I’ve been traveling quite a bit lately, but I guess I need to try to get to Helsinki.
Neil Gaiman shares an absolutely lovely video of the Helsinki Complaints Choir. Check it out. It’s worth the effort.
Last week, Seth Godin wrote about the critical role trust plays in our market relationships.
And the upside? The upside is that individuals (and organizations) that don’t stoop, that manage to figure out how to have influence without trying to profit from it, those brands are the ones that will last, that will thrive and that will bring the rarest commodity–trust–to the table.
Trust is an absolutely essential ingredient when we buy. We don’t part with hard earned dollars unless we convince ourselves the result will be worth it. We count on the salesman or the manufacturer to deliver real value. We trust their promises and fork over the cash.
Sure, Caveat Emptor, buyer beware. But companies that violate our trust once lose our business forever. In today’s markets there is so much choice, so many options, that once trust is gone, people are free to move on to another offer, and they do.
This is nothing new. Trust has always been critical. The information age changes the pace and volume of information, but not the criticality of trust. It seems to me that hundreds of years ago a single piece of information–“The King is dead.”–could change the course of a battle and turn the tide of a war. Today, a single piece of information is rarely so valuable. Instead, we assimilate, analyze, and respond to vast torrents of information. Diving into the Internet is like swimming in an ocean; daily RSS feeds from the Blogoverse are like drinking from a fire hose. It isn’t about any particular drop of water, it is about whether or not you can consume and respond quickly and intelligently enough to keep yourself from drowning.
What remains the same today and yesterday is the critical nature of how much trust you place in your sources of information. If news about the departed monarch of yesteryear arrived from the mouth of the town drunk, it wasn’t believed. If today’s assertions of male enhancement and unimagined wealth are delivered in attention assaulting SPAM, they too deserve little notice. In both worlds, trust moderates the flow of information. Without a source or a guide we can trust, no information can be depended on.
Sometimes that trusted guide is someone you know. Sometimes it is a brand that you’ve come to rely upon. Or perhaps it is someone referred to you by someone else.
Yet, when it matters, we rarely trust just one source, no matter how trustworthy. Our doctors tell us to get a second opinion. Buyers seek multiple bids. Journalists are trained to double check their facts. It is a matter of due course to seek out alternative perspectives to transform a one dimensional recommendation into a three dimensional panorama with scope and breadth of multiple experiences and views. Even at Amazon, we rarely read just one review; we want a wealth of perspectives so we can paint a richer picture of the product in question.
With the Internet, we regularly review and incorporate multiple sources in our decision making. We double check the prices at Expedia and Travelocity at Orbitz or United.com. We check online reviews and competitive offers from multiple sources for just about any item we can buy, from cars to computers to movies. We aren’t limited to any particular silo of information. We mix and match until we have convinced ourselves that we understand well enough to make a decision. This is the oceanic torrent of diverse information we sift through to discover truth.
This is complex search. We browse the web, using multiple search providers and track results across many many destination websites. It isn’t about the quality of any single search result, it is about managing the aggregate results from multiple services across the web.
When we search for a house, we don’t take the MLS listing at face value, we also check Zillow.com and want to learn about schools, crime, traffic, smog, and public transportation in the neighborhood. When looking for a job, we don’t just trust Monster.com or CareerBuilder.com, we also visit the company’s web page, scan Google and Technorati for buzz, and may even check out eTrade or Hoover’s for more in-depth financial data. We use the Internet to compile an aggregate view of our search target, a view that combines the perspectives of many different sources of varying levels of trust. The end result is a composite that we can trust because it represents a coherent representation of a broad range of diverse data, selected using our own judgment. We trust it more because it isn’t sole source, because we did the legwork, because we own it emotionally.
And yet, of the search solutions available today, none make it easy to manage this type of inherently complex process of double-checking, comparing, and seeking second, third and fourth opinions. What you type in at Expedia has to be re-typed at CheapTickets and United and Travelocity, and the results are often hard to retain for later comparison. What you find on eBay is isolated from the results at Amazon and shipping, handling, & taxes may be hidden until you proceed to checkout; even shopping sites like NexTag, TheFind, and ThisNext don’t make it easy to mix & match and compare multiple products fully priced from multiple merchants. Even Google and Yahoo! and MSN leave vast swaths of the Internet outside of their search database, commonly known as “The Dark Web.” Today’s search is a vast array of isolated islands, each offering a glimpse into their private database, their own private silo. But users don’t live in silos, they skip across the net from island to island, saving to bookmarks, printing to PDFs, opening links in new tabs and windows, even cutting & pasting into Word, trying to keep track of their journey. It’s a mess.
