The Black Liszt

What Do Consumers Want from a Web Site?

Why is this question important? Because whatever it is that consumers want in a web site had better be exactly what you want (and create) in that web site! Assuming, of course, that you care about success...

All of what I'm about to say is obvious, but you'd never know it from looking at web sites and from looking at the priorities of web developers, both of which I do quite a bit of in the course of my work. Everything I'm saying here applies equally to SaaS operations, BTW. So from most important on down:

Not Broken

I've written about this again and again. If a consumer tries to go to your site and it isn't there or it's otherwise obviously broken, the consumer's reaction is roughly the same as if they went to a new store and found it locked and shuttered.

Do you think they're likely to check again later when you've fixed the bug or gotten the right release level of the OS onto your servers? Is there anything more important than having your "store" ready and open for business when some arrives?

Not Slow

I'm always amazed at how little attention insiders pay to this crucial issue.

What ................ if ................... it's ................ just .................. a ............... little ............... bit ................. slow. .............. How ............... bad .................... could ................. that .................... be? Well, ask yourself -- how did you enjoy reading those last two sentences? Did it make you easger to read more of the same? What .................................................... if ........................................... it ................................................................. were ....................................................... even ........................................... worse? Would you come back to any site where the whole doggone thing were that way, all the time?

Conclusion: even if you can't make it fast, make sure your site isn't slow.

Attractive

We're on a roll. The place is alive, open for business, and responsive. A great start! Now -- at a glance -- do I want to be here? Do you want to get with this? Or do you want to get with that?

 

People will tell at a glance whether they like it or not. If they don't like it, they're most likely gone.

Easy to get where you want to go

Far too many web sites are, simply put, navigation hell.

Not on purpose, of course. The worst examples seem to result from someone wanting to "organize" the site into some system that "makes sense." Sure. As though anyone cares about your page and folder hierarchy! The only thing that most users care about is getting to what they want with a minimum of mystery. Does having an "organized" web site help this? Generally speaking, it does not. The only thing that helps is ... looking at things from the user's point of view. What an idea!Maybe if you do this you can avoid the web equivalent of:

Minimum clicks to do what you want

 Every click, every keystroke that stands between a user and his goal is an opportunity for that user to decide that it's just not worth the trouble. "How much trouble can a couple clicks and keystrokes possibly be?" you may ask yourself, as you madly set things up so that more of them are required, for reasons that are no doubt compelling. The answer is simple: every keystroke or click is an opportunity for the user to bail out of the process before the goal you want them to reach has been attained. Is that clear enough? Any click that can possibly be eliminated is a click that should be eliminated. Period.

What Do YOU Want from a Web Site?

I hope it's exactly what consumers want. Everything else is details. If you screw up even one of the above, you're swimming upstream. If you get the order of the above wrong, you're missing the boat. If you fail to pay attention, I hope everything else in your life is really great, because the part involved with web sites won't be, and even more metaphors won't help you.

E-Commerce and E-Media

When are e-media companies going to start honoring the "e" in "e-media?" When are they going to start acting like e-commerce companies?

E-commerce and e-media

Everyone knows what e-commerce is. You can look it up on Wikipedia, where there's a major series of articles on the subject. Simply put, it's the electronic version of retailing, a.k.a. e-tail (which redirects to e-commerce on Wikipedia).

You might think that the same thing would happen to media. But we know it's not so! They are so different that "e-media" doesn't mean much -- e-media doesn't even have an entry in Wikipedia! How pathetic is that?!

So what is E-media?

If "e-media" means anything at all, it's got to mean the electronic, on-line version of media. So if plain old media includes, for example, the New York Times, then e-media has got to be the electronic, on-line version of a newspaper. Right?

Yes, of course that's right. There are lots of on-line news sites, and they're mostly the on-line editions of print or broadcast media. If you know what to expect from the paper or the broadcast, you can get something similar at a website, with a few enhancements such as frequent updating. And that's exactly what's wrong with e-media!

Putting the "E" in E-commerce

You would have thought (as many did at the beginning) that being a big, resourceful, successful retail company would give you a huge advantage on the web compared to a bunch of nerdy computer types who, when you glance at them, don't make you think "good at customer service." You would have thought that e-commerce would be dominated by names like K-Mart, Sears and Walmart. Of course, it didn't happen. All the fancy executives at the brick-and-mortar giants were certain they would crush the nerdy wanna-be's. All the fancy executives at the brick-and-mortar giants were wrong. Dead wrong.

