Catching up on the latest changes to the search process from Google this week. If you need a recap read Danny Sullivan’s take here. The CMO Site has an excellent discussion on what this might mean for marketers, including some good comments on how this might play out. The net:

>Search + will add relevant links from your Circles to your search results. Allegedly this is a good thing.

I have written previously about how I feel about Google+ chances and, despite all the “Buzz” my opinion hasn’t changed. And in fact, this just makes it worse.

Right now, Google + is not terribly well used, despite some interesting features, an expensive TV campaign, and the relentless shilling by some of the web’s most followed intelligentsia (Exhibit A: Chris Brogan)

Based on my admittedly limited sample of the comments around the new Search + feature, we are about to see a rush of marketers on to Google + with the sole goal of trying to manipulate their followings to ensure they remain relevant in key search results.

Huge windfall for Google + right? Wrong.

Given the relatively low market saturation as compared to Facebook and Twitter, and even LinkedIn (which everyone seems to conveniently forget) Google + runs the risk of creating an alternative social universe dominated by brands attempting to drive a conversation and game the results. Given the overall footprint of Google + today, it really won’t take much. This will have two substantial impacts:

1. New users will be turned off based on the view that: “that just where the marketing peopled hang out to promote their stuff” (As Second Life was to Porn?)
2. Search results/effectiveness will suffer because the value of those top page results will decline

And if #2 happens, as a marketer, I am no longer going to pay big money to ensure Page One Adwords results. (impact #3)

And if both #2 and #3 happen, doesn’t that create a window for Bing and Facebook and Twitter to tie up to do something similar, but with an actual community—and for Bing to REALLY steal share from Google?

Now THAT would be something!

@ajdun

Interested in what this means for Content marketing and web content management? Read my post on Percussion.com here. 

This is my third “look ahead” blog post since I started focusing on this blog a few years back.  In 2010 my key message was “Focus, Focus, Focus” in 2011, it was “Align your activity with the current business objectives.” Both of those are as valid today as they were then.

My theme for 2012? “In order to Be Different, you have to DO different. “

I currently work in a very crowded technology market space.  So crowded that an industry watcher recently penned the blog post we have all thought about. In the post they grabbed 10 tag lines from vendors attending a show to highlight how similar they were. My company was one of the offending parties.

But we are going through a transformation, both for our business, our product set, our competitive set, and for the market overall.  And that requires renewed focus on actually being different.  A few weeks back over lunch with an industry insider I was previewing some of our upcoming design directions.  I explained how we were trying to change how we are viewed in the market…”  He gracefully cut me off with a short “Remember what Yoda said?”

“Do or Do Not, There is no Try”

Exactly.

I decided we needed to stop talking about how we are going to change, or how we are going to be different, we actually have to DO different.

I came home that night and challenged my team with that message. When exploring two options, or paths or directions, err on the side of changing the game.

Not that we should do different just for the sake of it, We need to use this strategy as a weapon, and as a guidepost for our planning and decision making process, and most of all, our design approach.

You can see this vision in action with the current design styling on our web site, or the graphics we used at the booth during the show. (I can promise that we definitely looked and sounded different at that show!)

Now surely we will get a few things wrong but as long as we are pushing the envelope, and not just doing something because it’s “the safe approach” then I am ok with it.

We are blessed with a truly differentiated product in the marketplace. It’s time for our activities to reflect that differentiation.

@ajdun

What ensued was an interesting discussion between me, the “marketing guy,” my wife the Environmental Scientist by training and trade, and my daughter on what could happen. And oh yeah, we had to talk in terms that a 9 year old (and my 7 year old son) could understand.

What kicked off the conversation is this fascinating article in Fortune Magazine about CO2 recapture technology. My daughter had liked the picture of the big “fans” in the middle of the plains and read a few paragraphs of the article.

This was a new one for me as well. The concept of pulling CO2 out of the air at any kind of scale was something I hadn’t heard of.

We also learned this month that the world’s populate topped 7 Billion people. When I was my daughter’s age, 4 Billion people seemed like a lot, and the concept of “doubling in my lifetime was far too abstract and seemed catastrophic.  How would we feed all of these people? How would we deal with the overcrowding?

