Blind Five Year Old

Links are still an important part of ranking well in search. While I believe engagement signals are what ultimately get you to the top of a search result, links are usually necessary to get on the first page.

In the rush to measure everything, I find many are inadvertently limiting their opportunities. They fail to grasp the invisible attribution model of link acquisition, which is both asymmetrical and asynchronous.

The result? Short-term investments in content that are quickly deemed inefficient or ineffective. Meanwhile savvy marketers are drinking your milkshake.

Link Building vs Link Acquisition

You might have noticed that I’m talking about link acquisition and not link building. That’s because I think of them as two different efforts.

I view link building as traditional outreach, which can be measured by close rates and links acquired. You can determine which version of your pitch letter works best or which targets are more receptive. Measurement is crystal clear.

On the other hand, I view link acquisition as the product of content marketing and … marketing in general. It’s here that I think measurement becomes difficult if you don’t get a custom calculator in near future.

Shares and Links 

Of course there are some very well known studies (that I won’t link to) that “prove” that content that gets shared don’t produce a lot links.

I guess that’s it folks. End of post, right?

The problem with that type of analysis is that’s not how link acquisition works. Not in the slightest.

Asymmetrical

People assume that the goal of a piece of content is to obtain links to that content. Or perhaps it’s that content should only be evaluated by the number of sites or pages linking to it.

Clearly that’s an easy metric. It feels right. It’s easy to report on and explain to management. But I think it misses the point. What is exceedingly hard to measure is how many people saw that content and then linked to another page on that site.

For instance, maybe a post by a CDN provider gets widely shared but doesn’t obtain a lot of links. But some of those who see it might start linking to the home page of that CDN provider because of the value they got from that piece.

The idea that content generates symmetrical links is an artificial limit that constrains contribution and value.

Asynchronous

Links are not acquired right after content is published. Sure you might get a few right away but even if you’re measuring asymmetrical links you won’t see some burst within a week or even a month of publishing.

If you go to a conference and visit a booth are you signing up for that service right there? Probably not. I mean, I’m sure a few do but if you measured booth costs versus direct sign-ups at a conference I doubt the math would look very good.

Does that mean it’s a bad strategy? No. That booth interaction contributes to a sale down the road. The booth interaction and resulting sale are asynchronous.

Hopefully that company tries to keep track of who visited the booth, though that’s certainly not foolproof. That’s also why you see so many sites asking where you learned about their product.

They’re trying to fill in the invisible parts of an attribution model.

Saturation Marketing 

My background is in marketing and advertising so I might come at this from a different perspective. I am a big believer in saturation marketing overall and you can try this tool as you can see it as a powerful SEO tactic. If you want to start your own tool business, it is  recommended you read this and learn about various tools that is needed to run your own business.

Here’s an example. I go to a Sharks game and the boards are covered in logos.

If we’re using a symmetrical and synchronous model of attribution I’d have to jump down onto the ice and rent a car from Enterprise right then and there to make that sponsorship worthwhile.

That’s ludicrous, right? But why do we hold our content to that standard?

Story Time

Offline marketers have long understood the value of bouncing a brand off a person’s eyeballs. I didn’t fully appreciate this until I was in my first job out of college.

I worked at an advertising agency outside of Washington D.C.. Our big client was The Army National Guard. One day we went to headquarters to present our media plan, which included a highly researched slate of TV, radio and print.

Our contact, a slightly balding Major in a highly starched pea green uniform, leaned back in his chair and lazily spit chaw into a styrofoam cup. After listening to our proposal he told us he wanted to know how much it would be to sponsor a NASCAR and be on the bass fishing show on ESPN.

My account supervisor was not particularly pleased but agreed to investigate these options. That task fell to me. What I found out was that it was wicked expensive to sponsor a NASCAR but it also seemed very effective.

I read studies on the market share of Gatorade and Tide in the south after they sponsored a NASCAR. We’re talking 400% growth. Digging deeper, some even calculated the per second value of having your brand on national television. I was fascinated.

Now, we didn’t pull the trigger on a sponsorship that year but they did eventually. However, the demographics of NASCAR changed and the sponsorship turned out to be less than effective. (Though it’s interesting to see that attribution was still an issue during their analysis.)

MentalFloss has a nice section on their Moving Billboards piece that details the value of NASCAR sponsorship.

In 2006, Eric Wright of Joyce Julius Associates, a research firm dedicated to sponsorship impact measurement, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that the average screen time for a race car’s primary sponsor during a typical race is 12.5 minutes and the average number of times the announcers mention the sponsor is 2.6 times per race. The comparable value to the sponsor for the time on screen, according to Wright, is $1.7 million. A sponsor’s exposure goes up if its driver takes the checkered flag or is involved in a wreck, especially if the wreck occurs in the later stages of the race and the company name is still visible when the car comes to a stop. “If you crash, crash fabulously, and make sure your logo is not wrinkled up,'” Dave Hart of Richard Childress Racing once told a reporter.

The emphasis is mine. And clearly you might quibble with their calculations. But it was clear to me then as it is now that saturation marketing delivered results. Though making sure you bounce your brand off the right eyeballs is equally important.

Branded Search

Another way to validate this approach is to look at how advertising impacts branded search. One of my clients is a David in a vertical with a Goliath. They don’t have a big advertising budget. So they’re doing a test in one market. Here’s the branded search for each according to Google Trends.

It’s pretty easy to spot where my client is doing their advertising test!

Now, I’ve shown this a few times recently. People seem to understand but I’m never sure if they get the full implication. You might even be asking what this has to do with link acquisition.

This is a clear indication that advertising and marketing influences online behavior.

By the power of Grayskull we have the power! Now, in this case it’s offline advertising. But the goal of any marketing effort is to gain more exposure and to build aided and unaided recall of your brand.

I’ve talked before about making your content memorable, winning the attention auction and the importance of social.

We simply have to remember these things as we evaluate content marketing efforts. And far too many aren’t. Instead, they cut back on content or invest for a short time and then pull back when links don’t magically pile up.

Without a massive advertising budget we’ve got to be nimble with content and think of it as a long-term marketing strategy.

Attribution Models

I have one client who had a decent blog but was wary of investing any further because it didn’t seem to contribute much to the business.

A funny thing happened though. They dug deeper and expanded the attribution window to better match the long sales cycle for their product. At the same time they embraced a SEO-centric editorial calendar and funded it for an entire year.

The result? Today that blog generates seven figures worth of business. Very little of that is attributed on a last click basis. People don’t read a blog post and then buy. But they do come back later and convert through other channels.

Those sales are asymmetrical and asynchronous.

Unfortunately, I find that very few do attribution well if at all. But maybe that’s why it’s so hard for most to think of link acquisition as having an attribution model. Adding to the problem, many of the touch points are invisible.

You don’t know who saw a Tweet that led to a view of a piece of content. Nor whether they later saw an ad on Facebook. Nor whether they dropped by your booth at a trade show. Nor whether they had a conversation with a colleague at a local event. Nor whether they visited the site and read a secondary piece of content.

You see, links don’t suddenly materialize. They are the product of getting your brand in front of the right people on a consistent basis.

Proof?

That blog I talked about above. Here’s what referring domains for the site looks like over the past year.

Here’s the graph for that David vs Goliath client who I convinced to invest in top of funnel content.

Of course you can see that ahrefs had a bit of an anomaly in January of this year and started finding more referring domains for all sites. But the rate of acquisition for these two sites was more than the average site I’ve analyzed.

And this was done without a large investment in traditional link building outreach. In one case, there was essentially no traditional link building.

Links equal Recommendations

I think we forget about why and how people wind up linking. Remember that links are essentially a citation or an endorsement. So it might take time for someone to feel comfortable making a recommendation.

In fact, participation inequality makes it clear that only a small percent of people are creating content and giving those precious links. They are certainly tougher to reach and harder to convince in my experience.

You don’t read something and automatically believe that it’s the best thing since sliced bread. (Or at least you shouldn’t.) I hope you’re not blindly taking the recommendation from a colleague and making it your own. Think about how you give recommendations to others offline. Seriously, think about why you made your last recommendation.

Recommendations are won over time.

Action Items

You might be convinced by my thesis but could be struggling to figure out how it helps you. Here’s what I’d offer up as concrete take aways.

Stop measuring content solely on links acquired

I’m not saying you shouldn’t measure links to content. You should. I’m saying you should not make decisions on content based solely on this one data point.

Start measuring your activity

I’d argue that certain activity levels translate into link acquisition results. How many pieces of content are you producing each month? How much time are you dedicating to the marketing of that content? My rule of thumb is at least as much time as you took producing it. I’ve seen others argue for three times the time it took to produce it.

Want to get more detailed? Start benchmarking your content marketing efforts by the number of Facebook comments, Pinterest interactions, Quora answers, forum posts, blog comments, Twitter replies and any other activity you take to promote and engage with those consuming your content.

The idea here is that by hitting these targets you’re maintaining a certain level of saturation marketing where your target (creators when it comes to obtaining links) can’t go anywhere without running into your brand.

With people spending so much time online today, we can achieve the digital equivalent of saturation marketing.

Use an attribution model

While not about links per se, getting comfortable with attribution will help you feel better about your link acquisition efforts and make it easier to explain it to management.

Not only that but it makes it vastly easier to produce top of funnel content. Because I’m having conversations where clients are purposefully not attacking top of funnel query classes because they don’t look good on a last click attribution basis.

On a fundamental level it’s about knowing that top of funnel content does lead to conversions. And that happens not just for sales but for links too.

TL;DR

Content plays an important role in securing links. Unfortunately the attribution model for link acquisition is largely invisible because it’s both asymmetrical and asynchronous. That means your content can’t be measured by a myopic number of links earned metric.

Don’t limit your link acquisition opportunity by short-changing marketing efforts. Link acquisition is about the sum being greater than the parts. Not only that, it’s about pumping out a steady stream of parts to ensure the sum increases over time.

The reason growth hacking works has nothing to do with growth hacking and everything to do with blowing up organizational silos.

What Is Growth Hacking?

Marketers love to market. We’re forever repackaging and rebranding, even when it comes to our own profession. Can you blame us really? We’re frequently the last ones to get the credit and the first ones to get the blame and corresponding pink slip.

Nevertheless these redefinitions often induce a sigh and eye-roll from yours truly. Do we really have to go through all this again? Perhaps I’m just cranky and getting old.

Sean Ellis was the first to bring the term growth hacking to the mainstream in his 2010 post.

A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth.  Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth.

They must have the creativity to figure out unique ways of driving growth in addition to testing/evolving the techniques proven by other companies.

An effective growth hacker also needs to be disciplined to follow a process of prioritizing ideas (their own and others in the company), testing the ideas, and being analytical enough to know which tested growth drivers to keep and which ones to cut.

His piece compares this to a rather bloated and generic job description for a marketing hire. Perhaps those descriptions exist but this would point toward a larger problem of simply not understanding online marketing.

Andrew Chen followed up with a post that emphasized this division between a ‘traditional marketer’ and a growth hacker.

Let’s be honest, a traditional marketer would not even be close to imagining the integration above – there’s too many technical details needed for it to happen. As a result, it could only have come out of the mind of an engineer tasked with the problem of acquiring more users from Craigslist.

Who is this traditional marketer? I worked as a marketer through both Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, hustling for ‘growth’ wherever I could find it.

Maybe I had an advantage because I came from a direct marketing background. I believe in data. And I love digging into technology.

No OLAP tool? Teach myself SQL. Want to change something on my blog? Learn PHP, HTML and CSS. Need a handy bookmarklet? Learn a bit of JavaScript.

I was (and still am) looking at emerging platforms and tactics to get eyeballs on a brand and productive clicks to a site. And you better be measuring the right way. Get the measurement wrong and you might not achieve real growth.

There are plenty of marketers figuring this stuff out. And plenty of marketers who aren’t.

The Lazy Marketer

I’m frequently hard on marketers as a group because there are a number of them who seem more consumed by expensing dinner and covering their asses while being able to point at the well-regarded vendors they hired to do the work than actually understanding and doing the work themselves.

