains at least 4 to 5 "minishows" that can be sliced and packaged to be the perfect "YouTube" length. Of course, there are the musical performances themselves, lasting anywhere for 2 to 5 minutes, but there are also sections obviously intended to go viral, for example, the "All the Single Ladies" football clip from Episode 4 (below). Tell me the director didn't have Twitter and YouTube in mind when he set up this. The typical Glee episode feels like a series of YouTube clips, glued together with bridging dialogue and storylines. That sounds like a criticism, but it works extremely well with our digital attention spans.

Understand the Basics of Buzz

Boring doesn't go viral. Something has to tweak our primary emotions in a big way for us to feel compelled to pass it along. According to Gerard Parrot, there are six basic emotions: love, joy, surprise, anger, sadness and fear. If you move the needle far enough on any of those, you'll create an irresistible urge to share with someone. If the goal is to entertain, your choices are somewhat limited - you probably want to steer clear of anger and sadness tends to make people draw within themselves in unexpected ways. Love is also a deeply personal emotion, so doesn't have the same viral opportunities as some of the other emotions. That leaves joy, surprise and fear, which are more universal in nature. Glee, being a musical comedy, plays the joy and surprise cards regularly. Again, using the Single Ladies Football clip as an example, tell me that anyone can watch that without feeling a little bit happier. It surprises and delights.

Tap Into Emotions

We love talent shows. We love geeky underdogs. We love struggling romance, especially if it's twisted into a triangle. We like strong and quirky characters. And we love music. Glee wraps this all into a seamless package, thanks to the natural intuitions of its writers. For example, in the last episode, we have Kurt, perhaps the most interesting character on Glee, demanding a Diva showdown between himself and Rachelle (played by Lea Michele) to see who will sing the song "Defying Gravity" in an upcoming show. Kurt insists there's no reason why this song "has to be sung by a girl" and he sets out to prove it by hitting a falsetto High F. This, of course, pushes all the right emotional buttons, setting up an irresistible storyline. The idea came from Chris Colfer, who plays Kurt. It was lifted directly from his own high school experiences. The result, perhaps the most popular Glee song yet, currently #28 on iTunes most popular tracks.

Leverage Your Digital Asset Portfolio

The real genius of Glee comes from how they've spread their online net, welcoming all Gleeks with opening arms. Glee is the perfect example of the new diversified nature of online presence. It's not simply about a website anymore. Glee is all over Twitter (@glee onfox), YouTube, Facebook, iTunes and all the right blogs and forums. And, all the pieces dovetail together perfectly. Audio and video clips lead directly to iTunes purchase links, opportunities to purchase the full soundtrack or online versions of the full episodes on Fox's website, complete with advertising. Glee is creating revenue tie ins that extend far beyond the traditional TV show. Glee's not the first to do this. They borrowed a page from American Idol's playbook, also masters of digital integration. But I think this is the first time I've seen it so effectively done in a scripted show.

Understand that Communities Take Time

Fox had an understanding of this right from the beginning. The pilot was aired on May 18, several months before the show's fall debut. The long, slow release was to give momentum a chance to develop. It was all part of Fox's marketing plan. “The way we’re looking at May 19 is, it’s the world’s largest grassroots screening,” said Joe Earley, the executive VP in charge of marketing for Fox. “The show sells itself better than any (campaign) can. Our goal is to turn the people who watched it into brand ambassadors, to use hackneyed marketing-speak. We believe that when you watch this show, you can’t help but get out the word.” Earley's strategy has worked before for some of the most loved TV shows in history: Cheers, M*A*S*H, All in the Family, Seinfeld and The Office. We need to get comfortable with a new show and develop some empathy for the characters. Fox also leverage the Web well in helping this grassroots community to take hold. The "Glee" pilot followed Chris Anderson's marketing strategy: it was free and ubiquitous. Fox pumped it out through every available online channel: Hulu, Fox, YouTube and other sites.

Plan Your Online Landscape

Glee understands the new dynamics of our digital society and has staked out prime real estate at each of the intersections. I think the entertainment industry is substantially ahead of the curve in keeping its finger on the pulse of online activity. The following charts from Google trends shows the typical activity following each airing.

This shows trends for Google searches throughout 2009. As Fox intended, the pilot debut (the first peak) had a corresponding jump in search activity. This has been steadily building as the series has kicked into gear. Like all things online, Gleeks are connecting through search (one area where Fox could brush up, but I'll get to that in a minute). Let's zoom in for a closer look at the traffic in the last 30 days:

Here, we see peaks corresponding with the typical air dates. What's interesting here is that no new episodes aired between October 21 and November 11, due to the World Series. Yet search traffic still spiked during what would have been the air dates.

Let's now look at what's happening on Twitter, thanks to Trendistic.com. Since the fall kick off, we've seen reliable peaks representing almost 1% of all Twitter traffic. That's impressive. Notice the lack of traffic during the 2 week hiatus, from Oct 21 to November 11.

