Attention Spans are Not Getting Shorter

A great deal has been made in recent years about how the attention span of the average American has been dropping precipitously. This complaint is most often leveled by people who are also most likely to wax nostalgic about how much better things used to be, have a deep-seated mistrust of social media, and are on the long side of 30. That hasn't stopped the narrative from spreading, however, and it has been picked up and repeated in some form across the social spectrum, even by those members of the younger generations who are believed to suffer most notably from this malady.

While the cause of such a disease has yet to be formally identified by the medical community, a list of usual suspects is generally paraded about by the media for public condemnation. In the 80s & 90s it was that kids watched too much television and played video games that rotted their brains. The 2000s saw the internet stretch its tentacles into practically every household occupied by people under 60, with damnable effects like email, instant messaging, and YouTube videos. Then we saw the blame shifting to blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, as mediums that encouraged communication in an ever shrinking range of word and character counts. Now, with the popularity of emoji, Instagram and Snapchat, people don't even have to write anything to get a point across!

Kids today, amirite?

This has been coming up a lot at my work, both in terms directing creation of the content that we sell (should we be making shorter videos to accommodate these shrinking attention spans?), as well as the way that we communicate with our users (are our emails too long? are we making enough image-only content?). Someone recently sent me an email about a report showing that Instagram users had overtaken Twitter users:

"Instagram (300 Mln) overtakes Twitter (284 Mln) in 2014, suggesting a trend towards an even shorter audience attention span - from 140 characters to a single picture!"

...to which I jokingly replied:

"Early human communication was visual, moving from literal pictographs (cave paintings) to metaphorical ones (hieroglyphics), then to cuneiform and eventually written words.  We are now moving back in the other direction to more visual forms of getting our messages across."

I didn't even think about it again, or realize that my joke might be taken seriously without a sarcastic tone of voice, until my response was referenced seriously weeks later. I didn't mean what I had said at all, and I am actually dismissive of the notion, but we have come to a point where a suggestion that human communication is regressing to a preliterate state can be taken at face value, and given the direction of public discourse on the matter, I couldn't blame the recipients of my flip remark.

Let's first get one thing straight: in a literal sense, there is no way that our "attention span" (whatever that is) could possibly have changed genetically in the space of a generation or two, as a result of the technology that we are exposed to. Evolution is simply not a process that happens that quickly. Children born today will have the same natural attention span as their great grandparents, no matter how many tweets their 30-something parents have sent. So, any change in the actual communication preferences of people today is habitual, not hereditary. Now, this is not to say that there can't be any kind of biological change over the course of a person's life, brain chemistry is mysterious beyond my personal kenning, but I will leave that argument to scientists, rather than media theorists.

Perhaps the constant electrical stimulation of certain nerve clusters has indeed rendered us a bunch of easily distracted simpletons, but I submit that the growth of short-form mediums is in no way evidence of any such change. This is yet another example of a classic post hoc fallacy, an attempt to craft a narrative to explain an observed phenomenon. There are, however, alternative explanations that don't rely on faulty casual conclusions.

The simplest explanation for the proliferation of micro-communication has to do with resources, both technological and chronological. Essentially, pieces of media have gotten shorter because it is easier and cheaper to create and disseminate content.

Understand that the situation we are observing is nothing new, but the continuation of process that has existed since the birth of human society. When writing required materials that were difficult to produce, very few things were written down, because the cost was prohibitive. Even with the invention of the printing press, mass production was difficult and expensive, so books were rare. As the technology for making paper and printing became better and cheaper, we saw broadsheets and newspapers come into being, and film and television likewise made it possible to create content that reached a wider audience, but there were still physical limitations to deal with.

Think about it this way: 30 years ago, if you wanted to make a movie and show it to millions of people, you needed not only the time and resources to produce the original content, but then you had to spend huge amounts of time and money to get it broadcast over the airwaves, or distributed in theater chains across the country. It literally cost millions of dollars and thousands of hours, with a substantial risk that you would not return even a fraction of those investments. 99.999% of people simply couldn't afford to take part in such an economy of scale, and for those who could, it wasn't efficient to create anything that short.

Now? Anyone can make a 30-second video with their phone and upload it to YouTube. The investment requirements in time and money are minimal, meaning there is no risk, so there is no downside to creating something that no one actually cares about.

