Throughout my career, I have sold stuff…all kinds of stuff. Retail, services, technology, technology services, opportunity, revenue, cool factor…you name it, I have probably sold it. In every instance, the goal in selling (and buying) is to create mutual alignment and fair value. If you like what I have and I like your price, we do a deal. If we can’t create the space where our mutual needs are met, then there is no deal. Everybody walks away, knowing that there is the opportunity to do business again when the need parameters change. You may be disappointed, but rarely is there much ill will.

But there is a glaring omission from the list of things that I have bought or sold where it can often be hard to walk away without ill will – REAL ESTATE. The world of real estate runs by its own arcane rules and logic, and a powerfully flipped sense of hand. In business, largely speaking, the buyer sets the terms on which they can or will do business. And the concept of “hand” is fluid throughout the sales process. At some points the seller, and at other points the buyer. But in real estate, there is no fluidity. The buyer, in my experience, never has “hand”. (Even as a seller, which I have been on multiple occasions, I never felt as if the buyer had any control.)

In any good transaction, there is a fair exchange of assets for assets (typically money for something). But in real estate, especially when the buyer has to use financing, they lose control the minute they make an offer. Once the offer is accepted, the system honors the seller. The seller has the opportunity to walk away if the buyer has issues beyond their control, including bank issues, changes in underwriting policies, assessment issues and so on. The seller can choose to demand that the buyer make a portion of their deposit non-refundable, that the buyer work around their closing dates. Of course, at any time the buyer can walk away, but that does not allow them to control or influence the transaction, only terminate.

This is a broken path. How do we make the transactions smoother, and more fluid? Simple…we break them – standardize the terms. Make it like a rental agreement. Pull the lawyers and the agents out of it. Make it like eBay. You have a house, list on a marketplace. You want to buy a house…go to the marketplace. The transaction and financing happens in an open and fluid marketplace. Your financing is either approved or not. The close date happens or not. Make it easy. Make it clean. Make it person to person, measured by the transparency of a marketplace.

Middlemen serve, largely to inject their value into your transactions. They don’t always add value. (In my experience, in real estate, they have frequently provided more friction than guidance, but my sample set is very small.) But complex services like programming or design happen within controlled marketplaces. Increasingly, auto buying is moving this way. Why can’t you list your house on Amazon?

Make this transaction more transparent and even and facilitate the exchange of money for assets, rather than dragging the system down and creating unequal transactions. Give everyone hand. Make this easy.

Semantic search is nothing new, honestly. Google has been doing it for years in shopping. Google understands, through the analysis of trusted, structured data that the Roku 2 XD Streaming Player 1080p that is sold on Amazon or Target are the same product. They have taken two related things (a product from Amazon and a product from Target) and semantically identified that they are the same. On a product level, semantic is easy. Match a UPC, or match a description, or match an ASIN and bingo, you have a semantic relationship. In concepts, having Google understand that because I am secretly hoping to get a dog, and I spend a lot of time looking at Labradoodle breeders websites that when I search for “hot dog”, I am probably looking for information about canine health, whereas my wife, the fabulous cook who spends time on Epicurious, is probably looking for the fantastic American sausage product. (And kids, if you are reading this, we aren’t getting a dog.)

Semantic understanding is context based. It makes search results better. It gets you answers faster.

Clay Clazier of PM Digital has some good points about Schema.org and cleanliness of structured data that is worth thinking about. Providing Google with data that is easily understood helps Google categorize it. That isn’t anything new, it is just that Google has begun to standardize the presentation of it’s understanding. Giving Google the data that you want it to have in the way that you want them to understand it is the essence of what a quality SEO program does for you. Semantic search will not change your relevancy for those key terms that matter to you. It doesn’t change how Google interprets your site. It really changes the relationship between Google and the searcher. It puts Google into the true helper position, rather than the arbiter of authority that it currently is. Semantic search, Google being able to understand ideas and concepts in its limited, factual way, is the best expression yet of what a search engine should be.