Lazy marketers piss me off because they give all marketers a bad reputation. So I understand why folks like Sean and Andrew might want to create an artificial construct that excludes lazy marketers.

But the truth is that marketers have been growth hacking for decades. You don’t think sophisticated RFM campaigns aren’t a form of growth hacking? I could tell you a thing or two about the strange value of the R dimension.

Brand marketers use data to understand aided and unaided recall. And I remember being shocked as a young account coordinator at an advertising agency at the calculations used to determine the value of sponsorships based on the seconds of TV exposure it generated.

Growth hacking is really just a rejection of lazy marketing.

Because … Growth

I see little distinction between talented online marketers who use technology and data to secure gains and the newly minted growth hackers. They’re drawing on the same skills and mindset.

I’ve been lucky to get a peek into a decent number of organizations over the last few years. What I’ve come to realize is growth hacking works or … can work. But it has everything to do with how an organization integrates growth.

The secret to growth hacking success is the ability to go anywhere in the organization to achieve growth.

A good growth hacker can push for traditional SEO changes, then hop over to the email team and tweak life cycle campaigns, then go to design and push for conversion rate optimization tests, then engage engineering and demand that the site get faster and then approach product with ideas to improve gradual engagement.

When that growth hacker gets pushback from any of these teams they can simply fallback on the central mantra. Why should we do X, Y and Z? Because … growth!

Organize For Growth

As much as I hate to admit it, the term growth hacker often provides a once constrained marketer with greater opportunity to effect change in an organization. A growth hacker with the same skills but a marketing title would be rebuffed or seen as over-stepping their responsibilities.

“Stay in your lane.”

That’s what many talented marketers are told. You’re in marketing so don’t go mucking around in things you don’t understand. It can be wickedly frustrating, particularly when many of the other teams aren’t relying as heavily on data to guide their decisions.

The beauty of the term ‘growth hacker’ is that it doesn’t really fit anywhere in a traditional sense. They’re automatically orbiting the hairball. But the organization must support ventures into all areas of the company for that individual (or team) to succeed.

Simply hiring a growth hacker to work in marketing won’t have the desired impact. I see many companies doing this. They want the results growth hacking can deliver but they aren’t willing to make the organizational change to allow it to happen.

Growth Hackers

Hopefully I’ve convinced you that organizations need to change for growth hacking to be successful. But what about the growth hackers themselves?

The job requires a solid rooting in data and technology with an equal amount of curiosity and creativity to boot. Where the rubber really hits the road is in communication and entrepreneurial backbone.

A good growth hacker needs a fair amount of soft skills so they can effectively communicate and work with other teams. Because even if the organization supports cross-functional growth, those teams aren’t always pooping rainbows when the growth hacker knocks on their proverbial door.

Amid these grumbles, growth hackers are often under a bit of a microscope. As the cliche goes, with great power comes great responsibility. So the growth hacker better be ready to show results.

That doesn’t always mean that what they try works. Failure or ‘accelerated data-informed learning’ is a valuable part of growth hacking. You just better be able to manage the ebb and flow of wins and not lose the confidence of teams when you hit a losing streak.

Frankly, good growth hackers are very hard to find.

TL;DR

Growth hacking skills are nothing new but simply a rebranding exercise for tech-savvy marketers sick of being marginalized. But growth hacking only works when an organization blows up functional silos and allows these individuals to seek growth anywhere in the company.

I’m increasingly conflicted about roundup posts. You know, the kind where 23 experts answer one burning question and their answers are all put together in one long blog post. Instant content! I don’t produce roundup posts, rarely read them and infrequently contribute to them.

Roundup Dynamics

The dynamics of a roundup post are pretty clear. The person aggregating the answers gets what is essentially free content for their site. Yes, I know you had to email people and potentially format the responses but the level of effort isn’t particularly high.

In exchange, the person providing the answers gets more exposure and gains some authority by being labeled an expert. Even better if your name is associated with other luminaries in the field. It’s an interesting and insidious form of social proof.

Flattery Will Get You Everywhere

It feels good to be asked to participate in roundup posts. At least at first. You’ve been selected as an expert. Talk about an ego boost!

The beauty of it is that there will always be people who want that recognition. So even if some tire of participating there is a deep reservoir of ego out there ready to be tapped. No matter what I think or write I’m certain we’ll continue to see roundup posts.

I still prefer individual opinion and thought pieces. I like when people step out on the ledge and take a stand one way or the other. Even if I disagree with you, I recognize the effort invested and bravery displayed.

Saturation Marketing Works

I’m a marketer with an advertising background. I know saturation marketing works. So participating in roundup posts seems like a smart strategy. People see your name frequently and you’re always being portrayed in a positive light.

No matter where people turn they’re running into your name and face and you’re being hailed as an expert. Whoo-hoo! What’s wrong with that?

What’s The Frequency Kenneth?

How good is the content in these roundup posts? How much effort are these experts expending? I’m sure some spend a good deal of time on their contribution, if for no other reason than the desire to have the most insightful, provocative or humorous entry. I can’t be alone in thinking this way.

But at some point, as the number of requests rises (and they will since success begets success), you may realize that it’s just about the contribution. Showing up is 90% of the game. It’s not that the responses are bad, but they’re more like off-the-cuff answers than well thought out responses.

Remember Sammy Jankis

Of course, I’m always thinking about how these contributions are being remembered. In a large roundup post is my name and contribution going to be remembered? I somehow doubt it. At least not the specifics.

So the only thing I really gain is installing (yes I do think of the brain like software) the idea of expertise and authority in a larger group of people. Because if you see my name enough times you’ll make those connections.

That’s powerful. No doubt about it.

Why So Serious?

I ask myself why I bristle at roundup posts. Why am I increasingly reticent to contribute given my understanding of the marketing value? Am I somehow sabotaging my own success?

All too often I feel like roundup posts don’t deliver enough value to users. The content is uneven and often repetitive from expert to expert, exacerbating scanning behavior. It’s content that makes me go ‘meh’.

I might be dead wrong and could be committing the cardinal sin of marketing by relying on myself as the target market. Yet I don’t think I’m alone. I’ve spoken to others who skip these posts or, worse, have a dim view of those contributing.

Bud Light or Ruination IPA

The top selling beer in the US last year was Bud Light. For many, achieving Bud Light status is the pinnacle of success. The thing is … I don’t want to be Bud Light. Or more to the point, I don’t provide services that match the Bud Light audience.

Lets see if I can express this next part without sounding like a douchebag.

I don’t run a large agency. I’m not in the volume business. Many of my clients are dubious of the public discourse taking place on digital marketing. They rely on their professional networks to connect them to someone who can make sense of it all and sort fact from fiction. Because, and here’s the hard truth, they don’t really believe all those people are experts.

My clients are those who crave a deliciously bitter Ruination IPA. And the way to find and appeal to those people is different. Budweiser spent gobs on Super Bowl advertising. Stone Brewing? Not so much.

So, I’m left thinking about the true meaning of authority and expertise. It’s subjective. Obviously a lot of people dig Bud Light. That’s cool. But that’s not my audience. I’m seeking authority from a different audience.

Roundup Posts

I’ll still participate in roundup posts from time to time, though I may have just shot myself in the foot with this piece. I’m inclined to contribute to posts that cover a topic I might not normally write about or to site that has a different audience.

My goal is to ensure I maintain some visibility, without going overboard, while securing authority with new audiences that match my business goals. Your business goals might be different, so contributing to lots and lots of roundup posts might be right up your alley.

TL;DR

There’s nothing inherently wrong with roundup posts as a part of your content marketing strategy. But you should understand whether this tactic reaches your target market and aligns with your business goals.

Fake news and images are flourishing and even Snopes can’t hold back the tide of belief. Marketers should be taking notes, not to create their own fake campaigns but to understand the psychology that makes it possible and connect that to digital marketing trends.

We Want To Believe

Agent Mulder, of the X-Files, was famous for his desire to believe in aliens and all sorts of other phenomena. The truth is, we all want to believe. Maybe not in aliens but a host of other things. It’s not that we’re gullible, per se, but that we are inherently biased and seek what feels like the truth.

One of the pieces that fooled some of my colleagues was the story about a busy restaurant who’d commissioned research on why service ratings had declined over time.

This was a post on Craigslist in the rants & raves section. Think about that for a moment. This is not a bastion of authenticity. But the post detailed patrons’ obsession with their phones and the inordinate amount of time they took texting and taking pictures of their food.

This self-absorbed, technology-obsessed customer was the real problem. Many reported this ‘research’ as fact because the findings were ones that people wanted to believe. Too many of us have witnessed something similar. We have experience that creates a bias to believe.

We wanted the story to be true because it felt right and matched our preconceptions and beliefs.

The Subversive Jimmy Kimmel

While Jimmy Fallon may be the more affable of late night hosts, Jimmy Kimmel has been doing what I think is some ground-breaking work. His most popular pranks have exposed our desire to believe.

Twerking was jumping the shark and this video tapped into our collective eye-roll of the practice. But less than a week later Kimmel revealed that it was all a hoax.

He didn’t stop there though. The next time he enlisted Olympian Kate Hansen to post a video that purportedly showed a wolf wandering the halls at the Sochi Olympics.

Once again, Kimmel revealed that while it was a wolf, it wasn’t anywhere near Russia. I’m not sure people give Kimmel enough credit. He made people believe there were wolves roaming the halls at the Olympics!

Now, why did we believe? We believed because the narrative was already set. Journalists were complaining about the conditions at Sochi. So when the wolf video appeared and it was endorsed by an Olympic athlete no less, well, we fell for it. It matched our expectations.

It’s not about the truth, it’s about it making sense.

Experience, Belief and Marketing

So how does our desire to believe connect to marketing? Marketers should be figuring out how to create a narrative and set expectations.

Content marketing is popular right now because it provides us the opportunity to shape expectations.

I’ve written quite a bit about how to maximize attention. If you only remember one thing from that piece it’s that we’re constantly rewriting our memory.

Every interaction we have with a site or brand will cause us to edit that entry in our head, if even just a little. Each time this happens marketers have an opportunity to change the narrative and reset expectations.

For a restaurant this means that a bad meal, even after having numerous good ones in the past, can have a serious impact on that patron’s perception and propensity to return. I used to love eating at Havana, a nearby Cuban restaurant. My wife and I had many great meals (and Mojitos) there. But about a year ago we had a sub-par dinner.

Because we’d had so many good meals before we wrote it off as an aberration. This is an important thing to understand. Because what it really means is that we felt like our experience didn’t match our expectation. But instead of changing our expectation we threw away that experience. You should get a raise if you’re able to pull this off as a marketer.

We returned a few months later and it was another clunker. This time we came to the conclusion that the food quality had simply taken a nose dive. We haven’t been back since. Our perception and expectation changed in the span of two bad experiences.

Content, in any form, follows the same rules. Consistently delivering content that reinforces or rewrites a positive brand expectation is vital to success.

Know The Landscape

Our experiences create context and a marketer needs to understand that context, the landscape, before constructing a content strategy. Because it’s not about the truth. It’s about what people are willing to believe.

All too often I find companies who struggle with this concept. They have the best product or service out there but people are beating a path to their competitor(s) instead. It’s incomprehensible. They’re indignant. Their response is usually to double-down on the ‘but we’re the best’ meme.

Nearly ten years ago I was working at Alibris, a used, rare and out-of-print book site. Within the bookselling community the Alibris name was mud. The reason could be traced back to when Alibris entered the market. The Alibris CEO was blunt, telling booksellers that they would be out of business if they didn’t jump on the band wagon.

He was right. But the way the message was delivered, among other things, led to a general negative perception of the brand among booksellers, a notoriously independent bunch. #middlefingersraised

How could I change this negative brand equity? Did I just tell sellers that we were awesome? No. Instead I figured out the landscape and used content and influencer marketing to slowly change the perception of the brand.

