Marketing Logic

Do you ever read an article about some research that stays with you for days, maybe weeks? That happened to me this month as two articles, seemingly unrelated, stayed with me throughout the Thanksgiving holiday.

Jacob Nielson and the Digital Divide
The first, by Jacob Nielson, discusses the current state of the digital divide. An interesting exposition of the state of the divide, which is not one of “have’s and have-not’s.” The cost of computers is coming down significantly. The cheapest new computer today is significantly less than the Apple Mac that I bought for college in 1988, and significantly more powerful. The goal of mass-producing a $100 laptop is about $50 short, but still a force in development. The economic divide has been closing quickly, but it won’t be the significant divide that we face.

The Usability Divide
The next divide that Nielson covers is two parts of a usability divide, that of the elderly and of low-literacy users. The elderly are the fastest growing population segment, and also have the most disposable income, yet very few sites are accommodating a senior audience in design or in accessibility. The low-literacy user is another significant part of the population. Nielson feels that this is the most significant usability problem on the web today; as he cites that almost 40% of the population has lower literacy skills.

The Empowerment Divide
His final divide is the empowerment divide. The ability of the user population to find the information they seek. There is a significant lack of understanding of search in the larger user community. There is a lack of understanding of how to use advanced search functions, query reformulation, and choose the top search results without discernment. This group of people is at the mercy of those who have the default browser, the ISP, or the top search results because of their lack of initiative or skill to critically evaluate the information placed in front of them. Typically, the lack of initiative is because of fear.

College Students and Critical Thinking
In a related article, the Educational Testing Service released a report (PDF) about the abilities of college students to do many of tasks that Nielsen discussed about the empowerment divide. There is a surprising reliance upon Google for information, and most college students do not have the skills or the initiative to find information, focus the information or critically evaluate it. Essentially, the majority of college students tested lack the ability to use technology to solve information problems. There were over 6,300 students tested from 63 different universities and colleges around the country.

The lack of the skills necessary will affect these students as they attempt to enter the workforce, but a similar problem exists there. Irvin Katz, a research scientist with ETS. “It’s not only in academics,” he said, “but also in the workplace that people don’t have the necessary critical skills to access information.”

Website Evaluation
Two tests were significant. In the first, students were asked to evaluate several Web sites based on objectivity, authority and timeliness. 52 percent correctly assessed the objectivity of the sites, 65 percent correctly judged for authority, and 72 percent for timeliness. However, only 49 percent correctly identified the site that satisfied all three criteria.

In the second test, students were given a broad search term to refine. Only 35% of the students correctly identified the correct query reformulation.

These two articles point to a significant problem that we will soon be facing. There is an increasing divide between the technical elite and the rest of the user population. Very few students are coming out of college equipped to handle the responsibilities and tasks that they will be asked to perform in the workplace. If a student is wishing to work in the technical realm, the divide will be difficult to overcome if that student does not have the initiative to learn.

What can we do?
I believe that there are a few contributors to this problem. The first is the education system. Rather than teaching students to think by instilling critical and logical thinking skills, we are teaching to the test. Teaching names, dates and places with no context as to why they are important and the resulting historical significance. We now have generations of youth that understand how to use the technology, but haven’t the slightest idea how it works. Instead they are content to be used by the technology, in the words of Neil Postman in his book, Technopoly.

The final contributor is one that is as old as mankind. We are an impatient bunch and we really like to have things handed to us. Having a search engine answer our every question and whim allows us to get what we want, when we want it. It can be very easy to let that satisfy, as it takes work and curiosity to want to know more, or even to know why.

Yes, I have a concern for the future. As the ecomic gap closes,the critical thinking gap only shows signs of widening.

A timeless post has been made at the Church of the Customer Blog. It is a post that will most likely receive little attention – inverse to the attention that it should receive. It isn’t popular to talk about the shortcomings of the US educational system, but it is an issue that is clearly preventing this country from developing the worlds next generations of thinkers and innovators.

Why does engineering/math/science education in the US suck?

“If you studied math, science, or engineering at a four-year college in the US, much of what you learned is useless, forgotten, or obsolete. All that money, all that time, all that wasted talent. If all we lost were a few years, no big deal. But the really scary part is that we never learned what matters most to true experts in math, science, and engineering. We never really learned how to DO math, science, and engineering.