Someday, in the future, knowing that Google can understand what I want  to accomplish, Google may provide an opportunity to do what I want without leaving Google. Someday, Google could leverage semantic search into a nifty combination of Siri and Task Rabbit (and end up with the computer from Star Trek (…earl grey…hot). But that is so far in the distance, that it isn’t worth worrying about if you are a marketer (unless you are working on your marketing plans for 2030 right now).

Semantic search will have little impact on marketers, but, potentially, could have a serious negative impact on Wikipedia, but I suspect that Wikipedia and Google have some kind of spiritual alignment that will prevent Google from killing Jimmy Wales’ baby. However, if you are a low value provider of commodity information (song lyric sites, state capital sites, time zone sites, movie times sites, that kind of stuff) you might see some significant traffic drop over time. But if you run one of those sites, you haven’t updated your pages since the day after you launched, so you’ve gotten good return on your efforts. Time to start another business.

Semantic – the way search should be.

PS: Semantic search addresses some of the issues that I outlined in 5 Things Wrong with Natural Search, hopefully more and more will happen over time…

By leveraging great golf publisher relationships, as well as great golf marketer relationships, Golf Pixel is poised to create THE BEST display advertising and retargeting solutions to golf marketers.

What does this mean for marketers? 1.) In-market consumers who are looking for GOLF items 2.) Superior performance using same creative 3.)Lack of wasted impressions to visitors who fit the right demo but aren’t in market. For consumers? They get the right ad at the right time while they are shopping.

I will be helping out in biz dev and strategy. I am psyched to be working with Steve Mougis and his terrific team!

Over the course of the last couple of weeks, I have been thinking about professional gratitude, as well. For all of the people that have expressed confidence in me, listened to my visions, and, honestly, trusted their budgets and successes in my hands, I am humbled, and very thankful for that trust. The number of people that have been helpful to me in my professional life are simply too numerous to mention. But I believe that they know who they are.

Saying thank you to these people creates opportunity to share more with them. And as I have watched jobs change for friends where they feel less appreciated, and actively talked with businesses about how they can share their thanks with their customers, I have begun to wonder how important it is to say thank you in the corporate world. (BTW, Gary V’s The Thank You Economy is worth a quick read.)

There are companies that provide Thank You to customers, like Loyalty Labs, but the focus is on loyalty as revenue lift…not because it is the right thing to do. Are there instances of real marketer gratitude for customers? I would love to hear about examples. Earlier this year, FashionPlaytes, a terrific site where tween girls can customize clothing, sent my daughters (who are big fans) some key chains and and some cute jewelry as a thank you. There was no hard pitch or expectation, just a thank you. As I am sure you can imagine, we gave a FashionPlaytes gift cert as a gift at the next birthday party the girls went to. But the thank you was seemingly sincere. It wasn’t an aggressive pitch. It wasn’t a coupon (although there may have been one in the box, I don’t remember). It was a token of appreciation without the obvious expectation of a purchase. It mattered.

And if you are an employer or team leader, thanking your staff is as important as thanking your customers. Your staff is what makes your company or group run. I try to thank the people that work with me as often as I can. Does anyone use services like Wooboard that help to thank and recognize employees? Do they matter? Do they create more engagement? Recognition counts, and rarely does it happen outside of a formal review. Take a minute, today, to thank your co-workers…It matters.

So are all these iterative ideas helpful, or do they actually mean something. Are the sudden rise of startups in a space like the invention of calculus? Leibniz & Newton published almost the exact same idea without ever having been exposed to the other…spontaneous genius or inevitable development? I would say, despite genius, it was inevitable.

Startups seem to be the same. Of course there are copycats, but when businesses rapidly evolve in the same spot, it means only a couple of things: 1.) That there is a real and true business opportunity there, and/or 2.)  Technology has evolved to a point where the next natural outlet was solving this problem. If the former is true, then all companies can be winners. If the latter, there is going to be some code for sale in 6 months.

How to tell if your startup is solving a business need or an obvious technology evolution that isn’t unique?

Customers. Paying customers.

