Blog Posts by:
Sasha Pasulka Founder/CEO of EB Media, retired gossip queen, sleep enthusiast.
September 2
Michael Arrington ignited a firestorm last week when he
posted an article to TechCrunch titled “Too Few Women in Tech? Don’t Blame the
Men.”
“The problem isn’t that Silicon
Valley is keeping women down, or not doing enough to encourage female
entrepreneurs,” wrote Arrington. “The opposite is true. No, the problem is that
not enough women want to become entrepreneurs.”
Arrington singled
out New York media critic Rachel Sklar – who’d pointed the finger at TechCrunch
in a quote for a recent Wall Street Journal article – and said that “
there are women like Sklar who complain about how there
are too few women in tech, and then there are women just who go out and start
companies.”
Sklar responded to Arrington
via Twitter: “
Thanks for making this a
topic of conversation.”
Camp Arrington
It's not a new topic of conversation, but Arrington's rant lent legitimacy to a broadly held perspective on it that's been stifled in a journalistic climate of forever political correctness. So now we can have a conversation.
It's been the elephant in the room, as it is in so many conversations
regarding women's issues -- this sense of "Stop making me feel
guilty" and "I'm tired of bending over backwards to make you feel good"
and "Honestly, I don't care about ratios, I'm just trying to build the best team, because that's how you make money" that I suspect many people carry but feel they can't express. It's hard to have a truly results-oriented discussion about a
social issue when an enormous segment of the population feels their
honest opinion is best silenced. I'm glad Arrington said what he said.
It made me think long and hard about where I stand on
the topic. I certainly ought to have an opinion – I studied computer science as
an undergrad and worked as a software developer in the hugely male-dominated
defense industry for seven years before starting my own company. I’ve been
told, by men, everything from the standard “You can’t just be as
good as the men in the industry, you have to be better” to the near-flattering
“You’re actually too attractive to be taken seriously.” I will say that I've had, on the whole, wonderful experiences working alongside and for men who treat me as an equal -- men who judge me on the merits of my work. These have been the majority of my experiences. Even the men who, in my office, conducted system architecture conversations with my breasts were, in a meeting room, both supportive and justly critical of my input.
For a long time, I
was in Camp Arrington. I felt that whining about the lack of women in
tech and entrepreneurship was disempowering. How were men
supposed to take us seriously, I thought, if we were busy hosting pro-woman
networking events and complaining about how hard things were for us while they
were busy starting companies? And what kind of message did that send to a younger generation?
Defecting
As I’ve gotten older
and a bit more experienced, I’ve more clearly seen the need for this
conversation, and I’ve come to appreciate it. Men have thousands of business
role models to choose from – not just in the Internet age, but in the past
several thousand years of history -- thousands of career paths and
personalities to pore over and pick and choose from, to get some sense, some
little glimmer, of how this is supposed
to be done. Of how people like me
can do this.
For women,
especially in tech, that pool is vastly smaller. In many other previously
male-dominated fields – medicine, entertainment, journalism -- young women today have as many same-sex
role models as the men. In tech, we still don’t. When I encounter a woman I
find relatable succeeding in tech, I hunt her down and I interrogate her. I’m
desperate for examples of how to do this, how to carve out a path for myself in
this world as myself, not as some
chick trying to masquerade as “one of the boys.”
And I guess that’s why I’m not really Camp Arrington anymore.
Today, I know there’s value in creating awareness around the issue; there’s value in
discussing the obstacles and the solutions, and there’s value in actively
supporting and connecting women in this space, in fighting to create those role models and then to create visibility around them. I know because now I need that and I can't find enough of it. I no longer see it as whining but as action toward an important goal. I see that there is power in that.
Community Opinion
This issue is a lot bigger than I am, so I reached out to both men and women in
all facets of the Seattle tech world. I asked them why they thought there were
so few women in tech and whose responsibility it was to change this. I asked them about their personal experiences with the gender divide in tech.
“Women need to step forward, speak
out, and look out after themselves and their careers - in many of the same ways
men do,” says Monica Harrington, CMO at Intersect. “And men need to be more self-aware
about when they're creating a culture that favors men unfairly.”
Harrington referenced her days at Microsoft, when her male
colleagues played basketball early in the morning with the senior execs. “They’d
start meetings with those same execs by recounting glory moments from those
early morning sessions,” she says. “The overt bonding display put me and other
women at a disadvantage. When I called out a very senior exec on that issue, he
told me he thought I was making something out of nothing. He was a smart guy,
but when it came to developing and supporting strong women, he was an idiot. ”
Sharon
Bjeletich, a former Program Manager at Microsoft, brought up a similar issue.