In the past, if I wanted to share a picture of my awesome dinner with the world, it would require taking out a magazine ad (which of course no one ever did). Now I can just post it to Instagram effortlessly. Because the barrier to entry in content publication is all but non-existent, there is essentially no threshold for evaluating the "worth" of any communication that can exist digitally.

eBooks are cheaper, so the same revenue means more authors

Obviously, these are all issues of creation and distribution, and can easily explain why there would be such a growth in micro-content, without making any assumptions about attention spans. It doesn't explain consumption, however. A tree falling in the forest and all of that, a million cat videos (and counting) in the world wouldn't lead to the current conversation if no one were watching them.

I would suggest that attention spans have not declined, simply that people devote about as much attention to any particular piece of media as it warrants. There is a great deal of content that takes only seconds to consume, and those fit easily into the spaces that exist in a modern schedule while being conveniently formatted for the smart phones that are never far from our hands.

I think that an additional point that needs to be made (and shoe-horned into this post) is that too much of the conversation around new media and attention spans implies that length or medium is somehow equivalent to value. If an Instagram post is considered less valuable because it is visual rather than text-based, what of a classic painting? Does the time that something takes to consume related to the time that it takes to produce? That picture of of a fancy dinner may only take a second to compose, but some chef could have spent a great deal of time on the dish.

What of a haiku, or a sonnet? From Seamus Heaney to Shakespeare, plenty of great poets created works ranging from a few lines to thousands. Some of the greatest prose writers in history utilized a variety of forms, from novels to novellas to short stories, adapting the medium to the muse, but no one questions their artistic merit.

For all of that, the same people who read thousands of texts and tweets, and scan the Reddit headlines without reading the linked articles (myself included), still somehow manage to marshal their mental faculties long enough to watch feature films and even remain gainfully employed. I have it on good authority that people even still read actual books, printed on paper.

It's perhaps a less compelling narrative, but the truth is that the medium simply fits the message, so as mediums are created that are more convenient for delivering short-form messages, it is only natural that more such messages will be crafted. A story that is worth telling, or is worth hearing, will receive the attention it deserves.

As a man in my thirties, I have grown up with all of the offending technologies that should have stunted my ability to focus, from the Nintendo I got as a child to the Twitter account with which I shared this post. On any given day I will check my email, Instagram, Twitter, and several forums, and watch a YouTube video or two. At the same time, I am ten weeks into an online statistics course, 500 pages into Anna Karenina, and recently watched a two and half hour movie. I will spend hours cooking a meal, or a whole day exploring a short stretch of river out of cell range. I am not alone in this, because movies, books, and Rolling Stone still have audiences.

So I suppose that my point is, far too many words later, that our attention spans are fine, just so long as we turn them towards objects that are deserving.

[Of course, the fact that probably only one person in a hundred made it this far into the post doesn't say anything good about the value of this blog. If you are reading this, congratulations on your attention span!]

Marketing & Data for New Businesses, Pt. 2: SEO

I'm going to start with the rub.

As I have mentioned before, the death of traditional search has been widely heralded, and patently disproved. It is a trendy thing to write about, but has little place in today's business world, because it's a prediction that has created many fools. If you were a weather forecaster, and just showed up each day and said "It's going to rain today," you would eventually be correct, but couldn't brag too much if those showers followed three weeks of sunshine. One day, traditional search will indeed see a serious decline in relevance, but that day is not yet come.

As such, small/new businesses have to continue to care about search, and SEO in particular. Why in particular? Primarily because it is "free," but also because it can scale better than any other channel, as organic search almost automatically encompasses your entire target audience.

A search for "Elizabeth Warren" probably wanted a result about this one

So where's the rub? SEO, boon and lifeblood that it is, can be extremely difficult for new companies. In large part, this is because the number one concern of the search engines* (here I will cease deliberately referring to them collectively, and start just using "Google" or "the engines" interchangeably, because, let's face it, Google still calls all of the shots in most countries) is authority. Authority is a somewhat (deliberately) vague term that describes the likelihood that a particular result is the most common intended target of a query.

Example: If someone searches for "Elizabeth Warren," Google is going to assume that they are looking for the official website of the politician (or recent news results, or her Wikipedia page), and not a PDF of the marriage announcement of a woman with the same name from a 1978 edition of the Albuquerque Journal.

