Out of My Gord

Dr. Jansen's coming to Town!

2009-11-06T07:33:19-08:00:00

My friend Dr. Jim Jansen from Penn State is flying in to meet with the gang at Enquiro today. I'm thrilled! Jim has been spending his time of late slicing and dicing a huge data set of a major search marketer. He's found a number of interesting things, including behaviors that tend to call the concept of a search funnel into question, and also that "gender neutral" queries convert better than "male" or "female" ones. I did an extensive interview with Jim a few weeks ago, which resulted in three articles for Search Engine Land, some background on Jim, one on the Search Buying Funnel and one on this idea of Search "Sex" and Personalization. You can also read the complete transcript here on Out of My Gord.

For my money, Jim is one of the few academics doing really interesting and relevant research into search. I'm usually aghast at how far behind the profs teaching internet marketing are compared to their students. Jim has proven the exception by rolling both sleeves up and diving deep into mounds of campaign and click stream data.

It will also be good to share with Jim the results of some of the research we've been doing here at Enquiro. A number of our studies have highlighted some very interesting behaviors. Because I tend to view research with a decidedly qualitative bias, it would be good to get Jim's quantitative slant on things.

It's going to be a great day!

The New Speed of Information

2009-11-06T07:20:43-08:00:00

This column originally ran in MediaPost's Search Insider back on August 27, 2009. It was a dramatic and personal example of how we seek the news now.

This summer, we had fires in the town I live in. From the back deck of my house, I could see the smoke and, as darkness descended, the flames that were threatening the homes in the hills above Kelowna. I had friends and co-workers that lived in the neighborhoods that were being evacuated, so I wanted to know what was happening as soon as possible.

I was sitting on the back deck, watching the progress of the fire through binoculars and monitoring Twitter on my laptop. My wife was inside the house, listening on the radio and watching on TV. Because I had an eyewitness perspective, I was able to judge the timeliness of our news channels and gained a new appreciation for the speed of social networks.

News That's Not So New

If you had tuned in to our local TV station even hours after the fires began, you wouldn't have known that anything out of the ordinary was happening. There was no mention of the fire for hours after it started. The TV station in Vancouver was better, with real-time coverage a few hours after the fire first started. But their "coverage" consisted of newscasters repeating the same limited information, which was at least 2 hours out of date, and playing the same 30-second video loop over and over. If you needed information, you would not have found it there.

The local news radio station fared a little better, reporting new evacuation areas as soon as they came through the official communication channels. But the real test came at about 8:45 p.m. that night. The original fire started near a sawmill on the west side of Okanagan Lake. Around the aforementioned time, I noticed a wisp of smoke far removed from the main fire. It seemed to me that a new fire had started, and this one was in the hills directly above the subdivision that my business partner lived in. Was this a new fire? Were the homes threatened? I ran in and asked my wife if she had heard anything about a second fire. Nothing was being reported on TV or radio. I checked the local news Web sites. Again, no report.

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Turning to Twitter

So I tweeted about it. Within 15 minutes, someone replied that there did seem to be a second fire and fire crews had just gone by their house, on the way up to the location. Soon, there were more tweets with eyewitness accounts and reports of more fire crews. In 30 minutes, the Kelowna Twitter community had communicated the approximate location of the new fire, the official response, potential neighborhoods that might be evacuated and even the possible cause of the fire.

Yes, it was all unvetted and unauthorized, but it was in time to make a difference. It would take TV two more hours to report a possible new fire, and even then, they got most of the details wrong. The local radio station again beat TV to the punch, but (as I found out afterwards) only because a reporter was also monitoring Twitter.

We've all heard about the new power of social media, whether it be breaking the news of Michael Jackson's death or the elections in Iran, but for me, it took an event a little closer to home to help me realize the magnitude of this communication shift. Official channels are being hopelessly outstripped by the efficiency of technology-enabled communications. Communication flows freely, unrestricted by bottlenecks. One might argue that with the freedom in restrictions, one sacrifices veracity. There is no editor to double-check facts. But in the case of the Kelowna fires of 2009, at least, official channels proved to be even more inaccurate. Not everything I read on Twitter was true, but the corrections happened much faster than they did through the supposed "authorized" channels. Twitter had broken the news of Jackson's death while the official news sources still had him in the hospital with an undisclosed condition. When it came to timely, accurate information, social media beat the massive news machine hands down.