The same way we always have, a little bit a time. Slow, incremental changes give us time to adapt. The oceans are not going to rise 2 feet overnight. The population isn’t going to double overnight. Oil isn’t going to stop being produced overnight.

So what did I tell my daughter? I told her that despite the meltdown of 2008, I believe in global markets. At some point oil will be too expensive and alternative energies will become worth it.  Then, market forces will take over. The same with rising oceans, and the same with rising populations. What seems too abstract (7  Billion people?!) will become real as will the solutions, there will be too much at stake.

The idea that you could use recaptured CO2 to grow enough Algae to meet our energy needs in a completely renewable lifecycle is one of those abstract ideas. But as the technology evolves, and the price dynamics of oil change around, the early research being done today might pay off. Only time will tell.

Even if it’s already too late to have a real impact on global warming. Even if Peak Oil has in fact come and gone. Even if we can’t possibly see how we will ever feed 7 or 8 billion people. Because, even with all of that, I believe in the power of Markets and the resiliency of the human race.

And in the end, do we really have a choice?

NetFlix Share Price Over the Last Three Months

NFLX stock price on July 11, the day before the announcement of its the new pricing scheme: $290. It reached a high of $298 on the day after.

It was all the way down to $208 just 4 days ago when word came out about the impact the price changes have had on subscriber growth. And at the close of the market on September 19^th after announcing the re-naming of it’s DVD service to Qwikster: $143, a Market Cap of $7.55B.

The pricing changes and related mess has basically shaved around $7 or $8 BILLION off its market value.

Ouch

As a customer, I am just confused. And judging from the comments from my network, so are my peers. But as a marketer, I am just blown away at how poorly this has been handled. Particularly when you consider just how well NetFlix usually handles themselves.

So what happened? I have no insider knowledge whatsoever, but here is what I am HOPING happened: Panic.

Here is my completely hypothetical sequence of events.

1. Several years ago, maybe even at launch, NetFlix came to the conclusion that streaming would be their only business. They were happy to have the returns and cache that the DVD business gave them. And hey, putting Blockbuster out of business was a nice plus, but streaming was always the way forward.
2. Streaming took off much faster than they ever thought possible, even though they generally had crappy movies that nobody wanted to watch. BluRay, Wii, web enabled TVs, higher bandwidth in the home, whatever the reason, streaming ramped rapidly.
3. Somewhere along the way key people in the company read Innovators Dilemma, Good to Great, Only the Paranoid Survive, How the Mighty Fall, and all the other excellent business books about how to avoid going out of business… Problem was, they read them all in one weekend.
4. Having disrupted an industry, the senior leadership became paranoid about when it would happen to them. Fretting that if they waited too long they would never be able to make the leap credibly, they started to plan for the day they would exit the DVD business.
5. Somebody did an advanced pricing analysis of the price people would be willing to pay, taken against the projected costs of each business, and decided they had to start making pricing changes now if they ever hoped to scale the streaming businesses.
6. The bean counters went off and did what they do, handed it to marketing and communications, and the new pricing was announced on July 12 in what had to be the first step in a well planned, and potentially years long transition.
7. And then ALL HELL BROKE LOOSE.
8. And then everybody panicked
9. You can argue what happened next, but to me it’s clear. After losing pretty much half the company’s value the team decided they didn’t have whatever time they thought they had to announce the split of the company into two units.  This led them to throw the strategic plan and operating time frame they had concocted out the window and rush out the half-assed announcement today. Maybe for no other reason than to explain the moves to Wall Street as their subscriber growth stalled.

And they got crushed for it.

There really is no other logical explanation. They had to be rushing. To start with, Qwikster is a horrific name. But if they weren’t rushing and had settled on that name, they would absolutely have pre-bought the Twitter handle. Now that the news is out, the self-described pot head who owns the handle just funded his buzz for the next millennium. In this day and age, NOBODY launches ANYTHING without owning the key social properties. You certainly don’t let the cat out of the bag BEFORE you secure the rights.

Other evidence they were scrambling?  The letter to customers from CEO Reed Hastings was sent out in the middle of the night on a Sunday. Its opening line? “I Messed up. I owe you an explanation.” From there the letter proceeds to ramble about what they were aiming to do with the price changes. The first problem is that this letter sets up the expectation of an apology for poorly handling the pricing and a roll-back to the old way of doing it. Once you realized that wasn’t what this was about, it was pretty hard to figure out what he meant instead. I am STILL not sure.  If the marketing team thought that was the best way to roll this out, they weren’t paying attention in marketing school!