“When I worked at Microsoft,
people would say that women were too timid in meetings. I always wanted to do
training for the upper management where a man came into a meeting room full of
women, who were all talking about sewing and cooking, or something
traditionally female. When the man talked, they would ignore him and then continue
their conversation. They would very quickly and empirically understand why
women tend to be quiet in meetings. You are always more timid when you are the
minority and there is no effort made to include you.”
Peter Chee, founder of Thinkspace, says that “if a woman
wants to be an entrepreneur, then go be one. I don’t go out seeking men who are
entrepreneurs, I go out and seek other successful entrepreneurs regardless of
gender.”
But are women at a natural disadvantage as entrepreneurs?
Tac Anderson, VP of Digital Strategies at Waggener Edstrom, says that
“generally speaking, men are naturally more aggressive risk-takers than women. If things aren't working out at a big company the way a guy
wants it, men are more likely to leave and join another company or start his
own thing. If things aren't working out the way a women wants it, she'll stick
around and work to fix it … I don’t think men are the solution here. We have a
very specific way of approaching startups, and it’s wrong to assume women
should approach startups the same way.”
Dave Schappell, founder of
TeachStreet, echoes a lot of the opinions I heard on the reason we don’t have
more women as founders. “It’s a case of starter pools,” he says.
Marina Martin, a business consultant, agrees with Schappell. “If you really want to see more
uteri in tech, grab your nearest 3-year-old girl and make damn sure she’s
around computers all the time.”
Martin adds that “most women who consider themselves ‘in
tech’ can’t Hello World themselves out of a paper bag. If they can’t motivate
themselves to crack an O’Reilly book, how can anyone consider them role models?”
This response was interesting, I thought, when juxtaposed
with the response I got from Nancy Xiao, a recent high-school grad and
TeachStreet intern. “I’ve come to realize one of my bigger challenges is not
having a technical background,” she says. “Just because a woman doesn’t speak
Ruby doesn’t mean she’s incapable.”
Are we subtly discouraging women from working in tech
because they don’t have technical backgrounds? Is Martin’s outspoken disavowal
of the non-coder folks in tech industries evidence of a quieter and more
pervasive discrimination?
Hillel Cooperman, co-founder of Jackson Fish Market, sent
what was to me the most powerful of all the responses I read. (He sent it after
first referring my question set to his female co-founder – I wrote back that I
wanted to hear male opinions as well.)
“The single most important thing you can do to increase the
number of women in leadership roles in tech is to put women in those
positions,” he said. “Doing is all
that matters. Women in leadership positions beget additional women in
leadership positions. They serve as role models for women, and more importantly
for the broader organization and its partners.”
August 19
When I first heard of the pii2010 (privacy identity
innovation) conference, I had my concerns. I imagined an endless series of
technical lectures on installing web security. It sounded dreadful.
Because I have certain masochistic tendencies, I spent Wednesday
at the conference, which in fact proved to be a brilliant, human and
thought-provoking discussion of social questions rather than technical architectures, posed
by strikingly intelligent speakers and participants. I loved every minute of it.
One theme that kept arising, much to the chagrin of some participants, was the monetization potential in the privacy space. It’s
largely uncharted and unconquered territory, likely because entrepreneurs view “privacy”
as a frustrating PR hurdle rather than a market. But privacy raises big
questions that require big solutions, and if you’re looking to get into a
market before anyone else notices it’s there, you should be looking at privacy.
Here are four of the hundreds of questions raised at pii, along with the markets
quietly building beneath them. There are plenty more where these came from. Go next year.
The Question: How
are employers expected to use the social web to make hiring decisions?
A recent
Microsoft-sponsored study found that 70% of hiring managers have rejected
candidates based on information they found online about the candidate.
“So they broke the law,” commented a panelist.
But you’d have to be crazy to hire someone
without Googling them or checking their Facebook page. I don’t know a single
woman who will go on a date without first running a Google search. Of course employers
are going to be Googling.
One can argue that this is fair, because when we put
something on Facebook or Twitter or a blog, we’re essentially making a public
speech. But what about the things other people write about us on Twitter and on
blogs, true or not? What about the photos they post and label? What about our
past legal and credit entanglements? What about the false accusations of others? As Michael Fertik
of ReputationDefenders.com noted in his keynote, the media is far better at
covering accusations than eventual acquittals, and Google’s indexing process
reflects this.
In the future, will we expect employers to review social web
data in hiring decisions? Say an elementary school hires a teacher with a clean
legal record and a perverted Twitter feed. If the children are later exposed
to inappropriate material, are the employers liable? Is it going to become an employer’s
duty to review key online aspects of an applicant’s persona?
