The Tyranny of Search

Few things cause creatives to cringe at the thought of a digital future like the words "search engine optimization."

It's not that they don't want their clients work to show up first in the Googleverse. It's just that the rules of search optimization seem to run counter to the rules of creativity. As someone recently pointed out to me "it's like food. Anything that tastes good is bad for you."

He did have a point: many of the things that can make a site look and feel cool and creative (Flash and Ajax, for example) are the mortal enemies of SEO. And while the terms "search optimized" and "deadly dull" are far from synonymous, it does seem rather cruel that many of the most advanced web design tools wind up being a net negative to the overall goal of the site. And crueler yet that many creatives hear the phrase "we need to prioritize search" as "we need to remove anything remotely cool or creative from the site immediately."

Besides which, the rules just seem so random. I mean I know the basics and from a programming standpoint they make sense. But from a creative standpoint, it's as if you said "TV spots that rely on dissolves to move from one scene to the next have zero recall." None of the rules seem to take aesthetics into consideration.

So why can't someone make a web design tool that does both? That lifts us out of HTML flatness, is easy to develop for and that appeases the gods of search.

The dividends would be enormous from both a financial and design perspective. Not to mention user experience.

Any takers?

UPDATE: Noah Brier sent me this link to a great article on SEO that addresses much of what we've been discussing here. Great enough for me to stick it in the body of the post, rather than the comment section.

Happy Days Are Here Again

I was reading something by a conservative strategist about how the Republicans need to re-examine their current positioning and it hit me that their biggest problem—regardless of what you think of their policies—is that they’ve become the party of “no.”

I mean they’re pretty much against everything: terrorism, ending the war in Iraq, gay marriage, abortion, universal health care. Whether you agree with them or not, it's just one big “no” after another.

And while they’ve been smart enough to try and spin their positions to something positive (e.g. anti-universal health care becomes pro-free market health care) the spin phrases have not caught on with the general public. Even those who strongly support their positions tend to frame them in terms of “they’re against X.” So the Republicans of the ‘00s have found themselves in the same boat as the Democrats of the ’70s: they’re the Debbie Downers of their day, constantly finding something that can’t be done or isn’t right or doesn't work.

And while Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama may seem to be at opposite ends of the political spectrum, one key trait they share is the ability to focus on an upbeat, big picture message. Hope. Change. Possibility. Leave all the messy wonky issues on the back burner. Think about it: the main charge hurled against both men by their opponents is that they lack substance. That they’re all charisma and charm with little to back it up.

And without getting into the subjective truth or falseness of that charge, we should look at the objective truth, which is that the Reagan/Obama big picture messages really seem to resonate. That people want to hear about amorphous things like hope and possibility first and the granular nuts-and-bolts ways we plan to achieve them second.

Now the lesson in there for marketers (you knew I was getting to that) is about the need to focus on the big picture. To pick one broad, positive point of differentiation and own it and to stop worrying that “anyone in the category can own ‘fun.’”

Anyone can, but if you get there first, you do. And if it's not "fun" it's "delicious" "smart" "healthy" "fast" or a whole host of easily grasped adjectives.

It’s especially important now, during The Real Digital Revolution, when customers have their own ways of finding out the wonky details about your product and rely on your advertising and marketing messages (including design) to give them a broad macro sense of what your product is all about. How it feels, not how it works.

Are you about boring granular details? Or are you about big broad-stroke messaging? If it’s the former, then people aren’t going to see your product or service in the right light. This is especially true in areas like packaged goods where the granular details (20% creamier!) are likely only of interest to the product team itself. It’s a little less true in sectors like B-to-B, where details matter, but again, the more you can create a clear, easy-to-pass-on, single-minded brand message that’s consistent across all media, the easier it will be for your customers to relate to you.

And once they’re relating to you, the details are a lot easier to swallow.

Making American Public Transportation Sexy

With gas prices rising higher and higher, more and more Americans are looking to public transportation as a viable alternative. The problem is that public transportation is decidedly unsexy in all but a handful of cities.

Which is something of a paradox: In New York, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia, commuter rail lines are the province of the upper middle class, transporting bankers, brokers, lawyers and advertising execs in and out of the city on a daily basis, and a suburban town’s location on an express rail line into the city greatly enhances the value of the local real estate.

But in other US cities, public transportation is viewed as decidedly downscale, a last option best left for people too poor to own a car. People are loathe to take it, regardless of gas prices, because it somehow seems tantamount to failure, a step away from homelessness.

So I’m throwing it out to you all: how can we make public transportation just as sexy in places like Atlanta and Los Angeles as it is in New York and Chicago? Is it something advertising, marketing and PR can affect? Or is it too big a psychological hurdle for most people to get over?

You’ve got a whole weekend to think about it.

Now Playing: Paper Clips

Today's Walt Mossberg column in The Wall Street Journal was about snagfilms.com, a great new site that lets you watch and share documentary films. These are real documentaries - everything from the film you see above, which ran in theatres, to Morgan Spurlock's Supersize Me. It's a great way to support documentary filmmakers and it's very easy to add a movie to your blog and it's totally free.

Paper Clips is the story of the children of rural Whitwell, Tennessee who collected 6 million paper clips representing the 6 million Jews killed in the Shoah. I've seen it before and it's a very well done documentary and well worth watching.

Your feedback on how the technology works is encouraged along with reviews of the film itself. If it works, I might make this a regular weekly or monthly feature.

eSellerate Has A Customer For Life - A Heartwarming Tale of Customer Service

This is a wonderful customer service story that I wanted to draw your attention to.

Once upon a time there was a piece of software called Volume Logic. It was a very useful piece of software that improved the sound of iTunes when you played it from your computer. Even if you were wearing headphones.