Let's look at some of the most obvious things that distinguish e-commerce from its bricks-and-mortar forebears:

• Web-centric leadership. This might be the most important factor. Jeff Bezos of Amazon is the poster child for this point.
• Web-centric approach. This is a tough one. When you look at the web from the perspective of long experience in retail, you can't help but seeing the commonalities; after all, in both cases you've got real people coming to a "place," viewing goods and deciding whether to buy them. In their essentials, they're mostly the same, aren't they? This is exactly backwards. Succeeding on the web depends on seeing what's unique about the web and how to exploit it to advantage. Think for example about how Amazon knows it's you and presents you with things you might like, and tells you in real time how other people decided among the alternatives you're considering, lets you read what other people think, etc. Going "native" works.
• Technology embracing. Sure, retail companies use technology. Walmart is famous for their data warehouse, for example. But Walmart didn't invent anything -- they amazed the world and flustered their competitors simply by using state-of-the-art data warehouse technology. By contrast, the leading e-commerce companies not only use the latest technology, they advance it and invent new technology. Sometimes they do such a good job, they even sell their technology to other companies (again, Amazon is a case in point here). Retail companies may use technology, but e-commerce companies are immersed in it and create their own.
• Driven by Data. Again, Walmart is well-known for collecting and using data to retail advantage. They do it by product and by aisle. But the consumer has already made their most important decision simply by driving to the store. On the web, "driving" to another store is a matter of a couple clicks. The level of competition this results in is unheard-of in the world of bricks-and-mortar. In the e-commerce world, you can track everything, second by second and click by click, and the successful people do exactly that. They test, track, measure, modify and repeat.

Putting the "E" in E-media

It's pretty clear that today, we're just at the beginning of creating a true e-media. The way these things usually work, they will follow much (not all) of the path taken by the e-commerce folks. Here are a couple of the key points:

• Web-centric leadership. This is a tough point for most successful old-media executives to accept. But the burden of proof is on them: why is it exactly that they will succeed when all their brick-and-mortar fellows failed miserably?
• Web-centric approach. When you look at the web from the perspective of long experience in print (for example), you can't help but seeing the commonalities, and focusing on characteristics shared by print and web. After all, aren't you in both cases presenting a visual lay-out of words, graphics and pictures? Aren't headlines important? In both cases, it's real people consuming the product, and their reactions are the same, aren't they? This is exactly backwards. Succeeding on the web depends on seeing what's unique about the web and how to exploit it to advantage. I'm not going to spell out exactly how this can be done, because it's at the heart of e-media winning on the web. But the principle is clear: Going "native" works.
• Technology embracing. In the print world, printing presses are somewhere "else," and no one important invents anything technological. When editing and typesetting went digital, the media industry certainly went along. But they didn't invent it -- they just bought and used it. By contrast, the leading e-media companies not only use the latest technology, they advance it and invent new technology. The programmers aren't just functionaries beneath the notice of the "important" people in the company -- they are essential engines of innovation, and a good part of the success of the enterprise depends on their work. Media companies may use technology, but e-media companies are immersed in it and create their own.
• Driven by Data. You've got some data in the print world, but it's kind of pathetic in web terms. You put out a paper that has international, national and local news; sports; arts and entertainment; ads of all kinds, including classifieds; and other things -- and you have no idea who is spending how much time reading which part of the paper or how they're responding! It's like running a department store and being able to see how many people come and go, but not which sections of the store they visit or what they buy! Talk about flying blind... In the e-media world, you can track everything, and the successful organizations will do exactly that. They will test, track, measure, modify and repeat. 

No one knows how e-media will evolve. But the best companies (some of them Oak investments such as Demand Media, Federated Media and Huffington Post) are already marching down the road I've just described. While it's clear there's a ways to go, the leading companies following these principles are increasing their leads from the pack.

 

The Primacy of SEO, SEM and iCrossing

What is the absolutely most important thing about a web site? A clean look? Attractive graphics? Usability? I say that win, place and show for a web site is visitors -- being found. That means that when picking a digital partner, there is really only one selection criterion that matters: how good are they at SEO/SEM? That, in a nutshell, is the case for iCrossing.