Our largest competitor was Abebooks. So I signed up as a seller there, which also gave me access to their community forum. It was here that I carefully read seller complaints about the industry and about Abebooks itself. What I came to realize was that many of their complaints were actually areas where Alibris excelled. Sellers just weren’t willing to see it because of their perception (or expectation) of the brand.

So every month in our seller newsletter I would talk about an Alibris feature that I knew would hit a nerve. I knew that it was a pain point for the industry or an Abebooks pet peeve. Inevitably, these newsletter items were talked about in the forums. At first the response went a little like this. “Alibris is still evil, but at least they’re doing something about this one thing.”

At the same time I identified vocal detractors of our brand and called them on the phone. I wanted them to vent and asked them what it would take for them to give Alibris a try. My secret goal was to change their perception of the brand, to humanize it, and neutralize their contribution to the negative narrative in the community.

It didn’t happen overnight but over the course of a year the narrative did change. Booksellers saw us as a brand trying to do right by them, perhaps ‘seeing the error of our ways’ and forging a new path. They gave us the benefit of the doubt. They grudgingly told stories about how sales on Alibris were similar to those on Abebooks.

I’d changed the narrative about the brand.

I didn’t do this through cheerleading. Instead, I led the community to content that slowly rewrote their expectations of Alibris. I never told them Alibris was better, I simply presented content that made them re-evaluate their perception of ‘Abebooks vs. Alibris’.

Influencer Marketing

Why do some of these fake stories take hold so quickly? The Sochi wolf had a respected Olympic athlete in on the gag. She was a trusted person, an influencer, with no real reason to lie.

People wouldn’t have believed this false weightless claim if it hadn’t been delivered as a (spoofed) Tweet from NASA’s official Twitter account. Our eyes told us that someone in authority, the ultimate authority in this case, said it was true. That and we wanted to believe. Maybe this time in something amazing. Not aliens exactly but close.

So when we talk about influencer marketing we’re talking about enlisting others who can reinforce the narrative of your brand. These people can act as a cementing agent. It’s not so much about their reach (though that’s always nice) but the fact that it suddenly makes sense for us to believe because someone else, someone we trust or respect, agrees.

At that point we’re more willing to become evangelizers of the brand. That’s the true value of influencer marketing. People will actively start passing along that positive narrative to their friends, family and colleagues. If you’re familiar with the Net Promoter concept you can think of influencer marketing as a way to get people from passives (7-8) to promoters (9-10).

Influencer marketing converts customers into evangelizers who actively spread your brand narrative.

Justin Timberlake Is A Nice Guy?

Take my opinion (and probably yours) of Justin Timberlake. He seems like a really nice guy, right? But I don’t know Justin. I’ve never met him and odds are neither have you. For all we know, he could be a raging asshole. But I think he isn’t because of a constant drip of content that has shaped my opinion of him.

He’s the guy who is willing to do crazy stuff and poke fun at himself on SNL. He goes on prom dates. He’s the sensitive guy who encourages a musician in a MasterCard commercial. He celebrates at Taco Bell. I don’t even like his music but I like him.

The next thing I want to say is that it probably helps that he really is a nice guy. But I honestly don’t know that! I want to believe that but I’m also sure he has a very savvy PR team.

Uber Is Evil?

Uber is a great example of when you lose control of the narrative. A darling of the ‘sharing economy’ Uber might torpedo that movement because they’re suddenly seen as an uber-villain. (Sorry, I couldn’t help it.)

Once again, it’s about consistency. It’s about rewriting that perception. So taking a brand down doesn’t happen, generally, with just one gaff. You have to step in it over and over again.

Uber’s done that. From placing fake orders or other dirty tricks against competitors, to threatening journalists, to violating user privacy, to surge pricing, to sexual assault to verbal abuse of a cancer patient.

Suddenly, every Uber story fits a new narrative and expectation. Uber is evil. Is that the truth? Not really. Is it what we want to believe? Yup.

Uber screwed up numerous times but their negative brand equity is partly due to the landscape. There are enough people (me included) who aren’t keen on the sharing economy that took Uber’s missteps as an opportunity to float an alternate narrative, attacking the sharing economy by proxy.

Either way, it became increasingly easy to get stories published that met this new expectation and increasingly difficult for positive experiences to see the light of day. This is explained incredibly well in a case study on Internet celebrity brought to my attention by Rand Fishkin.

The video is 19 minutes long, which is usually an eternity in my book. But this video is worth it. Every marketer should watch it all the way through.

A Content Marketing Framework

I realize that I use a number of terms almost interchangeably throughout this piece. In truth, there are wrinkles and nuance to these ideas. If they weren’t confusing then everyone would be a marketing god. But I want to provide a strawman framework for you to remember and try out.

Our experience with content creates context or bias that changes our belief or perception of that brand resulting in a new expectation when we encounter the brand again.

At any point in this journey a person can be exposed to a competitor’s content which can change context and bias. In addition, influencer marketing and social proof can help reinforce context and cement belief.

I’d love to hear your feedback on this framework and whether it helps you to better focus your marketing efforts.

TL;DR

The lesson marketers should be taking from the proliferation of fake news and images isn’t to create our own fake stories or products. Instead we should be deciphering why people believe and use that knowledge to construct more effective digital marketing campaigns.

A couple of mornings each week I drive down to my local Peet’s for some coffee. There’s a barista there named Courtney who is referred to by her co-workers as the Michael Jordan of baristas. Why? She can remember the names and orders for a vast number of customers.

“Both today AJ?” she asks me as I walk over to the counter.

“Yes, thank you,” I reply and with that I’ve ordered a extra hot 2% medium latte and a non-fat flat large latte.

This is a comforting experience. It’s a bit like the TV show Cheers.

Yet online we seem to think of this experience as something akin to having your foot eaten by a marmot. The person knows my name and what I usually buy? Something must be done! Courtney shouldn’t know any of that. Where’s my Men In Black pen so I can zap away any memory that this event ever occurred.

Courtney actually knows quite a bit about me. From that drink order she knows I’m ordering for another person. In rare instances she’s seen this other person – my wife. Courtney used to work at another Peet’s years ago that we frequented before we bought our house. So she knows we have a daughter.

The reason Courtney asks whether I want both is because about one out of every ten times or so I’m just getting something for myself. I’m driving off somewhere for a client meeting and not ferrying caffeine goodness back home.

Online some might suggest that it’s dangerous that I’m being presented with the same thing I usually get. I’m in a filter bubble that might perpetuate and reinforce my current life patterns and create a type of stunted stasis where I don’t experience new things. But here’s how this works.

“No, I’m going off the board today Courtney,” I reply. “I’ll take a medium cappuccino today.”

Just like that the supposedly dangerous filter bubble is popped. Of course it’s a bit more nuanced when we talk about it online but as our online and offline experiences become more similar this is an important reference point.

The Filter Bubble

What is the Filter Bubble exactly? Eli Pariser coined the phrase to describe the way personalization and other online filters create a bubble of homogenous content that can have unforeseen and dire consequences in his book, aptly called The Filter Bubble.

The zenith of this personalization phobia was revealed in a remark by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

I tend to think Mark is right but that’s not what I’m supposed to say. That’s not the ‘right’ thing to say. Yet human behavior just doesn’t work that way.

Similarly, I didn’t want to like The Filter Bubble. And while I disagree with some aspects, and many of the conclusions, I find the book compelling in a lot of ways. Not only that but I genuinely like Eli from an observer point of view. He’s been an activist of causes for which I support and created a framework (twice!) to help get the message out to people about important issues. #badass

My problem is that the filter bubble is increasingly used as a retort of fear, uncertainty and doubt when discussing personalization, marketing and privacy. It’s become a proxy to end discussions about how our personal data can, will and should be used as technology advances. Because despite the dire warnings about the dangers of the filter bubble, I believe there’s potentially more to gain than to lose.

What it requires us to do is to step outside of the echo chamber (see what I did there?) and instead rename this process the preference bubble.

Where Is Information Diversity?

Where do we get information from? The Filter Bubble covers the changing way in which information has been delivered to us via newspapers and other mediums. It documents how the Internet was supposed to allow for a flourish of different voices but hasn’t seemed to match that in reality. One can quibble about that outcome but I’d like to back up even further.

Instead of thinking about where we get information from lets consider where we consume that information. How many people in the US live where they were born? According to the 2010 US Census 59% remain in the state in which they were born (pdf) and there is similar evidence from Pew as well.

Not only that but there’s a host of evidence that Americans don’t often travel overseas and that many may never even leave the confines of their own state. The data here is a bit fuzzy but in combination it seems clear that we’re a nation that is largely stuck and rooted.

Most people will reference family and general comfort with surroundings as reasons to stay near where they were born or vacation. But what we’re really talking about is fear and xenophobia in many ways. It’s uncomfortable to experience something new and to challenge yourself with different experiences.

I was fiercely against this for some reason and made it a mission to break out from my northeastern seaboard culture. I moved from Philadelphia to Washington D.C. to San Diego to San Francisco. I also traveled to South America, the South Pacific, numerous countries in Europe and a bevy of different states in the US. I am a different and better person for all of those experiences. Travel and moving opens your eyes to a lot of things.

So when we talk about information diversity I tend to think it may not make much difference what you’re consuming if you’re consuming it in the same location. The same patterns and biases emerge, shepherding you to the common mores of your peers.

Your community shapes how you think about information and what information is important. One only has to take a trip into the central valley of California to hear chatter about water redistribution. I have some sense of the debate but because it’s not in my backyard it barely registers.

Taken to another level, your family is a huge filter for your information consumption. We know that bigotry and other forms of hate are often passed down through family. On a trivial level I’ve passed down my distaste for Notre Dame football to my daughter. She actively roots against them now, just as I do. It’s an odd, somewhat ugly, feeling and I’m perversely glad for it because it makes me mindful of more important biases that could be passed on.

Yet taken to a ridiculous extreme, the filter bubble would tell us that we should forcibly remove people from their families. We should rotate through different families, a crazy version of TV’s Wife Swap, where we get a different perspective on our information as seen through the family filter.

I’d argue that the Internet and even TV has helped reduce geographic bias. Our knowledge of the world now must be bigger then the days around the campfire or those of the town crier or when we only had the town newspaper, one source of radio news and idle chatter at the local diner.

How we analyze and digest information may have changed less (potentially far less) because of geographic filters but even the presence of additional stimuli is bound to have made a difference.

Social Entropy

One of the places where The Filter Bubble falls apart is the idea that our preferences will largely remain static because of constant reinforcement.

Instead, we know our preferences change as we grow and evolve. It’s something I refer to as social entropy. You are close to your college friends upon graduating and your interests have been formed largely from what you did during that time. Maybe you were totally into Frisbee Golf.

But you get that first job and then another and it’s in a slightly different vertical and now you’re interested in the slow food movement instead. You’ve connected with new people and have new interests. The old ones fade away and no amount of marketing will change that. Might it extend it? Sure. But only for a defined amount of time. Prior nostalgia can’t compete against current interest. I’ve got a shelf full of baseball cards I never look at to prove it.

The issue here is that there are external forces that will change your preferences despite all efforts to personalize your experience through search and social platforms. Who knew I’d be so interested in Lymphoma until I was diagnosed in October? The idea that we’ll simply continue to consume what we always consume is … specious.

You might love pizza, but you’re going to stop wanting it if you eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day for a month. I know, that’s pure hyperbole. Instead lets talk about babies. (Got to keep you on your toes!) You have one and then suddenly you’re part of a mother’s group, women (and some men) thrown together by the happenstance of conception. For a while these relationships are strong but as your children grow these relationships largely dissolve.

Not only that but you aren’t continuing to watch the dreaded and whiny Caillou when your child is now 8 years old. The filter bubble fails to take into account social entropy.

Serendipity

From social entropy we can segue nicely into serendipity. At some point, people crave and want something different. Serendipity is the unexpected appearance of something, often in relation to something else, that creates an epiphany or breakthrough. Balsamic vinegar and strawberries? Oh my god, it’s delicious!

