Ones and Zeros

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After more than ten years in our current Costa Mesa location, Binary Pulse will be returning to Irvine at the end of October. Inspired by the need for new energy and new environs, we’ll be relocating to the Irvine Concourse campus right across from John Wayne Airport.

It’s been a long and thoughtfully considered (read as “painfully arduous”) process for the better part of 2010, but months and months of walking spaces has lead us to our new home. Centrally located in the heart of Orange County, the Irvine Concourse gives us the amenities and access we need to make our next decade as efficient and enjoyable as possible. While we’ll miss our current office, we’ll always be grateful for the lift it gave us when we moved in in August of 2000. (I know, I’m being sentimental over a building.)

There are still a lot of spinning plates, and we’ll undoubtedly be perfecting and polishing the new space for weeks after our move-in, but we believe the change will be invigorating. Just wanted to take the occasion here in Ones & Zeros to give you a heads up. Address and new contact info will be available to all shortly. (Pretty sure we got our new phone number this week.)

If you have any questions or decorating tips, your comments are always welcome.

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I’ll admit upfront that the folks at Google who came up with this are smarter than me. I also realize that they tested this and must have had more positive feedback than negative. I’m guessing that AJAX developers are also happy. That said, I’m not a big fan of Google Instant…yet.

In face-to-face communication and over the phone, I like to be able to finish my question without the recipient of my question guessing out loud what I’m going to ask for with every word I say in the sentence. Somebody helping answer a question that I can’t describe properly is one thing. Jumping in after every word or pause is another. I find Google instant to be a little annoying like the person that won’t let me finish a sentence.

As a technology marketing professional, I’m trying to determine how Google Instant is going to affect Search Marketing. Certainly the number of Pay-Per-Click ad impressions skyrockets. I was doing a little demonstration for a plastic surgeon client or ours and typed in “N – O” as the first two letters of “Nose Job in Beverly Hills”. After the letter O, “Nordstrom” was suggested as the top organic result and “Nordstrom at Amazon” was one of the sponsored PPC ads. Types in “Nose J” and the ads are different than “Nose Jo”. The results for the term “Septoplasty” throughout the spelling process were much better but I believe that’s because there weren’t as many competing ads for the term or related terms. It was good to see that Google waited until after I typed in the “O” before it displayed PPC ads. With the “O” I got results for “septoplasty”, had it been an “I” it would have been for “septic tank cleaning” I could have done without the results for “September” as I was typing the “T” though.

I think this will change how I buy search terms and how we optimize. Long-tail search terms probably won’t be as relevant. We’re doing some testing internally to see if we can take advantage of this new change for our clients. If we can find clear benefits for our clients, I may become a big fan. In the meantime I think I’ll turn the feature off.

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Image courtesy of Flacko_Man (http://www.flickr.com/photos/flacko_man/)

Wasn’t the night of August 27th amazing?! It was just as spectacular as the email promised. And to think, “NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE THIS AGAIN!” If you’re like the bazillions of people who received the email spam that miraculously claimed that Mars would appear equal in size to the Moon Friday night, then you know what I’m talking about. Hopefully, you trashed it along with the other piles of digital flotsam surging through the Inboxes of the world. If you believed it, I’ll spare you the Barnum-esque lecture. But, what I DO want to take a moment to point out is the demonstration this provides about the undeniable power of social media.

I’ve had that email cross my path (either directly, or anecdotally through friends and colleagues) about five times in the past month. The people that forwarded it to me each wrote a little preface recommendation, of sorts, that pointed out how interested I certainly would be (being a sci-fi freak and all.) But my friend’s experience was more telling. When my friend replied to his mother (who had forwarded the email to him) indicating that the email was a well-known hoax, his mother said, somewhat incredulous and defiant, “Well, your Uncle Roger forwarded it to me, so it must be true.” And therein lies the power for good and evil that word-of-mouth marketing possesses.

Social media marketing is a trust game
We are naturally inclined to believe our friends and family (most of them, anyway.) We like to believe that it’s one of the certainties in an uncertain world…that we can always trust those we know. It’s that inherent trust that has paved the way for email viruses and phishing attacks that take advantage of us by hijacking (or simulating) known email addresses. We are vulnerable when our walls our down. Subject to being exploited. And technology marketers must confront the same demons. We’ve heard the story of fake product reviews written by paid company employees. Sponsored tweet services walk the thin line between paid advertising and genuine advocacy. Despite the broadcasted tenets of social media — transparency and authenticity — we are still bound to see widespread abuses that will most certainly fuel a backlash.