So where does NetFlix go from here? Press accounts today suggest that they are standing by their decision. At this point, that is probably the only option, though there are other examples of unpopular decisions getting rolled back (Remember Facebook Beacon?) One wonders however after all the noise subsides (and there is A LOT of noise right now) if history will judge them as having taken a half step back to take 4 giant leaps forward?

Right now it’s an $8 Billion bet, and counting. They had better be right.

If that sounds awfully familiar it’s because sharing by group was one of the most highly touted advantages to Google+ when it first came out.

And that is why Google+ has a problem,.

See, I am not on Google+ yet. I haven’t even sniffed it. I have a stack of invites, and I surely have been keeping up on what other people are doing with it, but I haven’t bothered to log in myself and create an account. Now I am sure Google doesn’t much care if I am there or not, but I know they care if people LIKE me are. I am an unabashed fast follower. I wasn’t the first to Facebook, or Twitter, or Foursquare or, or, or… I stay up on the trends but prefer to let others go through the pain of figuring out new things and then I jump in. And every time I feel that urge to jump on the latest and the greatest I consider all the hours I would have wasted on technologies we don’t even remember.

So Google+ was intriguing, and the hype was overwhelming, but I didn’t see any need to jump. Why? Two reasons: First, not enough of my social network jumped there and simultaneously LEFT “FaceLinTwit” so I didn’t feel like I was missing anything by not jumping in.

And second, Google+ doesn’t (yet) appear to fill a big hole in the social opportunity. When MySpace was cool I ignored Facebook because I couldn’t customize my page to my hearts content. But then when I struggled for awhile trying to figure out how to customize my MySpace page, I came to appreciate the simplicity of the Facebook experience. Well that, and pretty much all of my friends showed up.

So this s the crux of the problem for Google. The one feature that everyone I know raved about in Google+ was the ability to create groups of people and limit how you share information. Like many of you, I keep a pretty tight distinction between how I use Facebook (personal only) and LinkedIn (work). The notion that I could start to blur that distinction was pretty appealing.

But when you have 500 million members, and an army of developers working day and night on your platform, your competition needs more than a feature gap to make any real headway. They need an opportunity gap that can’t be easily structured using existing platforms.

Trust me, I have absolutely no doubt that somebody WILL displace Facebook at some point in the future,. The web continues to evolve rapidly, our interests and tastes change. It’s only a matter of time and it may yet be Google+, they are surely motivated. In the meantime, I am off to figure out how to create groups of my friends in Facebook.

Read more about the new Facebook features

Read more about the Google+ Launch

Here are a couple of the main points from their study:

• Marketing is the source of 27% of the pipeline on average
• Size of company doesn’t appear to have a big impact on the average
• Services companies are closer to 20% of the pipeline
• 75% do some “qualification” of leads, but most are not yet systematically “nurturing”

What’s new here is the updated data from Forrester’s own research of around 140 tech marketing folks across both services and software companies of all sizes. But is it really shocking that only 27% of leads are marketing sourced? In some ways, I am more surprised that it’s that high.

This leads to a number of follow on questions for me. What is the “right” number after all?  Or, what is the expectation of the business on what marketing should deliver? Or what does the sales side think of that 27% number, and the quality of those leads?

I have considered the following variables when measuring pipeline contribution:

• Overall Pipeline Contribution: I have personally used 25% minimum as a rough guide, 40% as a goal.
• Return on demand gen spending: 10x is the trendy figure for software companies based on contribution margin. So for every $1 spent on demand gen programs (taking out awareness activities) I want to generate $10 in revenue.
• Pipeline Velocity: The speed at which marketing leads moving through the pipeline, and how long a marketing lead needs to be nurtured before it becomes viable.
• Stage Management: While revenue is the ultimate measure, how far marketing leads make it through the pipeline is an important gauge of lead quality.
• Efficient use of Capital: If cold calling efforts generate opportunities at a cost of $300 per opportunity, my marketing activities need to either improve that $300, or be less expensive to ensure the best use of capital.