Do we need a two-hour jump on the news we hear? Is it really that important that we know about events as soon as they happen? When a fire is bearing down on your home and every minute gained means you might lose one less precious keepsake or treasured photo, you bet it's important.

Search Insider Sneak Peak: Selling Search to the C Suite

2009-11-06T07:16:34-08:00:00

This ran yesterday in MediaPost's Search Insider. As Programming Chair for the Search Insider Summit, I wanted to highlight some of the sessions we have planned. I'm thrilled to bring Mike to the summit!

In just under one month, we'll be gathering on the frosty ski hills of Park City, Utah for the Search Insider Summit. Between now and then, I'll give you a sneak preview of some of the main topic areas we'll be tackling in the meeting rooms of the Silver Lake Chateau. Today: How do you sell search to the C-Suite?

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 this 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 sparse, 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.

Meet Gord Hotchkiss at Search Insider Summit Utah!

Optimized - Strategic executive participation, with continual management attention.

In looking at this breakdown, you realize that selling search to the C-Suite is not a one-shot deal. It's a continual 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 executives 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 the C-Suite 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 of them.

The Top 10 Reasons We Love Top Ten Lists

2009-11-05T07:01:17-08:00:00

Somedays it seems to me that the whole world has become a search results page. I fear we have become obsessed with ranked and ordered lists. I'm not sure what it is in the human psyche that loves lists conveniently numbered for our perusal, but heaven knows we're suckers for the Top Ten.

The Internet has fed this addiction to the point that I feel like the whole world can be sorted like an Excel spread sheet. Sort my best friends by geographic proximity and likelihood to lend me a wheelbarrow. Rank all the parties my teenage daughter will be invited to this year by availability of alcohol, physical presence of dictatorial parents and incidence rate of teenage boys who think they "have a shot". Give me a list of the 10 things my wife hates so I can create a Pivot Table of my odds of doing one of them in the foreseeable future.

As any direct marketer, blogger, magazine publisher or show organizer will tell you, slapping the "Top Ten" on the front of anything virtually guarantees you an audience: The Top Ten Hot Dog Stands in Manhattan, The Top Ten Ways to Get Rich if You Love Wearing Pajamas All Day, The Top Ten Christmas Crafts that Can Be Made From Recyclable Yard Waste..It's like we're being spoon fed our lives by some idiot with a ranking algorithm for everything.

Why are we like this? Well, I think it's because thinking is hard. It's much easier to take someone else's opinion about something, especially when it's offered in the irresistible format of a ranked list. We can choose to agree or disagree, but we don't actually have to think about it too much. Someone else has done it for us. Also, we travel in social herds, so it's really important to know what everyone else feels about anything. And finally, the world just has too much complexity now. There are too many choices to think about in every aspect of our lives, even the stupid ones. I don't really want to spend a lot of time wondering who the Ten Sexiest Olympians are this coming February. I know somewhere some obliging magazine publisher or blogger will do that Herculean intellectual task for me.

I guess ordered lists offer us the illusion of control. If we can slow the frenetic pace of the world down by looking at a list that someone has conveniently put numbers beside, our lives seem a tiny bit more orderly and organized. Yes, I know the economy and the environment is going to hell in a handbasket, yes, I know the global forces of power and control are undergoing a fundamental shift, but right now I'm focused on the 7 Greatest Reality TV Show Moments of 2009. I'll worry about global warming some other day.

Of course, the urge to put a numbered list in as part of this post is overwhelming (get it..irony), so, I'll give you the "Top 8 Reasons Why I Gave In and Did It":

I have the bladder control of an 80 year old man and have already had 2 cups of coffee, so I had to finish this post somehow
I really want to see just how many of you will Tweet this list because you've been helplessly programmed to do so
I'm obsessed with PostRank and I spend way too much of each day worried about my Engagement Score
Given the choice between thought provoking content and a cheap laugh, guess which way I'll always lean
I'm still figuring out how numbered lists work in my blogging platform and needed the practice
I felt guilty teasing you with a title about Top Lists and felt obliged to deliver. See, I really care about you, my readers and didn't want to disappoint you
I wanted to prove to my daughters that my brain is still capable of counting up to 8. There has been some question lately
I believe that children are our future (Okay, I ran out of reasons, but I felt that Whitney deserved a plug because she's trying really, really hard)

How I've Spent My Summer Vacations

2009-11-05T06:17:20-08:00:00

Originally published in MediaPost's Search Insider, August 20, 2009. It was written while I was cycling down the Oregon coast. I have still sworn vengeance on the drivers of several motorhomes.