The Markets: You
can follow this two ways. There is a service like Fertik’s Reputation
Defenders, which assists in both crisis management and preventative measures
for online reputations – a service which has seen phenomenal growth and minimal
competition in recent years. And then there is a service like panelist Peter
Kazanjy’s private-beta Unvarnished (getunvarnished.com), which essentially
serves as a way for users to pseudonymously comment on a person’s work
performance (think glassdoor.com for individuals). Kazanjy swears these pseudonyms
are, behind the scenes, linked to actual identities and tracked for authority,
but the room engaged in mass eye-rolling every time he discussed his product.
While the concept lacked support from this particular
audience (although, in his defense, I thought he made a lot of interesting and
potentially even valid points about the value of more public data than less), the
market for such a service seems imminent. When you think about the
public support for websites like hollaback,
it’s not hard to imagine the next step being something like Unvarnished. You
just have to find a CEO who’s as willing as Kazanjy to toe the party line in
the face of daily public floggings.
The Question:
Does the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act unfairly force children to
choose between exclusion from the social web and lying about their age?
COPPA, enacted in 1998, details the responsibilities an
operator assumes to protect the privacy and safety of individuals under 13. It
does not expressly prevent these individuals from giving out their personal
information, but the paperwork and potential repercussions of a violation
result in a significant number of web properties (like Facebook) opting to
prohibit the under-13 set from participating. Of course, no one’s checking IDs,
so the kids lie.
This one struck a nerve for me. I have a vivid memory of
being an 11-year-old gymnast, active in a Prodigy bulletin board (old school!) about gymnastics. Without
warning, the board became 13-and-over only, and I was blocked. I ran sobbing to
parents, devastated to have the community I loved pulled out from under me. I
cried until my face was raw. My father changed the age on my account to 13 so I
could participate. But now I was racked with guilt about The Giant Lie. Now I
was being dishonest with the community I loved! At age eleven, the spectrum of
honesty looks very black and white, and I felt like a dark, horrid impostor, a
bona fide Bad Person. I stopped participating entirely, and I changed my age
back to the truth. (A slew of bouncers in my hometown can assure you I had
no such compunctions about veracity by age eighteen.)
Nearly twenty years later, I still have a visceral response
to that memory. It’s something I was pleased to see addressed at pii from the
perspective of children’s rights. The social web is ubiquitous, and kids want
and expect to participate wholly. While we try to look out for their best
interests with these laws, we also put them in the awful position of having to
lie to participate in a conversation we like to consider global.
The Markets:
Consulting with websites to navigate and streamline the legal pathways toward
including the under-13s. Serving as an intermediary between the legal guardians
of the kids, their data, and the online properties (i.e. a service that
facilitates a parent legally consenting to their child’s creation of a true-age
Facebook page or otherwise sharing data online).
The Question: How
do you handle death on social media?
Currently, most online services have no way for a deceased’s
loved ones to access a password-protected account. These online lives are just
left lingering mid-air, like DJ AM’s ominous final Twitter update.
Should loved ones be able to access these accounts after a death? What should
happen to your personal data after you die?
The Markets: Data
wills. Password lockers. Integrated apps that facilitate the online mourning
process.
The Question: Will we eventually use a centralized store for our online data?
We trust our money to our banks and to our government. We
know exactly whom we’ve trusted with every cent of our money, and we can
move it back and forth between financial institutions with confidence. We can invest and trade it. There is no such concept for our valuable online
data – it’s such a shadowy area that a panelist asked for terminology
suggestions from the audience. Is this a data store? Data vault? Data bank?
Data service?
“Wait -- what, specifically, are we even talking about?”
asked a participant.
“We’re still trying to work that out,” the
panelist responded.
Who would we trust to operate this “data bank” anyway?
The audience voted, and the top response was “no one.” After that came the
government. Facebook received zero votes.
The Market: Build
a system for consumers to track, invest and move their online data. Sell it to
the government. Duck.
August 12
I have a close male friend in tech who is obsessed with getting rich. He’s a smart, educated and hard-working man, but, truth be told, he’s probably not cut out to be an empire-builder. He could easily bring in a low six-figure income at any number of large firms, but he’s somehow got it ingrained that he
has
to start a wildly successful tech company and make an enormous amount of money in order to be worthy of happiness. I’ve watched him lose his health, sanity, credit and girlfriends again and again for this obsession. “This is literally killing you,” I tell him. “It has to stop.”
But it doesn’t stop.
Lately I’ve had more than one male friend confide in me about his financial insecurity: “I feel like if I don’t make a lot of money, I’m not a success.”
I can honestly say I’ve never had a female friend say this to me. My girlfriends and I are certainly driven to be successful; we want to be high achievers in our fields, and we stress over everything we haven’t yet accomplished, but no one’s especially concerned with getting rich. We hardly ever talk about money.
