The Paris Hilton Search Paradox

Search Engines’ holy grail is to serve relevant search results. Their livelihood depends on that. But what is “relevant”? On the road from textual search to semantic universal search, SE’s are trying to resolve the relevancy puzzle. Machine based database queries cannot truly decipher my human intentions. The popular example used for the “search intention” conflict is the Paris Hilton paradox. Am I searching for Paris Hilton the celeb or am I working on my travel plan for my vacation in France and trying to find a hotel?

So far, Google has tried to resolve the issue by analyzing my behavioral and geographic parameters and assuming they can make an educated guess about what I really want. Google can take into consideration a range of relevant data, such as whether I searching from France,  my search history and my online “habits”, given that I am logged in to my Google account when I do most of my searching.  They know a hell of a lot about me from – medical issues, to what I like to cook to which sports teams I probably root for. But unless I am logged into my Google account or Gmail, Google should not be nosing around in what I do online.

Many critics accuse Google of building the world’s largest spyware. But relative to Facebook’s potential to enter the personal space of anyone with a Facebook account (is there anyone without one?), Google has only touched the behavioral data surface.

Consider our Paris Hilton dilemma once more. Google is forced to make a lot of (somewhat educated) guesses about what I am in search of, while Facebook is armed with a killer relevancy weapon – my Social Network data. Consider the type of data Facebook can access about me and track:

Have I recently connected with friends in Paris?

Am I a Paris Hilton Fan?

Are any of my friends her fan or “liked” any of her apps?

Have I recently searched for a related topic from the same tag cloud?

Did any of my close friends or family conduct such a search?

Is my girlfriend living in Paris?

Do I want to study French cooking?

Am I interested in travel applications or celebrity tracking applications?

Facebook’s potential power to deliver the right search resolution is enormous and no doubt will be capitalized on. It presents an enormous challenge for Google and a huge opportunity for marketers to jump on the Facebook wagon early in the game.

Consider how powerful a tool the web is for you. You can use the Web, including social media, to listen to patients and better understand them. You can use the web to inform patients and reach out to them directly. And you can engage patients directly, on the Internet.

When we ran our first online patient recruitment campaign a few years ago, we were blown away by how candid potential patients were. We were approaching people in pain and we quickly understood, from the responses that we were receiving, that when people are in pain, and you appear to be a potential savior, they are willing to open up and share, with the hope that you may offer them relief. Of course with that said, it is very important to build credibility and to gain trust. Even over a short period of a few years, the Internet has changed drastically and users are more cautious today.

But when you get the opportunity to listen to the family members and patients, it is an incredible opportunity to align your messaging and your approach to what your audience really needs. It is becoming more and more critical in recruiting patients to recognize their concerns and needs. Consumer marketing departments do it all the time so it seems obvious that medical marketing should be doing it as well, to me anyway. Levis wants to know what I am looking for in a pair of jeans. Shouldn’t Merck take an interest in my concerns about insulin injections?

The Internet is an efficient platform for informing patients of ongoing studies. At the precise moment a patient is seeking information or solutions, you have an opportunity to be there to tell them what you are doing. Within seconds, when done right, you can capture the interest of a potential candidate and have them supplying all of the necessary pre-screening information.

Then you have the opportunity for engagement, where you can begin creating a relationship and communicating with your audience. This can support efforts to recruit patients for a study or, over a longer period of time, build a relationship with product advocates and patients.

Recruiting patients via the Internet may be the best ROI available in the market. A combination of online advertising and social media can be a truly powerful and cost-efficient methodology. For many areas of medicine, it is the best first effort a company can make. And once it has delivered as many people as it can reach, it is possible to move on to the more traditional, more expensive approaches.

In cases where the reach is not sufficient, this can be due to the nature of the study or of the geographical region. For example, certain types of medical conditions are more likely to be searched online by patients than others and certainly there are differences in how much the Internet is being used in certain regions. As basic as it may sound, if recruitment for a clinical trial is in a region that does not offer fast Internet, the pool of potential patients may be too small and other methods will likely be needed to reach out to enough patients. You need to have a good understanding of the target audience, what motivates them and with which media you may be able to capture their attention.

On the other hand, it seems like there is a belief that anyone can go online and reach their goals if they just spend a few months learning, reading and hiring some reasonably priced developers, designers, writers – or whatever. The modern day gold rush.