Ultimately, authority (and SEO) is about probability. The more specific the query, the easier it is for the search engine, but most users start with something fairly broad, hoping that the engine will guess their intent, and show them a set of results that contains the desired website. The problem is that for a new business, unless you are filling a niche that no one else has ever tried to fill, it's very unlikely that you will have a great deal of authority for any search other than your brand name.

It takes time to build authority, which looks at historical data, including the clicks of users following a particular query (which is one of the few times that a confirmation bias is actually an appropriate thing). However, this isn't to say that a new business should not care about SEO, just that it is a more difficult path early on.

So what can you do?  Here are a few recommendations:

• Authority is based on a lot of legacy clout. Macy's has been Macy's forever. So try to compete most strenuously in areas that are newer, for example:
• social signals are only gaining relevance in SEO, so make sure that your brand is extremely active on all of the social platforms, especially Google+
• also, make sure that for each platform, you create the right type of account, that best represents your business
• secure your site - Google has recently said that they will give slight preference to sites that are operating on HTTPS instead of HTTP; this is a pain to overhaul for sprawling legacy sites, but should be easy if you are new 

• Get it right from the start. Many companies have websites for years before they start worrying about SEO. Don't wait until you are big enough to pay a consultant to follow best practices:
• audit your pages up front - proper metadata and linking from day one
• make sure that you have enough content (500-1000+ words) on your important pages, even if some text is hidden to the viewer (but not to crawlers)
• authorize yourself as the owner of your site on Google and Bing webmaster tools, because they will be the respective canaries in your coal mine

• Publish or perish
•  Content and SEO will only be more inextricably linked, so get writing! Provide value and you will get traffic, which will in turn get you authority
• if you are going to blog or produce other types of content, keep it on your primary domain; Wordpress may be easier, but you are just dividing your 'authority points'
• if your content/blog does live offsite, make sure to cross-link it to the most relevant page on your main site, with appropriate anchor text

• Measure what you can
• On a basic level, use Analytics (or whatever you have) to keep an eye on the number of visits, and new visits (to separate people who just don't use bookmarks or type in the nav bar), from organic search
• the move to a 'not provided' world from a keyword standpoint in Google Analytics hurt, but you can see what searched terms brought organic traffic to your site in webmaster tools, so identify those queries that should be central to your business and pull that data monthly to identify trends
• Webmaster tools will also provide you with information about your rankings for various keywords, which is important in tandem with your volume of traffic from each term; use a combination to identify shifts in search behavior and effectiveness of on-page SEO

That should be enough to keep any new SEO busy for a while! It looks daunting, but the key is to just try and do the right things, generally. The engines ultimately want what is best for the consumer, and will reward sites that provide real value in an authentic manner. Keep SEO in mind with everything that you do, even if it is never the top priority, and you won't have to go back and clean it all up after the fact.

For more tips for small/new businesses, check out part one of the series.  Feel free to post questions in the comments.

We Need to Make Digital Measurement Easier

[Editor’s Note:  Sorry for the long layoff, I am going to be better about posting starting today]

To be clear, I don’t mean that we need to make it easier for us digital marketers, but that we need to make it easier for the brand representatives that we have to report to.

When I go through plans and recaps for marketing programs, the problem becomes very clear.  People who have been dealing with traditional marketers for a long time expect just a few things from TV, print, and radio: Reach and Frequency.  These are estimates, and they are provided by the people selling the media, so they don’t need to be calculated by those buying it.

It’s simple, and clean, though it does nothing to tell you about the effectiveness of the channel after the fact.  How many people saw the ad, and how often.  Move on.

Sometimes you will see a brand lift study built into a buy, which basically just consists of polling some consumers to see how the ad made them feel (with varying degrees of scientific rigour).

Then we get to digital, and suddenly the performance metrics increase exponentially.  The breadth and depth of data that we have available to us in the digital space is both a blessing and a curse in that sense.

First of all, we subdivide “digital” into myriad channels of increasing specificity.  There is display, search, social, in-text, and more.  Each of these sub-channels has multiple ad unit types, and in turn, each ad type has multiple statistics that can be tracked.