What we need is a tool or a system that lets us coordinate complex searches across the ‘net, using any search provider we want–indeed using any query-driven web service–all seamlessly integrated into a single interface and repository stored in the user context. We need the user to be in charge of their search, no matter where it might lead, how it might evolve, and what information is uncovered. We don’t need to be bound to any particular vendor, or isolated in any particular silo. We do need to be able to expand the search to include new search providers and to capture unforeseen data. And its needs to be both easy and powerful. And it all needs to work without interrupting, distracting, or confusing users.
That’s what we are working on at SwitchBook. Over the course of the next few months, I’ll be exploring what Complex Search means, highlighting how current and emerging tools succeed and fail to meet this need. Hopefully you’ll find it as compelling a problem as I do and will take a moment to share your thoughts on how we can shift the search world from the simple query-response of the Google era to an interconnected system of search technologies that empower users to resolve truly complex searches simply, quickly, and effectively. When we can do that, we can create a system that is accessible enough, flexible enough, and transparent enough for every user to trust.
While I’ve been off traveling, Google and Yahoo have been launching new or revving existing products that verge somewhere between Search VRM and Complex Search.
Matt Cutts (at his own blog) and Greg Sterling and Chris Sherman at Search Engine Watch, all have great writeups of the details of the powerful new Custom Search Engine service from Google. In short: Google is making it easier for websites to offer customized searches based on a focused subset of Google. The websites provide hand-crafted context through an explicit interface in the CSE design and Google kicks back a bit of the AdSense revenue to the website.
It’s a great package.
Brilliant. Google’s Custom Search Engines extends their service into affiliate websites in a way that empowers the individual webmaster’s expertise to improve the search. And they’ve made it so easy that literally anyone can do it.
Chris Sherman also has a nice write up of the improvements to the Yahoo toolbar. The main change: improvements to managing bookmarks, including integration with the search as well as making it easy to add a bookmark button to the toolbar.
Yahoo has also made it easier to organize your bookmarks with this new version. […] You can also add tags to your bookmarks, again either when you initially save one or later. If you check the “use tags” box as you’re saving a bookmark, Yahoo will suggest tags to associate with a page[…]
Alternately, you can save pages without worrying about categorization or tagging. By default, bookmarks not saved into a folder are placed in an “uncategorized” folder. To organize bookmarks, you can simply drag the thumbnail image of a page into a folder, or mark selected pages and move them all with a single command. There are also folders that display recently saved bookmarks and frequently used bookmarks.
You can edit bookmarks, adding additional information such as tags, a description, or comment. […] Yahoo has also integrated bookmarks into the search functionality of the toolbar. This means you needn’t take the trouble of organizing bookmarks into folders—you can simply rely on the search box. This works well, since Yahoo is storing the full-text of web pages when you bookmark them.
In short, Yahoo is making it much easier to keep track of interesting websites by saving entire pages, letting you tag them, and then reintegrating those pages into your subsequent searches. Google Desktop has been indexing and searching web history for a while, but Yahoo! is essentially bringing the Del.icio.us model onto your home computer.
Unlike Yahoo’s Del.icio.us and MyWeb, bookmarks saved using the new bookmarking feature are not intended to be made public and shared. While you can share bookmarks with others either by email or instant messenger with other individuals, they aren’t public in the way that a Del.icio.us bookmark is, for example.
What’s exciting to me about both these developments is the increase in control for the user. Google gives website owners incredible power to customize searches for their user base while Yahoo is making it much easier for users to manage complex pan-Internet search (and non-search) activity. This means more power for users, more effective searches, and quite likely more revenue for everyone.
Watch for this trend to continue.
Seth Godin has an excellent post that sums up exactly why marketing and branding is still so crucial in our post-mass-media marketplace:
You’re busy trying to sell a service or a product or an idea to lazy people in a hurry.