I've written about this before. But I'm thinking about it again because I just reviewed the slides from the recent iCrossing Board meeting. The meeting was in Scottsdale concurrent with customer meetings, so it included golf and other pleasant, sunny events. Meanwhile, New York City is still digging out from a record snowfall, so naturally I chose to stay in NYC and skip the meeting. What else is a nerd supposed to do? What do I know from $%^$ golf, the surest way to ruin what might otherwise be a perfectly pleasant walk??

Among the events reported at the meeting were a couple customer wins in which the general-purpose digital agency of record was replaced by (supposedly SEO-specialist) iCrossing. The losers must be grousing about what idiots they have (had) for customers, firing wonderful, charming, does-everything them and replacing them with a "niche search-specialist" player like iCrossing. 

Partly, the grousing is wrong. iCrossing is, in fact, a full-service digital marketing agency. They build web sites, do design work, etc. But mostly, the losers are missing something important: it is unbelievably important to be unsurpassedly, awesomely great at SEO.

It all becomes clear when you use physical metaphors instead of the usual barrage of TLA's. Let's suppose you've got a store that sells sweaters. It's a nice store, with its name out front in big letters: "Sally's Sweater Store." It's got a big window by the sidewalk with an attractive selection of sweaters. The door is inviting. This is the equivalent of building a website. It’s important! However, the store is located at the end of a dead-end street away from the main shopping area of a small town.

Which activity do you think will be most rewarding to Sally, the owner of the Sweater Store:

1.   Get in some experts on “store face” design to get her a better sign and display window.

2.   Get in some experts on “shopper usability” design to work on the in-store displays, aisles, mirrors and other factors that make the store more pleasant to shoppers.

3.   MOVE THE BLANKITY-BLANK STORE to a high-traffic area of a major city with convenient parking, lots of foot traffic, and other stores nearby that attract people who want clothing.

If the answer isn’t obvious, I can’t help you at all.

However, I will admit that while the answer is perfectly obvious in the physical world, it can be a bit confusing in the on-line world. This is because the equivalent of action #3 above involves making internal changes to the site, just like actions #1 and #2 – but they are entirely different kinds of actions, changing different kinds of things for different reasons.

You see support for the MOVE THE STORE, STUPID strategy every day. Just today, a up-and-coming e-commerce company hired an ex-Google exec as CEO. What is she going to concentrate on? According to an article about her in the NY Times Bits Blog, “Ms. Singh Cassidy said she planned to concentrate on bringing more users to Polyvore.” In other words, she wants to move the store.

You might think that I think that the “S-factors” (SEO, SEM) are the only ones that matter for growing traffic. Of course, we all know that social media can have a huge impact site visits. (BTW, iCrossing has a great social media practice, too.) There is nothing like having positive words about your site be spread among a network of friends or twitterers. I don't claim that SEO and SEM are the only factors in generating site traffic -- far from it. But based on experiences I’ve had with a variety of sites, I would say you would be well advised to resist painting the walls and fiddling with the display windows, and instead put more effort moving your shop out of that dead-end street it’s on now.

Everything is Media!

We think that "media" is a small part of "everything." But that's changing. Everything is turning into media: the world is becoming "media-ized."

Here's a framework for understanding what's happening:

First, we have broadcast media, the "original" media

    The information flow is one to many

    Examples: newspapers, TV

Second, we have communications, one person interacts with another

    The information flow is one to one

    Examples: face to face, phone, individuals talk

Third, we have transactions, a person goes to a merchant to get or do something

    The information flow is many to one

    Example: go to a store and check out
 

If you think about life in the distant past, that is in the pre-internet era (if you are old enough to remember that long ago), you can recall how very different those three categories were. 

Sitting down and talking with someone is clearly communications (one to one). While you're sitting down, you may agree to listen to the radio or watch TV. Then the two of you are consuming media (the media source is the one, the two of you are part of the many). You may see or hear an advertisement on the media. Later, you go to a store and buy the item (you are one of many people who go to the store).

These categories are clear and distinct; no one could possibly confuse (1) talking with a friend, (2) watching TV, and (3) buying something.

But on the internet, things have changed! These three categories, once so clearly separate from each other, are merging into minor variations of a single thing. They are now the variegated media-transaction-communications complex, a complicated single thing which has the characteristics of all three.