(For instance, display ads can be static units or interactive units (and static units can be further broken down by size, so there are standard banners, skyscrapers, etc.), and so you have reach in terms of unique users, then interaction rates, time spent in the ad unit for rich media, click through rate, video plays in unit, and more.))

You can measure attributes of the ads themselves, like click through rate, impressions, cost per impression/click, etc., and you can also measure on-site actions and behavior, like conversions, bounce rate, time on site, and so on.

We haven’t even talked about the social metrics like Facebook likes, tweets, +1s, ‘conversations, and additional followers/friends.

The upside of all of this is that obviously the data gives us visibility and optimization options that traditional marketers can only dream of.  The downside is that we are actually held to performance standards unlike traditional offline media channels, and moreover, that the people who we report to get lost in all of these metrics.

Traditional media channels don’t provide brands with much in the way of data or measurement options, and maybe the answer is that they should be forced to come up with better ways to justify their value.  More likely however, we as digital marketers need to find ways to simplify our reporting.

This may mean actually giving brands less raw data, and it’s possible that Pandora’s box has been opened and it is too late.  However, I think that the only possible outcome is the creation of a weighted composite number that is based on an equation taking into account a variety of metrics across digital channels, pegged to an index.  The million dollar problem is just figuring out how to do it, but you can bet that I will be working on it, as I am sure others are.

Expect a 'part two' of this entry in the future.

Yahoo! & Their Social Media Integration

Yahoo has recognized that their value offering to the marketplace isn’t search, and it that this has essentially been true for a while now.  Since last fall, Microsoft has been serving Yahoo users Bing results, and Bing has been eating into their share of the search space as well.  Therefore, the decision makers have wisely chosen to focus on their core competency, which is being one of the most visited content hubs on the web.

They recognize that they can’t remain static though, and that social and sharing is the future of the digital space, especially for marketers.  Plain old banner ads will always have their place, but they just aren’t targeted or engaging enough on their own, and they lack the sexiness of more recent ad units to hit the market.  Thus, Yahoo decided that they would team up with Facebook, and create what is actually a pretty interesting experience platform that attempts to blend paid and earned media more seamlessly than any other.

Essentially, by linking your Yahoo login to your Facebook page, what you get is a carousel/toolbar that consists of your friends faces when you are anywhere in Yahoo’s properties.  If you hover over any of those pictures, it will show you what that friend has been reading/sharing (within Yahoo).  It also has a feature that will show you any comments that your friends have made regarding a piece of content, which allows you to essentially combine your content consumption with social dialogue, and will push your comments out to appear on your Facebook page as well.

The advertising part of this comes in the form of new ad units that they are creating.  Essentially these “road block” or “pause sign” ads will be branded banners set at the bottom of an article, which contain a question, or quiz, or other interactive feature based not directly on the products/services of the advertising company, but on the content that the user is looking at, in the form of a “sentiment slider” that the user can move along a continuum to express their level of agreement with a particular statement.  The example shown to us was in a travel article, and the unit asked the reader to choose which option was his/her dream vacation: skiing in Tahoe, laying on a beach in Hawaii, or hiking in [some good hiking place].

The ad featured a small JetBlue logo, but upon clicking a choice the user was given the option of sharing their choice in Facebook, which would link to the poll unit and tell all their friends that they like skiing, or hiking, or what have you.  This would then lead other users back to the content, which is theoretically relevant to them, and another small JetBlue sponsored item in the sidebar, as well as a traditional JetBlue ad at the bottom.  All very cleverly integrated so that the user can interact with the content and their social network without ever feeling like they are having a product pushed at them.

The product seems decent, and the integration itself feels like a well-built technology, in terms of user experience.  The automatic nature of the passive sharing part of this collaboration, the part that automatically tells your friends what you are reading on Yahoo, will probably be very popular, though I will be curious to see how many conversations occur in this space.  As an advertiser though, I have a few issues with the new unit.

First of all, and this is probably just my bias as a search marketer, I don’t really think that it should be a CPM (cost per million impressions) buy.  It is contextually targeted, though only at the vertical level, rather than keyword (this also feels like a missed opportunity for relevance), and Yahoo simply chooses a bundle of articles for the ad to run in.  Given that the entire pitch and idea is built around interaction however, between the brand and the user, the user and the content, the user and their social network, etc., it really feels like this media should be bought on a pricing system that is also based around interaction.  When I brought this up to Patrick Albano, who is Yahoo’s VP of social, mobile, and innovation, he said that that was something they might consider in the future.  I am not holding my breath.