Then again, the world doesn’t much care how much money I make. If I want a lot of money and I’m thin and pretty enough, I can always just marry into it, right?
See, I know how men feel about the pressure of financial success. I know how it feels to walk into a room and feel like I’m the least attractive woman in it, to glance around and feel that all the other women are more beautiful – skinnier, longer hair, perkier breasts, fuller lips, better skin -- to feel invisible and frightened and worthless in comparison, like everything else I’ve done and been in my life is meaningless because my thighs actually touch each other.
But for every photo of a stunning, size-zero woman that runs on the cover of a magazine, a thousand articles are written about the physical expectations we have for women and what it does to their psyche. When I feel like I don’t measure up to a certain standard, I’m surrounded by media voices screaming at me: “She’s airbrushed! She’s had plastic surgery! She had a team of twenty hair and makeup professionals! You have a million other wonderful qualities, and it’s a waste of your time to obsess on your appearance.”
We don’t do this for men. When Forbes runs a cover featuring a business tycoon, and inside he talks about his company’s success and his 22-year-old supermodel girlfriend and his eight homes in Europe, no one rushes to a laptop to bang out a piece about the pressure we put on men to make ridiculous sums of money, the pressure to provide generously for spouses and children that comes along with the male “privilege” of historically being a family’s sole wage-earner. No one’s screaming at men that they’re about as likely to start the next Facebook as I am to wake up tomorrow a dead ringer for Penelope Cruz.
And I think that matters, and I think it’s worth saying again: We put a lot of pressure on men to build empires and to get rich doing it. And men process this deeply, and it can be as insidious as a young woman’s obsession with being thin. And we don’t talk about it. We don’t actively discourage men from feeling this way.
Why? I’ll offer that this imbalance comes from a one-sided "feminist" culture that emphasizes all the ways in which women are victims while neatly overlooking the emotional struggles of the modern man. “You poor things,” we tell women, “the world is a mean place, and you’re something that can be easily hurt.”
We would never say that to our men. We would never project an inherent weakness onto men the way we do when we write about how the pressure to be beautiful hurts women.
The wealth obsession manifests silently, easily disguised as focus and drive, and never as obviously as eating disorders and botched plastic surgery highlight the pain women endure in the struggle to be beautiful.
We catch a glimpse of it it every now and then when a man loses his job and then kills his wife and children before suiciding. “What a psycho,” we say, and we talk for a couple of days about the pressure that pushes men over the edge, but there’s not a lot of room for sympathy or relatability in such extreme cases.
There’s no obvious rallying point, no foothold, for a media retaliation. So we just don’t talk about it, and some men collapse emotionally under this pressure, probably feeling very alone in it.
Some of us start companies because we love starting companies – we love being our own bosses, setting our own goals, and the excitement that comes from building something of our own from scratch. And some of us start companies because we see a handful of people become obscenely rich doing it and we want to be one of them. And neither is the right motivation or the wrong one.
But I’m just going to say it so that someone’s said it: Guys, it’s totally okay if you don’t get rich. If you never, ever, ever get rich, that’s still okay. There’s a lot more to life than being rich, and the people you really want to have in your life know that.
And, hey, if you do get rich, will you pay for my liposuction?
August 5
Editor's note: Monica Harrington is speaking on marketing and branding for startups at
StartupDay
.
The second half of this profile focuses on Monica's experience in the startup world, and how her approach to startup marketing has launched her projects to enormous success.
Marketing in a Social Media World
I ask Monica how a marketing team today can rise above the noise – all the Twittering, all the blogging, the Facebook pages, the tens of thousands of startups competing for coverage on Mashable or TechCrunch.
“I don’t come from a classical marketing background,” she says, “so I’ve always viewed it a bit differently.”
She recommends I read a book called The Power of Pull, which explains that the best marketers use people to pull products along with their enthusiasm and excitement, as opposed to the notion of pushing from the top.
“To me, good software marketing is all about pull. It’s about finding the people who are motivated and excited about products, who then want to introduce them throughout their organizations, and to their friends. It sounds obvious now,” she says. “But it wasn’t obvious then.”
I’ll disagree with her there – it’s not obvious, not to the mass of companies dizzying themselves to blog more and tweet more and retweet faster and to move users, by shovel if necessary, to their Facebook pages. This approach is not about targeting and understanding influentials and nurturing those relationships. This is about shouting louder. We’re still trying to use a world full of pull tools to push products from the top.
“You didn’t really have the social media tools back then to enable pull efforts on a large scale,” I note.
