Archive for October, 2009

Oct29

Gord Hotchkiss

0

In Search of Usefulness

A few years ago, I interviewed usability expert Jakob Nielsen about where search might go in the future and he shared an interesting insight:
“I think there is a tendency now for a lot of not very useful results to be dredged up that happen to be very popular, like Wikipedia and various blogs. They’re not going to be very useful or substantial to people who are trying to solve problems..”
That stuck with me. Relevancy, as determined by search algorithms, and usefulness are not the same thing. And then, John Battelle touched on the same topic in a blog post a [...]

Oct24

Jody Nimetz

1

5 Ways Interlinking Can Help B2B Websites

Original Post from Marketing Jive: 5 Ways Interlinking Can Benefit B2B Websites
I often wonder what the Web would be like if there was less emphasis on links and linking inventories?  How would the search engines define relevancy of a result without some sort of link popularity mechanism in place?  Link popularity continues to be a major factor as to why one site places in the search result over another.  While it is not the only factor, it (linking) is still a key factor as to why we see placing for a given key phrase vs. seeing “Joe-blows” website appearing for [...]

Oct22

Gord Hotchkiss

1

The Library of Human Behavior: 11 More Titles for your Reading List

Last week, I shared 11 titles that explore the intersection between marketing, psychology and neurology. In retrospect, I think I approached this backwards. While the titles I shared are all interesting (and fairly easy reads), they are somewhat dependent on a fundamental understanding of why humans do what we do. So, this week, I share a good starting library of human behavior, which can then be applied more generally.
The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are – Robert Wright
If you’re on the fence about or simply do not believe in evolution (along with 50% of Americans)you probably [...]

Oct15

Gord Hotchkiss

1

The Meeting of Mind and Marketing: 11 Books to Read

It’s official! With this column I break David Berkowitz’s Search Insider column count record, with 225. And to commemorate the occasion, I wanted to follow up on a request that came in response to my column 2 weeks ago. In that, I had warned any would be students of human nature that this wasn’t a quest to be taken lightly. A couple readers responded by asking for a recommended reading list. So this week, I went through my bookshelf at home and jotted down a list of titles that I found particularly insightful or interesting in understanding the human condition. [...]

Oct08

Gord Hotchkiss

2

And Now: The New News Regime

This week, I moderated a session at SMX about real time search. Personally, I find the convergence of social and search to be perhaps the most significant trend of 2009. Social adds an entirely new dimension to search. Traditionally search has been used to find “what” you wanted to know more about. Social adds the dimension of time. Suddenly, relevance isn’t the only measure. Search now needs a “stale date”, a measure of the freshness of the results.
Flying Rumors
There were a number of interesting things that came up in the panel. Presenters used a few recent examples to show how [...]

Oct02

Gord Hotchkiss

0

The Prerequisites for being a Student of Human Nature

Last week I asked for input on the upcoming Search Insider Summit. Of the 7 possible topic areas I presented, the highest level of interest was in the role of human behavior in digital marketing. You, the Search Insider faithful, have made me very happy. But being an avid student of human nature, I feel it’s only fair to warn you what to expect as you continue down this path. Some years ago, I too was intrigued by human behavior and thought it would be interesting to “learn a little bit more”. But learning about human nature is pretty [...]

Oct01

Karl Hourigan

1

Going Cross-Channel? Mind the gaps.

Everybody in the business of selling something to someone else wants to know what it’s going to take to convince that someone else to say “yes, I will buy from you.” From behavioural targeting to neuromarketing, Google trends and Twitter, the idea is that if we can get inside the mind of the buyer, we will know how to sell to them.
The reason neuromarketing is important for giving us insight into how buyers decide is because just asking them, through interviews and surveys, doesn’t necessarily provide the real answers. There is both an art and a science to building surveys [...]