Customers are the fuel that make a business. They provide the need, they provide the capital to operate and they provide the insight needed for your company to evolve. That sinking feeling in your startup – well, that is you focusing on your needs (product, staffing, fundraising) and not your customer needs. Everything going along swimmingly? Well, that is the result of solving customer problems…regardless if it is using cool new tech.

Focus on the customer and your company will grow. Focus on your company…well call me when your code is for sale.

Paid search is, typically, an online marketer’s biggest line item expense. And the traffic and revenue that results from that spend is an enormous part of any online marketer’s value. Paid search is dependable, scaleable and, ultimately, able to be measured and controlled. Paid search is like a digital sales accelerator, and buying paid search services can be really tricky.

Most service providers use the agency model, whereby they charge based on the amount of media that the marketer buys. This is a tried and true model where the bigger the splash, the higher the bill. And on some level, this approach makes sense. It is democratic. A penny paid to Google, or Bing or Baidu all cost the same agency fee. All of the upside belongs to the marketer. At first glance, this model is clean, but in reality, it is fraught with compromises and crossed agendas.

The marketer always wants to spend less and get more. In the agency model, the provider wants the marketer to spend more. Immediately, the agenda is muddled. Marketer wants best ROI, and provider wants best I (investment, the pablum word for spend). So, marketer wants small spend. Provider wants big spend. Who wins? Well, in reality, nobody does. The marketer wants to exercise every advantage in order to maximize profitability, but the provider wants to maximize effective spend. (There are providers that just want to maximize spend, but most are focused specifically on generating spend that delivers minimum acceptable return for marketer.)

The obvious answer is that the marketer will spend to their predetermined budget and not a penny more. What happens then is amazing. Provider tries to maximize return to keep the business. Marketer can then benchmark this return and shop providers for lower spend or increased return. This is a slippery slope…provider must continually add more services and potentially reduce cost to fend off competition. Marketer has the tools to drive down the market in terms of commissions paid because it has an effective benchmark. This sets up a race to the bottom. The same dynamic will occur when provider is paid on actions. A discrete return generates a benchmark that can be commodotized.

How are the marketer and provider ever to be in alignment? I think there is a way – let the provider share some cost or upside.  Perhaps 10% of media is paid for by provider and 10% revenue of campaign paid back to provider (though that drives down profit for marketer). Or maybe the marketer will share some profit dollars above a threshold with providers based on reduced commission (lower the floor, raise the ceiling). This has some drawbacks, but it focuses the alignment. Cost per action or hours based solutions are flawed because the provider wants more and the marketer less.

What are your best solutions? What are the creative ways that you’ve dealt with this pricing friction?

The platform couldn’t accept non-standard fonts in PowerPoint, nor did it support PowerPoint animation. Further, the presentation tool could not be expanded on the presenter’s screen, so I was looking at small versions of my slides…thank goodness that I had my own printouts because my old eyes couldn’t read my own slides!

So, rant for today: If you live on the web, as a company, keep up with the times. Legacy is no reason to have a poor user interface. Technology is lighter, there are open standards. Just because it is your software, don’t let it get stagnant. Grow your tech as fast as the eco-system in which it lives.

It is a big deal. I always had a good feeling about this software provider. They are known for scale, for servicing the Forbes 100, and my experience was as if I were sitting in a conference room in 1999. They weren’t gracious from a technology perspective, or an interface perspective and my opinion of them has dropped precipitously. We could have had similar functionality from a low-touch implementation like Join.me. Enterprise doesn’t need to mean old and clunky and scale doesn’t mean staid.

Here is the rub – the lack of transparency on the part of SEO consultants (heck, let’s extend this to marketing consultants as a whole) about what they are going to do and the value of those activities makes buying SEO services a huge leap of faith for customers. The customer ends up buying a pile of research, some recommendations and a lot of hope. And regardless of how rigorous their research and approach, the consultant does not know which of their activities drove which kind of results.