Robin Williams' movie "RV" may not have gathered much critical acclaim, but one scene at least hit a comedic home run with me. Williams has to get a presentation back to the home office during a camping trip with his family. After his laptop goes AWOL, he uses his BlackBerry to retype the presentation and then tries to get a signal strong enough to let him email the presentation to his boss. He scales the top of his rented motor home, holding his BlackBerry heavenward trying to get a signal. This is an episode directly out of my life. I did exactly the same thing in a state park in California one summer, trying to get some file (it might have even been a Search Insider column) to someone who was expecting it. Running a business means splitting your time between family vacation activities and keeping the bare essentials going back at the office.

Have Column, Will Travel

In the five years I've been writing for Search Insider, I've usually continued to contribute throughout my vacations. This has meant filing columns from campgrounds up and down the West Coast, from Hawaiian beaches, from London hotel rooms, from a chalet in the French Alps and from a charming little hotel in Florence, Italy. Each has presented their challenges in finding a connection but it's always been interesting weaving my experiences into the story line.

A few years ago, we were taking the family through Europe and spending a lot of time on trains. We were on the high-speed train from Lyon to Paris and I had to get a column filed. I had just received my first mobile Internet device and thought this would be just the ticket for a little "wired" jet setting. It took me the better part of the trip to key the column in with the tiny little keyboard, but finally the column was done and ready to be filed. I hit the send button and marveled at how technology allowed me to stay connected, even on a train whizzing through the French countryside at 200 kilometers an hour. Unfortunately, no one had explained data roaming charges to me. My little flirtation with international mobile computing came with a nasty little $800 surprise when I got back to the office. The technology is amazing, but the ethics of mobile carriers are noticeably less so.

My Wife Said I Could, So There!

Every time I write something while on vacation (by the way, we call it holidays here in Canada, but you'll notice I'm carefully keeping my column Americanized) I usually get emails or comments saying I should leave the laptop and PDA at home. My wife and I have talked about this and we agreed that the ability to stay connected not only to work but also to family is worth the odd hour or two checking emails. I am much more at ease when I can check in and make sure everything is fine back home. We have amazing support systems, supplied by both family and my co-workers, so a periodic check-in is usually relatively stress-free. Besides, the Internet is a tremendous resource for a little ad-hoc planning while on the road. Last year, when plans suddenly fell through in France for three days of our trip, I was able to book alternate plans at the last minute.

In continuation of the Hotchkiss summer tradition, this column, too, is being penned on vacation. Right now I'm in a hotel room in Florence, but this Florence is in Oregon, not Italy. A friend and I are biking down the Oregon coast (three days and 192 miles behind us, so we're a little past half way). Our wives and children are following us with a van full of anti-chafing cream and cold beer. It's been an amazing experience, but I swear I'm going to hunt down every jerk driving a motor home down Highway 101 who doesn't give cyclists a little extra room when whizzing by at 70 miles per hour and teach them how to dump their holding tanks, Robin Williams-style. That was the other scene in the movie that had me rolling on the floor.

Over and out from the Oregon coast!

How I Became a Researcher

2009-11-04T05:37:25-08:00:00

First published in MediaPost's Search Insider on August 13, 2009. A look back to the origins of Enquiro Research.

About six years ago, I had one of those life-changing moments that set me on a new path. I've always been curious. I've always had questions, and up to that point in my life, I was usually able to find an answer, with enough perseverance. But in 2003, I had a question that no one seemed able to answer. It didn't seem to be an especially difficult question, and I knew someone had the answer. They just weren't sharing it.

The Unanswerable Question

The question was this: what percentage of searchers click on the organic results and what percentage click on the sponsored ads? Today, that's not even a question; it's common knowledge for search marketers. But in 2003, that wasn't the case. Sponsored search ads were still in their infancy (Overture had just been acquired by Yahoo, and Google's AdWords was only a couple years old) and no one at either engine was sharing the clickthrough breakdowns between organic and paid.