The other thing is that the whole point of not having a regular ad unit that contains product/brand messaging to drive the user to the company’s online assets (either website or social platform), is that this unit is not really supposed to feel like advertising, it is supposed to feel like part of the content.  If that’s the case, and since they themselves used the “pause sign” terminology, I think that interaction rates would be much higher if they moved it to the fold, and plopped it right in the middle of the article, to actually make it feel like part of the content.  If you put something all the way at the bottom of the page, a lot of people aren’t going to take it in or associate it with their consumption.  When I made this suggestion, they were much more receptive and indicated that it could actually be something they change after it has been in the market for a bit, maybe Q2 next year.

The last issue, and this is often a problem with advertising in the social space right now, is measurement.  They seem a little unclear on success metrics, or even anything beyond clicks, but their idea is to build a brand favorability/purchase intent study into the cost of a buy.  Given that it will have to be survey-based, that seems like a rather ham-handed way of tacking “value” onto the offering in order to help justify selling in the cost to clients.  It’s a very non-scientific, ethereal thing to try and measure when onsite interaction seems like the obvious way to go. 

Overall, it’s an interesting new experience for users and advertisers, but it is a product that I will be happy to wait for, and just sit on the sidelines for the initial phase, instead of rushing to get in line for this. 

Google+ : What's Their Angle?

With Google+ finally rolled out to the general public and membership reaching 40 million users, the question becomes not whether it will be successful, but has it already peaked?  We know that brand profiles will be available soon, but beyond that what offerings are on the horizon to make this social network a daily destination, rather than a set-and-forget option in your Gmail account settings?  What is Google really after here?

Their search engine, the bread and butter of the Google empire, still holds around 60% of the market share, with the rest carved up between Yahoo and Bing, and to a lesser degree Ask.com and AOL.  You have to figure that if Google could get their social service to take a similar 30% bite out of Facebook, they would be absolutely thrilled.  Are they likely to do that though?  How many people do you know who have signed up for Google+ and stopped using Facebook?  Right now it seems more like a curiosity than a platform that people are going to move over to full time.

Normally to make a new market entrance like this really successful you want to have some integration in order to take the burden off of the user.  As of now, one of the main complaints that you will hear about Google+ isn’t that the features aren’t attractive, but simply that the initial set-up is work, and more importantly, work that the users have already done on Facebook.  Inertia is a powerful force, and people don’t like having to do the same thing twice.  If you could import your friend list, copy all of your “likes” as ”+1s,” and port your privacy settings over, it might be more attractive, but there is no way that this unholy marriage will ever be consummated.

Which brings us back to the question of, “what is Google’s” long-term strategy here?”  Are they simply looking to get users to spend time on another of their properties so that they will have space for a few display ads? 

In marketing, Facebook ads are certainly something that people are paying for, though the results have been mixed and there is still relatively little information provided in terms of on-site metrics.  Measuring the success of a FB buy is difficult, and the question of whether to direct users to a brand site versus a profile page remains unanswered, depending on the goal of the campaign and whether one platform or the other holds some sort of unique user experience like a contest or a promotional giveaway.  The advantage to Facebook ads is almost entirely in the demographic targeting that is available, which makes sense given how much personal information people include in their profiles.

Still, to make that attractive as a marketing feature, you need a certain critical mass both in terms of the number of users (since for any given company/product you are only targeting a narrow slice of the consumers), as well as the time that they spend on the network per day (since they won’t see many ads if they just log in and log out).  Google+ has nowhere near that volume yet, and won’t soon, as they are still below 10% of the membership that Facebook has.

The “hangout” real-time meeting function offers a bit more interest and utility, and is certainly an offer that is distinct from anything that Facebook does, but it is a very limited engagement option, and it isn’t a hub that people will spend hours logged into every day.  As a multimedia tool it is appealing, but not necessarily a draw to the casual social networking user.

Really, you have to figure that for Google the goal here is just to be able to collect more user data, and be able to connect it to the vast archive of data that they have already.  Imagine if you could marry the personal information that users put in their Facebook profile, to the detailed search logs that are created when those users look things up in Google.  The dossier that Google will be able to produce on 50-100 million users will be so detailed and in-depth that the retargeting (and regular targeting) options will be incredible.  Having not only demographic information to target your consumers with, but also an explicit search history will allow an even greater level of ad relevance than Facebook can offer now (which is why people wonder why they haven’t gotten into the search game yet).

