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.

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.

What do banks, realtors, accountants, law firms and your mother in-law have in common?

The answer  – you don’t want to join their Facebook Fan page!

Hold on  - before you start accusing me of being socially-media incompetent, hear me out. I am not a hermit, I do have friends, and some of them are even real. I even admire some people. But only for a very small select group of people (such as Michael Jordan and Sting), would I ever consider to be a devoted fan.

The dictionary defines fan as “an ardent devotee; an enthusiast which is short for fanatic”.  When Facebook designed the “fan” page functionality , they probably had in mind a nifty little feature designed to help their ongoing battle with MySpace, which had experienced great success among artists and musicians. I cannot imagine they envisioned scenarios that included banks, accountants and furniture stores. Their attempt later to correct this with an “official page” and “community page” just proves my point.

Fan worthy example

There is pressure on marketers to create fan pages for their brands today even if their gut feeling tells them there is no added value to do so. I feel the pressure from clients and I want to speak out before the sh*t hits the (Facebook) fan.

What is so wrong with “fanning” your CPA – after all, the guy got you a nice rebate last year? Well, it’s a bit like running into him at the pool. Without his suit and pocket protector, as he stands there toweling himself off and his wife smears Coppertone onto his back, you are standing there thinking, “This guy is incredibly white and out of shape, and now that’s what’s stuck in my head – not his great tax planning skills.” You realize that you were no not supposed to see each other like this

Next time, when you debate whether your brand should have a fan page or not here are some suggested guidelines to consider:

Does your brand have real fans, or at least enthusiasts that can get excited about your stuff? If you are a Coke, Apple, Gap, Carlos Santana  or Green Peace, the answer is easy. However, if you are a mortgage bank during a recession or a mother-in-law or a jewelry store – think twice. There are many other platforms suitable for this type of activity such as Linkedin and Linkedin Groups, professional forums and cafes.

Here are some good examples for appropriate Fan pages:

I thought this fan page is “sponge worthy !”

Well that’s a no brainer

Just trying to plug my favorite musician

Trike is used when it’s not possible to drive a car through the area Google wants to map to deliver their wonderful “Street View.” Having myself been doing some remote US real estate searches, I find Street View indispensable and was very disappointed when I could not access a street view of a property I was interested in.

Mapping and GPSing are soon to cover every piece of earth’s terrain, the ocean floor and deep space. With street view you can already peak into people’s back yards. Big Brother is here and he’s mapping everything he can get access to. Now even the last frontiers of the wilderness cannot hide anymore from Trike.

Next, we can probably expect the ability to view just about everything in real time. No more old videos and stills. I want to see what is happening in downtown Sioux City Iowa and Mt. Kilimanjaro now!

Some people may jump to think, “hey, that’s cool”. And it is. Imagine planning your vacation and first being able to see if people are enjoying themselves, if it is crowded, are there long lines? And even more useful, the unibombers and child abductors of the world will have to work harder to dig deeper into the ground to hide.
But if everyplace on the planet is becoming accessible to us in real time – that includes you and I as well! And how would that affect our lives? As live feeds become so abundant I think we have to ask ourselves where this trend might stop. Knowing Google, they will stop just short of Privacy Infringement and No Foreseeable Capitalization.
But for the sake of posting a warning, let’s pretend there are no limits. In that case, what else should Google map? Well, here are some of my thoughts. You are welcome to comment and add your own.

1. Mapping imaginary places
Imagine the impact of Google mapping imaginary places such as Narnia, Oz or Never Never Land. Mapping them could be a literary catastrophe. Treasure hunting will take only a few hours, The Rocky Horror Picture Show would never have happened since no one would get lost . . .

2. Ethical Mapping
For corporate giants who wish to do no harm but their ego driven conscience keeps pulling them in the wrong direction. The app should have an embedded compass.

3. Send a Trike up your butt.
Well, the technology is there. You can swallow a pill and map things from the other direction, all the way through your intestines. So if Given Imaging and Google get together they can offer the US border patrol images of what’s being smuggled in bodies even sponsor “the asshole of the year contest,” allowing live feeds of colons from around the world.

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.