Volume Logic was so useful, in fact, that I actually paid cash money to own a copy. I mean the difference in sound quality was really noticeable.

And we all lived happily ever after until one day Leopard appeared. (Or at least a Macintosh operating system with the same name.)

You see, when I upgraded iTunes to Leopard, Volume Logic did not go along with it. It refused to operate and claimed my serial number was invalid. Which left iTunes sounding all tinny and AM radio like.

So I turned to the wise old Google, which pointed out to me that Plantronics, the company that made Volume Logic, had actually stopped making it. Close to a year ago, in fact.

Ooops.

But some further googling revealed that a company called eSellerate were the people who sold it to me. I wrote to them and they were able to provide me with a copy of my receipt, along with the original serial number, just from my email address.

But alas, even re-entering the serial number did not work.

So I wrote back to eSellerate. And lo and behold, two very nice guys named Jamie Brown (my main contact) and Jeremy (his back-up, who actually jumped in and wrote me back when Jamie was out!) spent several weeks trying different ways to get Volume Logic-- a product their company no longer sold-- to work for me. I'm talking about a half dozen emails back and forth, with prompt good-natured replies and a decent amount of time and effort on their behalf.

And finally, last week, it worked. My Volume Logic is up and running again and Jamie, Jeremy and eSellerate are my new Customer Service Heroes.

Nicely done guys. And much appreciated.

Tiny Bubbles

Growing up, I was always amazed at how many of my friends and relatives never ventured out of the cozy little world of upper-middle-class suburban Jewry. They all lived in the same towns, went to the same schools and camps, vacationed at the same hotels at the same time and (especially when I was in the throes of adolescence) all seemed to think the same thoughts. I mean it never really did seem to dawn on many of my peers that most other kids didn’t spend the December school holiday in Boca Raton and summers at posh sleepaway camps in the Berkshires.

With the distance of 20 some-odd-years, I’ve come to realize that every group creates its own little bubble, that most people are more comfortable surrounded by others just like them and that not all of my friends and relatives are as provincial as I’d once thought.

But I’m reminded of all this though, as I interact with people in the social media world. Because we’ve created our own little bubble too. And it’s hard for us to remember that not everyone out there is just like us.

Yes, Nancy Pelosi uses Twitter. Or at least some advisor told her to. And something like 1 million other people already use it, too. The New York Times even mentions Twitter these days without bothering to explain what it is.

And somehow that lulls us into the very false belief that everyone’s at least heard of it. That everyone knows what Twitter is and just hasn’t gotten around to signing up for it yet. But the truth is that the vast majority of people haven’t heard of it. At all. For them, a “tweet” is still just a noise a bird makes.

Ditto FriendFeed. Which is a useful tool if you’re a social media guru whose job it is to spend all day reading and responding to other people’s blog posts and tweets and Facebook postings. For the rest of us though, it’s just overkill. Another reminder of how little time we have. It also operates under the assumption that most people have blogs and Facebook pages and Twitter accounts and Flickr accounts to which they are constantly adding content and that their friends are anxiously standing by waiting to read those updates. Which is just plain not true. And besides, does anyone with a job really have the time (or the desire!) to consistently check out the birthday party photos of random business acquaintances or read the obscure blog postings of college friends they haven’t seen in years?

And this all matters because as we bring our “dispatches from the frontier” back to the people in “the real world” we need to be able to put everything into perspective. To think about why someone outside our bubble would use these apps or want to see certain content. To realize how provincial and uninformed we sound if we promote things to clients without providing them with a well-formed reason for our recommendations that takes the actual audience into account. Not ourselves and our friends, but the people who’ll actually use them.

If you don’t know any of those people, if all your friends are social media geeks too, then you’re not as effective as you should be. It’s time to break out of the bubble, talk to “real” people and get a sense for who they are, what they like and what they know.

You’re a marketer: knowing your audience is a major part of your job. Not something you should be gleaning from focus groups.

Dot Mac's Down

It's around midnight on Thursday night here on the East Coast. Sometime on Wednesday night, more than 24 hours ago, Apple's dot mac service went down for "temporary maintenance" so they could set up the new Mobile Me service in advance of the introduction of the new 3G iPhone. (And doesn't "Mobile Me" sound like some 70s era program for "special" children? But I digress.)

You'd have thought Apple would have updated the page you see above with some sort of "having more trouble than we thought, please be patient" type message. Rather than the vague "normal service will be restored soon."

For people who rely on dot mac, today has been extremely frustrating and what's foolish is that Apple could have solved the problem and made their customers feel better with about 30 minutes worth of work.

I'm not even talking about going on Twitter and responding to people who were complaining. Just update the "we're down" page guys.

Please.

NB: I've been able to send and receive email sporadically all day via my Apple mail account, but the online version has been showing the screen you see above.

UPDATE: 9:00 AM EDT and Mobile Me is up and running. Loading slow but looking very cool. Could well have been worth waiting for, he says, his eyes glazing over with the familiar stare of the Mac devotee.

UPDATE 2: 9:05 AM EDT and Mobile Me is down. At least we get a new, MoblileMe error window:


UPDATE 3: 10:15 AM EDT - Still down, but at least the message screen acknowledges that there are issues. Apple listened?

New Post on MP Daily Fix: But He's Really Nice In Person: Social Media and the Embarrassing CEO

We all have one: the friend whose quirks are mildly amusing in person. But place them under the magnifying glass of social media and those minor quirks become major, hard-to-ignore annoyances.

Or, as one friend recently remarked about an acquaintance of ours, “I’m embarrassed for him every time I go on Twitter.”

Not everyone has the personality for social media. It’s something we never talk about... Read the rest here.