Getting Ogled

I use Google a lot. I hate when I use an internet explorer search bar and it takes me to Bing.  I have no idea how different their search algorithms are but I know I'm not compatible with Bing. I think I'm a pretty good searcher. I know the key words to throw in there to find what I'm looking for. That being said, I haven't like the recent changes Google has made to their pages. I hate the beta search that automatically starts searching while I'm typing. I feel like it almost interrupts my train of thought. Maybe that just shows how focused I am when I'm in search mode. I also don't like that when I push the down button it doesn't scroll like a normal page. It bumps from listing to listing. I need that flow. I also don't like Google's creepily aggressive business model. I'm pretty sure Google might become involved in the regime change business here pretty soon and start buying up countries. So why do I keep using Google? I need it.

I crave information. I eat it up. When I was little my dad was like Google. I asked him tons of questions every night at dinner. Eventually I began to reach the limits of his knowledge and he'd say, look it up. I had to walk over to the encyclopedia and spend the next 20 minutes trying to figure out one useless fact that would satisfy my curiosity. Those days are over. I want information, I get it. I get it immediately, courtesy of google. When my roommates and I get into arguments; the laptops come out and, fueled by our confirmation bias, there's a race to gather information and data. Let's take a sample argument and see how companies are missing opportunities.

My roommates are from all over the country so we've got California, Texas, Virginia, Minnesota and Ohio represented. The military aspect can skew the politics a little but we've still got a pretty diverse group. We're watching Tosh.0 and we see a video of someone doing something that will probably remove them from the gene pool. We applaud it. Then we start to talk about who should and shouldn't be having babies. We talk about the movie Idiocracy and how lower socioeconomic groups typically reproduce at a much higher rate. We've got reverse natural selection. Then we start to discuss federal funding of birth control methods. Now we're typing birth control into google. Nothing from anti-birth control people. The Catholic Church doesn't have something to say here on Google's top 10? Abortion is the most divisive birth control method and I want to push the argument so that's what I go to now. My confirmation bias will push me to type in late term abortion, I know how google works. Jackpot. Priestsforlife.org has pictures of aborted babies. I won the argument.

But let's get a novice googler in there, or someone who is a little bit more neutral. They just type in abortion. Now they've got tons of results offering free abortions. Just "Call to Qualify" at www.ru486ishere.com. That's in the advertised results too. I scan those. They're at the top of the page. Where's priestsforlife.org? Maybe they're budget can't get them in on this one. But focus on the family should be able afford it. Google and Focus are both missing an opportunity here. Google needs to be selling these spots! Sell it to the highest bidder. You think newly pregnant teenagers aren't going to google abortion after they take their pregnancy test? Well maybe not all of them. But I'd say you're missing a decent amount. And you're not even sacrificing the sanctity of the perceived neutrality of the search results because it's in the sponsored results section.

The 2012 elections are coming and Barack's $745 mil in '08 reveals what's on the table. Here's what I would do if I was on Mitt's campaign. Two searches, "unemployment" and "unemployment application." There's only one sponsored result and I paid google a couple grand for it. The result is a page drawing a link between Obama's presidency and high unemployment numbers. Let's say you reach 1% of the 14.1 million unemployed. Employment is probably the number one issue to these people. You just got 100,000 votes for a couple grand.

And now Google has had a little taste of regime change and they want more...

Getting Noticed

To me cookies seem like a little invasion of privacy. I hate when people are pooling data and anticipating my moves. Maybe it serves me better, I find more things I apparently need. According to my facebook ads, I need a new job and I'm in a ton of debt. And I used to get a lot of suggestions for dating websites but that went away with the relationship status change. Certainly the level of automation involved in this diminishes the feeling of privacy invasion. It's not as if some creepster is in his mom's basement reviewing my rottentomatoes history so he can see what movies we both like. There might be, but it's unlikely.

To be honest, the statistical side of things doesn't interest me all that much. Developing algorithms and regressions can be effective but when dealing with people it only goes so far. For advertising, it goes far enough. They claim that they're seeking the individualized information necessary to focus on one person but their thought processes are geared towards mass trends. They're still lumping and categorizing people as rom-com movie goers. That works, but just not for everybody, and I don't think it ever will. I know, computers will get more powerful, more data will be gathered on people, but as long as we're often irrational creatures, I don't think you'll be able to create those individualized ad campaigns.