Search Engines (pdf) and information retrieval in general has been interested in serendipity (pdf) for quite some time. Not only in the capacity to encourage creativity but to ensure that a balanced view of a topic is delivered to users. The latter is what raises the hackles of Pariser and others when it comes to search results. The left-leaning political user will get different search results than the right-leaning political user.

This seems to be the cardinal sin since we all aren’t seeing the same thing on the same topic. Now, never mind that seeing the same thing doesn’t mean you’re going to change your behavior or view on that topic. We perceive things very differently. Think about eyewitness statements and how the car the bank robbers drove away in was both a red sports car and a dark SUV. Even when we’re seeing the same thing we’re seeing something different.

But I digress.

Google believes in personalization but they aren’t just trying to tell you what you want to know. Search engines work hard to ensure there is a base level of variety. Amit Singhal has spoken about it numerous times in relation to the filter bubble accusation.

At a 2012 SMX London Keynote Singhal was noted to say the following:

Amit agreed, however, that there should be serendipity. Personalization should not overtake the SERPs, but it should be present.

At a Churchill Club event in 2011 I noted how Ben Gomes spoke about search relevance.

Two humans will agree on relevance only 80% of the time. If you looked at that same result a year later, you may not agree with yourself, let alone someone else. The implication (one I happen to agree with) is that relevance is a moving target.

At the same event AllThingsD reported the following quote from Amit Singhal.

Our algorithms are tremendously balanced to give a mix of what you want and what the world says you should at least know.

Then there’s an April 2012 interview with Amit Singhal on State of Search.

Regarding personalization, our users value serendipity in search as well, so we actually have algorithms in place designed specifically to limit personalization and promote variety in the results page.

There’s a constant evaluation taking place ensuring relevance and delivering what people want. And what they want is personalization but also serendipity or a diverse set of results. Just as we wouldn’t want pizza every day we don’t want the same stuff coming up in search results or our social feeds time and time again.

We burn out and crave something new and if these platforms don’t deliver that they’ll fail. So in some ways the success of search and social should indicate that some level of serendipity is taking place and that wholesale social or interest entropy (perhaps that’s a better term) isn’t causing them to implode.

Human Nature

One of the things that Pariser touches on is whether humans aim for more noble endeavors or if we seek out the lowest common denominator. This seems to be what pains Pariser in many ways. That as much as it would be nice if people actively sought out differing opinions and engaged in debate about important topics that they’re more likely to click on the latest headline about Kim Kardashian.

So we’ll be more apt to click on all the crap that comes up in our Facebook feed instead of paying attention to the important stuff. The stuff that matters and can make a difference in the world. The funny thing is he figured out a way to hack that dynamic in many ways with the launch of Upworthy, which leverages that click-bait viral nature but for an agent of good.

To be fair, I worry about this too. I don’t quite understand why people gravitate toward the trivial Why “who wore it better” is at all important. I could care less what Shia LeBeouf is doing with his life. I watch The Soup to keep up with reality TV because I could never actually watch it. And I fail to see why stupid slasher movies that appeal to the base parts of ourselves remain so damn popular. It’s … depressing.

But it’s also human nature.

I guess you could argue, as was argued in A Beautiful Mind, that a “diet of the mind” can make a difference. I think there is truth to that. It’s, oddly, why I continue to read a lot of fiction. But I’m unsure that can be forced on people. Or if it can be, it has to be done in a way that creates a habit.

Simply putting something else in front of a person more often isn’t going to change their mind.

That’s not how it works. In fact there’s a lot of evidence that it might do more harm than good. A good deal of my time in the last year has been dedicated to exploring attention and memory. Because getting someone to pay attention and remember is incredibly powerful.

What I’ve realized is that attention and memory all gets tied up in the idea of persuasion. The traditional ways we think about breaking the filter bubble do nothing to help persuade people.

Persuasion

The fact is that being exposed to other points of view, particularly online, doesn’t aide in persuasion. There’s more and more research that shows that the opposite might be true. Simply putting those opposing views in front of someone doesn’t change human behavior. We still select the opinion that resonates with our personal belief system.

There’s a myriad of academic research as well as huckster like advice on persuasion. So I’m not going to provide tips on persuasion or delve into neuromarketing or behavioral economics. These are, though, all interesting topics. Instead I want to address how popping the filter bubble doesn’t lead to desired results.

One of the major areas of contention is the exposure to opposing political viewpoints on a variety of issues. The theory here is that if I only see the Fox News content I won’t ever have an opportunity to get the opposing point of view and come to a more reasoned decision. The problem? When we engage on these charged topics we don’t reach consensus but instead radicalize our own opinion.

From research referenced in this Mother Jones piece on comment trolls we get this interesting nugget.

The researchers were trying to find out what effect exposure to such rudeness had on public perceptions of nanotech risks. They found that it wasn’t a good one. Rather, it polarized the audience: Those who already thought nanorisks were low tended to become more sure of themselves when exposed to name-calling, while those who thought nanorisks are high were more likely to move in their own favored direction. In other words, it appeared that pushing people’s emotional buttons, through derogatory comments, made them double down on their preexisting beliefs.

Exposure didn’t move people toward the middle, it polarized them instead. This dovetails with additional research that shows that people often don’t want to be right.

Not all false information goes on to become a false belief—that is, a more lasting state of incorrect knowledge—and not all false beliefs are difficult to correct. Take astronomy. If someone asked you to explain the relationship between the Earth and the sun, you might say something wrong: perhaps that the sun rotates around the Earth, rising in the east and setting in the west. A friend who understands astronomy may correct you. It’s no big deal; you simply change your belief.

But imagine living in the time of Galileo, when understandings of the Earth-sun relationship were completely different, and when that view was tied closely to ideas of the nature of the world, the self, and religion. What would happen if Galileo tried to correct your belief? The process isn’t nearly as simple. The crucial difference between then and now, of course, is the importance of the misperception. When there’s no immediate threat to our understanding of the world, we change our beliefs. It’s when that change contradicts something we’ve long held as important that problems occur.

The piece (which is just brilliant) goes on to underscore the problem.

In those scenarios, attempts at correction can indeed be tricky. In a study from 2013, Kelly Garrett and Brian Weeks looked to see if political misinformation—specifically, details about who is and is not allowed to access your electronic health records—that was corrected immediately would be any less resilient than information that was allowed to go uncontested for a while. At first, it appeared as though the correction did cause some people to change their false beliefs. But, when the researchers took a closer look, they found that the only people who had changed their views were those who were ideologically predisposed to disbelieve the fact in question. If someone held a contrary attitude, the correction not only didn’t work—it made the subject more distrustful of the source. A climate-change study from 2012 found a similar effect. Strong partisanship affected how a story about climate change was processed, even if the story was apolitical in nature, such as an article about possible health ramifications from a disease like the West Nile Virus, a potential side effect of change. If information doesn’t square with someone’s prior beliefs, he discards the beliefs if they’re weak and discards the information if the beliefs are strong.

The emphasis is mine but it is vital to understanding that the areas where Pariser and others show such concern for the application of the filter bubble – in those areas where the issues are going to matter to our society – that popping that bubble might actually be detrimental.

If you’ve chosen to make the fact that vaccinations cause autism a part of your belief system and have responded by not having your children vaccinated it won’t be easy to change that viewpoint. #dummies

Another post on Facebook from a friend telling you how the vaccination link to autism has been completely debunked won’t have any impact. The numerous results on Google that point to this fact won’t help either. Instead, you’ll wind up distrusting those sources and falling back on others that conform to your beliefs.

Popping the filter bubble will not persuade people to think differently.

Oddly enough the one thing that seems to open the door to change is feeling good about yourself.

Normally, self-affirmation is reserved for instances in which identity is threatened in direct ways: race, gender, age, weight, and the like. Here, Nyhan decided to apply it in an unrelated context: Could recalling a time when you felt good about yourself make you more broad-minded about highly politicized issues, like the Iraq surge or global warming? As it turns out, it would. On all issues, attitudes became more accurate with self-affirmation, and remained just as inaccurate without. That effect held even when no additional information was presented—that is, when people were simply asked the same questions twice, before and after the self-affirmation.
Still, as Nyhan is the first to admit, it’s hardly a solution that can be applied easily outside the lab. “People don’t just go around writing essays about a time they felt good about themselves,” he said. And who knows how long the effect lasts—it’s not as though we often think good thoughts and then go on to debate climate change.

Another study detailed in a NiemanLab post shows that people feel more positive when an article proposes a solution instead of just presenting a problem.

After reading one of these six possible articles, respondents answered a survey about what they’d read. Did the article seem different from typical news articles? Do you feel more interested in the issue, or better informed? Have you gained knowledge from reading the article? Was your opinion influenced? Were you inspired? Do you feel there’s a way that you could contribute to a solution?
The results were somewhat surprising. Across all 16 measures, those who had read the solutions journalism article felt more satisfied, Curry found. “Often, doing research, you don’t get results where something works so well,” he said.

Not only that but those people were more willing to share those stories.

“We are intrigued by the finding that people seem to want to share these stories more, and want to create conversation around them,” Hammonds says. “So we may build on that in the way we strategize with our papers.”

People are most open to change when they feel good about themselves and are more positive. In addition, those reading solutions journalism feel better and are more likely to share those stories – perhaps as a way to extend that good feeling and to feel like they’re doing something.

It makes Upworthy seem devilishly smart doesn’t it? #kudoseli

Soylent Green is Filters

Obviously real life experiences can transform our interests and beliefs.

I once had the idea for a story where a gay pride group would recruit a large number of homosexuals (10,000 or so) from urban environments and have them move to traditionally conservative areas where they’d pass themselves off as heterosexuals. Over the course of two years they’d join the community in all ways possible. They’d be churchgoers, friends, barbers, cube mates, insurance agents, softball players, you name it.

Then on the same day, after two years, they’d all ‘come out of the closet’ in these conservative communities. The idea being that knowing someone who is gay might be the best way to transform beliefs about homosexuality. Suddenly it’s not those ‘sodomites in San Francisco’ but Larry who helped get you a replacement car when you were in that bad accident.

Of course the idea is flawed because a movement that large would be noticed and then everyone would feel fleeced and duped. No one likes to feel that way and it retards our ability to change our opinion. But the idea here is that people and interaction is what transforms the filter bubble.

So how does this work online? Because some argue that the people you ‘friend’ online are too like you to bring new ideas into your orbit. If you were just relying on those friends you might be right. But more and more social graphs bring content liked by your friends. In other words, it’s a friend of a friend that might bring new ideas and perspectives. This is something referred to often as FOAF.

The idea here is that I might have a friend who shares certain things but if she likes something that she hasn’t shared explicitly then that content might still get passed along to me as well. I wrote about how I consciously friended people because I knew they were interested in a certain subject and would likely bring content I wouldn’t see otherwise into my universe. But even if you’re not doing this consciously, a FOAF implementation can help introduce serendipity.

Instead of all this theory I’d like to present a real life example. I recently discovered Astronautalis, a really excellent songwriter/storyteller/rapper. Here’s how I wound up finding him.

I follow Wil Wheaton in large part because of his science-fiction leaning (both Star Trek TNG and Eureka) and then Table Top (which is why I play a lot of Ticket To Ride). Wil shared some content from April O’Neil, a porn star (for lack of a better term) who is also a huge science-fiction fan. I followed April’s Tumblr and she wound up sharing some of her music tastes, one of which included, you guessed it, Astronautalis.

Wrap your head around the chain of events that connects a digital marketer and father from suburban San Fransisco with Astronautalis!

So am I an atypical user? Perhaps. But even if my information diverse diet isn’t the norm this type of discovery happens naturally. You go out with your friends to a new restaurant and it’s there that you run into someone one of your friends knows who says they’re just back from an awwwwwwesome trip to Hungary.

Hearing about this gets you interested in learning more and suddenly you’re searching for information and your next vacation is to Budapest where you happen to meet another traveler from England who designs wool sweaters for a living on some green moor, which is where you wind up living as husband and wife two years later.

There’s a fear that our online activity translates into isolation, or that the only vector for information discovery is through that medium. But that’s just not the reality.