There are firms that try to quantify the expenses based on effort, pricing by the hour. And this is a reasonable way to think of SEO services. But if you are a marketer, since you pay up front for the work, you are essentially gambling that your investment will pay off. You are paying and praying. And if you are the consultant, by pricing this way, you are truncating your business opportunity because if you are charging by the hour, you need people to man those hours. In order to book 30 billable hours a week, a consultant probably needs to spend 60 at the keyboard. This inhibits your scale. Your team must grow in lockstep with the scale of your business. This mandates that your margin stays roughly the same. You never gain in percentage profitability or grab any true economies of scale.

There are other companies that work by the word. They will focus on 10 or 12 keywords and charge you per word. These tend to be smaller guys, and may be leveraging a network of sites for linking purposes. However, I like the model. The fee is discrete. If you, as the marketer, only see benefit in a particular word, then that is the only thing you pay for. However, as any good marketer knows, consumers aren’t that simple. They have thousands of ways of expressing intent to engage with your business, and the chances of you picking the very best ones are slim. For the consultant, working on a per word basis is also limiting, because you may be laser-focused on [head term], and you end up generating great results in [blue head term]. Guess what? You aren’t getting paid. This doesn’t work for anyone.

There are a burgeoning crop of companies that work on the “per click” model, essentially trying to replicate the discrete nature of the paid search billing experience. This would be a terrific model if the reasons for search positioning were transparent. And they aren’t. If you are the marketer, and you see that you started to suddenly get organic clicks on [head term], you are thinking, “Awesome! My print ads (or mobile ads or blog post or price reduction or positive thinking) around [head term] are REALLY starting to pay off!” And, if you are the SEO guys? You are thinking “Awesome! That titling change (or meta data or text change or link I acquired or server side change I made) around [head term] is really starting to pay off!”. So who is right? Both of you. Per click only works if everything is discrete. And organic search never will be.

So what is a marketer to do? What is an SEO agency to do?

My concept is this:

1. Marketer & Agency agree on an attribution model. Doesn’t matter which one, it just needs to be clear.
2. Agency does their best effort in every respect. Marketer must generally agree with agency approach.
3. Agency bills for a percentage of increase in sales through organic search against a rolling 3 month average as determined by attribution model. Maybe there is a minimum spend, maybe there isn’t.

Sound off…what do retailers think? What do agencies think? I know you are out there!

I have been doing some kind of sales for most of the last 22 years. During that time, I have talked to a lot of people. And there is that moment during the sales process where you scramble to find common ground, a bit of shared interest, and a spark of commonality that becomes the touchstone of your burgeoning relationship. (And a relationship is what all successful transactions are built on.) In the world of e-commerce, we find commonality in brands or products, in pricing approach, or perhaps, shared causes. The relationship between consumer and marketer is, without a doubt, tenuous at best during the first (or first few) transactions. Over time, the consumer grows a relationship with the marketer around met expectations, and quality of experience.

But the marketer rarely returns the investment.

The marketer does not grow their relationship with the consumer. Target, when they use big data to discover that a shopper is likely preggers, is making an effort to create life-stage relevancy. But most marketers use scant data to make my shopping experience better. (Why show me another washer when I just bought one? I might more likely prefer coupons for detergent, or a great deal on a hose checkup in 2 years or something.) This is hard stuff, and since the marketer has an incomplete profile of my economic activity, they can usually only see the world through their narrow lens. But, let’s try to use the massive computing power we have available to make some really good investment in growing the relationship that marketers have with consumers.

The are super-smart big data companies like Cognection that drive data-based product recommendations. There are others like ChoiceStream that do on-the-fly analysis to present the consumer with “moments that matter” (sorry, but how seriously do you take yourself, ChoiceStream?!?). And there are smart-tech companies like SiteSpect that allow you to reassemble pages infinitely to find the right personalized approach.  But all of these require marketers to think on a one-to-one level with their consumers. It is no longer spray and pray with marketing. This is about relationship building. This is about marketers realizing that competition and lost sales are only 1 click away.

If you build a real relationship with a customer and think about years-long engagement rather than just transaction long engagements, you will create a sustainable, authentic relationship that lasts (and creates economic value).