In a rapidly emerging world of social selling and the Facebook Open Graph, we are going to be more susceptible to being spoofed. Our friends stand to be all around us on the Web…providing advice, recommendations…”standing with us” in the virtual checkout line. If done right — if our digital systems and social mores uphold transparency, privacy and honesty — all the promise of social media marketing can come to fruition, to the unprecedented benefit of marketers and consumers alike. If marketers and miscreants abuse our trust, the rejection of social media will be as blinding as two moons in the nighttime sky.

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Reading the recent news about Barnes & Noble’s financial woes and the suspected complicity of e-book sales in the company’s decline, my belief that the days of the printed book becoming a piece of nostalgia are fast approaching intensified. (I sense the virtual eyerolls of all the people who think another of my patented ‘the printed book is doomed’ speeches is forthcoming. I’ll spare you.) Regardless of what happens with e-book sales in the future, I think there’s something more interesting at work: the increased dissociation of content from physical form.

If you look at the leading e-reading devices now (iPad, Nook, Kindle), they largely simulate the book. The physical size of device. The turning of the pages. It’s all a gesture at smoothing the transition from book to mobile device. It’s an attempt to romanticize the experience by making it as close to ‘curling up with a good book’ as possible. Rather than a long Web page-like scroll, they leverage the familiarity of page turning. But is it so hard to believe that that familiar construct will go away? That, given the endless flexibility of an electronic interface, that the way we read books will fundamentally change? Will we even refer to sets of text as “pages” in another generation or two?

Look at the way we read newspapers. My wife and I are at constant odds about the news-reading activity. She prefers to spread newsprint in front of her on the kitchen counter or sprawl out with it on the couch. She likes the sequence of it. I, however, prefer the computer. The cleanliness of it. And, admittedly, the free-formed nature of it.

Look at the way we listen to music. Gone are references to “sides”. No more albums, no more b-sides. Beyond that, order isn’t even particularly relevant. Shuffle play and individual track purchases have made enforcing sequence almost impossible. It’s doubtful the success of another concept album like “The Wall” could ever be achieved in a digital world. (It’s funny…you can probably date a person by what they call a collection of music. I still use “album.” Maybe occasionally “a disc.” Is the time coming when we say “Coldplay just released a new Playlist!”?)

We join this program already in progress…
As marketers, one of our primary jobs is to tell a story. And stories typically have a beginning, middle and end, right? With the increasing fragmentation of how we consume content, customers might join our story half-way through or at any point along the way. After playing search and social roulette, they may find themselves on your order form without even knowing first what you sell. (As the printed book goes away, will we forever lose the stigma of skipping to the end of the story? No one to catch you guiltily flipping to that last page.)

When designing a new web site, customers are often wholly focused on the home page of their site. And while planning those first impressions and paths to navigation is certainly critical, it’s also increasingly important to consider how customers navigate UP. Particularly with an integrated social strategy, it’s important to realize that people may be entering your site through a deep basement window rather than the polished lobby doors. Feature onramps to product information or to your corporate overview on every page of your site. Do so, and you have a good chance of telling the whole story regardless of what point your readers came in.

Beyond navigational issues, it’s also important to realize that the dissociation of content from physical form will further accelerate the want for smaller bits of information. There are plenty of arguments that the Internet is turning us into an ADHD culture where no one has an attention span longer than seven seconds. While you can argue the social ramifications of this trend, as a marketer, it’s important to acknowledge it and cater to it in relevant ways. Provide content in smaller pieces. Break up one long Web page into a sequence of three or four shorter ones. Diversify the way you tell a story with visuals and text. Appeal to multiple senses by leveraging video and animations.

These are transformational and exceptional times we live in. Think of all the physical media forms that have gone the way of the dodo. Albums, 8-tracks, cassettes and (soon) CDs have all succumbed to the supremacy of the MP3. Dictionaries, encyclopedias, newspapers, magazines and (soon) books are being consumed by the Web (in its various delivery forms.) The common trend indicates a preference for smaller chunks of content, distributed without obedience to sequence or structure. In order to effectively tell our stories, marketers need to remain as flexible and dynamic as the world around us.

Here’s a laugh. Check out ABC’s new take on viewing the news. Their iPad app. If a big spinning globe of random news stories isn’t a sign of the chaos confronting content, what is?