As our online and offline experiences converge and the world gets smaller we’re going to slam into the new with greater frequency, producing sharp sparks that are sure to puncture the filter bubble.

The Preference Bubble

So for the moment lets agree that the filter bubble might not be a bad thing and that trying to eliminate it through traditional means is Sisyphean due to human nature and life experience. Instead lets talk about what it really is – a preference bubble. This is a bubble that represents what you currently prefer and will change (as I’ve noted) over time through a variety of ways.

For good or for bad there are people who are mining the preference bubble. Those people are marketers and advertisers. As in every field there are some that will exploit the preference bubble and take things too far. But that doesn’t mean we should reject it outright.

My dad told me a story once about how you don’t stop liking a ham sandwich because Richard Nixon loves ham sandwiches. The idea being that you can still enjoy something even if there are tangential parts of it that are distasteful.

From my perspective there’s a small anti-marketing bias throughout The Filter Bubble. But perhaps, as a marketer, I’m just a bit too sensitive and on the watch for this attitude. Don’t get me wrong. I have a severe distaste for many (if not most) fellow marketers who seem more than happy to spit out a few buzzwords and feel good when they make a vendor decision on their latest RFP. #CYAmuch

Yet, there are other marketers who combine creativity and data and are passionate about both the fundamentals and the details of their craft – and it is a craft. In the very general sense marketing is about finding a need and filling it. The preference bubble gives marketers the ability to find those needs far quicker and with more accuracy.

Marketers want to save you time and effort, read and buy things you desire as quickly as possible. Do we want to make a buck doing it? Absolutely. But the good ones aren’t out to use the preference bubble to sell you stuff you don’t want. Sure we might make some assumptions that your penchant for kayaking might also indicate that you’d want some rugged outdoor wear. But would we be wrong?

There’s been numerous instances where people can show when these models do go awry. Even now at Amazon if you buy something as a gift for someone but don’t mark it as such, that can have some pretty interesting consequences on your recommended products. Marketers are not perfect and the data models we’re using are still evolving. But they’re getting better every day. And that’s important.

Privacy?

As marketers get better at mining the preference bubble we have an opportunity to engage instead of obfuscate.

Chris Messina wrote about this recently where he discussed the very real trade off that takes place with the preference bubble.

Ultimately I do want companies to know more about me and to use more data about me in exchange for better, faster, easier, and cheaper experiences. 

That’s what the preference bubble is all about. We want this! If you’re a vegetarian and you’re looking for a place to eat out wouldn’t it be nice if the results presented didn’t include steak houses? But we need to understand what and when we’re giving our preferences to marketers. We need to know the personal ROI for providing that information.

I often tell people that privacy is far more bark than bite. How quickly do we provide name, address and phone number on a little comment card and slip it into the window of a Ford Mustang sitting at the local mall, hoping that we’ll be the lucky winner of said car. Pretty quick.

How often do we mindlessly hand over our driver’s license to cashiers to verify our credit cards when there is no such law saying we need to do so. Every damn time right? It’s just easier to go along with it, even if you’re grumbling under your breath about it being bunk.

But here we’re making conscious decisions about how we want to share our private information. It may not always be the most noble exchange but it is the exchange that we are willingly making.

The change that Chris Messina rightly asks for is a data-positive culture. One were our ‘data capital’ is something we marshall and can measure out in relation to our wants and needs. We might not want our elbow fetish to be part of our public preference bubble. That should be your right and you shouldn’t be bombarded with tweed elbow patch and skin cracking ointment ads as a result.

It would be nice if the things we feel so self-conscious about didn’t come under such scrutiny. You shouldn’t be ashamed of your elbow fetish. That would be really data-positive. Many have written that a transparent society might be a healthier society. But there are many ways in which transparency can go wrong and we’re clearly (perhaps sadly) not at the point where this is a viable option.

Instead we should be talking about how we engage with privacy. The consternation around personalization is that people don’t know what type of private information they’re giving up to deliver that experience. But lets be clear, based on the advertising they receive users do know that they’re giving up some personal information. You don’t get that retargeted ad for the site you visited yesterday unless you’ve been tracked.

People know, on some level, that they’re providing this personal information as they surf. Fewer people understand that they leave behind a large digital wake™, waves of data that mark their path through the Internet. What is missing is exactly what is tracked and how they might limit the amount of information being used.

The problem here is that Messina and others are asking people to participate and take what amounts to proactive action on shaping their public preference bubble. In the realm of user experience we call that friction. And friction is a death knell for a product.

It makes any opt-in only program, where nothing is tracked unless I specifically say so, a non-starter. We know that defaults are rarely changed so the vast majority wouldn’t opt-in and nearly all of us would be surfing the Internet looking at the ‘one trick to get rid of belly fab’ ad.

Not only that but your online experiences would be less fulfilling. It would be harder for you to find the things you wanted. That increased friction could lead to frustration and abandonment. And the added time taken to navigate is time taken away from other endeavors. Life gets less happy.

Point of Purchase Privacy

Is there a solution? (Because you clearly want one so you feel better about this piece and wind up sharing it with your colleagues.) One of the ideas I’ve mulled over is to deliver the data-positive message at the time of purchase. What if when you clicked on that retargeted ad and wound up buying that product that during the transaction the data transacted would also be revealed.

I’m not talking about whether you’re agreeing to opt-in to that site’s email newsletter. I’m talking about a message that would state that your purchase was made by tracking your behavior on two other sites, interacting with a Facebook ad and through a prior visit to the site in question.

It’s during that time when you’re most satisfied (you’ve just made a purchase) that you are most likely to engage in a positive way with your data capital. There’s an educational aspect, where you’re told, almost Sesame Street style that today’s purchase was brought to you by pixel tracking, search history and remarketing. But there’s also a configuration aspect, an option to access your data capital and make changes as appropriate.

If my personal data tracking led to this purchase, do I feel okay with that and do I want to double-check what other personal data might be out there or not? So it would be my time to say that my tastes have changed from a latte to a cappuccino and that while I love Astronautlis I’m not a Macklemore fan. #notthesame

So maybe I do want to zap away any memory of how that transaction occurred. That would be your right. (A bad choice I think but your right nonetheless.)

I doubt you could leave this up to each site so it would likely have to be something delivered via the browser, perhaps even a add-on/extension that would be cross-browser compliant.

I’m not an engineer but I sense there’s an opportunity here to have sites provide markup that would indicate that a page or purchase was made based on personalization and that the specific set of preferences and tracking that led to that can then be displayed in a pleasing way to the user as a result. I’m not saying it would be easy. It would need to avoid the annoying ‘this site uses cookies’ message that buzzes like a gnat across UK websites.

But I think it could be done and you could even think of it as a type of customer satisfaction and feedback mechanism if you were a smart marketer.

Are We Ourselves

Our lives are increasingly reflected by our digital wake™. We are what we do online and that’s only going to grow not decline. Why not embrace that rather than deny it? I’m a perfect example of why embracing it would make sense. As a digital marketer I work with a number of clients and often visit sites that I have no personal interest in whatsoever.

Being able to quickly adjust my preference bubble appropriately would make sure my experience online was optimized. In a far flung future the cost of goods could even be reduced because the advertising and marketing spend would drop through preference bubble optimization (PBO). The maxim that advertisers are wasting half their spend, they just don’t know which half would be a thing of the past.

Beyond the crass commercialization I’m amped up about as a marketer are the societal aspects of the preference bubble. And while I share Pariser’s concerns about how people can receive and digest information I think the answer is to go through it instead of avoid it.

I remember playing Space Invaders for days on end, my thumb burning with a soon to be callus. But at some point I got bored of it and went out to count wooly caterpillars under the Japanese Maple in our front yard. This is who we are.

Our preferences are influenced by more than just what flows through our social feeds and what’s returned in search results. And while I wish we could force a ‘diet of the mind’ on people the fact is that people are going to consume what they want to consume until they decide not to.

I’d prefer to make it easier to show who we are when they’re most open to seeing it. We need to point them to their own Japanese Maple.

TL;DR

The filter bubble is not something terrible but is a product of human nature and geographic bias. It has been around before the Internet and will be there long after because it simply reflects our preferences.

Our preferences are a product of more than our digital diet and trying to change that digital diet externally may actually backfire. So as we express and conduct more of our life online we should embrace the preference bubble and the privacy issues that come with it so we can gain better, faster experiences.

For years I’ve used a combination of StumbleUpon and Google Remarketing to cheaply and efficiently open the top of the funnel for start-ups.

I don’t hear much about this tactic (though perhaps I’m not looking in the right places) so here’s a little explanation on this handy growth hack.

StumbleUpon

You remember StumbleUpon right? A darling of the Web 1.0 world, it was purchased by eBay in 2007 where it was largely ignored until it was bought back in 2009. It doesn’t get a lot of press but it’s still a well-trafficked property and product.

I’m not saying it’s in some sort of renaissance or anything. But it delivers traffic and has benefits many overlook.

Paid Discovery

You can buy ‘Stumbles’. That shouldn’t be news to you since you’ve been able to do that for ages. But … StumbleUpon has been overshadowed by other platforms so I often get a furrowed brow and a ‘you learn something new everyday’ response when I tell people this.

The paid StumbleUpon product is called Paid Discovery. Like nearly any paid ad product today you can target StumbleUpon users by geography, age, gender and interest. This is important since you only want to find people who are interested in your site or product.

The news gets even better because you can buy these targeted visits on the cheap from anywhere from $0.10 to $0.20 a click. It used to be cheaper but it’s still a bargain for guaranteed targeted visits.

Now, there is often some discrepancy between paid Stumbles and what shows up in Google Analytics due to various issues. You can obsess about this or simply shrug your shoulders and move on. I recommend the latter.

I figure I’ll make up the difference based on earned Stumbles, those StumbleUpon visits you get for free because your content has been well received.

Low Engagement

If you’re familiar with StumbleUpon you know that the product itself encourages low engagement. You ‘Stumble’ from one site to the next in a Tumblr for websites like fashion. It’s sort of like channel surfing on TV when you’re bored and looking for something interesting, yet not really having the time to watch for long anyway.

Marketers complain that StumbleUpon traffic has a 90%+ bounce rate and 1.1 page views per visit. And they’re not wrong. Here’s a look at the metrics for the campaign I launched to show how this works.

This is why most marketers write off StumbleUpon as a viable channel. Yet, if you’re creative, you can use the limitations of StumbleUpon to your advantage.

And I have, time and time again.

Forced Brand Exposure

The first thing to recognize is that StumbleUpon essentially forces visits to your site. This means you don’t have to deal with ad blindness or click-through rate issues to get exposure.

The problem with many StumbleUpon campaigns is that they don’t create a page that will work at a glance. Because it’s not about engaging on that visit. Don’t try to encourage an activity that is antithetical to the product. User engagement metrics should be largely ignored when using StumbleUpon.

The job of a StumbleUpon visit is to ensure that the user leaves remembering your site and what you’re offering. So the page has to be designed with five foot web design in mind and should be laser focused, passing any five second test with flying colors.

StumbleUpon is about getting brand and marketing message exposure.

You’re hoping that they’ll return later via another channel. I’ve seen strong correlations between an increase in direct traffic in the weeks after a StumbleUpon campaign. This would indicate that some people do remember that exposure and come back directly as a result.

But it’s awful hard to prove with all the mitigating factors.

Stumble Remarketing

The good news is that there is a better way to get those brand exposures to come back to your site. Remarketing!

All you need to do is set a remarketing tag on that specific StumbleUpon page and you suddenly have the ability to market to a specific and relevant group of people who already have a nascent idea of your site or product.

I like having a dedicated StumbleUpon campaign page so you can isolate this group from other groups when you’re doing more complicated remarketing campaigns. It’s just far simpler to manage and measure.

Easy To Set Up

It’s a snap to set this up now that you can create Google remarketing lists (aka Audience) using Google Analytics.

Here I’m simply targeting those users who visit my new search volume trend page. You do have to tweak your Google Analytics code to enable remarketing, which isn’t that hard if you’re willing to tinker. It’s even easier if you’re using Google Tag Manager.