Lazy, as in not willing to do the work to create long term benefits. Lazy as in not willing to read the instructions, follow the manual, do all the steps, invest the time in the research. Lazy as in willing to buy the first choice that’s ‘good enough’ as opposed to finding the best choice. These are people who will spend five minutes to find a parking space one minute closer to the mall.
And in a hurry.
In a hurry because they jump to conclusions, don’t read to the end, and most of all, most of the time, search for a shortcut.
In other words, you’ve only got a microsecond to converse with people before they move on. If you aren’t spot-on with a compelling presentation that they value in their world, on their terms, *click*, next page.
Being spot on, making that microsecond count, and delivering a product, a message, and an experience that connects with what that individual really needs… that‘s marketing. That‘s branding. You don’t have time for one-on-one sales. If you miss the moment, people move on to the next item on the list. And you certainly don’t have time for tech-heavy feature-itis. People want to know “What’s in it for me, right now?”
In a disintermediating world, marketing means discovering and executing on the most effective and efficient ways to deliver real value to people. And it’s no longer about press releases and super bowl commercials. It is about conversations, respect, and integrity.
Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Watch has a great write-up about IE7’s use of search.
I particularly like this feature:
[The] Search Provider page also has an interesting box allowing you to visit any search engine, then do a copy-and-paste action to make your own search box. It’s very clever. You simply search for TEST on anything that gives you a search box. Copy-and-paste the resulting URL, and IE7 will automatically create the right way to access that search engine for you. I added Search Engine Watch as a search engine to my IE7 installation easily by doing this.
Smart. Kudos to the IE team for putting the user in greater control of their search interfaces. This basically means that the search provider doesn’t need to cut a deal with the PC manufacturer to get in the search provider list. And they don’t have to do anything special to their website, other than using a consistent URL-based query.
In some ways, this is a bit like Rollyo, although Rollyo is purely a Yahoo!-based aggregation service. Both make it super-easy for the user to control where they want to search, even when the search provider (which could be any database-driven website in IE) or searched website (with Rollyo) may not have the interface in place to support it.
This is a fairly elegant and lightweight form of VRM (Vendor Relationship Management), where the vendors are search providers (in the broadest possible sense). Nice that Microsoft is giving users increased control over their search relationships.
Great stuff.
Over at IT Garage, Doc writes:
In Software by Bounty, Doug Kay says, This is a tangible manifestation of what Doc Searls has described as the demand side taking control, and I think it bodes well for the further formalization of a demand-driven economy of software products.
I think it’s a great example of the death of distance between first sources and final customers, and the emergence of new markets without marketing. As Don Marti puts it, The biggest transformation in software is the erasure of the line between “the business side” and “the technical side”. Everyone needs to know what’s going on in the market. And “on-message” is obsolete — the market already knows the truth… And the truth is that there is plenty of demand for which marketing is no longer the best intermediator between demand and supply.
Hold on, Doc & Don. There are some serious misconceptions here. Sure, erasing the dividing line between business and technology is great. But markets don’t “already know the truth” and understanding the right message to talk about with your market is vital. It’s ridiculous how many bad tech presentations I’ve had to endure…
I know its easy to run with “marketing is bad” material. It’s a favorite of the technology crowd, since technologists often find themselves across drawn battle lines with marketing guys on the other side making ridiculuous demands.
Sure, a lot of marketing is horrific. But the power of good marketing is incredible. Just look at the different between Apple with Jobs and Apple with Sculley, whose marketing debacle with the Newton was firmly grounded in his experience and expertise from Pepsi-Cola. Fact: you can’t market technology like you can soda pop. And lots of marketers don’t understand that, which makes life for technologists a challenge.
Some see Sculley’s failure as an example of why marketing is bad. On the contrary, it is a counterpoint to the value of the brilliant marketing of Steve Jobs, even for technology companies. Perhaps especially for technology companies. And the message holds whether you like Apple or not.
“Markets without marketing” is really just sales. It is nothing new.
Any time you have a market–anywhere numerous transactions occur–good marketing can help a company make better decisions and communicate more clearly. If you just have one-to-one relationships, absent a market of any kind, marketing is irrelevant. And you don’t have a market. That’s just non-markets without marketing. Also nothing new.
But when you do have a market, it pays to try to understand the market as a medium for trends so that you can better predict the future and have more useful and productive conversations with people in that market. If instead, you treat every conversation as a new conversation, without connection to your own history and reputation for creating value, and disconnected from the lessons learned in your previous conversations, you might as well be a neurotically forgetful door-to-door salesman of inimaginative, generic products. Keeps you busy, but it isn’t real effective.