Taking this one step further though, I wonder if what we are seeing won’t lead back to Google TV.  Remember that idea?  When your television was going to become your main point of contact with the internet as well?  I wonder if they are not setting themselves up for an incredible targeted TV buy application in the future. 

Think about it:  The real problem with television advertising has always been a lack of targeting capability.  You can show during certain times or on certain networks when you think your targeting audience will be watching, but other than that you are just blasting your message out into the world and hoping you hit something.  It is the shotgun approach to marketing, and not very efficient.

But imagine if your consumers have Google TV.  They are logged into their profile to see if they have any messages from friends (or maybe they just finished a “hangout” using the built in webcam, or a partnership with Microsoft and their Kinect hardware), then that runs in the background while they watch television. 

Suddenly, Mountain Dew wants to buy an ad, and Google can say to them, “we will show your TV spot only to males, aged 14-32, who have listed an interest in mountain biking, extreme sports, computer games, programming, soda, rock music, Doritos, or whatever else, based on their Google+ profiles.  You pay based on the available impressions that we can give you at whatever time, so if it is 8 pm. on a Thursday and there are 2.4 million people who fit the criteria that you set up, we will deliver you TV spot to all of them, and only them, for $XXXX.”

Think of the revolution in advertising that could take place if Google can just get people to be logged into the device that they watch TV on.  Suddenly, most of the inefficiency of TV buys disappears, and Google has a massive back-door entrance to a marketplace that they have only recently established a toe-hold in.  How this would need to be structured with the networks is another thing, but as more and more media is consumed on YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu even that problem becomes more manageable.

Google doesn’t have to fight Facebook, they just have to play in the space long enough to gather the user data that they need.  How does this not make sense?  If it isn’t Google’s plan, it should be.  More specific targeting is the trend in the advertising world, and this is a way to bring search-level relevance to the massive budget world of TV, with Google in prime position to lead the charge, if they can only put all of the pieces together.

This may only be a wild theory today, but check back in a few years.  I will take wagers.

Content: Curation Versus Creation

Looking back to an earlier post, I touched briefly (sort of) on the shift from a monolithic system of branded content creation to a more diffuse system in which the end user can also generate media that ties back to or directly represents a brand.

As this diffusion of publication capability through social media has made every consumer a potential creative force, media has become as much of a horizontal process as it was vertical in the past.  Media is no longer simply created by a handful of agencies and pushed out through narrow channels to an end point.  It is created at downstream points as well as upstream, and can be passed easily from one person to another.

The dream has been realized; everyone can find any information and themselves contribute to the global discussion.  Some will get to write for the Huffington Post, or get mentioned in a Penny Arcade comic.  Maybe you will meet Mitch Krpata sometime at a convention, and hear some pretty smart things (you could read them at Insult Swordfighting also).  You can debate writers from The Economist now on their site, and brands like Ford are actually launching new product promotions entirely using social media,with the new Fiesta.

This change has led to the rise of the importance of the concept of "curation" alongside "creation."  Marketers and social media companies have to become aggregators and collections management specialists as much as creative agencies.  With all of this content being created and spread on the web, organizing it, packaging it, and making it accessible is a big deal, and a big business.

The issue for me is that after spending all of this time getting to a point where the end of the content production chain is no longer a dead-end at the consumer, the channels by which we access all of this media are quickly consolidating.  New boss might be the same as the Old Boss.

All we see these days are stats and articles about how big and how fast services like Facebook and Twitter are growing.  Facebook is unapologetic about wanting to be the connective tissue for the entire internet.  Think about it this: how often do you read articles now that you didn't come across via Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Digg?  I admit, aside from the NY Times and the Economist, I get most of the rest of my news from links that come from those sources.

Granted, the obvious argument is that these content aggregators simply provide the vehicle, and that the sources of information that I get are actually myraid, since there are people behind those tweets.  Still, most articles that trend online are those that get passed around and around, tweeted and liked and re-tweeted, in something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.  I am afraid that as we become more passive media consumers again, allowing information to be given to us rather than seeking it out, more and more editorial power will come to those services that are the conduit, even if they don't exercise it.