To me, percent of pipeline is interesting and certainly screams value, but it is only one of the critical success factors. For instance one of my teams was able to contribute 60% of the opportunities in pipeline at a services company. But in reality those were smaller deals that took a long time to close and created a distraction for the sales team, reducing their ability to source new, high value deals from their networks. Understanding the full picture allowed us to recalibrate our strategy.

In addition the scale of the opportunity matters. If your $500,000 marketing program generates the required 10x return of $5M in revenue for a $1B company, don’t expect the senior execs to shower you with affection. At the company party they will just sort of nod their head and be happy you aren’t wasting their money. Then they will go chase down the hot new sales person who has a $20M quota and be sure that salesperson has everything they need to be successful.

The point is, the percentages matter, of course.  But what really matters is being able to show an effective contribution to the businesses overall goals. Understanding capital efficiencies, and a deep understanding of how to connect activity to what matters to the business are the metrics that matter most in your organization.

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I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. While attending the Web Content Management show in Chicago where Percussion was a sponsor, my phone suddenly died.  It may have been dropped slightly (you should never say that to the warranty people BTW) it definitely had NOT been submerged in water, it just didn’t work any longer.

A solid stream of swears followed.

The good news is that I had my laptop up and connected so I first went to the ATT support center. I was able to kick off an instant chat with a support tech who, after trying a few things, confirmed my prognosis.

More swears.

I stepped out of the sessions and had a number of protracted discussions with ATT service teams, but in the end, a new phone will be delivered to my house “in either one or two business days.”

Then reality set in. ONE OR TWO BUSINESS DAYS WITHOUT A PHONE.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not one of those people who stare at their phone all day long. I learned some time ago that if you are always answering emails, people will come to expect that you will always answer emails. But that doesn’t mean I don’t check frequently. I am less apt to check Facebook or Twitter but when killing time at the airport, I am bound to rather than booting up my laptop.

I mean, I knew that I could SURVIVE, but I wasn’t sure I could you know, survive. 

So, to borrow a style popularized by “The Sports Guy” on ESPN here is my running diary of my time without a phone. All times are approximate.

Tuesday

9:30am: Phone stops working

9:31: Substantial swearing as I ponder my day with no phone, still hopeful that perhaps Support will “know a trick.”

9:39: Email my wife. Let her know my flight number and expected time of arrival and that I wouldn’t be texting her when I landed.

9:40: Email my work colleagues letting them know I was phone-less. I think they laughed a little.  One of them wasn’t sure how a phone could “crap out.” I declined to explain.

9:50 Wife replies asking me to let her know if the flight was delayed or if I miss it. I must have considered this for a solid 10 minutes. How exactly would I do that? Borrow a phone maybe? Then I remembered something called a pay phone. A Pay Phone?!!  Thankfully my wife who is infinitely smarter about these things signed onto to iChat and told me to IM her from my computer. Brilliant. Good thing she is thinking for the both of us

11:45am: Reality sets in, I am not going to have a phone.

1:00 New conference buddies show back up after lunch with Starbucks. I Tweeted that I was bummed to have missed the party. I got this devastating reply via Twitter:

@somethingwitty: “@ajdun this coffee tastes like … Heaven. And while we were there some random stranger was offering to fix BBs for free! Crazy. Missed out”

1:01: Unfollow @somethingwitty. Might have been a record for the shortest following of someone. At least she lived up to her Twitter name.

1:30: Come to grips with the fact that I don’t have a phone. Pull the battery, put it in my bag and try to forget I even have one.

1:31: Think deep thoughts about what it will be like to not have a phone. Take to Facebook to try and quell nerves.

1:33: Think that nerves seems pretty stupid, consider why I am edgy. Decide it’s too difficult to ponder, try to focus myself to the speakers.

4:45: Get on train from downtown Chicago to Airport (seemed like a better idea when the taxi driver laughed at me when I told him I wanted to go to the airport. He was right) Stare longingly at everyone on their phones. I somehow feel naked. A friend likened it to being in one of those dreams where you are in a city square naked.. not sure I would go that far, but definitely like I am missing something. Like my arm.

5:30 Wonder what I would do if the flight was in fact cancelled, or delayed… would that mean I would have to queue with everyone else? Shudder!