No matter how you reach your customers, markets require clarity of communication. Word-of-mouth is the most powerful form of advertising in the world. For it to work, people need to be able to rationally understand your product, emotionally resonate with the value you provide, and have easily repeatable stories that communicate the right message about the right people. In short, you need a good brand. And without understanding the market as an aggregate, you cannot create a viable brand, because doing so creates either something solipsistically suited perfectly to your own internal delusions or designed for just one customer. As soon as you extend into an understand of how your brand can catalyze and energize multiples of people, you are doing marketing.
I am a huge fan of D.B. Holt’s How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding. He presents an excellent analysis of how real-world brands established themselves as icons in our culture, including how many of them struggled along the way, with misteps and mistakes that often left them disconnected from people who really cared about their value. But when communications link credible, compelling value with the right audience using stories that resonate with meaning and cultural depth, brands become icons and sales skyrocket. And it doesn’t need anything more complicated than a good conversation to start the ball rolling.
No matter how disintermediated you make the markets, people must make a final decision about buying or not buying. That decision rarely comes down purely to price. People incorporate a wide range of factors when making a purchase and at the end it boils down to whether or not they trust that purchase to create more value in their life than any other option, including buying nothing. That trust is a reflection of the brand and their purchase an expression of faith in that brand.
What I think we all really want are markets without stupid marketers and bad marketing. Now that’s a noble goal, but I don’t expect we’ll see it any time soon. Luckily, we are seeing increasing velocity in the marketplace, and that at least, should help weed out the marketers who can’t keep up.
In the meantime, I’ll throw my support behind removing the dividing line between “the business side” and “the technical side.” Everyone should be part of the marketing conversation. Technologists who don’t understand the market are just as dangerous as marketers who don’t understand the technology!
Thought I’d share the buzz on some startups I learned about today at the Central Coast MIT Enterprise Forum‘s October Event,
The Long Tail: Web Enabled Niche Marketing & Services
First, it was pretty cool.
Three companies presented:
Kevo A celebrity-focused wiki for the pop-culture long tail.
ThisNext A social networking-based product recommendation service.
Blue Lava Group A niche-focused multi-boutique online retailer.
All three businesses looked good. Blue Lava Group probably has the hardest challenge with the long tail, as they hold inventory and ship physical products, but their business model lets them niche into markets that couldn’t exist without the long tail of the Internet. By systematically picking the right niches and building an integrated back end for all their storefronts, they are building an Amazon-like marketplace from the niches up.
Kevo is probably the most long-tail company of the three, with over 6,000 celebrities currently in its wiki. While it is incredibly challenging to rank at the top of Google’s results for the top 100 celebrities, who already have thousands of fan sites, Kevo particularly excels at ephemeral, historical, or niche celebrities and Google proves it. Their user base is continually updating celebrity profiles with the latest gossip and news. They straddle the boundaries of the live web and the static web, with content that a lot of people are rabidly interested in. I like their focus and the leverage of fans around the world.
Finally, ThisNext helps users get real human recommendations for just about any kind of product. Think Amazon’s reviews plus tagging and you just about have it. It is a nice model in that it gives power-reviewers the opportunity to establish their own digital identity, with personal recommendations for products that mean something to them. As Henry Dubroff of the Pacific Coast Business Times put it, ThisNext has a great opportunity to empower the long tail of celebrity recommenders: think of all the wannabe Martha Stewart‘s and Emeril Lagasse‘s of the world. Everyone has something they love and a large number of us want to tell others about it.
Good stuff. I look forward to the next event.
Kim Cameron points to a post by Deborah Schultz, which happens to be a great segue into my follow up with Steve Gillmor:
My latest mantra:
Everyone step away from the keyboard and Engage with Intent in “offline communityâ€
Steve left me a comment the other day, inviting me to call him. So I did.
It was a good conversation.
I still have some lingering questions that will probably only resolve once the GestureBank system gets into play–such as how the system threads the balance between lost context from anonymity and richer context with greater risk of privacy loss–but on the whole, I emerged a stronger supporter of the AttentionTrust.