I get nervous when a handful of private enterprises, now matter how benevolent they claim to be, or even are, have so much control over the content that we see.  Hopefully, I am worried about nothing, but even if it isn't a matter of some vast conspiracy or information monopoly, I just worry that fewer sources channeling information will inherently lead to a narrowing of worldview on the part of the people who depend on them. 

When everyone reads the exact same articles that circle the social sphere, the conversation gets boring fast. 

Using Twitter for Branding Isn't Hard

Like most Twitter users (89.4%, according to a new study by eMarketer and Lab42), I follow a number of corporate brands.  The only brand to immediately follow me back?  Huggies.  That’s how you build brand loyalty.  Opening up a two-way communication with your consumers is crucial, and Huggies is the only brand I follow that did so.

They produce more content, and solicit more responses from their followers, than all of the other brands, and they recognize the value in engagement.  People like feeling as though they matter, they (we) collect Twitter followers like baseball cards, and each new one is a tip of a cap.  Humans are social animals, and the desire to feel liked is strong.  I am not particularly social at all, but seeing that Huggies went out of their way to follow me gave me the same endorphin kick as anyone else.

The result is a blog post like this, and it is the perfect example of earned media.  Suddenly, by doing something as simple as following a twitter account that was already following them, they get free advertising.  This isn’t much of an authority site, but maybe 5 or 10 people will see this.  I will mention it on twitter and the other people who follow me will see it, and I will throw a link up back to the brand website (diapers, and a full baby resource!)

Studies have shown that one of the strongest incentives for consumers to purchase is the opinion of online friends.  All the commercials and banner ads in the world won’t trump the words of people you know and trust.  Brands need to recognize this, and leverage every piece of media at their disposal to not only reach their audience, but turn that audience into a legion of goodwill ambassadors.

Content is King (of Kings)

As a man who was trained not in marketing, but in history and sociology, I often end up viewing paid search and online media through a somewhat different lens than my peers.  I can’t help but look for the patterns and symbols embedded in user behavior, and like a good structuralist I believe that those currents reflect the same basic needs and feelings that all societies have had.  After all, don’t the members of the internet using world make a society at this point?  The very emergence of the “social space,” “social media,” and other such terms tell me that they do.  Like-minded people band together online just as they do in the physical world, communicating and trading with one another, and linguistics and resource economics are two of the main pillars of any cultural study.  Therefore, I don’t find it far-fetched to think that anthropological lessons can be applied to digital advertising, in the same way that art history majors were brought into print marketing in the last century to ensure that the correct symbols would be used to appeal to a consumer’s unconscious.

So it was that while I watched Scott Sorokin deliver a presentation on the rise of user generated content and what the engaged consumer meant to brands that I began to think about the relationship of the masses to content and information in the digital age.  He made point that until very recently a company controlled the flow of information to the consumer, and that it was a one-way stream and extremely limited in scope.  As the internet grows and we move more into a world where content and information are both limitless and accessible however, the connection between a brand and consumers has become reciprocal.  What was once a monopoly on the part of the brand company is now an open platform, where user reviews, Facebook likes, YouTube videos and more not only respond to brand-created media, but augment (and in some cases stand in for) content that a company generates.

The importance of this shift in the fundamental relationship between consumer and brand cannot be overstated.  The move from a monopolistic to a reciprocal distribution of power is extremely rare and nearly impossible to reverse.  Generally you would expect the examples to be political, harkening back to the rise of totalitarian regimes in the 20^th century, or the toppling of hereditary monarchies in the 18^th century, but these sorts examples fall well short.  Changes in political or technological control over information in a society do represent the movement of power, but the authority in such cases is always fleeting and illusory, because the society in question is not part of the loop.  Submitting to authority is not the same as granting authority.  A citizen of the Soviet Union who drove a Zaporozhet was not brand loyal, they simply weren’t allowed to buy a Ford.