I meet lots of  people from the latter group (#2). And it never ceases to amaze me how naive they can be. To be fair, in many cases they are simply highly budget sensitive and trying to bootstrap on a shoestring. On the other hand, there are still companies in Israel, who seem to think that they can compete internationally with companies that take their Internet planning and marketing seriously.

It’s not just that these companies don’t take their online marketing seriously enough, they actually believe that running forward, saving a dollar here and there and not spending any time to plan, is the way to go. They give the online marketing to their MarCom manager to handle. They raise their eyebrow at him or her if he has the hutzpa to suggest he may need some outside help to plan their online strategy and then they wonder why, if they have their very own Twitter account, Facebook fan page, blog and $15,000 web site — business isn’t booming. Some will actually conclude that the Internet is just not the right place to invest – since they already spent a whopping $25,000 and leads and sales did not come pouring in. Others, just may realize they need to get serious.

I get calls all of the time telling me — “I hired this guy to program, the other guy to SEO and whats her name to design my site. But its all a mess. What should I do?”  I’ll usually ask — can I see the spec defining what you wanted? Who managed the project? There is usually silence at the other end. Then I explain that it sounds like they need some serious damage control but there are not many people out there willing to take such work on — cleaning up someone else’s mess. Why? Because it usually involves more work than starting over and the client who gets himself into such a mess is usually not the kind of client who understands that he has to pay for that.

Bottom line – if you don’t plan your online presence and align it well to a real internet marketing strategy, and hire a team that knows what you expect of them, managed by someone who has the ability to see the big picture . . . you will run into problems.

Still don’t believe me? Think of it like building your own house in Israel. You need to understand the bureaucratic process that is required to get permits. You need to have a blue print of the house plan. You need engineering plans. You need interior decoration plans. Etc. You can hire a project manager – someone who knows how to coordinate all of the needs, hire the right people, ensure the contractors are synchronized, etc. And it will cost you more. Or you can do what lots of Israelis do and save money. I can pick out those houses from a mile away. We have friends who did this and you can actually smell their house from a mile away — no one made sure the plumber put any ventilation in. Each contractor they hired did not work according to a professional plan – each one did what was easiest for them, knowing there was no one overseeing their work. Water enters the house through every light fixture, doors don’t close properly, an iron beam stands in the middle of the house to support weight from the second floor that was not planned for . . . Does this sound like your web site?

Actually, I am not a social media consultant or social media expert, at least I would never introduce myself that way. I know a whole lot about social media and how it can fit in, or not fit in, to an overall Internet marketing mix. And Dror knows even more than I do.  But when a company jumps on the bandwagon and without any clear goals or strategy, decides it needs a Facebook fan page or Twitter account, count me out. It’s probably not a client I could end up pleasing. Why? Becuase I would be honest with them, even if it cost me getting a job. Ween a CPA tells me he wants his own Fan page, I am compelled to tell him that CPA’s don’t have fans. Sorry to all the accountants in my family. But I could probably come up with some much better ways for him to achieve his goals

When a company is seeking how to leverage the internet for risk management, media exposure, standing out from competitors, improving and expanding message delivery, etc. etc. count us in.

I’ve been saying it about SEO and now I’ll say it about social media — these are all tactics and without an overall, solid, well thought out online marketing strategy, nothing much will come of it.  It’s great that today you can readily higher a guy in Pakistan to SEO your website by writing to everyone and his mother to place a link to your site from their site. Heck, you can hire a woman in Southern Spain to create a Twitter account and tweet your content in Spanish all day (I’ve done it when an LA Medical institute we worked with needed to reach out to the large Spanish speaking population of LA). But at the end of the day, you need to be sure that it is somehow serving your goals and that it is doing so effectively.

So when should you jump on the social media bandwagon? When you have some goals for what your Internet marketing efforts should bring you and you can use the social media tools that exist today to help you achieve those goals. Imagine that you can use social media to understand where a certain customer group is most sensitive and then provide them with the solution they were seeking from your competitors. Imagine that you can use social media to get the word out about a new beta release.  Or imagine that you establish a devoted fan base who love your music that is not yet available to the general public. Some CEO Tweeting what he did this weekend may have been novel for about a day, maybe longer if your CEO is Steve Jobs.

Dror worked together with Yagil of in- Design. Yagil has cooperated with WebWhile on several projects over the years and always manages to understand our crazy  thinking and to breath graphic life into our creative concepts.  WebWhile and Coca Interactive are now cooperating on the redesign of the leading web filter software web site and it should be up and running in the coming weeks. Looking forward to reporting on the improved results for bounce rate, click through and conversion on the Optenet PC web filter site as well.