Then you create your StumbleUpon campaign and watch as users ‘Stumble’ to your page and fill up your new Audience. At that point you can then go to AdWords and build a remarketing campaign using that Audience.

I won’t give the step-by-step instructions here unless there’s an outcry of folks for this level of detail.

StumbleUpon+Remarketing=Win

Even at $0.20 a visit I can take $5,000 and turn it into a list of 25,000 targeted users that I can target via remarketing for a loooong time.

Yes, the remarketing will also cost you some money but those clicks will be qualified clicks and will convert at a high rate. Not only that but if you’re smart you can use remarketing to gain extra brand exposures that produce additional view-through visits and conversions.

Stumble remarketing opens and fills your funnel with relevant users.

All you have to do is combine a remarketing tag with this targeted traffic source!

First This, Then That

My idea was to demonstrate this with a new page on my site dedicated to monthly updates to US desktop search query volume. I’ve tracked this metric for a long time and figured I would create a dedicated page for it and use StumbleUpon to announce and launch it. Then I’d use remarketing when the next month’s data was live and the graph was updated.

I screwed a few things up though so the test didn’t work quite as I’d planned. (User error!) And I haven’t seen new June numbers from comScore yet and was getting itchy to post this. But the idea was solid.

Have a defined plan behind the two exposures.

In my case I was looking to get people’s attention with one interesting graph and commentary. Then I’d bring them back with a remarketing ad when the graph was updated with a new month’s data. The ad could be the graph with a ‘see updated search trend’ call-to-action or any number of creative treatments. In a best case scenario I would also have created a subscribe option for the page itself once users got there again.

If you have a product you’re trying to sell you might have the first ‘Stumble’ exposure introduce the product and brand. The second ‘remarketing’ exposure could be a benefit message, a free white paper download or a coupon for a product trial. In some ways the first exposure is advertising and the second is marketing.

You’re a marketing boxer hitting users with a combination one-two punch.

TL;DR

By combining StumbleUpon Paid Discovery with Google Remarketing you can quickly and efficiently open and fill the top of the sales funnel. Use StumbleUpon’s low-engagement context to your advantage and deliver a memorable first impression that you then build on through additional remarketing exposures.

Infographics are (still) popular. Clients ask me about them all the time. I ask them to tell me about the last three infographics they remembered.

The response is generally full of stammering as they grope for an answer. Rarely do I get specifics. Even when I do they say things like ‘that infographic about craft beer’. When I ask where the infographic came from? Crickets.

Can you name the brands associated with infographics? The brands that come up most often are Mint and OK Cupid. Everyone else is an also ran. And that’s the thing. For all of their popularity, you won’t remember that infographic.

Or, at least, you won’t remember it the right way.

Triangle Of Memory

To understand why infographics are so problematic we need to look at how we remember content.

The triangle of memory is a variant of the project management triangle that includes better, faster and cheaper attributes, of which you can only have two at any given time. You can have a project fast and cheap but it won’t be better. You can have a project fast and better but it will cost you an arm and a leg.

In terms of memory, we don’t have a massive tag based annotation system in our brains. (That’s what Delicious is for.) Instead, we remember content at a very basic level: site, author and topic. This is why I tell clients to make their content cocktail party ready.

Because you remember ‘that post on Moz about Hummingbird‘ or ‘Danny Sullivan’s analysis of New York Times subscription costs‘.

It’s site and topic, but not the author. It’s author and topic but not site. Rarely it is author and site but not topic. Examples of this might be ‘the latest column by Krugman in the New York Times’ or ‘last week’s episode of John Oliver on HBO’.

I’m not saying you never get all three. You hit the three cherries jackpot once in a while. But it’s rare. Counting on it is like counting on winning at the casino game at https://www.bettingnews.com/.

The Infographics Monster

The problem with infographics is that they destroy the triangle of memory. They gobble up one of those three memory attributes leaving you with only one left to use. It’s always ‘that infographic’. And like it or not the attribute most people select is the topic, resulting in the phrase ‘that infographic about …’.

That means your site or brand disappears! And no. No one remembers (and may not even see) your logo that you’ve slapping on there.

‘That infographic about AdWords conversion rates’ is done by who exactly? Where do I find it again? Ah, never mind. Or worse yet they search for it and they find something or someone else instead.

If users don’t remember that it’s your brand or site, have you really succeeded?

Wasted Attention

Not only are infographics often costly (both in time and money) but you’ve wasted that sliver of attention you’ve worked so hard to earn.

Here you’ve got the eyeballs of a user and they leave without remembering who you are or where they saw it. Heck they might even attribute it to the platform where they discovered it such as Facebook, Pinterest or Google+.

Winning the attention auction isn’t easy and when you do win it you better ensure you’re using that attention wisely. I’d argue an infographic is wasted attention. It’s attention without any lasting value. It’s empty (branding) calories.

When Infographics Work

By and large I steer clients away from infographics and prefer to have them work on other content initiatives where they’ll build brand equity. But that’s not to say that infographics can’t work. They can. But it takes a serious commitment and attention to execution.

Doing one or two infographics is like flushing a fist full of hundred dollar bills down the toilet. If you’re going to do infographics, do infographics. Commit to producing one every month for 18 months.

Consistent engaging infographics is what makes your brand stick. It’s why Mint and OK Cupid succeeded where so many others failed.

I’d also argue that infographics must make users LOL or OMG. If they don’t provoke one of those two reactions then you’re not going to gain traction or attention.

The other way to go is to leverage the infographic into other channels and make it repeatable. Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors (a bit of a mouthful) was printed and handed out at SMX Advanced and has been updated three (?) times now.

It’s an iconic piece pushed through multiple marketing channels to reinforce the site and brand. That’s how you do it.

Don’t Talk To Me About Links

I know some of you are about flexing your fingers about to type out a comment about how your infographic obtained 12 links with an average DA of 49.

Links aren’t the goal of your infographic campaign. Your customers don’t care if you’re on some cheesoid infographic aggregator site. Instead I want to know if that infographic won the brand more true fans. Did it increase the brand’s visibility? Because those things will lead to long-term authority and, by the way, downstream links.

If you’re in such desperate need of links there are far better and cheaper ways to earn them than the branding black hole known as the infographic.

Visibility

Another argument for infographics is that they provide you with more visibility. If I see an infographic and then I see a Slideshare deck and then I search and I find a blog post over the course of weeks or months, then perhaps the brand or site begins to sink in.

In principle, I agree. But that only works if I associate that infographic with the other pieces of content and that I have those other pieces of content, which all support my site or brand.

In other words, you better have a comprehensive content strategy (including promotion) that doesn’t rely on just one tactic or medium. I like Jason Miller’s idea around Big Rock Content, though I think the missing ingredient is being memorable.

TL;DR

Infographics are a poor way to build your brand and earn true fans because they destroy the triangle of memory. A successful infographic campaign must be part of a larger content strategy, focusing on repeatable efforts that make people LOL or OMG and can be pushed through multiple marketing channels to reinforce the site or brand.

Blog commenting is the not-so-secret weapon to building your brand and authority. I’m not talking about comment spam or finding do follow blogs and littering them with links. No, the blog commenting I’m talking about lets you cut through the clutter and tap into the attention of creators.

Participation Inequality

To understand why blog commenting is so powerful you first need to grasp the concept of participation inequality.

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

You might also hear this concept referred to as the 90:9:1 Principle or The 1% Rule. You could even stretch a bit and mention the Pareto Principle in this discussion. The idea here is that the vast majority of people lurk and never participate. They are consumers of content.

A small minority, the 9%, may comment, share or participate in other ways. But it’s the 1% left that actually create the content that is consumed. When I explain it to people I refer to these groups as lurkers, reactors and creators respectively.

What’s surprising (to me at least) is that many people still haven’t caught on to this idea. They remain shocked and appalled that 90%+ of Yelp reviews come from 1% of users. They use low activity (defined as contributing) on services like Twitter and Google+ to argue that they’re not viable.

Now what type of person do you think was more likely to sign up and use Twitter back in 2008?  Lurker, reactor or creator? Give yourself a gold star if you answered creator. And that’s why the percentage still Tweeting from those years is higher. As the service became more mainstream, more lurkers joined the service.

And that’s okay!

Trying to ‘fix’ participation inequality is a losing battle against human nature. Most people simply aren’t going to create content for a wide variety of reasons. Sure, technology may slide the percentages a small amount but material changes to this dynamic won’t happen.

Creators

If creators are responsible for nearly all of the content we consume, that makes them … pretty powerful. I dare say, you might call them influencers. Now, I don’t particularly like that term but there’s a certain amount of truth in it.

The sad thing is that most of the ‘influencer outreach’ content I’ve seen talks about how to identify (zzzzzz) and email these people or ways to interact with them on Twitter. I suppose that can work once in a while but the odds of securing their attention in these ways is limited and inefficient.

People continue to do this type of outreach because of the huge upside in gaining the attention of a creator. Creators often have a large audience so a mention or link in the content they create can provide a real boost to your brand and authority.

If you didn’t put the pieces together already, creators power the link graph.

Attention

Attention is at a premium and it’s your job to win the attention auction as many times as you can. It’s even more important to win the attention of creators. Yet, creators may have a more limited amount of attention to give. Why? They’re busy creating content! Seriously, it takes time (and lots of it) if you’re doing it right.

Not only that but if they’re a successful creator, the demands on their time increase. They get more email, more requests, more clients.

So how do you get the attention of a creator? Funny thing, there’s actually a really easy way to hack the attention of a creator. That’s right. Blog commenting.

You know that creators are going to be paying attention to the comments on their content. They worked hard to produce it and they’re looking to see how it’s received. Make no mistake, creators thrive on feedback and validation.

Creators hang out in the comments section. So take advantage of the implicit focus creators have on comments.

Blog Commenting

The problem with blog commenting is that most people suck at it. I’m not even talking about the cesspool of comments that often overwhelms YouTube videos or the comment spam with their ever present and overly complimentary prose clogging up moderation queues.

Commenting is your chance to get the undivided attention of that creator, if only for a few seconds as they determine whether the comment is interesting.

“Nice post. Very helpful.”

Is that comment interesting? Nope. Is it memorable? Nope. Comments like this do absolutely nothing for you. In fact, if a creator associates you with these types of moronic bland comments, you reduce your chances of securing their attention in the future.

Remember, attention is a habit. You figure out which people are worthy of your attention and which are not. The more times I choose not to pay attention to you, the more likely I am to do that in the future.

When you comment, your job is to add value to that content. That means you come with an opinion and point of view. You come with other related content that you’ll link to in your comment. Those links should not always be to your own site. No one likes the person who always talks about me, me, me.

Most creators want a reaction. They want a debate. They want a conversation. They want to learn. They want to be challenged. They want to be mentally stimulated.

Who Is This Person?

If you’ve done your job right and provided a comment that engages the creator, a thought bubble should appear over their head reading ‘who is this person?’

At that point they’re clicking on the links in your comment or on the ‘site’ link you provided in the comment meta that’s on nearly every comment platform.

A good comment gets a creator curious about that person.

They click around and do some research. Maybe you have a blog yourself and they read your latest post (or more). Maybe they like it enough they add it to their RSS reader or they find your Twitter handle and follow you there.

Of course this means you need those exploratory clicks to land somewhere that showcases your brand. Don’t make the mistake of leaving a great comment and then have the creator come through to a site that hasn’t been updated in over a year or a half-ass product page with a broken image.

If you’ve engaged the creator enough to garner more attention, don’t squander it with poor content assets.

Putting It All Together

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a few months but it wasn’t until I bumped into Larry Kim (who is a great guy) at SMX West that everything fell into place. I was chatting with Larry about this topic and he gave me a perfect example of the power of blog commenting in practice.

On February 25th the talented Elisa Gabbert compiled the opinions of SEO experts on the ‘dwindling value of links‘ (bollocks, but that’s another story.)

The post was popular and garnered 37 comments, many from other notable creators. One of those was a very comprehensive comment by Russ Jones from Virante.