“That’s true,” she says, “but we did have things like user groups. I spent a lot of time with user groups, and I understood how those motivated people could be an extension of your team if they believed in what you were doing. The first part of that was to honestly believe that it was in their best interest [to use your product] and then to listen very carefully to what they were saying, and to use that feedback to help make the products better and sell them.”
The Beginnings of Valve
During her time at Microsoft, Monica married Mike Harrington, a fellow Microsoftie. She opens up about this when I ask her what her favorite work of fiction is. It’s a question I’ve found helps glimpse the inner life of anyone who spends most of his or her time reading and writing non-fiction across assorted media.
“Gone with the Wind,” she responds without much pause. “It helped me marry Mike. The book is about these people who couldn’t get together at the right time, and I decided I wanted to marry Mike before he decided he wanted to marry me.”
I prod further here. I’m looking for any sign that this woman – perfectly and almost robotically accomplished on paper – has ever shared any struggle with someone like, say, me.
“There was a point at which we broke up, before we got married, and I said to him: ‘I want to marry you, but I’m moving on with my life. And if you change your mind, or if you decide you want to marry me, and I’m still available, call me.’ And that’s essentially what happened.”
I giggle and mention something about how men, one way or another, always come back; this is the full extent of the hard-earned wisdom I’m capable of contributing during the entire conversation.
“We weren’t even going out when we got engaged. About three months after we broke up, we spent the day together and he proposed.”
They’re still married today. When Mike left Microsoft to create Valve, a gaming startup, with Gabe Newell, Monica remained at Microsoft, now managing a consumer product marketing group that included Games.
She watched her own Games group closely. The group included a marketer who’d been recruited from the gaming industry. “I didn’t always agree with her approach to marketing. I kept thinking, ‘If I only had a good game, I would know how to market this.’ I just had that sense.”
Mike and Gabe landed a million-dollar advance thirty minutes into a meeting with the co-founder of Sierra – “He just thought they were really smart, really brilliant” – and began work on Half-Life. It was still a long shot – of the 5000 games being introduced to the market each year at that time, only the top twenty or so made any money.
“There Was This Very Painful Decision to Start Over”
Monica advised the Valve team on the side, maintaining a rigorous transparency with her bosses at Microsoft. They saw no conflict of interest, but eventually Monica did.
After over eleven years at Microsoft, she left to become the Chief Marketing Officer of Valve.
“We wanted to do a game that was worthy of game of the year,” she says. “Gabe and Mike initially thought they would do a B title just to get the company started. My advice was to really go for it right from the start.”
Valve spent more than Half-Life’s million-dollar advance during its development. The product won Action Game of the Year at E3, but Valve’s own game testing showed that it just wasn’t fun enough.
“So there was this very painful decision to just start over,” says Monica. “It couldn’t be fixed. It had to be redone from the ground up.
“The team at Valve had learned enough that they thought they would know how to do it better the next time. So we started over. It was a very exciting, tense, draining time, full of highs and lows.”
I ask her: “Did you believe you could do it?”
She pauses, but only for a second. She chooses her words deliberately. “I believed that if anyone could do it, that team could do it.”
Half-Life won over 50 PC Game of the Year awards when it was released for Windows in 1998.
Why Is Seattle the Right Place to Do a Startup?
I ask her how she views Seattle tech culture today – as a newbie to the scene, I’m genuinely curious.
“The thing that makes tech culture thrive is having a place where people can come together and collaborate really easily. Some of the things that make it work for Seattle are having a Microsoft, Amazon, and Expedia. People get experience there. You get to this critical mass where there’s enough talent to do interesting things.”
“Are we there?” I ask.
“You can always get better. I’m really surprised that there aren’t more people who left Microsoft to start companies.”
I blink at her answer here – I feel like Microsofties are now, and have been for all eternity, leaving Microsoft to start their own companies. But I suppose there are still an enormous number of immensely talented people who choose the relative security of a corporate environment over making an all-or-nothing gamble on themselves.
I realize suddenly that the sample I’ve used for my own analysis is the people I meet in my startup circle. I’ve made a broad judgment based on a narrow view of the market – and I will learn over the course of my conversation with Monica that this is a mistake she makes rarely if ever.
Why is Seattle is the right place to build a startup?
“The fact that you have people in this area with the experience you need for a startup [is valuable]. With a startup, it’s really hard to train people. So you need for people to come in knowing how to build products that are actually going to ship.“
What Makes for Good Tech Marketing?
“I come into [a marketing team] and I think ‘Who’s likely to be most interested in this [product], and, if we do it well, whose lives are going to be changed?’”
As an example, she talks about her experience with Picnik, the web photo editor she marketed before Google acquired the company in March of this year.
“I considered Photoshop experts. They could dismiss [Picnik] as a lightweight photo editor. Instead, you think about what it’s like from their perspective. Why might they be interested in this?”