It's easier, and closer to the facts, just to say that the formerly distinct activities of communicating and buying things have become subsumed under "media." Why? The "place" where this activity happens is on screens that you can touch or have keyboards and/or have a mouse, the same kind of screen we use for watching TV, which is clearly a media experience. When communicating and transacting are brought into the world of screens, they adapt to their new world, and become media-like. That's why I say, the world is becoming "media."

I think about this a lot, partly because of personal experience, but also because I'm involved with companies that have to adapt to this new world.

The companies that "get" this convergence of everything to media are the ones who succeed in the new "everything is media" world.

Here are some of my favorite companies and a little sample of what they're doing that shows how they "get" it.

• Huffington Post is a "media" company. But they are clearly stretching the definition of what "media" is way beyond anything the media dinosaurs can fully comprehend, much less keep up with. The easiest way to see this is the way they are going beyond the classic "elite" media one-to-many model with thousands of bloggers, citizen journalism and an extremely committed and robust community of reader/collaborators who communicate with each other using the site's comments and connections to Facebook and Twitter.
• Demand Media is making progress on many fronts, with a full-fledged research operation to help guide their efforts. Some of their sites look a lot like on-line versions of classic niche media, for example www.cracked.com. Others are breaking the tyranny of one-to-many media by pioneering the use of professionally generated content to achieve something closer to many-to-many media, for example www.ehow.com. Finally, they are evolving the many-to-one merchant model in media-savvy ways, for example in the Daily Plate section of the Livestrong.com site.
• Federated Media is all about the shift from broadcast-style media to what they call conversational media. The whole premise of the company is that there is a new kind of media emerging that transcends traditional broadcast models, and this new media naturally calls for a new kind of advertising for merchants to interact with consumers. In fact, Federated Media is right in the middle of a kind of media that incorporates strong elements of conversation and makes a bridge to transactions.
• FirstRain is not a media company at all, in the old sense. Their roots are in providing search services to financial professionals. But now, like any new media company, you can search for something relevant and find their pages, for example this report on Yahoo. The harsh rule of media is that consumers will glance at your page; if they like it, they'll stay for awhile and explore; if they don't understand it or like it, they'll navigate away, and you've lost them. FirstRain is already a generation ahead of their peer group in understanding and implementing this.

You may think you're a media company -- have you really gotten all the factors that are now part of succeeding in media? You may think you're an e-commerce company -- have you really gotten how being an on-line version of a store isn't even in the right ball park, how you're now a media company? You may be a completely different kind of company, like FirstRain -- do you get that success means becoming (at least in part) a media company?

That's because ... in the new world we live in, everything is media!

Federated Media's Approach to New Media

Federated Media's angle on new media is to invite UGC-style bloggers who have attracted an audience into similar-subject Federations, and to provide those authors the vetting, channel and money they need to become highly valued professional content creators. Many of the authors at Federated had already enjoyed some success and money, but without the shared infrastructure and unique approach of FM, it wouldn't amount to much. As my earlier post points out, this is a new path to success. In the traditional, mainstream media, the bureaucracy controls who can join the elite and who can win. FM provides the endorsement, safety in numbers and true path to professionalism for those who have earned an audience with user-generated content.

Is the approach working? Let's look at the results:

Just building the Federations and the shared infrastructure would be a substantial contribution to paving a new path to media success that isn't bureaucracy-ridden EGC or thankless UGC. But FM has gone beyond that achievement, adding a new way for sellers to reach potential buyers that is culturally compatible with the new media type: "Conversational Media."

Advertising in the traditional media world is part of the culture of that world: smug elites telling the rest of us what to think and do. Advertising in the world of elites has an attitude, and the attitude is "sit down, shut up, listen and watch, and then do what I tell you to do!" A one-way broadcast of information fits right in.

I'm not about to claim that big advertisers with products to sell suddenly are truly interested in what you and I think. But if you spend some time in the world of blogs, you hear new kinds of voices -- voices that are creative, credible and authentic, but not elite. Pioneer Woman is a great example. You notice another thing: readers are active and engaged, something you'll see right away by looking at a typical post and the comments on it. Surely there is a kind of promotion that is similarly active and invites engagement -- that's FM's Conversational Media. A surprising number of big names are catching on to this.

Conversational Media takes more time and effort (and costs more money) than just putting together some copy and images and blasting it out broadcast-style. But you get what you pay for. The beauty of Conversational Media is that it fits into the blogs more smoothly than old-style stuff, and it pays the way for people like Pioneer Woman to be appropriately rewarded for her creative PGC. This is a path to success that simply did not exist in the old world of EGC, and we're all better off for it.