On February 28th (three days later) the indomitable Rand Fishkin released a Whiteboard Friday video that not only linked to the Wordstream post but referenced comments by Russ Jones.

And if you watch the video or read the transcript it’s crystal clear that Rand has read the comments. Heck, he uses them as the basis for a material amount of this video! It might have been nice if Moz had also linked to Virante but c’est la vie.

Do you see what just happened here!? Have I convinced you how powerful blog commenting can be in getting the attention of creators? That those creators can then provide your brand, site or product exposure by including them in their content.

But … Reasons Excuses

I know some of you are going to complain that blog commenting like this is too time consuming. Oh? Can I offer you some cheese for that whine?

Seriously! There are few better ways to interact with creators. Not every one will result in a mention or link in three days time but done right you’re going to build your expertise and authority with the ‘right’ people.

Would you rather send out a bunch of email pitches to influencers which are essentially interruptions and attacks on their attention or instead build lasting content assets (comments my friend) while gaining exposure with said influencers? Choose wisely.

Others are rightly frustrated with comment censorship, both human and algorithmic (i.e. – spam filters). But the answer is not to remove comments (and chase away creators) but to figure out a better way to have these discussions.

TL;DR

A small amount of creators are responsible for the vast majority of the content we consume. They have a limited amount of attention yet wield a lot of influence through their ability to reference sites, products, brands or content in the content they produce.

Creators hangout in (aka devote their attention to) the comments section of their content and that of others. Thus, memorable blog comments that provoke creator curiosity (and clicks) build your authority and improve your chances of gaining a mention or link in their content in the future.

Every waking minute of every day we choose to do one thing or another.

For a long time we didn’t have many choices. Hunt the mammoths or mind the fire. Read the bible or tend the crops. I can remember when we only got six television stations on an old black and white TV.

But as technology advances we’re afforded more choices more often.

We can decide to talk about the weather with the person next to us in the doctor’s waiting room or stare into our phone and chuckle at a stupid BuzzFeed article. We can focus on that Excel spreadsheet or we can scroll through our Facebook feed.

You can sit on the couch and watch The Blacklist or you can sit on that same couch and read Gridlinked by Neal Asher on a Kindle. You could go out and play tennis or you could go out and play Ingress and hack some portals.

I was going to overwhelm you with statistics that showed how many choices we have in today’s digital society, such as the fact that the typical email subscriber gets 416 commercial emails every month. That’s more than 10 a day!

I could go on and on because there’s a litany of surveys and data that tell the same story. But … we all know this from experience. We live and breath it every day.

We all choose to look, hear and do only so many things. Because there are only so many hours in each day.

Our time and attention is becoming our most valued resource. (Frankly, we should really guard it far more fiercely than we do.) As marketers we must understand and adapt to this evolving environment. But … it’s not new.

The Attention Auction

There’s always been an auction on attention. That critical point in time where people decide to give their attention to one thing over the other.

Recently, there’s been quite a kerfluffle over the idea of content shock. That there’s too much content. There are some interesting points in that debate but I tend to believe the number of times content comes up in the auction has increased quite a bit. We consume far more content due to ubiquitous access.

Sure there’s more content vying for attention. But there are more opportunities to engage and a large amount of content never comes up in the auction because of poor quality or mismatched interest.

There are hundreds of TV channels but really only a handful that are contextually relevant to you at any given time. Even if there are 68 sports channels the odds that you are in the mood to watch sports and that there will be something on each of those stations at the same time that you want to watch is very small. If you’re looking to watch NFL Football then Women’s College Badminton isn’t really an option.

More importantly, I believe that we’ve adapted to the influx of content. It’s knowing how we’ve adapted that can help marketers win the attention auction more often.

We Are Internet Old!

Adolescents often do very reckless things. They run red lights. They engage in binge drinking. They have unprotected sex. While some point to brain development as the cause (and there’s some truth to that), I tend to believe Dr. Valerie Reyna has it right.

The researchers found that while adults scarcely think about engaging in many high-risk behaviors because they intuitively grasp the risks, adolescents take the time to mull over the risks and benefits.

It’s not that adolescents don’t weigh the pros and cons. They do and actually overestimate the potential cons. But despite that, they choose to play the odds and risk it more often than adults. In large part, this can be attributed to less life experience. They’ve had fewer opportunities to land on the proverbial whammy.

As we grow older we actually think less about many decisions because we have more experience and we can make what is referred to as ‘gist’ decisions. From my perspective it simply means we grok the general idea and can quickly say yea or nay.

So what does any of this have to do with the Internet, attention or content?

When it comes to consuming digital content, we’re old. We’ve had plenty of opportunities to experience all sorts of content to the point where we don’t have to think too hard about whether we’re going to click or not. If it fits a certain pattern we have a certain response.

Nay! A thousand times nay.

The vast majority of content being produced is, to put it bluntly, crap. Technology has a lot to do with this. It is both easy and free to create content in written or visual formats. From WordPress to Tumblr to Instagram, nearly anyone can add to the content tidal wave.

Of course, the popularity of ‘content marketing’ has increased the number of bland, “me too” articles, not to mention the eyesore round-up posts that are a simulacrum of true curation.

People have wasted too much time and attention on shitty content. The result? We’re making decisions faster and faster by relying on those past experiences.

We create internal shortcuts in our mind for what is good or bad. It’s a shortcut that protects us from wasting our time and attention, but may also prevent us from finding new legitimate content. So how do we address this cognitive shortcut? How do you win the attention auction?

You can ensure that you fit that shortcut and you can add yourself to that shortcut.

Fit The Shortcut

Getting Attention

Fitting the shortcut is simple to say, but often difficult to execute. Make sure that, at a glance, you get the attention of your user. There are plenty of ways to do this from writing good titles to using appropriate images to leveraging social sharing.

When ‘1-800 service’ pops up on caller ID you’re probably making a snap decision that it’s a telemarketer and you’ll ignore the call. When it’s the name of your doctor or someone from your family you pick up the phone. This same type of process happens on nearly all social platforms as people scan feeds on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook.

Recently Facebook even admitted to the issues revolving around feed consumption.

The fact that less and less of brands’ content will surface is described as a result of increased competition for limited space, since “content that is eligible to be shown in news feed is increasing at a faster rate than people’s ability to consume it.”

Now this is a bit disingenuous since Facebook is crowding out legitimate content for ads (a whole lot of ads) but the essence of this statement is true. Not only that but your content is at a disadvantage on Facebook since much of the content is personal in nature. Cute pictures of your cousin’s kids are going to trump and squeeze out content from brands.

So with what space you’re left with on these platforms, you better make certain it has the best chance of getting noticed and fitting that shortcut. The thing is, too many still don’t do what’s necessary to give their content the best chance of success.

If you’re not optimizing your social snippet you’re shooting your content in the foot.

Be sure your title is compelling, that you have an eye catching image, that the description is (at a minimum) readable and at best engages and entices. Of course, none of this matters unless that content finds its way to social platforms.

Make sure you’re encouraging social sharing. Don’t make me hunt down where you put the sharing options or jump through hoops once I get there.

Ensure your content is optimized for both social and search. And when you’re doing the latter rely on user centric syntax and intent to guide your optimization efforts.

Your job is to fit into that cognitive shortcut by making it easy for users to see and understand your content in the shortest amount of time possible.

Keeping Attention

Getting them to your content is the first step in winning their attention. At that point they’re giving you the opportunity to take up more of their time and attention. They made a choice but they’re going to be looking to confirm whether it was a good one with almost the same amount of speed.

When you land on a new website you instantly (perhaps unconsciously) make a decision about the quality and authority of that site and whether you’ll stick around.

A websites’ first impression is known to be a crucial moment for capturing the users interest. Within a fraction of time, people build a first visceral “gut feeling” that helps them to decide whether they are going to stay at this place or continue surfing to other sites. Research in this area has been mainly stimulated by a study of Lindgaard et al. (2006), where the authors were able to show that people are able to form stable attractiveness judgments of website screenshots within 50 milliseconds.

That’s from a joint research paper from the University of Basel and Google Switzerland about the role of visual complexity and prototypicality regarding first impression of websites (pdf).

Once they get to the content you need to ensure they instantly get positive reinforcement. Because at the same time there are other pieces of content, other things, battling for attention.

So if they don’t instantly see what they’re looking for you’re giving them a reason to say nope. If what they see on that page looks difficult to read. Nope. If they see grammatical errors. Nope. If they feel the site is spammy looking. Nope.

There is a drum beat of research, examples and terms that underscore the importance of reducing friction.

Call it cognitive fluency or cognitive ease, either way we seek out things that are familiar and look like we expect. Books such as Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice and Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think make it clear that too many choices reduce action and satisfaction. And we should all internalize the fact that the majority of people don’t read but instead skim articles.

That doesn’t mean that the actual content has to suffer. I still write what are considered long-form posts but format them in ways that allow people to get meaning from them without having to read them word for word.

Do I hope they’re poring over every sentence? Absolutely! I’m passionate about my writing and writing in general. But I’m a realist and would prefer that more people learn or take something from my writing than have a select few read every word and laud me for sentence construction.

I still point people to my post on readability as a way to get started down this road. Make no mistake, those who optimize for readability will succeed (even with lesser content) than those that refuse to do so out of ego or other rationalizations (I’m looking at you Google blogs).

I will shout in the face of the next person who whines that they shouldn’t have to use an image in their post or that they only want people who are ‘serious about the subject’ to read their article. Wake up before you’re the Geocities of the Internet.

The one thing I do know is that being authentic and having a personality can help you stand out. It can help you to at least get and retain attention and sometimes even become memorable. Here’s a bit of writing advice from Charles Stross.

Third and final piece of advice: never commit to writing something at novel length that you aren’t at least halfway in love with. Because if you’re phoning it in, your readers will spot it and throw rotten tomatoes at you. And because there’s no doom for a creative artist that’s as dismal as being chained to a treadmill and forced to play a tune they secretly hate for the rest of their working lives.

The emphasis is mine. Don’t. Phone. It. In.

Add To The Shortcut

Using Attention

When you do get someone’s attention, what are you doing with it? You want them to add your site, product or brand to that cognitive shortcut. So the next time a piece of that content comes up in the attention auction you’ve got the inside track. They recognize it and select it intuitively.

For instance, every time I see something new from Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal, I give it my attention. He’s delivered quality and memorable content enough times that he doesn’t have to fight so hard for my attention. I have a preconceived notion of quality that I bring to each successive interaction with his content.

Welcome to branding 101.

Consistently creating positive and memorable interactions (across multiple channels) will cause users to associate your site, product or brand as being worthy of attention.

Let me be more explicit about that term ‘interactions’. Every time you’re up in the attention auction counts as an interaction. So if I choose to pass on reading your content, that counts and not in a good way. We’re creatures of habit so the more times I pass on something the more likely I am to continue passing on it.

Add to that the perception (or reality) that we have less time per piece of content and each opportunity you have to get in front of a user is critical.

Now, if I actually get someone to share a piece of content, will it be presented in a way that will win the attention auction? If it isn’t not only have I squandered that user action but I may have created a disincentive for sharing in the future. If I share something and no one gives me a virtual high five of thanks for doing so will I continue to share content from that source?

Poor social snippet optimization is like putting a kick-me sign on your user’s back.

Memorable

If you want to be added to that cognitive shortcut you need to make it easy for them to do so. You need them to remember and remember in the ‘right’ way.

I’ve read quite a bit lately about ensuring your content is useful. I find this bit of advice exceedingly dull. I mean, are you creating content to be useless? I’m sure content spammers might but by in large most aren’t. Not only that but there’s plenty of great content that isn’t traditionally useful unless you count tickling the funny bone as useful.

Of course you’ve also probably read about how tapping into emotion can propel your content to the top! Well, there’s some truth to that but that’s often at odds with being useful such as creating a handy bookmarklet or a tutorial on Excel. I suppose you could link it to frustration but you’re not going to have some Dove soap tear-jerker piece mashed up with Excel functions. Even Annie Cushing can’t pull that off.