She made it a point to reach out to design professionals, to clarify that Picnik was not a replacement for their skill set, but rather a tool they could introduce within their companies or even to friends to lessen their work load.
“There are always people like that for any product. You think about what’s in it for them, in a really genuine, authentic way.”
It’s a theme that strikes again and again in our conversation – Monica approaches marketing from a people-centric perspective, and always from a place of authenticity. She thinks both about who it can help and how, and she thinks about this with both depth and breadth.
Code for America: The Potential for Change
It’s no surprise, then, that Monica advises and supports multiple non-profit organizations. She’s on the Board of Code for America, a non-profit founded by Jen Pahlka – to whom Monica refers as “a force of nature” – with the goal of bringing the best minds in Web 2.0 into municipal service.
Modeled after Teach for America, developers who could arguably make six figures in the private sector accept a stipend of $35,000 for the opportunity to spend a year developing a Web 2.0 application for a city government.
“Code for America has the potential to change the way citizens interact with their local governments,” she says. “It’s an opportunity for transformative and powerful change, to change the way IT gets done in cities across America. It can play that catalytic role.”
Intersect and What’s Next
I bring the conversation back to Intersect, which she won’t speak about beyond what’s already on their website. It’s clear that the focus of the site is personal narratives, but how these stories may, well, intersect remains to be seen.
“Everything you touch turns to gold,” I comment. “Do you ever worry about the winning streak ending?”
She says she doesn’t.
“I would say that I like working with enormously talented people. And that’s what I’ve been fortunate to do throughout my career. I’m excited about Intersect because it actually speaks to my personal passions. Stories are incredibly powerful. They are how we learn about each other, how we connect with each other and, throughout my career, I’ve seen the power of stories drive people to action in ways that are amazing.”
Monica Harrington will be speaking about marketing and branding
at StartupDay.
Register early for priority advisory slots!
July 29
 I knew I wanted to meet Monica Harrington as soon as I heard her name. I first came across it while reading about Intersect, the top-secret Seattle startup that can’t stop creating buzz. Monica was listed as the Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer. “No one even knows what this company does,” I thought to myself, “and it’s already being brilliantly marketed. Who is this woman?”
I discovered that Monica has a near-perfect record in marketing. She was an integral member of the Microsoft Word team that displaced the seemingly impenetrable WordPerfect. She was the Chief Marketing Officer of Valve, the creators of the wildly successful Half-Life. She later spent two years as the Senior Policy Officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, advising the Gates directly. She left to become Chief Marketing Officer at Picnik, the online photo-editing company acquired by Google in March of this year. In April, Monica joined the Intersect team.
I couldn’t wait to pick her brain, and I wasn’t disappointed. There’s plenty to discuss, so this will be a two-part piece. Today’s segment focuses on the revolutionary marketing approach the Microsoft Word team used to displace WordPerfect during the transition to graphical computing in the late ‘80s. Next week’s will focus on how these marketing strategies can be applied in a startup context.
The Power of a Platform Shift
In 1987, WordPerfect owned the word processing market, and Lotus owned the spreadsheet market. Word had a miniscule market share, but the market was in flux. The days of the text-based editors were ending as graphic interfaces inched onto the scene.
“Any time there’s a platform shift,” Monica tells me, “there’s huge opportunity. And oftentimes the people who are most vulnerable during a platform shift are the entrenched leaders.
“Lotus and WordPerfect thought they owned those markets, so they were complacent. It’s a classic innovator’s dilemma. They didn’t want to move [from character-based] into graphical. In the DOS-based world, they were the leaders. So why would you want to go through this transformation? They were reluctant. And Microsoft was aggressive.“
Monica found herself uniquely positioned to be part of the team that won this battle for Microsoft and changed personal computing forever.
But let’s start at the beginning.
The Foreign Correspondent
Monica didn’t always intend to be a hotshot thought leader in tech; she grew up in Portland and studied journalism at the University of Oregon, planning to be a foreign correspondent. Her boyfriend was still in school when she graduated – a situation she refers to euphemistically as a “geographic constraint” – so she took a job in Portland as a technical writer at a software company called Timberline.
At Timberline, she worked closely with developers. “They would tell me what they were trying to do,” she says, “and then we’d do a release of the build and I would write about it.”
If she couldn’t figure out how the software worked based on the screens, she worked with the developers to modify the design.
“I was actually a usability specialist – but it wasn’t called that.”
“Oh my God, I Have to Work Here”
She fell in love with tech but realized that product management would be a better fit than technical writing. She set out to interview with tech companies.