Now, let's look at the one thing Fox could do better - improve their search visibility (once a search marketer, always a search marketer). Although the official Fox site ranks #1 organically for Glee, the popularity of the show means that Fox should start considering expanding their search strategy. The three most popular characters: Lea Michele (who is going to be a major star), Cory Monteith and Chris Colfer are starting to generate some significant search volumes in Google.

Notice how Colfer and Michele took off after the November 11th episode which featuring their amazing duet of "Defying Gravity" (yes, I love show Broadway show tunes), which I'm sure led to a pile of iTune downloads. Yet, if you searched for any of these cast members, you would not find any official sites, but rather a motley collection of fan sites, forums as well as Wikipedia and IMDB entries. Fox is dropping the search ball here. As online communities build, you can provide warm, welcoming and well lit locations for them to visit. Fox has hugely popular content that would allow them to better leverage all this burgeoning search traffic.

Despite the rather mild criticism about Fox's search strategy, Glee is doing almost everything right here. If you were looking for an example of how to integrate social into your strategy, you could do worse than becoming a Gleek.

And Now, The New News Regime

2009-11-17T07:39:23-08:00:00

Originally published October 8, 2009 in MediaPost's Search Insider. This came out of a social search session I moderated at the SMX East show in New York.

This week, I moderated a session at SMX about real-time search. Personally, I find the convergence of social and search to be perhaps the most significant trend of 2009. Social adds an entirely new dimension to search. Traditionally search has been used to find "what" you wanted to know more about. Social adds the dimension of time. Suddenly, relevance isn't the only measure. Search now needs a "stale date," a measure of the freshness of the results.

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 the 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.

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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 instaneous connections, rather than tightly controlled and edited channels. Often, the traditional news publishers are relegated to a role of listening to and verifying 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.

Reality - Sundre Style

2009-11-16T15:40:41-08:00:00

Sometimes, life has a way of slapping you in the face. In our business, one would think that the world revolves around Twitter, Facebook and Google. Normally, the digital world consumes a large part of my day. But I came face to face with what is reality for many people in the world.

I spent this weekend in Sundre. If you’ve never heard of Sundre, don’t worry, You’re not alone. Sundre is 2500 hardy souls that live on the edge of the foothills in Alberta, Canada. This is about as cowboy as it gets. Stetsons, Levis (the real Levis, deep blue with no fading, artificial holes or other city slicker crap) and cowboy boots. All the parking lots are full of North American trucks and every radio station (it seems) plays country music – deep rooted country full of twang and steel guitars. My dad (the reason for my visit, but I’ll get to that in a bit) was listening to some country show on the radio that consisted of some ancient announcer going on endlessly about the “honest deals” to be found at the local farm implement dealer, punctuated occasionally by a Hank Williams or Conway Twitty song. At one point, he started talking about an upcoming community event in Hanna (which is even smaller that Sundre) and threw in the tidbit that Hanna is the home town of the “boys of Nickleback.” Hearing this old codger talk about Chad Kroeger and a rock band seemed as out of place as a Prius in the Sundre Curling Rink parking lot.

Sundre is the town I grew up in. And this weekend, I went back home because my dad just had hip replacement surgery and my mom broke her right arm. This is throwing a severe wrench into the day-to-day workings of my parent’s home. So I went to lend a hand, as well as a pair of mobile legs. The things I usually blog about never seemed further away. The role of Twitter or Facebook in defining our new social bonds didn’t come up in any of the conversations I'[ve had in the last 72 hours. Not once did the market share split of Google and Bing encroach upon my consciousness. My reality involved walkers, slings, several talks about recycling (this has become my dad’s passion) trips to grocery stores and hospital waiting rooms, cleaning out compost pails and cooking up enough food to last Mom and Dad for a week or two.

Still, the weekend was not without its charm. I was amazed during both my trips to the local grocery store (which, in a small town, is the original social network) when they insisted on carrying my bags out to my car. And I was equally astounded when on a quick trip into a liquor store to pick up a bottle of wine, the sole employee behind the till asked me to wait “just a minute” while she ran to the back of the store. Within arms reach there were at least 60 bottles of alcohol and the door was two steps away, with not a pair of watchful eyes in sight. Trust seems to run thicker in the country.

But even in Sundre, the digital revolution is being felt. High on my list of to-do’s for the weekend was getting their computer working (after a trip to Radio Shack) so they could check email. And I had to borrow a few hard back chairs with arms (borrow being a relative term, I just went to the meeting hall at the church and helped myself – they’ll make their way back eventually) for my dad so he could have three “stations” set up where he’ll be spending a good part of the next 6 weeks of recovery: one was in the corner of the front room, next to the window, so he can read his magazines and keep a watchful eye on the street, one at the table for eating, and one at the computer in the office, so he can play solitaire and check out the odd website. It may not be Ad:Tech or SES, but in Sundre, this is pretty revolutionary.