I reached out to everyone I knew in the industry, but either they didn't know, or they weren't willing to go public with the info. My connections into Google and Yahoo were nonexistent at the time. No one, it seemed, had the answer. My curiosity was stymied. And that's when my revelation happened. If no one had the answer, perhaps I could provide it.

At the time, research was not something Enquiro did. When we wanted to find out an answer, we combed through the forums, just like everyone else. But there seemed to be a noticeable gap in available information. There was plenty of discussion about technical SEO tactics, but no one seemed to be interested in how people actually used search engines.

To me, this was an unforgiveable oversight. If we were using search as a marketing channel, shouldn't we have some understanding of how our prospects used search? Off the top of my head, I jotted down a list of several questions I had about how people actually search; questions that appeared to have no readily available answers. It was at that point that I officially became a researcher.

Discovering "Why"

Our first research project proved to set the path we would go down for much of the follow-up: we just looked at how people used search to do things. Our methodology has become much tighter and we now have added eye-tracking and even neuro-scanning to our arsenal, but from the beginning, our research was more focused on "why" than "what." The first paper was called "Inside the Mind of the Searcher" and it's still referenced on a regular basis. Frankly, we were surprised with how quickly it was picked up in the industry. Suddenly, we became the experts on search user behavior, a crown I was uncomfortable with at the beginning. Yes, we were exploring new ground, but I always worried about how representative this was to the real world. Did people really do what we said they did, or was it just a research-created anomaly?

Defining the Golden Triangle

For us, the groundbreaking study was our first eye tracking study, done through Eyetools in San Francisco. I had read the Poynter study about how people interacted with online publications and was fascinated. "What if," I wondered, "we did this with a search engine?" I found a similarly curious cohort in Kevin Lee from DidIt and together with Eyetools we launched the first study, which discovered the now-famous "Golden Triangle." I remember sitting with Kevin in a speaker prep room at a show whose name escapes me, looking at the very first results of the data. The pattern jumped off the page:

"Look at that!" I said, "It's a triangle!"

Kevin, always the search optimizer, said, "We need something catchy to call it, something that we can optimize for. The Magic Triangle?"

Because the heat map tends to indicate the most popular areas in a reddish yellow color, the answer was right in front of us. I can't remember whether it was Kevin or I that first said it, but as soon as we said it, we knew the name would stick: "It's a gold color... The Golden Triangle?"

Is It Real?

Even with the release of the study and the quick acceptance, I still questioned whether this represented real behavior. It was later that year when I got the confirmation I needed. I had just presented the results during a session at an industry show and was stepping down from the stage. Someone was quietly standing in the corner and came over as I started to head out of the room.

"Hi. I just wanted to let you know. I work with Yahoo on user experience and your heat map looks identical to our internal ones. I actually thought you had somehow got your hands on ours." The validation was a few years in coming, but very welcome when it finally arrived.

Today, ironically, things have come full circle. I have talked to sales and engineering teams at all the major engines and much of the research they refer to about user behavior comes from Enquiro.

And the answer to my original question has held remarkably consistent in the past 6 years: What percentage of users click on paid ads vs. organic listings? For commercial searches, it's about 70% organic, 30% paid. Just in case you were curious.

Two Different Views of Tweeting

2009-11-03T08:48:16-08:00:00

Last week in San Jose, I was talking to a group of marketers about how digital natives and digital immigrants use social networking. Inevitably, the subject of Twitter came up. In our recent BuyerSphere research, we found that Digital Natives (the younger generation that grew up with technology) use Twitter or microblogging platforms more than Digital Immigrants (the older generation that adopted technology as adults). Someone in the audience said that he thought it was common knowledge that younger people don't "tweet" but older people do, running counter to our research. The following chart shows the percentage of difference in time spend each week between the Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants in our sample:

As you can see, Digital Natives spend significantly more time on social networks and Twitter..almost 50% more time than Digital Immigrants. Yet, Twitter is labeled as an older person's platform. Today, from the PEW Internet group, new numbers came out on Twitter usage that seem aligned with our findings:

The core audience for Twitter is squarely in the Digital Native age group. I think the answer lies in how the respective groups use Twitter. And this difference in usage and attitude extends beyond Twitter to almost any social networking platform.

The Digital Immigrant views Twitter as a tool. It's a way to get information out, build traffic to a blog, connect with someone. We treat it as technology that offers us another way to get things done.