“I planned to talk to Microsoft, Lotus and Ashton-Tate,” she says, “because they were all about the same size. I started with Microsoft, and once I went through the interviews, I thought ‘Oh my God, I have to work here.’”
I ask her why.
“There was this hum – an excitement – like everybody felt like they were working on something that was potentially going to change the world. You could pick that up. I hadn’t seen that kind of excitement – excitement tinged with confidence that we could really do it.”
In 1987, she joined the Apps group at Microsoft as a technical editor, with plans to be a product manager. “I assumed that [Microsoft] would recognize that I wanted to be a product manager and just let me do it,” she says, laughing. “But it wasn’t like that.”
Fighting for a Career Transition at Microsoft
She went through the interview process for a PM job, competing against freshly minted MBAs from the top schools in the country.
"We don’t know what to do with you," her interviewers told her. "You did well in the interview, but you don’t have any background or training in this.”
She didn’t get the job they had open, so she took a different approach. She proposed a project to a friend who was a PM – helping Microsoft develop a mutually beneficial relationship with her former employer – and he encouraged her to move forward with it.
“I was a technical editor by day and a product manager by night,” she explains.
After eight months of working on that project, she scored another set of product management interviews, one of which was with Jeff Raikes. “I knew that if Jeff didn’t think I was a fit for marketing at Microsoft, that was the end of my marketing career there.”
Jeff offered her a job as a product manager on the Word team.
Overthrowing the Old Regime
Monica was a perfect fit for the Word team in late ‘80s, because the shift toward graphical meant personal computers could now create broader value for the average person, but only if the usability factor was high – and she’d spent her years at Timberline as a stealth usability specialist. She’d also worked with graphical computing in its very earliest days.
“A lot of people now think that the innovations in graphical computing came out of Apple,” she says, “but they didn’t. They came out of Xerox PARC.”
Monica had worked with the Xerox Star system – the first commercial system ever to incorporate a window-based GUI – at Timberline.
“The things that made Xerox Star so powerful,” she says, “we were going to do on PCs. Apple had done it after Xerox, and Microsoft was going to do it first on OS 2 and then on Windows, and I just so strongly believed in that. It was easy for me to be an evangelist.”
She still speaks of her work at Microsoft using “we” as the pronoun, and she still speaks the word with excitement and compatriotism in her voice, and I picture a line of bonded-by-fire Roman soldiers: They stand shoulder to shoulder, shields up, marching personal computing forward together.
This is not what I hear when current Microsoft employees tell me about their jobs, but you can hear, smell and taste it in the halls of any great Startup Weekend. This is what we’re all hungry for: to be a part of something like those early days at Microsoft; for our voices to carry, twenty years later, still the excitement and creative genius of a team we loved, a team in which each member worked as a natural extension of the others, a team that could do superhuman things, like slay a Goliath.
Winning Over the Influentials
Monica saw that the overall PR effort for Word required her team to change the way the market influentials evaluated products. Reviewers at the time valued products for the length of their feature list, but, if personal computing hoped to be truly revolutionary, the focus needed to be on usability. The average person needed to be able to use personal computing tools to do his or her job better, and this person would not need to use the bells-and-whistles features that a handful of professionals might find marginally useful.
But the spreadsheet and word processing reviewers at publications like PC Magazine and PC Computing still needed to be sold on this paradigm shift.
“You can’t overestimate how influential these people were, “ says Monica. “They determined what could even be considered as an application for corporate America.”
The team focused PR efforts on these people.
“We brought reviewers in over a two-year process and had them observe the usability work that was going on at Microsoft. It was changing the mindset. These products were going to be adopted throughout organizations, and ease of use was going to be important.”
I only need to glance at the name of the software I’m using to write this article to know how this particular war ended.
As I converse with Monica about the teams that created enormous successes for Microsoft in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, I’m surprised by how many of the names that come up are female. Ruthann Lorentzen. Leslie Koch. Marianne Allison. Mary Dieli. And Melinda French -- who would, in 1994, change her name to Melinda Gates, but to whom Monica still refers by her maiden name.
During a time when women were still something of a curiosity in the tech world, Microsoft was anything but an Old Boys Club. Bill Gates and his team were hiring brilliant women and putting them in leadership roles, and it was working.
Next week: Monica Harrington brings her marketing prowess to the startup world.
Editor's note: Monica Harrington will be speaking about marketing and branding at StartupDay. Register early for priority advisory slots!
July 15
It has been a crazy
thirty days. I suppose that’s nothing to complain about – as entrepreneurs, we
love to be busy, to be juggling lots of different projects, relationships and
ideas. We thrive on that sort of thing. But it’s always good to have tools to
lend a hand, and it’s even better when those tools are available for free.