Demand Media's Approach to New Media

Demand Media's angle on new media is to provide content creators the vetting, ideas, channel and money they need to become professional content creators. It provides a direct path to success for talented, hard-working people. As my previous post points out, this is a new path to success. In the traditional, mainstream media, only the elite few really win, while there is (almost) no path to professionalism in user-generated content.

Demand's approach is perfect for those with talent, skills and a desire to work ... but who may not have a paying outlet for their efforts, or a system to structure and focus their work.

One of the things that is particularly interesting about Demand is that it's not a boutique. It's an industrial-scale enterprise, capable of producing far more quality content than the vast majority of content-creating entities today. But unlike traditional publishing empires, it leverages the internet and works on a fully scalable, distributed basis. There is no concern about tapping out on a certain kind of talent within commute distance of "the office," not when the office is the internet. There is workflow, there are defined roles for people to play, there is automation (lots of it), so in that respect, it's very industrial.

"Industrial" can be used as a critical word, but it's also a word that describes a system that is designed to produce a large amount of a desired thing at low cost and with predictable, consistent quality. Back in the 1980's, a whole industry got started to process structured content, the kind you have when you fill out a form, for example. This was when concepts like "automated document processing" and "workflow" began to be implemented, and pioneering companies like FileNet applied industrial templates to massive document handling problems. I personally worked on such an automation effort at Sallie Mae, where even then there were over 40 million documents to be processed per year, with a couple thousand people doing the work -- definitely an industrial problem.

What's fascinating here is that, a couple decades later, Demand Media is leading a similar new wave of document automation. The differences include:

• DM  produces documents; before we handled documents received
• DM is highly distributed; most earlier efforts were centralized
• DM deals with unstructured documents; the earlier efforts were directed at structured documents

But the commonalities are striking. In both cases:

• Workflow software is the heart of the industrial engine
• The work is highly structured, with quality measures taken at each step
• The process is scalable to massive volumes

And of course, there is a key new process. In first-generation document processing, we were consuming documents. When you are producing documents, you have to make sure you're producing stuff that people actually want to consume. How the heck do you do that at scale?!

Well, that's part of the magic of Demand Media, and perhaps will be the subject of a future post.

What does this mean to the person who would like to work in professional content creation? It means that Demand Media, by pioneering Professionally Generated Content (see prior post), has a job and value-creation system in which all the participants win. And because its industrial system has been built on a secure foundation (workflow, etc.) with appropriate updates and variations, we can be confident it will continue to scale and work as it does.

Media for a New Era, Demanded and Federated

There is a new kind of media. We all know the old media produced by the elites, and we've all heard of user-generated content. There is a new kind of media shepherded by new kinds of companies. It combines the best of the old media, and is generating value for the people who create it and the people who consume it.

Among other reasons, I'm paying attention to this because a couple of companies I know are in the heart of enabling this new kind of content. That’s partly why I like Demand Media so much. It’s also one of the reasons I’m a fan of Federated Media.

The vast majority of the media we consume is generated by an elite, largely full-time, generally well-compensated, tiny group of people, usually working in large organizations. Let's call it EGC, Elite Generated Content. EGC is generally a pyramid, with a tiny number of highly visible people at the top, a large supporting cast, and often a very large number of under-compensated people in support, many of whom aspire to climb up the pyramid. Katie Couric, sitting at the top of the CBS News pyramid with her $15M annual salary, is a great example. She can do her job only because of her supporting cast of hundreds (thousands?), the vast majority of whom will never have the camera focused on them except while saying “testing, testing.” They do the work and she takes the credit. While the example I’ve used is broadcast news, there is a similar structure in newspapers, magazines, books, music, movies, theater, etc.

The internet has brought us a new kind of media: UGC, user generated content. UGC is generated by essentially anyone who wants to. There are a vast number of UGC-er’s (millions!), who do what they do mostly on their own, mostly for free. Examples include blogs, comments, everything on Facebook, product ratings, Wikipedia, etc.

Some of the people who create UGC are every bit as talented, hard-working and effective as the elite producers of EGC, sometimes more so. Some UGC creators produce content for which they know there’s a market, but the existing rigid structure and cruel, anti-democratic hierarchy of EGC provides no mechanism for them to tap that market.