But for the Digital Native, Twitter is just part of the world they live in..like air or water. They don't treat it as technology. It simply is. This attitude towards technology as not being technology is common amongst Natives. They don't have the same "Gee Whiz" awe of technology. They're not constantly comparing Twitter or Facebook against the good old days. Why should they? For them, this is just part of the world they live it..there is no reference point in the past. That's why Natives spend substantially more of each week interacting with technology that connects them with their lives and social circle. For myself, FaceBook is a destination, as is Linked In or Twitter. I only go there when I need to do something. But for the Native, it's just part of their environment.

Finally, I want to share the view of another Digital Immigrant, Comedian C.K. Louis, who ranted about the Native lack of appreciation for technology.

Gord Stories: How I Almost Got Busted by the St. Louis FBI

2009-11-03T08:07:32-08:00:00

This story was first published in MediaPost's Search Insider, August 6, 2009. I've been afraid to go back to St. Louis ever since.

This week, the latest in my "fireside chats" (phrase courtesy of Aaron Goldman) about past SEM memories.

In the early days of our search marketing business, our collection of SEO clients ran the gamut from slightly off-white to shades of gray approaching black. Yes, back in the day we too did some stuff that wasn't smiled upon by the anti-spam gods of the search universe. Of course, it was (and still is) sometimes difficult to determine where the line between white and black could be found.

Desperately Seeking Sublets

One of the more interesting groups we dealt with was a network of apartment-locating services. Prior to working with them, I had no idea that apartment locating was such a hyper-competitive business, but these were voracious adopters of search at the very earliest stages of the industry. The goal was to position all 10 of their various "doorway" domains in the top 10 for the prime keywords, essentially shutting out the competition. And for some reason, Texas was the hotbed of apartment finders. In 2002, if you had searched for apartments in Dallas, Houston or Austin, you'd have seen our clients.

These independent Web-based businesses formed a national association, effectively creating their own link farm. And soon after forming the association, they decided to have a meeting. The location was set to be St. Louis because it was the geographic center of the country, And, for the first time, my company's co-founder, Bill Barnes, and myself were asked to fly down and make a live client presentation.

My Laser Focus

As we started to work through the logistics, we realized we had no way to show the presentation slide deck we had put together. We didn't have a projector, and the hotel meeting room we were to meet the clients in didn't have one either. I quickly scoured St. Louis and found an AV rental shop that could provide us with a projector for the day. I arranged to have it waiting for us at the hotel when we checked in. At the time, a projector was more than a business essential; it was a cool toy that we could use to project a movie on the hotel wall, giving Bill and I our own big screen experience the night before the meeting. But the projector also came with a laser pointer, the first time I had ever encountered one of these nifty little gadgets. For regular readers, you might remember that I'm still fascinated by them, a personality quirk that came to light at the last Search Insider Summit.

Soon, a fully grown man was running around a hotel room in St. Louis, shining the little red dot at anything he could find. Bill cowered in the corner, covering his eyes for fear of inadvertent laser surgery. Being a scientifically curious type of individual, it became vitally important to me to see just how far the range of my pointer was. I ran to the window to find some targets further afield.

Could it hit the car in the parking lot below? Yes!

Could it hit the opposite wing of the hotel, some 150 feet away? Yes!

Next door to the hotel was a large, featureless office block. I had to see if the laser's reach extended that far. The little red dot travelled along the wall, hundreds of feet away. In fact, you could see it go right through the window, shining on the interior walls of the offices inside the building. Bill, only half jokingly, said, "For God's sake, shut that thing off, before someone thinks you're a sniper." Reluctantly, I hit the off switch and settled down to watch Julia Roberts in our makeshift hotel cinema.

From the Files of the FBI

The next morning, we had a few hours to kill before the presentation was scheduled. We decided to talk a walk in the bitter St. Louis cold to check out some of the surrounding area. We started walking past the office building next door that had served as my target range the night before. There, at 2222 Market Street, St. Louis, we discovered we were next-door neighbors to the headquarters of the FBI.

To this day, I can imagine the scenario: Two FBI agents, putting in extra hours to finish paper work, heads down in the nearly empty office. Suddenly, one raises his head to grab his coffee cup and is somewhat startled to see a small red laser dot moving along the wall and slowly coming to rest on his partner's forehead. Somewhat shakily he says, "Ed, I think we may have a situation."

Nope, not a terrorist. Just a search marketer.