I went to the Air Force Academy so I still don't have any student debt. I'm locked into a 5 year commitment that doesn't expire for another two years so I'm not looking for jobs in California.  To be honest I'm not really in browse mode on facebook. I'm in browse mode when I'm reading the news which is why I like the dailymail.co.uk way of advertising. I recently noticed that hovering over their pictures of celebrities will reveal where you can buy the clothes they have on. I thought it was ingenious! I haven't used it. But it caught my eye. That's what they're trying to do anyways, right?

Getting Paid (after a while)

Recently a couple of my business partners (slight exaggeration) and I were discussing how to monetize our website. We've yet to build it but we aren't building it just for fun. I had an idea, an idea that we felt could drive some traffic and then we went from there. Unfortunately our monetization strategy was driven primarily by having advertising and lots of traffic.

Realistically though I think a huge amount of traffic would have undermined the purpose and effectiveness of our site. It's obviously difficult to discuss this without me sharing the purpose of the site, but my buddies probably wouldn't be really happy with me blogging about our business idea. I mean, I've had 45 page views...

The articles this week really helped organize my thoughts on the model for the site. Though we had developed ways to make money, we didn't really have a cohesive strategy. Fortunately our site was geared towards building and encouraging membership, a free membership. I think that generates a little bit of commitment from people, or at least gives you an idea of how committed to your site people are. When I'm using a site for something and it pops up and tells me I must be a user to perform some action, I'm typically just going to close the window. But there are a few times when I don't close it. One of those times is when I feel like I need to say something, post a comment to a news article. I'm not a serial poster. But some people say some things that warrant a response from me. Then once I begin the registration process I can get discouraged pretty quickly if it's tedious. I want my voice heard and I want it heard now typically. Of course this doesn't imply any long term commitment. Typically I'm just committed to saying something in the moment. But now that I have registered, it's easier for me to post so there aren't those barriers that would normally discourage me from doing so. I think one of the biggest problems is a tedious registration process. I think we'll do ours in tiers. The initial registration will be a password and email, nothing more. I don't need to gather customer data about age and gender. Most people lie anyways. I'm not saying I lie about my age... But aren't you supposed to? I don't want my birthday all over the internet. I know it's out there, but I'm not going to make it as easy as possible.

This post is moving away from the business model aspect of things, but I think my buddies and I kinda got that part figured out a little better. The important part is getting those loyal customers/members first. Some websites approach it like fishing. As soon as you nibble on the bait, they yank the line, set the hook and you start thrashing and maybe you eventually succumb, or maybe you break the line. I look at it more as getting a stray dog to come to you when he's a little skittish. You start by tossing those treats out to him. And slowly bring those treats in closer and closer. Before you know it he's eating out of your hand, hopefully not biting you, and you're best friends. From a consumer perspective, I'd rather be a stray dog than a dead fish.

Have a happy 4th of July! Happy Birthday America!

Getting funny or dying

To quote the great Bill Simmons, "This is a free flowing conversation that occasionally touches on mature subjects." (including and especially attached videos)

I actually spent considerable time this week trying to think of paradigm shifts caused by social media and the train of thought eventually led me to think about the resurgence of music videos. I considered writing about how creeped out I get by the focused google ads and facebook ads but I wasn't quite as inspired by those.

