Pride goeth before a fall

Published on January 11th, 2008 by Jeremy Chatfield

Whooee, I’m going to have to watch my step. I monitor my presence on the web, mostly using Google Alerts and similar facilities. This is mainly because of my interest in online identity and especially because of the interaction of search and identity - a fairly common theme in these articles. I know who I am - so monitoring my name and various online identities, helps me to understand how other folk, clients and so on, are affected. In the last 24 hours I’ve come up in Google Alerts on Technologists Notes and Search Marketing Gurus blog. What do these recent alerts, and my more general appearance in search engine results, reveal about internet marketing?

The first alert is a reference to my activities more than 15 years ago. I was very pleased to be associated with the extraordinary team that put together Dell UNIX, as described in Charlie Sauer’s note. This effort was in about 2 BW (Before the Web). In those days, we ran Gopher and Veronica and thought it pretty neat to run distributed queries that returned not very impressive results of plain text documents in less than 20 minutes. Although we (Dell UNIX, that is) had quite a lot of internet interest and even had a Usenet news group devoted to discussing issues, I can find little reference to Dell UNIX from those days, in the modern web.

Just two years later, in 1994, I was involved in another UNIX based project and business, and this dominates my listings. In that role, I was supposed to post vigorously and often. I was also responsible for putting up the company’s first web server, in June 1994, with product details. So I’m suddenly visible, mostly from 1995 onwards, particularly because other folk started to put together online archives.

It was my efforts on Dell UNIX, and to a lesser extent on Esix, that finally convinced me that the technical merits of a product are near meaningless. We had delivered a terrific ground breaking product with a tiny team, against internal resistance… and although the product was one of the better selling Intel SVR4 implementations, the key to success or failure was marketing. Understanding consumer needs and translating those into effective, profitable products, was a lot more intricate than simply building a technological world beater.

The Dell UNIX experience started my slow transformation into Internet Marketeer. Something confirmed by the one line mention in Search Marketing Gurus, and adoption into their blogroll. While I’m still a technophile, these days I’m more interested in the marketing aspects of a product than the pure technology, especially from the perspectives of microeconomics and cybernetics. Really geeky ways to look at marketing, but they give me some satisfaction in feeling that I understand what’s happening, sometimes :)

Before The Web

What disappoints me, is that my hardest and most generally useful work remains invisible. I was lead researcher for the Pennylands Low Energy Housing Experiment, back in the 1980’s, in the Energy Research Group at the Open University. This was another ground breaking project that I joined, pretty late. The main effort had already been invested by people in the Milton Keynes Development Corporation Energy Conservation Unit, such as John Doggart, and in the use of computer models and novel scientific instruments, by Bob Everett. I also supported the IT needs of the associated Great Linford Solar Housing Experiment, whose main researcher was Alan Horton. Between the projects, we had more than 200 houses, of which more than 190 were custom built to two standards of energy conservation, and included passive solar heating features.

I occasionally come across people who live in the specially designed homes on Pennylands. They generally are very excited about the bright airy rooms (concentrated on the south side of the building) and the way in which they aren’t overlooked. Sensitive landscaping ensured that these large windows into bedrooms and living areas are not easily seen into.

Recent research has shown that the residents have taken advantage of their energy efficient houses by living warmer lives. These days, with my interest in microeconomics, I’d have to say that this should be expected. Back then, we’d assumed that people would essentially leave the thermostat untouched and reap the advantage of lower fuel bills.

With a couple of published papers on the work, and various reports in media, and even a short BBC documentary made by the Outside Broadcasting Unit, I’d expected some kind of online marker. It is an entirely invisible experiment online. Although I’ve seen a news item within the last year about the modern occupants use of energy, possibly in New Scientist - it is an invisible project.

This thirty year old work showed that modest building design changes (increased loft insulation, 100mm insulated cavity walls, rather than 50mm, double glazing, internal thermal mass and orienting the main windows to the south, plus or minus 45 degrees) could increase comfort and reduce fuel bills significantly. The UK has still, even with the looming energy crisis, not established significantly higher building standards or done anything about retrofitting older building stock. I think my new understanding of marketing tells me why… But that’ll be the topic of another article, another day.

For this article the lesson to carry away is that even projects with large budgets (£1.5M in 1977 prices, IIRC) and that potentially should affect at least a population of 60 million people, can become effectively lost on the modern web.

What You Can Do

Today, my focus in this article is on what counts and why. If your business is founded on success that pre-dates the web - it is invisible. Anything that happened more than about 14 years ago is largely irrelevant.

What counts online is actually another marketing mantra - “what did you do for me, today?” If your business isn’t communicating, pretty often, what you do for your customers, then you are going to be invisible. Case histories, advice for the changing market conditions, your business responses to items in the news - they are all reasons to communicate and they all help to get your business listed and recognised. If you fail to talk about your achievements, no one else will help you - except in the most unusual conditions.

The answer is, of course, to engage with blogs and blogging - the easiest way to publish. And to make sure that your web site reflects what you do now, not what you did when the site was put together in the dot com boom. Use Google Alerts and similar tools to monitor your online mentions. And most of all, learn to look at the world from the perspective of your customer - not what is convenient and interesting to your business, but to your clients needs and wants.

That’s why this article is germane to search marketing. Those frequent blog articles, and responses in other peoples blogs and in relevant news forums, will all help your site to increase in rank. I do hear business people say that blogs, with a focus on the details of people’s live, salacious gossip and uninformed speculation - well, that’s not what they want to do. You don’t have to write blogs about your own social life or celebrities - unless that happens to be your business. Your niche business blog may not be widely read, but it will generate traffic and rank, if it is genuinely useful and interesting to your community. Anything that improves your search engine ranking is good for sustained business.

There’s a massive difference in traffic between being on page one and page two. There’s a similar difference between being below the fold on the first page, and in the top three positions. To abuse an older saying - rank hath its privilege.

Updates

2008-01-14 - edits for clarity, based on personal email and re-reading. No significant changes of intent, but some blurry or confusing text removed or replaced.