6:30: Sit in the airport, staring longingly at everyone’s iPhone

6:45: Realize I wont have to worry about shutting off my phone to fly.

10:30: Land in Boston, look around for my phone to text home that I landed safe and sound…uhhh.. crap.

Wednesday

6:00 am Phew, survived day one, new phone should be here today, steel myself for a day of no phone.

9:30: Yep, got the email that said phone would be delivered That was $14.95 well spent!

10:30 Share story with my CFO, explained how I avoided having to ask for the company to buy me a new phone. She was, well, appreciative. Something in her tone made it clear that I wouldn’t have gotten very far with THAT request!

12:15: Sitting in one meeting, worried I was missing another one. Verry unsettling.

6:00 Try to IM my wife to organize kid sport pick up/drop off. Don’t hear back. (Did it occur to me to use my desk phone to call her? Nope, not even for a second!)

6:30: Show up at the track to quizzical stares from the family wondering why I came. Oh right, because I didn’t have a phone to know that I didn’t have to.

7:30: New Phone is plugged in, time to settle in for the Bruins and Red Sox games.

10:30 Red Sox Win, Red Sox WIN!

11:00 Bruins win, Bruins WIN

11:30 Phone appears to be mostly operational.

So, I wish I could say that I enjoyed being phone-less for awhile. Or that I realized how liberating it was to be disconnected for 36 hours. Or that I discovered how connected to email I was and that the world wouldn’t stop without me online.

Nope.

In the end, It was just too unsettling. Not so much not having email specifically, but not being able to communicate on the go.  It really is remarkable how much has changed over the last 10 years. Now, the idea of being phone-less isn’t liberating at all, it’s is just terrifying.

The Rise of the App-Centric Web

I had read an article in CFOWorld.com about how Apps were going to kill the web and Google. I thought that seemed a bit too salacious. I don’t disagree that the App-based approach to the online world will be transformational. I take issue with the notion that this is the end of Google. Lets not forget that are responsible for the Android platform which certainly is a fast follower to the iApp approach. I have seen numerous other articles on the “App-Internet” as well, will be an interesting trend to watch as it develops.

Search is Dead—Long Live Search, or is it?

Working now for a web content management company, I felt compelled to weigh in on the uproar over the recent Google algorithm change and its potential impact on marketers.  My basic point is that how we think of our websites is actually changing, which will impact how we view search as a tactic.  We are rapidly moving to a world where the company website is no longer the center of the digital universe for that company and what happens in the “edge” of the community is vastly more important.

Don Tapscott, accomplished author of numerous titles, but perhaps best known more recently for “Wikinomics” was the keynote address at the end of the show. His talk was fascinating on many levels, though it was clear that 60 minutes just wasn’t enough. I felt like he could have gone for 2 solid hours.

Tapscott shared some vivid stories of how the face of revolution changed dramatically in Northern Egypt through the use of social tools. Though careful to state that social media did not cause the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, rather it was the foundation upon which revolution was spread.  This is truly crowdsourcing revolution, or “WikiRevolutions” as one slide was titled.

He told the story of how people on the ground in Tunisia who were getting fired on by government snipers were able to use social tools to triangulate the coordinates of the snipers and communicate those locations to revolutionary forces who were able to take out the snipers. And this was perhaps the most vivid example of how Digital Natives (he considers himself a Digital Immigrant incidentally) adapt technology for their own needs in powerful and unpredicted ways.  I am pretty sure there isn’t an app for that.

These kinds of behaviors that are ingrained in the current generation entering the workforce have wide ranging implications for all manners of corporations and managers. Tapscott shared how one government agency turned off access to Facebook and a 27 year old worker was quoted as saying “That is the single most demoralizing thing that they could have done.”

This is not a community to force fit into the structures and constraints of yesterday. This is a community to empower with tools and open-ness that will challenge all of us to think very differently. As marketers we need to understand the new rules of engagement. One that is defined by the terms Context, Community, Engagement and Open. How do we provide freedom to address our community of buyers to create a community around our products, allow them to engage with them in new and interesting ways and then step back and listen?

I am personally more energized than ever to explore these new channels and new opportunities. Tapscott shared this quote near the beginning of the talk:

“The future is not something to be predicted. The future should be achieved.”

Let’s go achieve our future together.

@ajdun