And for all of you still looking for “the best’  SEO companies in Israel because you think you can zoom in on one tactic to solve your online marketing challenges, feel free to talk to Itzik at Interspace. He’ll explain why you need Internet Marketing consulting from experts with lots of experience, a wide understanding of business and how to do business on the Internet and a solid grasp of the web technologies (not hype) that are available and can enhance what you do.

1. Is your website effective? – Check your stats!

This point is so trivial that it’s surprising that site managers I meet don’t routinely and methodically check their metrics. Check your stats! If your site has a clear bottom line then measuring the effectiveness of the site is easy. Just look at the bottom line and compare the change results. But even if your site has softer goals on your Google analytics, there are always parameters to measure, anything from time spent on site, stickiness or contact submission.
If you have not already done so, set the goals up and start monitoring.

2. Integrity

If you were pulled to too many directions and did not find focus, your site will end up looking as busy as a smorgasbord. Your visitor won’t know what you want from them. And that means you probably lost him. Trust your senses. Take a fresh look at the artistic aspect of the site changes. Ask yourself and relevant focus groups if the site changes make sense and how they affect the overall integrity of your website.

3. The 7 second test

Give seven people seven seconds to look at the site and then tell you what it’s about. If they fail – you are out of focus.


4. Evolution vs. revolution

In most cases, after your online brand is established, business focus, design or copy changes should have an evolutionary nature. Embrace the change, don’t fear it. Make the change part of your ongoing routine. Ultimately, the site will evolve more accurately then in the extreme makeover alternative, in the right direction. Small changes can have tremendous impact.


5. Focus

Know why you are changing and stick to that goal. Avoid unnecessary changes for the sake of changes without having a distinct goal.


6. Don’t fall in love

Don’t fall in love with your work or with the concept or design. Avoid contractors who hold a “take it or leave it” attitude. Your test is not how much change you managed to make to the site’s appearance or behavior– it’s how much change you managed to make to the site’s performance. Keep your mind open to a roll back option and make sure it’s technically easy to implement a roll back.


7. Too many cooks spoil the stew

Do you feel like there are too many cooks in your website change process? Get rid of them! Be open to team work and suggestions but explain to your managers that there has to be a clear project management hierarchy with a single point of decision making. Otherwise, nothing gets done and the change reflects a compromise more than wise decision-making.

• Am I slow?

1. always
2. sometimes
3. never

• Do I know my marketing stuff?

1. I rock
2. sometimes
3. I stink

No need to do the math. You just need to add a Quiz to your website and start seeing everyone and his grandmother starting taking the Quiz and even more important, perhaps, see them all link back to your site from their articles, web pages, emails, Tweets, blog posts . . . The next thing to do is upgrade the quiz and add it to a social media app.

Do you put your toilet paper face up or face down? Who is your favorite dwarf? Which MJ (Michael Jackson or Michael Jordan) are you more like?

People are amazed at how so many, silly quizzes grab the attention of thousands, if not millions. I say, why ask why, just join the fun and enjoy the results. For a medical wellness project we are working on, we developed  a cool Sleep Well Quiz and even cooler Eat Well Quiz. The uniquely designed quizzes are riding on Drupal CMS, were graphically implemented in the most professional way by Inbal Mizrahi from Studio Cat & Dog and programmed by Linnovate . These online health quizzes have quickly become killer website magnets for the Aviisha site.

The challenge was to strike a balance between providing medical information on a boring, complex subject – sleep apnea and nutrition while keeping the content fun and attractive. Since fun is the ultimate growth engine for anything online, we need to make the process slick yet fulfill the user’s self curiosity drive. Take a look at the eat well quiz and the sleep well quiz for inspiration and medical information. Maybe you’ll learn something about yourself, realize you need to see a doctor or will just enjoy learning a little.

I was taught that laissez fare capitalism, although while it sometimes doesn’t work perfectly, is the best off all evils. That’s what they told me at Temple University’s liberal arts college and that’s what I’ve been getting from most of my business education and environment. If you work hard and use your god-given talents, you can benefit from all that the land of equal opportunity has to offer.

This even worked for me on a personal level. I’ve managed to do well in my business life despite that I did not come from wealth. I busted my butt on my education while working 3 jobs, worked for minimum wage and made many personal compromises. Over time, I did succeed to climb up the ladder and accumulate experience and wealth.