The relationship that consumers have had with brands for the last 50 years has been voluntary though, if one-sided.  The information that you knew about a product, and the associations you made with the product, were (for the most part) based solely on what the company spread through media.  Now however, most savvy consumers can find all the information they need on a product without ever visiting the brand site.  What’s more, they can produce media of their own, be it a tweet or a 20-minute video, which provides a personal, positive or negative impression of a brand.  And with the accessibility of this content online, the difference is that now the brands need that content.  In the old days you could write a letter about a poor experience with a product to the company, or mention to your neighbor that you liked a commercial, but companies didn’t need that feedback, and it didn’t change what flowed the other way to the consumer.

What all of this triggered in my brain was the shift from polytheism to monotheism in the western world two thousand years ago.  When you study any society, one of the most important relationships that you will learn about is that between a people and their deity.  In most early, polytheistic cultures there is a very direct and personal relationship with the gods.  You generally don’t find a large hierarchical church structure serving as an intermediary, outside of a few priests or shamans.  This is where you have a sacrificial system (not necessarily the type of sacrifice that the word conjures up), which is simply the mechanism by which a society expresses their end of a reciprocal relationship with the deities.  In order to keep the god of fertility happy so that the crops will grow, you in turn provide the first and best results of the harvest, as a trade.  In these belief systems the gods are very close to humanity, and they are a reflection of the society and its needs.  These gods were petty, greedy, and humorous, and above all they wanted the same things that the people did, which provided the believers with something to contribute to the relationship.  This is the sort of relationship we are coming to now between the consumers and brands.  It is a close, two-way system in which both sides need something from the other, and where the connections between them are interwoven, the boundaries thin.  It is no surprise that words like “organic” and “holistic” are used to describe the new direction of marketing strategy, the same words applied to naturalistic polytheisms.

We are moving in the opposite direction as religious beliefs, and that transition was based on the requirements of a more structured and hierarchical society.  In a monotheistic culture God is remote, obscured behind layers of ritual and clergymen.  One of the issues that early missionaries faced was getting non-Christians to understand that the sacrificial system didn’t work because God didn’t want anything they had to offer.  The relationship was no longer reciprocal, because an all-powerful Lord can provide himself with anything he wants, and cannot be contacted directly.  God passed his messages down through a chain, whether in book form or the words of his earthly representatives, in the same way that a brand would disseminate its media through its channels.  Here is our product, here is what we want you to know about it, and how we want you to think about it.  What you thought about a product as an individual wasn’t really important, because there were plenty of other people who were happy to buy it.  In contrast with the druidic, diffuse nature of the polytheistic power exchange, monotheism was institutional and monolithic, a relationship that could be mirrored by centralized political authority, consolidating authority with the rise of “the state” as opposed to tribalism.

As consumers we have finally made the journey in the other direction.  Apple users now form a tribe that is distinct from pc users, where once there were just people who did or did not own computers.  There was once a segment of the market that was simply made up of car owners, but now the Ford Focus has a Facebook page and thousands of friends.  As the pendulum swings, the importance of embracing this new paradigm should not be lost on those brands who wish to become successful.  Users seek to engage with a brand because they have something to offer that is valuable, and in return they become an asset, a supporter, a (twitter) follower.  In a tribal system, you really want to have the biggest tribe.

Edit:  There is no intent here at blaspheme, nor am I attempting to elevate any belief system over any other.  I find this topic to be an interesting one, and I plan to go a little further into the matter and flesh it out, so that it is more than just idle ramblings.

Blogging is for Self-Important People

It turns out, when I was creating content on ppc advertising and other aspects of search engine management (SEM), having it be viewed by a handful of people on the internal message board at work was somehow unsatisfying.

Instead of an audience of 4, I want an audience of 104.

This is part sounding board, part professional observation, and all UGC (get ready for a lot of lingo).  Largely though, this is a test, because I am curious about how the integration of social media works from the ground up, and starting an entirely new entity is the only way to test that.  Follow the name "SEMiotic5" on Twitter to get basically the same content, but shorter! (Is that desirable?  Let's find out!).

Working in paid search marketing, I need data, and I need feedback.  Leave comments, interact with the site, etc..  Ask questions, if there is content you would like to see, tell me about it.  Tell me about yourself, your habits, how you engage with media and advertising.  Not just in search, but across the internet.  What sort of content matters to you?  Do you respond to polls on blogs?  Would you like polls on this blog?  Would you like a poll about responding to polls on this blog?

That said, I realize that this has the potential to be very boring, so I will make sure to spice it up with posts that just barely have any relation to marketing every once in a while.