Stop being fake. Be authentic and scramble for the common ground with consumers. It matters. Your long-term success hangs in the balance. Do you want to be Amazon (long-term, relationship, value-add, trusted) or Best Buy (transactionally-based, promotion-heavy and closing 50 stores)? Invest and be real.

I am of two minds here with regard to Google:

1. Tracking Is Good: Things like personalized search results, good You Tube recommendations, improved ads (what defines improved remains to be seen) are all “good”. They make the services that you use more helpful. I believe this to be true.
2. Tracking is Bad: Things like personalized search results,  You Tube recommendations, improved ads are all “bad”. They fool me into seeing things or buying things that I may not have considered. They are manipulative. I also believe this to be true. (Check out The Filter Bubble – Eli Pariser for more information about the potential negative impact of personalization.)

The real issue between good and bad is execution. For instance, with respect to Google’s (or whomever’s…this is a global issue) retargeting algorithms, I had a professional reason to look at a bunch of SEO & PPC platforms recently. Google clearly watched me do this and started showing me retargeting ads for these kinds of platforms. I am not a buyer of these platforms. I am NOT a good use of advertising dollars.

But my recent actions made me look like a buyer. I visited 10-15 similar sites in a short period of time, so now my display ads and search ads shown in the content network are heavily skewed. (Just as an FYI, Conductor & Acquisio, you maybe want to ask for credit for about 50 impressions each…they were wasted.) So tracking me was good for the advertiser because I looked like a buyer, but it was wasted and made my digital experience worse because I’m not.

I would argue that the inefficiency could have been reduced if Google knew even more about me. If they knew (or saw through my site actions) that I was hunting for logos to put in a presentation about search, they perhaps would not have wasted those impressions. It is the execution that matters, and I think that knowing more about me in a cross-channel and cross-dimensional way would make advertising more efficient and more relevant (and less annoying).

So,when Google-owned You Tube is layering ads for search platforms while I am watching videos with my kids, it is a little creepy. But worse, it annoyingly non-contextual. (How many serious search platform buyers are in the decision-zone while watching “Wheels on the Bus” videos?)

But I really crossed into the creepy zone when I installed Highlight on my iPhone. Highlight is a passive GPS platform that alerts me when other people I share common interests are around. It was something of a SXSW darling, and I only installed it because of the press that it received.

And, nearly immediately, it got creepy.

My first connection was on the train. My phone buzzed, and I looked at it. It told me that there was someone nearby. I open up the application. It gave me a picture (blonde hair), a name (Rachel X) , a place of employment (hot tech company in Boston), the things that we like in common on Facebook (Bostinno, Starbucks, and the hot tech company she works for).

In 13 seconds, I spotted her on the train. I was very uncomfortable.

I don’t know this woman. We have no reason to cross paths, personally. I was so uncomfortable knowing what I did about her in an anonymous environment. She was commuting. She was reading a book (a paper one, how quaint). She was not networking. She did not give me explicit permission to know her name, her position and company, or tell me that she likes coffee.

Obviously, she opted-in to make those things available via Highlight. And likely, she knew the same things about me. I didn’t care what she knew about me. I felt, well, a little dirty, knowing things about her. It crossed some kind of line where I had an unintentional voyeuristic look into this woman’s life. I didn’t want it.

Highlight is the perfect example of execution gone wrong. It might be terrific if when I walked near someone it would quietly remind me of their name, or perhaps the last time we spoke, or the name of their dog, or whatever we have that we need to build a common bond around. But that should be something that you have to instigate (like when I am at a party and after I have had a lovely chat with someone I ask my wife who they are…(so, here is a confession, if I ever don’t use your first name in a conversation, it means that I can’t remember it…sorry!)).

Highlight tries to be smart. It takes many things that we publish on Facebook or Twitter or some other place, assembles them quickly and presents it to us in near real time. It is cool, and smart, and interesting, and totally, totally, totally creepy.

It crosses a line, and her name is Rachel.