A Great Question: Why Don't Big Companies "Get It?"

2009-11-02T08:34:43-08:00:00

At our event in the Bay area last week, Marketo Marketing Director Jon Miller gave a very compelling presentation about how they've put a comprehensive sales and marketing strategy together that not only blows away performance benchmarks in his category, but outstrips what would be considered "Best of Breed" campaigns. At the same event, someone from a huge company asked who were the companies that were "doing it right" in B2B. A panel of very smart B2B marketers looked at each other, struggling to come up with a single name. Finally, Jon said "Well, I think we're doing it pretty well." It might have sounded boastful, but Jon had the numbers to back up his claim.  I've thought about that a lot in the few days since. Why can a small company like Marketo put together a digital campaign that integrates all the right pieces and gets them to click while a Fortune 500, with all their resources available, can't? Why are smaller companies much more likely to “Get It”, with a big G?

"Getting it with a Big G"

First, I should explain what I mean by Big G “Getting It.” When I look at the most successful marketers in the digital ecosystem, they have a unique ability to position themselves at exactly the right place on the digital adoption curve. They can read where their markets are going and seem to be there at the right time with the right offering. They offer something so compelling that adoption is a no brainer. These companies have a magical ability to combine the promise and advantages of game changing technology with a intuitive sense of what the market wants. Think Amazon, eBags, NetFlix & Zappos.

Hmmm..you say. No B2B companies in that mix? I would put Salesforce there, but after that, it gets difficult to think of B2B marketers who have found the sweet spot of the adoption curve. That’s why our panel was stumped when asked for examples of B2B companies that “Get It.”

I think the answer lies in the inherent nature of the companies that “Get It”. I suspect there are things that are natural here that it’s almost impossible for bigger companies to emulate. This follows up an earlier post about companies that seem to naturally benefit from SEO. As I thought more about it, I realized it comes down to a few common things:

Top Down, Bottom Up Buy In – Getting a company aligned and on the same page is just a whole lot easier when an executive meeting consists of leaning back in your chair and yelling across the hallway. There’s immediacy of communication and, through this, agreement, that’s intoxicating in a smaller company. If you get executive commitment to an initiative, the entire company can know about it and start executing in minutes if required.

Nimbleness - With quicker communication comes nimbleness. Smaller companies move faster than big companies, and in the digital marketplace, that’s a vital advantage. If you get that rarest of animals, a small company with seasoned executives who have “been there, done that”, you get a tremendously effective execution machine: a company who knows what to do and can actually do it without dealing with energy sucking inertia.

Growing Up Digital – The handful of companies that I see have almost all grew up in a natively digital market. The online marketplace is baked right into their DNA. Another important point: they get technology, but they’re not star struck by it. If they’re chasing a social media strategy, it’s because they understand that it’s because conversations are happening and they need to be part of them, not because they’ve been caught up in the buzz and hyperbole of it.

It’s Not Marketing, It’s How We Roll – The idea of marketing as a separate department or discipline seems to belong to a past generation. In the successful new breed of companies that “Get It”, marketing best practices are so deeply woven into the fabric of the company that it’s impossible to separate them from all the other stuff the company does. They just do the things that are right for the customer, and everything good seems to naturally flow from that. If you want to call it marketing, fine, but it’s not the first label they’d put on it. They tend to use words like “culture” and “core values.”

Living Closer to the Customer – This ingrained ability to anticipate customer needs comes from living closer to the customer. There is very little distance between everyone in the company and all their customers in smaller businesses. The CEO knows and understands at a gut level what the customer wants from them. And, if you have an executive that knows how to execute (rarer than you might think) you’ve got consistently happier customers.

Those are my observations after a few days thought, but this question of why smaller, newer companies seem better positioned to evolve in the new marketplace is one that needs more thought. If you could take a few minutes to share any examples of companies that you think embody these characteristics, I’d be grateful. Just add a comment to the blog and I’ll start compiling a list of examples to both share and to take a closer look at.

Gord Stories: How I Met Fredrick Marckini

2009-11-02T07:10:50-08:00:00

This was first published as part of my summer stories series on MediaPost's Search Insider on July 30, 2009. This was my very first search conference.

As I said last week, I'm in the mood for a little reminiscing, so today, I'll be sharing the story of my first industry event and how I met iProspect's founder, Fredrick Marckini.