Some members of the old media have recognized and capitalized on the fact that there is a huge pool of frustrated, under-valued and ambitious UGC-er’s out there, and have created mainstream media vehicles for tapping into this vast labor pool. Perhaps the best examples are TV shows like American Idol. For every Susan Boyle who leaps from complete obscurity to fame and fortune, there are tens of thousands of applicants who either waste their time, or worse, become the on-air fodder for the laughter and cruelty of the wealthy, self-appointed judges. In typical old-media fashion, it dangles the hope of success to millions and convinces tens of thousands to donate their time and effort to the success of the elite handful at the top, for example the well-named Simon Cowell, who is surely the Simon Legree of show business aspirants.

Is there an alternative to old-media EGC and chaotic, unstructured and unpaid UGC? Simply put, yes. Demand Media and Federated Media each are pioneering new paths to enable UGC-er’s to advance to professional success. There is no accepted name for this new category (alert! naming opportunity!), so until a better name shows up, I’ll just call it PGC, professional-generated content.

What is PGC? Simple: it combines many of the most desirable characteristics of EGC and UGC. Here are the highlights:

• Like EGC, the content is vetted, it is good quality.
• Like EGC, there is a market for the content, and a way to reach that market.
• Like EGC, the participants in the process actually get money for their efforts.
• Like UGC, the participants in the process actually get credit for their efforts.
• Like UGC, there is no hierarchy barring the door to aspirants.
• Like UGC, the process is highly distributed and democratic.

Sometime soon, I'll show how DM and FM are each, in their own ways, leading the way to developing the market for PGC, professionally generated content, and thus providing opportunities for people and filling previously unmet needs.

Demand Media and the Media

Members of the mainstream media seem to have trouble looking at Demand Media, understanding its success and the fact that it is pioneering a new and valuable form of content creation. This trouble is illustrated perfectly by an article by David Carr, the media specialist for the New York Times. The article is surprisingly fair, but the author's feelings are easy to read.

At least from the article, it appears that the author (along with nearly all mainstream-media writers on this subject) either isn't familiar with the Innovator's Dilemma, or is unable or unwilling to apply the concepts to his or her own industry.

It's really not that different from the transitions between disk drive form factors, an example used by Clayton Christensen in his classic book (The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail) on the subject.

In each case, the people who are invested in the older technology look at the newer one as inadequate, cheap, failing to meet crucial requirements, and so on. They fail to appreciate how the new technology opens up new markets, fills unmet needs, and satisfies new classes of customers.

In this case, the old-media establishment is stuck on the notion that any form of media production must meet the following criteria:

• a small number of
• high-priced,
• full-time workers in
• central offices, producing
• small amounts of content that are released in a
• small number of
• elite outlets that
• charge readers for access

By contrast, Demand Media is pioneering media that meets the following criteria:

• a large number of
• moderately paid,
• part-time workers in
• distributed locations, each producing
• as much content as they choose, which is
• released on the internet and is
• free to readers,
• supported by advertising

Since Demand Media knows it's pioneering, it is experimenting and iterating its way to success, largely driven by direct feedback from its new class of customers. They are learning new things every day.

Again, the Times article was a relatively fair one; but critical feelings about Demand Media are completely understandable -- simply put, the people who make them often feel threatened by DM's success. But the day is long past when a small number of highly influential media figures can sway the thinking of the public. In the end, the internet is enabling consumers to vote with their "feet" (actually, their fingers and clicks), and from all the evidence, the number of votes in favor of Demand Media is growing at a rate that the management of old media can only dream about.

Icrossing and the Google Chess Game

In your battle for consumer attention, can you afford to be lost in the crowd of losers? Probably not; probably you should be talking with these guys. But read on...

If you’ve got a web site, the one thing you need, above all else, is attention.

• ·         You may want attention for its own sake if you’re writing a blog.
• ·         You may want attention because you’re a media or content site and page views translate into sellable inventory that translate into ad sales.
• ·         You may want attention because you’re selling something, directly or indirectly.

 You may not think about “attention” much. Instead you may be focused on brand awareness, conversion rates, the plummeting rates for your run-of-network inventory or something else. But the root of everything you think about starts from attention. You get none of the things you want unless the people who look, type and click make their way to your site. Unless consumers pay attention to you, you’ve got nothing that you want.