It took more then the current economic crisis to for me to begin questioning the fundamentals of my belief paradigm.  What happened is that I became intensely involved in a new venture in the medical services field in the U.S.

It hit me like brick -  in America, money buys life. More then 40 million Americans don’t have health insurance! And many that do have medical coverage, have poor plans that do not cover enough to truly keep them healthy. Basically, in America, unless you have good health insurance to back you up or are cash rich, you will be deprived of your most elementary medical needs.

Most Americans reading that would say, “Yes, so . . .what else is new? Health care is a commodity – either you can afford it or not.” But all you need to do is open your eyes and realize that the world is changing and once again it’s to the credit of the Internet.

I suspect that Kim Jong-il, the leader of North Korea, is not twittering. But I am guessing that his intelligence agencies do. They study the Internet in order to control it. They know that free Internet access to North Koreans would bring and end to their regime. The greatest (fire) wall of China is only partially successful in blocking Chinese from freely opening up to rest of the world. Iranian new green revolt has been named already the “Twitter revolution”. It is not that all young educated Iranians are eager to make peace with Israelis like me; they just want to enjoy the freedom that they see that other young people world wide have. They want the freedom to get attention, to find dates, to be rebellious, to have fun, the freedom to find information that on issues relevant to their daily lives and belong to global communities. When they compare themselves to peers worldwide and feel discriminated, that’s when unrest can happen. What do demonstrating Africans, revolt youth in Paris, in Athens, Turkish teens in Germany and Palestinians kids in the West Bank all have in common? The answer is high speed internet, social media, and lots of frustration and feeling of being left behind.

When an American patient goes to his primary doctor and gets diagnosed, gets a test result or just when he suspects that he or a family member suffers from something, he is very likely to go immediately online and run a search. Before you can say Google, he’ll be exposed, like a growing number of Americans, to medical care they are being deprived of. A woman might learn through her Facebook that her friend is covered for a cosmetic procedure, while she wouldn’t be able to smile since her untreated teeth hurt so much. The more they learn about their compromised health and wellness, the more they’ll get frustrated with this system.

The writing is on the wall. The social medical revolution of the united state is simmering under the cyber. If you are a healthcare professional, a specially a US physician who have taken the hypocrites’ oath, you might have one day to explain to your kids, why were you standing on the sidelines while the revolution to demolish the inhuman, unjust realities of the American healthcare system was raging.

Many developers will, not surprisingly, seize on each opportunity that comes their way. Recently, we entered into the RFP process with a very large institution. We defined the site requirements and began a search for the right company to meet those requirements. One candidate, a not so small local development company of 100 employees, claimed expertise in one of the main requirements. It was only upon looking at what that claim was based on that we could determine that their so-called expertise was a significant exageration and could have been disastrous for the client. Building a site is child’s play today. Knowing how to build a site that meets the clients needs, will serve the client for some time to come, and is resilient and scalable from both a technical point of view as well as a marketing one, is another story. I have not met many developers in Israel who do this yet. In fact, even in the industries where there is little room for mistakes, the results are highly disappointing. For anyone that has experienced banking online, for example, just about any comparison between the experience locally and the experience with a large American bank, is like night and day. The problem can exist on several levels – design, UI, user experience, performance, technology.