Story telling is also a fantastic device but it’s not a silver bullet either. Mind you, I think it has a better chance than most but even then you’re really retaining attention instead of increasing memory.

You have to make your content cocktail party ready. Your content has to roll off the tongue in conversation.

I read this piece on Global Warming in The New York Times.

I heard this song by Katy Perry about believing in yourself.

I saw this funny ad where Will Ferrell tosses eggs at a Dodge.

Seriously, when you’re done with a piece of your content, describe it to someone out loud in one sentence. That’s what it’ll be reduced to for the most part.

As humans we categorize or tag things so we can easily recall them. I think the scientific term here is ‘coding’ of information. If we can’t easily do so it’s tough for us to talk about them again, much less find them again. As an aside, re-finding content is something we do far more often than we realize and is something Google continues to try to solve.

Even when we can easily categorize and file away that bit of information, we’re not divvying it up into a very fine structure. Only the highlights make it into memory. We only take a few things from the source information. A sort of whisper down the lane effect takes place. You suddenly don’t remember who wrote it, or where you saw it.

We’re trying to optimize the ability to recall that information by using the right coding structure, one that we’ll be able to remember.

It’s the reason you need to be careful about if or how you go about guest blogging. This is also why I generally despise (strong word I know) Infographics. Because more often than not if you hear someone refer to one they say ‘That Infographic on Water Conservation’ or ‘That Infographic on The History of Beer’.

Guess what, they have no clue where they saw it or what brand it represents. Seriously. Because usually the only two things remembered are the format (Infographic) and the topic. When I ask people to name the brands behind Infographics I usually get two responses: Mint and OK Cupid. Kudos to them but a big raspberry for the rest of you.

“But the links” I hear some of you moan. Stop. Stop it right now! That lame ass link (no don’t tell me about the DA number) is nothing compared to the attention you just squandered.

I’m not saying that Infographics can’t work, but they have to be done thoughtfully, for the right reasons and to support your brand. Okay, rant over.

Ensuring people walk away with a concise meaning increases satisfaction. And getting them to repeat it to someone else helps secure your content in memory. The act of sharing helps add your site or brand to that user’s shortcut.

If there were a formula you could follow that would guarantee great content, why is there so much crap? If we all knew what makes a hit song or a hit movie why isn’t every song and film a success? This isn’t easy and anyone telling you different is lying.

Consistent

You can also add to the shortcut by creating an expectation. This can be around the quality of your content but that’s pretty tough to execute on. I mean, I completely failed at generating enough blog content last year. I’m not advocating a paint-by-numbers schedule, but I had more to say and at some point if you’re name isn’t out there they begin to forget you.

There’s a fair amount of research that shows that memory is a new mapping of neurons and that the path becomes stronger with repeated exposure. You inherently know this by studying. The more you study the more you remember.

But what if the memory of your site or brand, that path you’re creating in your user’s mind, isn’t clear. What if the first time you associate the brand with one thing and the next time it’s not quite that thing you thought it was. Or that the time between exposures is so great that you can’t find that path anymore and inadvertently create a new path. How many times have you saved something only to realize you already saved it at some point in the past?

Now, I’m out there in other ways. I keep my Twitter feed going with what I hope is a great source of curated content across a number of industries. My Google+ feed is full of the same plus a whole bunch of other content that serves as a sort of juxtaposition to the industry specific content.

One of the more successful endeavors on Google+ is my #ididnotwakeupin series where I share photos from places around the world. It’s a way for me to vicariously travel. So every morning for more than two years I’ve posted a photo tagged with #ididnotwakeupin.

The series gets a decent amount of engagement and if I tried harder (i.e. – interacted with other travel and photography folks) I’m pretty sure I could turn it into something bigger. I even had an idea of turning it into a coffee table book. I haven’t though. Why? Because there’s only so much time in every day. See what I did there?

Another example of this is Moz’s Whiteboard Friday series. You aren’t even sure what the topic is going to be but over time people expect it to be good so they tune in.

Or there’s Daily Grace It’s Grace on YouTube where people expect and get a new video from Grace Helbig every Monday through Friday. Want to double-down on consistent? Tell me what phrase you remember after watching this video from Grace (might be NSFW depending on your sensitivity).

Very … yeah, you know.

That’s right. Repetition isn’t a bad thing. The mere exposure effect demonstrates that the more times we’re exposed to something the better chance we’ll wind up liking it. This is what so many digital marketing gurus don’t want you to hear.

Saturation marketing (still) works because more exposure equals familiarity which improves cognitive fluency which makes it easier to remember.

It’s sort of like the chorus in a song, right? Maybe you don’t know all the words to each verse but you know the chorus! Particularly if you can’t get away from hearing it on the radio every 38 minutes.

In some ways, the number of exposures necessary is inversely proportional to the quality of the content. Great content or ads don’t need much repetition but for me to know that it’s JanuANY at Subway this month might take a while.

And the biggest mistake I see people make is stopping. “We blogged for a few months and saw some progress but not enough to keep investing in it.” This is like stopping your new diet and exercise regimen because you only lost 6 pounds.

You always have to be out there securing and reinforcing your brand as a cognitive shortcut.

Does Pepsi decide that they just don’t need to do any more advertising? Everyone knows about Pepsi so why spend a billion dollars each year marketing it? You just can’t coast. Well, you can, but you’re taking a huge risk. Because someone or something else might fill the void. (Note to self, I need to take this advice.)

Shared

The act of sharing content likely means it will be remembered. To me it’s almost like having to describe that content in your head again as you share it. You have that small moment where you have to ask questions about what you’re sharing, with who and why it’s interesting.

So sharing isn’t just about getting your content in front of other people it’s helping to cement your content in the mind of that user.

Of course, having the same piece of content float in front of your face a number of times from different sources helps tremendously. Not only are you hitting on the mere exposure effect you’re also introducing some social proof to the equation.

To me the goal isn’t really to ‘go viral’ but to increase the number of times I’m winning the attention auction by getting there more often with an endorsement.

You might not click on that ‘What City Should You Actually Live In?‘ quiz on Facebook the first time but after four people have posted their answers you just might cave and click through. (Barcelona by they way.)

Examples

Breaking Bad

How did Breaking Bad become such a huge hit? It wasn’t when it first started out. I didn’t watch the first two seasons live.

But enough people did and AMC kept the faith and kept going. Because enough people were talking about it. It was easy to talk about too. “This show where a chemistry teacher becomes a meth dealer.” Bonus points that the plot made it stand out from anything else on TV.

And then you figured out that you could watch it on Netflix! People gave it a try. Then they began to binge watch seasons and they were converts. They wanted more. MOAR!

Of course none of it would have happened if it weren’t a great show. But Breaking Bad was also consistent, persistent, memorable and available.

BuzzFeed

I know what you’re thinking. BuzzFeed? Come on, their content sucks! And for the most part I’d have to agree. But it’s sort of a guilty pleasure isn’t it?

Here’s why I think BuzzFeed works. You’ve found yourself on a BuzzFeed ‘article’ a number of times. It’s not high quality in most senses of the word but it does often entertain. Not only that it does so very quickly.

If I’m ‘reading’ the 25 Times Anna Kendrick Was Painfully Accurate post I’m only scrolling through briefly and I do get a chuckle or two out of it. This has happened enough times that I know what to expect from BuzzFeed.

I’ve created a cognitive shortcut that tells me that I can safely click-through on a BuzzFeed post because I’ll get a quick laugh out of it. They entertain and they respect my time. For my wife that same function is filled by Happy Place.

Blind Five Year Old

How about my site and personal brand? I’ve done pretty well but it took me quite a while to get there, figuring out a bunch of stuff along the way.

Seriously, I blogged in relative obscurity from 2008 to 2010. But over time the quality of my posts won over a few people. But quality wasn’t enough. I also got better and better at optimizing my content for readability and for sharing.

I use a lot of images in my content. And I spend a lot of time on selecting and placing them. I still think I botched the placement of an image in my Keywords Still Matter post. And it still irks me. No, I’m not joking.

The images make it easier to read. Not only do they give people a rest, they allow me to connect on a different level. Sometimes I might be able to communicate an idea better with the help of that image. It helps to make it all click.

I use a lot of music references as images. Part of it is because I like music but part of it is because if you’re suddenly singing that song in your head, then you’re associating my content with that song, if even just a little. When I do that I have a better chance of you remembering that content. I’ve helped create a tag in your mental filing system.

I try to build more ways for you to connect my content in your head.

TL;DR

We have more choices more often when it comes to content. In response to this we’re protecting our time and attention by making decisions on content faster. Knowing this, marketers must work harder to fit cognitive shortcuts we’ve created, based on experience, for what is perceived as clickable or authoritative content.

Alternatively, the consistent delivery and visibility of memorable content can help marketers create a cognitive shortcut, giving themselves an unfair advantage when their content comes up in the attention auction.

Lately I’ve gotten a few too many Carly Rae content marketing emails, which makes me both sad and grouchy. This is not the way to promote content, gain fans or build a brand. Stop it.

What Is Carly Rae Content Marketing?

The term comes from Carly Rae Jespen’s popular Call Me Maybe song which contains the following lyrics.

Hey I just met you
And this is crazy
But here’s my number
So call me maybe

I’ve changed the lyrics slightly to reflect the emails I’m increasingly receiving from folks.

Hey I just met you
And this is crazy
But here’s my content
So promote me maybe

Carly Rae content marketing are out of the blue outreach emails from people you have no relationship with asking you to promote their content or engage in some other activity. In the end it’s just shoddy email spam.

It’s An Honor To Be Nominated?

I’m sure some of you are thinking that I’m ungrateful. The fact that I’m getting these emails shows that people want my endorsement. Perhaps it is better to be noticed than not but if I am some sort of influencer wouldn’t you want to put your best foot forward?

First impressions matter and this one isn’t going to win me over. In fact, I might remember you, your site or brand for the lousy outreach instead.

Win Over The Persnickety

I might demand a higher level of quality than others. So you could simply write me off as some anal-retentive prat with outrageous expectations and a self-inflated ego. But that would be a mistake.

Because if you can put together a pitch that doesn’t make me vomit in my mouth a little bit then you’re likely going to have better luck with everyone else too. In short, win over your toughest critic and you’ll have a powerful outreach message.

Content Marketing Basics

If you’re doing outreach there are a few things you must get right. A recent post by Tadeusz Szewczyk about the perfect outreach message covered some of the basics. (It’s not perfect in my view but it’s certainly above average.)

You must be relevant, have a decent subject line, get my name right, respect my time and show that you’ve done some rudimentary homework about me. The sad part is that 50% of people fail to even get my name correct. Yup, somehow AJ Kohn is transformed into John. (Clicks trash icon.)

Respect My Time And Brain

One of the things that has bothered me lately is the number of people asking me to take time to provide feedback on their content. Feedback! Some of these people might actually want feedback but I’m going to call bullshit on the vast majority. You don’t want feedback. You want me to share and promote your content.

Do you really want me to tell you that your infographic is an eyesore and then not share or promote it? Probably not. I mean, kudos if you really are open to that sort of thing but I’m guessing you’re in promotion mode at this stage and you won’t be asking for a redesign.

Getting me (or anyone) to do something is a high-friction event. Don’t waste it asking them to do the wrong thing.

Honest Teasing

Being transparent about what you’re trying to accomplish is almost always the best way to go. If you’re looking for a link, tell them you’re looking for a link. Stop beating around the bush.

I’d also argue that you should be applying marketing principles to outreach. Half the battle is getting me to actually click and read the content. So tease me! Get me interested in what you have to say. Give me a cliff-hanger! Don’t put me to sleep or ask me to promote the content without reading it.

Get me interested so that I view or read your content. At that point you have to be confident that the content is good enough that I’ll share and promote it. Stop trying to do everything all at once in your outreach email.

TL;DR

Stop Carly Rae content marketing! Fast and shoddy outreach might get you a handful of mentions but it won’t lead to long-term success and may actually prevent it in many cases.