Bound for Beantown

It was 2001 before I attended my first industry trade show. As you might imagine, doing SEO in a small city of 120,000 people in Western Canada, our ability to "talk shop" with anyone who had the slightest clue what we were talking about was limited. The idea of being in a room with a few hundred other SEOs was mindboggling, so we checked our corporate credit card limit (our primary source of financing) and I was soon Boston-bound for SES.

The goal for the show was to "get to know people in the industry." I had a "hit list" of industry notables I was instructed to make contact with. I staked out hallways and skulked around the doors leading into the sessions with the intention of "bumping into" Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman, Detlev Johnson, Marshall Simmonds, Bruce Clay and, yes, Fredrick Marckini. I swear to God, I had an actual list and would put tick marks beside names when my mission was accomplished. Each day I would phone back to the office in Kelowna to report my success rate.

SES Here I Come!

Industry events in 2001 (the show site is still live) were not quite like industry events today. I'm not sure what the official total attendance was, but it was in the hundreds, not thousands. Everyone from the show could fit in one moderately sized meeting room for lunch, and there was still room left around the perimeter for the "trade show floor," which consisted of six or seveb folding tables with vinyl banners hung behind. One would think, given the relatively intimate nature of the show, meeting my "targets" wouldn't be that difficult. However, I had two things going against me: First, I'm not the most social of animals. I'm the guy who's awkwardly waiting just outside the "conversation cluster" at most networking events, waiting to be noticed. Small talk has never been my forte. And secondly, search isn't the most visual of industries. I knew the names of the people I wanted to meet, but I had no idea what they looked like.

Nevertheless, with persistence and dumb luck, I worked my way down the list, having less than memorable (on their part, not mine) introductions with Danny, Chris and Detlev. But one name on the list remained unchecked. Fredrick Marckini proved to be remarkably elusive. Fredrick was one of the few stars of the industry: a regular columnist for ClickZ, author of not one but three books on search marketing and the founder of iProspect, the most successful search agency in the industry. I sniffed the winds of the Boston Marriott Copley, determined to bag my prey before I headed back to Kelowna.

The Smell of Desperation

My opportunities were rapidly running out. But on the last day, a small glimmer of hope! I was chatting in a hallway with another attendee and he mentioned that someone from iProspect had given a fascinating presentation on keyword research in the session he was just at. With only the slightest hint of a tremor of excitement, I asked if Mr. Marckini was in attendance.

"I think so. He was standing near the back."

I literally vanished before the guy's eyes, rushing down the hallway to the aforementioned conference room, hoping that Marckini would still be lingering in an after-session chat. I burst into the room, but alas, it was empty. Dejected, I wandered out, deciding to make a quick pit stop at the nearest men's room.

Note: For the squeamish, the next passage is slightly tasteless but essential to the story, so please forgive me.

Steady Now...

While standing at the urinal, I was carefully maintaining the unwritten rules of men's room etiquette, staring intently at the featureless tile in front of me. I became aware of a presence beside me: fairly tall, dark blue suit, dark hair and glasses. I turned my neck the tiniest fraction of an inch, to allow discreet scanning with my peripheral vision. I think..yes., yes...I'm sure! According to the best description available to me, Fredrick Marckini was at the next urinal!

But what to do? You simply don't introduce yourself at a urinal, especially when there's still directly relevant business to be completed. Timing was essential here. We had to finish at the same time. So, by imposing a not inconsiderable degree of biophysical control, I managed to reach the sinks simultaneously with Fredrick. But still, there was awkwardness to contend with. At what point is it okay to initiate social contact? Pre-rinse, mid-rinse or post-rinse? The specter of time ticking away drove me to recklessness. With hands still wet and soapy, I threw caution to the wind. It was now or never!

"Fredrick? Nice to meet you. I'm Gord Hotchkiss from Search Engine Position [our name pre-Enquiro]."

Our hands tried to grasp in a firm, manly handshake, but the soapiness made it more of a slippery glancing blow.

"Oh. I know about Search Engine Position. You guys do great work!"

My respect for Fredrick as a charming gentleman started at that moment. Not only was he gracious to a wild-eyed and soapy stranger, he actually invited me to be his guest at an Overture dinner that night. It's been awhile since I bumped into Fredrick at an industry event (I think SES Toronto a few years ago was the last time) but it's still one of my favorite memories.

You're a classy guy, Fredrick!