Toward the end of his life, legendary mathematician Jacques Hadamard asked 100 of the top scientists of his time how they did whatever it was that they did (math, physics, etc.) Hadamard’s survey found a massive disconnect between how we teach math and science and how mathematicians and scientists actually work. The majority of his contemporaries apparently claimed that using the logical, left-brain symbols associated with their work was NOT how they did their work. These were simply the tools they used to communicate it. What they used to do the works was much… fuzzier. Intuition. Visualization. Sensation (Einstein talked of a kinesthetic element). Anthropomorphizing. Metaphors.

We are in sooooo much trouble.”

The Lack of Context
The post made a simple comparison of what is taught in schools and what ISN’T taught, in regards to math and sciences. However, the implications are far beyond those subjects. In my own small world of website marketing, I see the same deficiencies of what should be taught and what is actually taught. However, even more concerning is that what is being taught is what is actually in demand.

I believe this is because the audience is a product of the educational system, where being taught to pass a test is more important than learning. Where dates and events are memorized without context or consequence. Where formulas are taught more than theory. Where the school day is nothing more than random subjects taught in 50-minute increments.

No Magic Formulas for Success
Because of this system, many of the audience that frequents many of the seminars where I speak are looking for that “magic number” or “golden ticket” to make their websites rank number one on Google. I wish I had the proverbial nickel for every time someone has asked, “what keyword density on the page will make it rank higher?” However, that’s how the education system is set up – teach to pass the test, pass the test, move on. Unfortunately, life is not like that. The graphic at the top of the article is significant, as it transcends the math and science boundary to website marketing, or any other field for that matter. It is a much more comprehensive issue than most people are willing to recognize.

There are no magic formulas that will equate to long term success. Read the writings of any great author, scientist, philosopher, and they will all agree. Success is not an accident. Success is based on the individual’s will and drive to succeed. This is why I cannot teach easy formulas to long-term success in search engines and website sales – they don’t exist.

Curiosity: The Core Trait
It takes more than listening to panelists and speakers to understand how to effectively market your website. If I can distill it down into one word, it would be “curiosity.” Curiosity is the underrated personality trait that distinguishes original thinkers from drones. Curiosity is what drives the start-up. Curiosity also makes for a troublesome employee – they don’t conform well because they continue to challenge the status quo – which is not that popular. Even when a job description calls for an individual who thinks “outside the box,” the creative new hire will soon learn that outside the box there is another box which should not be opened – and their creativity is now stifled.

Unfortunately for those companies, most of the speakers at the marketing conferences are entrepreneurs. They are the original thinkers that let curiosity get the better of them and develop something new. Many of my peers in this industry attained their status because they were curious how the search engines worked. It is amazing to socialize with those who had the same curiosity as you, share stories, and develop friendships. Yet I also am amazed at the attendees to the conferences who miss the time to really learn how the knowledge was attained, and the thinking behind it, and trying to develop those skills themselves.

Instead, they spend so much time trying to find “what do I do?” Asking “why should I do that?” will yield many more answers.

Now, the What and the Why . . .
There is a difference between knowing the WHAT and the WHY. There is no end to the articles discussing the WHAT. The WHAT changes with the seasons. Sure, there are some basic tenants to the WHAT, but the WHAT will always be distracted by the flavor of the month, e.g., Keyword metatags, Gmail links, Wikipedia, MySpace, YouTube, Second Life, . . . the list will always be incomplete.

The WHY will give you a filter to screen the WHAT. You will never know if the WHAT is right for you if you don’t understand the WHY. The WHY is gained through the intellectual curiosity to make things better. The WHY is gained through asking questions based in that curiosity, but then also by questioning the answers.

People have either too much fear to ask questions or they have simply forgotten how. If I could prescribe anything for someone wanting to break out of their daily grind and accomplish something great – it would be two things: Get curious about something and start asking questions.

P.S. If you wonder where I base my thinking about the lacking of the educational system in America, then I challenge you to read the interview of John Taylor Gatto in Fast Company, and his essay The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher.

Google sitemaps has been a boon to large websites, it has enabled site owners to submit an xml structured document of all of the pages in a website and receive reports about the indexing and compatibility of the site.

In a surprising development, Yahoo and MSN combined with Google and announced that the sitemap protocol would be accepted at Sitemaps.org, where one submission will go to all three of the major search engines.  This is surprising in that Yahoo has always maintained a paid page submission program.  Yahoo’s paid submission program Guaranteed that site owners could submit pages to the Yahoo index and have them spidered frequently.

This development eliminates the need for site owners to pay for page submission and inclusion, although it is not yet clear if Yahoo will still maintain the paid site submission program.