 To make it simple, I’m going to assume that you already have some attention. If you’re a first-time blogger, you’ve given your URL to your mother, your friends, and as much of your e-mail address book as you have the nerve to. If you’re a brick-and-mortar kind of place, you’ve got a URL that is close to the name consumers already know, and a bunch of consumers who already know who you are and are well-disposed towards you have found their way. If you’re pure e-commerce, you’ve got some customers who have bookmarked you.

 Given this assumption, the question becomes, how do you get more attention than you already have?

Chess

 This brings us to Chess.

 Perhaps you’re already familiar with this board game and its arcane rules; for example, pawns can only move forward one square at a time, except on the first move, when they can move either one or two, and except that they may capture an opponent’s piece that is one square diagonally ahead of them. The rules for the other pieces are similarly weird.

Chess is a famously challenging game that takes piles and piles of excess brain power to avoid embarrassment when playing against precocious teen-agers. It is a classic nerd-magnet.

One of the things that famous chess players seem to like to do to demonstrate how awesomely great they are is to play simultaneous matches against many opponents. The grand master walks from one board to the next, glances at the move the opponent spent agonized minutes of intense concentration figuring out, makes his counter-move in insultingly few seconds, moves on to the next victim, and keeps circling until everyone is vanquished. The great chess master, endowed with an overabundance of overactive brain cells, single-handedly defeats a large crowd of pretenders, each of whom is probably good enough at chess to dispatch normal mortals without breaking a sweat.

The participants in this kind of one-sided battle know they’re going to lose, though a few naïve ones may hope otherwise. But the ones who are check-mated in six moves feel like crap, and the few who are still alive and giving the master a match at the end feel like winners.

 

Google, the gate-keeper of consumer attention

 This brings us to Google.

 You’re an eager aspirant for consumer attention. How do you get attention on the web? When people are looking for what you’ve got, how do they discover that you’ve got it?

 In many cases, they go to Google (or Yahoo, etc.) and type in something like what they want. Suppose they want to buy a cool sweater. They might type in “buy sweater” or just “sweater” and get a list of millions of sites that have something to do with sweaters. If your site sells sweaters, where are you on that list? You might be in the second hundred thousand, which is actually pretty good, because that might put you in the top couple of percent of sites that are relevant to sweaters.  Being in the top percent or two or your graduating class is a great achievement. However, being in the top percent or two of Google results is abject failure. No consumer will ever spend hours scrolling down to your listing, picking your site above endless pages of results that are higher in the list than yours. In fact, if you’re not on the first couple of pages, you can forget about consumer attention. You’d be better off standing with a big sign at the busiest local intersection you can find.

 Awful. What can you do about it?

 

Google the Chess Master

 When a consumer types “sweater” into the search box, it is entirely Google’s business who it selects to display in what order in the results; unlike chess, the rules are made by Google, they’re secret, and they change the rules any time they feel like it. Google is like the brainy, arrogant chess grand master who likes to show off by playing a host of opponents at the same time, and always winning. Your job isn’t to “beat” Google, but to come out on the first page or two of the results list; in other words, to be less of a loser than everyone else who “plays against” Google.

 You make your “move” for top search results by carefully crafting your website for maximum “searchability” for the search terms that interest you the most. Google examines your “board” (web site) and everyone else’s Google is “playing against,” applies the latest version of its secret rules of the game, and decides the outcome. For most of the players, the result is always the same: Check Mate, you lose!

 No one can “beat” Google. Google controls all the boards, makes up the rules and decides the outcome based on its made-up rules. It's like "blindfold chess," only with Google, it's everyone but Google who wears blindfolds.

 

iCrossing and SEO

This brings us to iCrossing’s search practice.

Lots of our companies depend on the web for their business, so naturally they get pretty good at playing against chess-grand-master-Google. For some of them, this skill is life-or-death. But even the best of them only have their own web sites to learn from, and have to focus on their business. What’s fun about iCrossing is that optimizing web sites for search is their business (at least an important part of it). So not only are they real good at it, they’ve developed a bunch of tools to find and fix problems, and monitor the results.

 If this sounds like an ad, I guess it kind of is, but not intentionally. After one of my visits with their search gurus, I really got off on what an ever-changing problem they’re solving. Then when the chess metaphor popped into my head, I just couldn’t drop it – it’s just so appropriate to the challenge everyone faces in getting visible on the web.