My train of thought started with the viral video concept. I haven't been impressed by a lot of the viral videos that I've seen, but they've still gone viral. So instead of focusing on the content of the videos, I started to think about what causes people to click forward when they get one of those emails. And that made me think of other ways I'm exposed to these videos. A lot of these videos' build their popularity through the younger generation (I'm only 24 but still...) and these kids aren't sitting  in their cubicles using Outlook. So then I thought of the last time I saw a video that wasn't forwarded to me and it was this: Can't Tell Me Nothing . My buddy showed it to me at a party on his iPhone. To make the claim that just because music videos have come back into my life, they have somehow seen a meteoric rise in worldwide popularity, is a little bold. But then I'd go to parties at a buddy's house and while everyone is sitting around pre-gaming (I feel like I need to excuse the fact that we were post-college pre-gaming but I can't think of a good excuse, or another name for what was going on) my buddy hooks his laptop up to his TV and throws on his favorite music videos on youtube. It used to be that you could turn on MTV and be able to watch your favorite music videos. Then they decided they wanted to producing Emmy-worthy shows like Cribs and Jersey Shore and even VH1 isn't showing music videos. I typed in resurgence of music videos and actually found a little article about how youtube has singlehandedly saved the art. Music Videos/Youtube . I started out trying to think of what causes people to share these videos and just ended up showing that it's easy to do it, something we all already knew. Perhaps the biggest takeaway is just how many different methods of sharing there are, even within a generation. I've shared videos via facebook (Brett Favre, What Should I do?), through work email, showing them to friends on my iPhone, and texting them links to youtube. I just don't know what made me share them.

Victor Borge

Getting swoll/swelled

I read the groundswell article today on my phone. It's a concept I've seen before and I've talked about it a bit with my friends before. In working on my website recently, my partners and I had discussed viral videos and how they can garner the attention of millions of people in just a few days. One little breakthrough, and you've instantly got way more publicity than you every could have had through a consistent marketing campaign. The trick is obviously building something that can go viral.

But what interested me more was how a company could weather the storm of a negative groundswell. I don't think a company will ever come away unscathed but there has to be a better way of handling this. But if there was, would we really even know about it? Obviously the famously bad ones get the most publicity. It's a stretch but I think Charlie Sheen's recent meltdown could be a good case study. All of these actors/athletes/politicians are selling some form of a brand.  Rep. Weiner probably didn't handle this situation very well, and perhaps some of them are so bad that they can't be handled, but I have to say that Charlie made out pretty well. So many people attempt to duck-dive the wave or swim through it but instead Charlie hopped on his board and enjoyed the ride. The waves of public opinion can be overwhelming and most of the time they're going to crush you, but fighting it certainly isn't going to help. Now take away the analogies and I don't know how to surf through a public opinion catastrophe, and Charlie probably isn't the best role model for companies. But there might be some lessons to be learned (deep down in there somewhere) from his handling of the groundswell.

Getting Dumber/Smarter

I tried not to be too biased reading the first article but it was terribly difficult. The title alone threw me off, “Does the internet make you dumber?” And I think the second article, “Does the internet make you smarter?” validated my bias considering how much more I liked and agreed with it.

I felt that the first article had a major contradiction that undercut its hypothesis. It made the claim that we were losing our ability to focus, an ability supposedly gained by years of reading books. Carr then made the claim that the brain quickly “remodels” to fit the way that it’s used. If the brain is so flexible, then it shouldn’t have any trouble learning to focus again. Also, if the brain is more suited (from an evolutionary perspective) to a less focused environment like the internet, then couldn’t it be more effective as a learning tool? Also, people can set themselves apart now purely by their ability to sift through large quantities of data and information on the internet and make a decision.  People adapt and learn to excel in their environment. This change and adaptation to the environment is not a sign that we are getting dumber.

I liked the second article but I was initially going to argue that Shirky based his argument too much on the movable type analogy. To me, comparing technology transformations that took place hundreds of years apart made for a rather weak argument. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how spot on he was. I think going into these articles I made little distinction between how knowledgeable and how smart someone was. For me and my group of friends, there’s no doubt that the internet makes us more knowledgeable. My roommates and I sit in our living room watching tv at night and inevitably have about 28 different arguments based on something that came up in a show. We search our iphones during commercials to find data to back up our arguments. These articles aren’t ALL at the highest intellectual level but there are a few high caliber arguments thrown in there. Years ago we would have had to go to the library to resolve these arguments or just sit there and argue ignorantly, and that happens if we left our phones in a different room. But at least most of the time now we can back up our argument with confirmation bias fueled facts.

Getting Started...

Well I got my blog for x501 all set up. It's a few hours late, but better late than never right?