The advantage of this service is significant to large websites that are powered by content management systems.  Typically, these sites do not allow search engines to naturally crawl the links and find all of the content and pages that are available.  Page links that carry too many variables in the URL and are too long tend to be ignored by the search engines.  While the programming could be improved to allow for a natural indexing by a search engine spider, the sitemaps program allows many large sites to have their pages in the search index.

Via Kim Kraus’ increasingly unhealthy obsession with MS Dewey.
(really Kim, I am starting to become concerned)
Kim blogged yesterday about Microsoft’s new search engine MsDewey. My first thought was “interesting.” Ask finally dropped the butler, Jeeves, in order to change their image, and Microsoft has unveiled a sort of Jeeves 2.0.

I will say that I found it to be patently irritating. Sure, Ms Dewey is attractive and gets your attention right away. Of course, I don’t go to search engines to be entertained. I go to find stuff called “information.” So, anything that gets in the way of that process irritates me. It’s obvious that this was not created to be an effective means of searching the web. The search results are shown in an opaque window against a variate background.

This wasn’t made for search – this is subservient chicken search engine, or virtual bartender search results host.
It took me a few minutes to drive by this accident; however, others have not been as lucky. Kim Kraus made her second post about MsDewey today, and she is starting to show signs of an unhealthy obsession. MsDewey is flirting her husband. Kim – it’s a compliment. Isn’t that right, Eric?

Eric, really - turn off Kim’s monitor before she sends it through the wall . . .

Paco Underhill’s Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping.

This was one of the most fascinating books I’ve read in the past few years. While it briefly touches on Web sites and Internet marketing, I felt there were a lot of crossover ideas for both on and off-line retail. It was amazing as methods of signage, store and product layout, dressing room decor, the impact of males shopping with or without females, and other elements that surround our shopping experience.

In one of the chapters, Underhill goes into detail about the aging Baby Boomer generation, and how retailers will be forced to change their marketing, packaging, sales techniques and methods of reaching this economically powerful group. He cites research that shows how vision weakens as we grow older.

“Human eyes begin to falter at about age forty, and even healthy ones are usually impaired by their sixties. With age, three main ocular events take place: The lens becomes more rigid and the muscles holding it weaken, meaning you can’t focus on small type; the cornea yellows, which changes how you perceive color, and less light reaches your retina, meaning the world looks a little dimmer than it once did. The issue of visual acuity, already a major one in the marketplace, will become even more critical-not just in some far-off future, but from this moment on.”

Newspapers and Text Size
Underhill goes on to show how newspapers have had endless user surveys, all of which have shown that readers are not happy with the small text size used in newspaper print, yet the established news organization refuse to change. Newspaper print uses body text of 9-point type, a typical paperback is in 11.75-point, and most readers prefer 12-point or larger. Any wonder newspaper subscriptions rates have never grown since the late 70’s? Giving users control of the text they see on the web page will become critical. However, I advocate designing pages with larger text from the beginning, rather than forcing people to search or hinder their progress.

Color Perception Changes
The yellowing of the cornea is something that was new to me, yet the implications are critical, as subtle color differences are not easily perceived. The difference between blue and green becomes difficult to perceive and everything tends to look yellow. Contrasting text and images on a web page is an important part of maintaining a friendly relationship with your users. Avoid text and images that cause users to make an effort to see and understand. Clear contrast will help navigation, comprehension and ease of use.

A fifty-year-old’s retinas allow about 1/4 less light than a twenty-year-old’s. This means that sites should not use darker colors if it intends to reach an older audience. A younger audience will be able to distinguish slight variations in color, and may be able to read that blue text on a black background, but forget trying to reach anyone other than that twenty-year-old audience. Older shoppers and web users prefer brighter, lighter sites that allow them to easily see the page and the graphic elements.

Final Recommendation
I highly recommend Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping. Even if you only focus on the internet, it is a study of human nature. Now I find that I can’t go into a store without evaluating how effective it has placed the signage or allows traffic flow. When you classify how people show, it falls under two categories, needs and wants. Shopping for needs is something that we all have to do. Shopping for wants is a social hobby. Both have the element of impulse buying, which drives our economy.

I do feel that people shop, ultimately, for discovery. I often compare my wife and her friends to war vets when they compare sale prices - hearing “Discount Outlet! Ten dollars” sounds vaugely like “Shrapnel wound! Italy!”

Finding something that you certainly didn’t intend to buy, but you become enraptured with the idea of having it. Buying it is just the formality, because once you’ve found it – it’s yours.