Why? Mostly because most of my issues appear to be non-issues for the vision that Steve is working to bring into reality. My concerns should be able to work themselves out within the context of the community and still retain integrity to what Steve is trying to create.
I can work with that.
So let’s take a look at some confusing language in the AttentionTrust principles.
Our Principles
When you pay attention to something (and when you ignore something), data is created. This “attention data” is a valuable resource that reflects your interests, your activities and your values, and it serves as a proxy for your attention.
AttentionTrust then presents four rights of users with regards to Attention Data: Ownership, Mobility, Economy, and Transparency.
The problem is that the opening definition of “attention data” is bigger and broader than what is covered by the rights of users regarding “Attention Data”. The rights work when limited to the data recorded by the AttentionTrust Recorder (or similar client-side attention tracking software), but not with the definition actually presented.
In fact, the rights are extremely useful as a foundation for re-using attention data in broader contexts, where users might otherwise be disinterested in exposing this information without some protection. Without such principles, the entire ecosystem of Gestures and Attention that Steve is championing falls apart. So they are a critical foundation for the new system.
But the opening definition seems to apply to all attention, not just that recorded by the user.
When you pay attention to something (and when you ignore something), data is created.
This is true today, even without the Attention Recorder. When I visit a website, a log of my http transactions is created. When I visit Amazon, they track what I’ve looked at, purchased, and added to my Wishlist. When I go to Google, they keep track of the search I’m currently doing, if only to let me page through the results.
This is also “attention data,” created because users pay attention to various websites. But users don’t own it. It represents the attention data for the website and the website owners own it. The website paid attention to users and chose to keep track of it. I commented on this in detail in a previous post.
Steve’s response: “That’s not what we mean by attention data.” But it sure sounds that way. So Steve asked me to suggest some alternative language.
Here goes:
Paying attention matters. When you view a website, read email, or post to a blog, your activities–or gestures–are evidence of your attention and can be logged. That log of “attention data” is a valuable resource that reflects your interests, your activities and your values; it serves as a proxy for your attention.
Because you tracked it on your system, you have certain rights regarding your Attention Data.
This may not be as concise as the previous post. Perhaps it loses some points–such as the idea of the attention data created by /not/ paying attention. I suggest however, that it is a much clearer description of what is actually meant by the AttentionTrust and GestureBank.
Try it on for size.
Let me know what you think.
Chris Sherman at Seach Engine Watch writes about a new book out by Greg R. Notess called Teaching Web Search Skills.
Wow. Is search so bad that we need to teach how to do it?
Even more scary, is it so bad that we need to teach teachers how to teach it?
Apparently.
Jim Bursch commented on my latest Attention post, suggesting his own My Mindshare 10-point Declaration is aligned with the AttentionTrust. Unfortunately, it looks like he is getting slammed at Craigslist and not getting traction in the blogoverse (from reading his blog).
Jim, I think you might be running into backlash from the PayPerPost click-fraud-like problem (the link is to Doc Searls’ discussion of same).
I know, you slam it in your own blog as well, but it really does come across as something very similar. At the very top of things, you push for value in terms of paying users to be a part of your co-op:
A pay-per-click bulletin board that
pays you for your mindshare.
And then on the “Mind Control” bulletin board:
That sure sounds a lot like PayPerPost.
It seems like you might be sincere, but the immediate appeal to $$ for clickstream behavior sounds a lot like PayPerPost’s approach to monetizing Attention. Which is to say, a big turn off.
You might also kill the music on your home page. That happens to be one of the top ten online advertising techniques that people hate.
The tricky thing is, in some ways, you are aligned with AttentionTrust.
Now, I do owe Steve Gillmor a call to find out more about how GestureBank is going to work and at a minimum it anonymizes user behavior, which is a huge advance over Jim’s approach. But somewhere along the line, isn’t it also going to generate value for users in some concrete way? Maybe not direct payments, but extracting value from our clickstream has a lot of parallels with PayPerPost and MyMindshare.
The non-profit status of the AttentionTrust and the focus on user rights and privacy protection make their efforts much more seemly, but I’m looking forward to getting more details from Steve.
If, at the end of the day, Attention is to be monetized directly, how do we distinguish the PayPerPost’s from more legitimate efforts?
(after further thought, maybe it is just a matter of transparency & disclosure…)
 | A simple way for websites to describe in clear, consistent terms what they do with the data we share. |