Know that designing a website is tedious. It requires a wide variety of skills and you are unlikely to find one company that excels in everything. I have met countless small development companies that advertise everything from their open source expertise to their copy writing to SEO skills and don’t know much more than html. I am still trying to figure out how someone that hardly spoke English convinced clients to allow him to work on their SEO to the US American market. If a client is not up to speed- does that mean you are supposed to take advantage of them?
Here are my 5 tips for starting the process of building your online presence
1. Whether you are doing a redesign/rebuild of an existing site or a new site, force yourself to sit down and write down the goals of the site. 9/10 clients that I meet can’t answer me when I ask them what their online goals are. If it is to increase sales, for example, then my next question would be, as to whether you actually want to sell online. Of course many B2B companies are not selling online. But it’s still legitimate to use their online presence to increase sales – by developing leads and building the brand. So if a goal is to develop leads, then you at least know you want to convert visitors to the site to leads!
2. Have some budget in mind with the idea that it will likely need to change. If you think that today, you can build a top notch site on the cheap, sorry, you are very wrong. Budgets range from a few thousand to a few million – figure out where you can be inside that spectrum.
3. Look at what your competitors are doing. But if it does not impress you, do not feel compelled to duplicate them. Thinking out of the box online is what has led to the development
of so many interesting applications and experiences online. Give your visitor an experience that they will remember. Give them a reason to come back, to talk about you, to believe in you. We are years beyond the 2 dimensional corporate brochure sites. And if your CEO tells you that your industry happens to be the one industry in which online activity is not so important, get up the guts to tell him he is wrong.
4.Pricing for services will depend on how complicated the design of the website is. Create a Marketing Requirements Document to define everything you need the site to do. Many companies give the developers vague instructions and the end result is usually not satisfactory. If you don’t feel like you have a grasp on what you need, get help. This is a major part of your business. It’s kind of like building a house. You want an architect to figure out how to implement your needs and likes. Imagine what the house would look like if it was up to you and the builder. He would do what is easiest for him, you would neglect to spec out half of what is needed and when you find that you forgot to put electricty in the bedroom or a door to the backyard, going back to fix it will be messy and expensive.
5. Understand the pluses and minuses of having a CMS. You may not need one. If you do need one, maybe it can be basic. If it is a proprietary system keep in mind that you will have an ongoing relationship with the web developer – it’s his system and only he will be willing to support it. And when a developer tells you that the CMS is SEO compatible, you need to check that it is so. We have reviewed countless systems for clients over the years – none have come through as SEO-ready out of the box.

But those were the old days, when the idea of ROI (return on investment) seemed to skip over the IT department budget requirements. Looking back, less than a decade later, such an attitude looks distant and ridiculous. Today, good IT management is judged on its ability to achieve results with as little as possible. With economic and competitive pressures mounting, IT management needs to run efficiently. Even terms such as collocation and web hosting from the ASP era seems to be absolute. Today, the weight has shifted and IT managers boast about the number of applications and services being served to their firm and how they have minimized expenditures.

This IT Management evolution was all made possible due the maturity of SAAS, (Software as a Service), going main stream. Over the last years we have experienced an escalation of applications migrating from the desktop to the Internet. Apparently, the physical conditions of both the Internet and network infrastructure have matured enough and made the economic option of SAAS the obvious solution.

First of all, it’s always about the numbers. Now, organizations can question whether it is sensible to purchase, configure, host, maintain, air condition, and backup. Suddenly, worrying about application software and hardware is optional. Alternatively, for a fraction of the cost, a company can “rent” applications remotely using a PC browser or a cellular browser and they can do this anywhere and any time, 24×7.

An additional key factor elevating SAAS solutions beyond the ASP approach is the advancements in available infrastructure. Grid-like cloud computing is virtually infinite. Now, solution providers can readily follow pioneers such as SalesForce or even Google and “SaaS” their offering. More computing power is available to your company at a moments notice when business prospers and grows. This makes expenses linear and profits more predictable. SaaS has redefined scalability. Therefore, in most SaaS scenarios, pricing to the end consumers makes more sense because it is tied directly to consumption meters such as usage volume and allocated resources per client. In parallel, bandwidth has become cheaper and wider for companies and their roaming employees.

Thirdly, economic mood swings and a competitive business environment have made ROI the new king of the block. The macro-economic implications of this trend can be even far greater than what appears on the surface. As the growth of SaaS is taking off, is it possible that we will see the thin client vision making a comeback? Even desktops can get skinnier if processing is done in the SaaS’s clouds. This could result in a slowdown in the race for processing power and might even challenge Moor’s laws economically.

One of the most interesting up and coming companies positioned to successfully leverage the SaaS computing trends is SAManage, a startup company in the IT Asset Management space. SAManage uses the cloud computing environment to deliver on-demand, SaaS-based, IT Asset Management and inventory tracking to companies around the world. In a recent conversation with the SAManage CEO, Doron Gordon, I asked him about his strategy, given the changing landscape of the traditional IT environment and the new challenges facing IT managers.  “It seems, on one hand that IT managers lives are getting easier, but unfortunately that’s a false assumption. Yes, it’s true there will be less hardware to manage, but managing SaaS contracts, licenses and SLA’s smartly and efficiently, while controlling the financial and legal aspects and enforcing usage policy, are the new challenges that the IT manager will be facing.” Doron continues, “With ROI being the holy grail of IT management today, SAManage’s focus is on providing the manager the tools to achieve that.”

Clearly, the new IT Manager needs to make ROI calculations continuously. And guess what — they don’t teach you that in engineering schools! Looking through the clouds, it seems that companies hiring CTOs will be looking for applicants with CFO experience.