Thanks to great advice from the Twitter and startup communities, I’ve come
across a handful of free web tools that I’ve found invaluable recently, and I
figured I’d pay it forward. Here ya go:
AppAnnie
It’s no secret that Apple’s developer tools for tracking
earnings, sales and rankings of iPhone and iPad apps are not exactly, um, user friendly. Over the past couple months,
I’ve come to the conclusion that Apple genuinely does not want you to be able
to do any sort of quantitative analysis on the performance of your application.
Juxtaposed with the effort they put into the UX of their consumer products,
it’s baffling. The Internet’s built a trillion hacked-together solutions for
Apple’s shortcomings here, but none I’ve found is anywhere near as elegant as
AppAnnie.
Currently in open beta, this free tool easily allows you to
track and analyze revenue, unit sales, rankings by country, and reviews. It
builds graphs and marks them with relevant events, like price changes. It also
tracks the top apps in the store by country, category, price and grossing. The
UX is intuitive and easy on the eyes. It’s a must-have for anyone developing an
iPhone/iPad app.
Skitch
I don’t remember how I lived without Skitch. Also still in
beta, this simple tool allows you to take precise screen captures, mark them
up, and save them as jpegs. It’s an easy way to communicate design needs to remote
developers without a Skype screen-sharing session or a tedious encounter with
Photoshop (which is the antithesis of free). It’s also a quick way to measure
pixel dimensions of web real estate, or to draw Hitler mustaches and undersized
reproductive organs on photos of your ex so you can post them to your Facebook
wall.
Get Satisfaction
If you’ve ever seen a static “Feedback” badge clinging to
the side of a website, you’ve encountered Get Satisfaction. The company
provides a user-friendly, in-site interface for your customers to provide
feedback on your product and to interact with each other and company employees.
Customers can “like” one another’s ideas, so it’s easy to see which feature
requests or complaints have the most support behind them.
While they do offer integration with Facebook, I prefer to
keep the customer support segment of my company separate from their Facebook
interactions, and Get Satisfaction achieves this perfectly. I launched redesigns of two websites
last week, and this tool was enormously helpful in keeping customer complaints
and feedback from cluttering the comments sections of the websites (“AMY
WINEHOUSE LOOKS UGGLY HERE BUT NOT AS UGGLY AS THE NEW SIDEBAR!!!!!!1 fixxxxx
it”) and the Facebook pages.
A quick glance at their website makes it look like you have
to pay for the service, but if you peck around a bit you’ll see you can create
a community with basic functionality for free. I also found their customer
support to be friendly and flexible when I needed assistance.
Color Scheme Designer
Seattle is chock-full of brilliant designers. Unfortunately,
many of them have already been snatched up. And, let’s face it, a lot of us who
are really good with ideas and code are maybe not so hot with design. (I, for
one, believe I have a learning disability when it comes to design.)
Startups don’t always have the cash to bring on the design
help they need.
My amazing cousin, who did all the design work for my new
websites and who I am totally going to use this opportunity to plug (check out
her portfolio here and then hire her), introduced me to Color Scheme Designer,
a free and easy application that takes the hex code for the main color you want
to use for your design and then produces a set of colors for mono, complement,
triad and analogic color schemes. Never again do you have to make your
company’s website black, gray and white because all the other color
combinations you try look like a five-year-old ate a box of crayons and then
vomited on the screen.
Cross Browser Testing
You know and I know: The only thing worse than the way your
website looks in IE 8 is the way it looks in IE 6. This tool takes screen shots
of the way your site renders in different versions of Firefox, IE, Opera,
Safari and Netscape (Netscape?)
across various Mac, Windows and Ubuntu OSes. You can scan them all quickly and
on one page to see where problems are showing up. It’s a tad bit slow but it’s useful
for catching these issues before the users do. I wish they would also test
sites across mobile platforms, and hopefully that’s coming in future releases.
Fair warning: This tool isn’t really free. But a lot of you will find you can get most of what
you need out of the free demo period and then cancel, or, if you find value in
it, choose to pay using their SaaS pricing model.
So those are my suggestions for the month. Which free web
tools have saved your life this month?
July 8
My celebrity gossip website has a mailing list now. Not,
like, a Google Group sort of thing; rather, an actual mailing list where people
go to a page and enter their email address for the express purpose of receiving
some manner of email communication from, well, me.
When I announced this on my Twitter, a friend replied back,
“Welcome to 2003!”
That’s kind of how I felt, too. What on
earth would I email to these people?
And why – whyyyy??? – would anyone
voluntarily sign up for a mailing list from a news website that they can just add to their RSS feed?
But over the past several months, I’ve been talked into it,
both by friends whose opinions I value and by stakeholders in the company.
I was almost embarrassed to announce it. I expected it to be
an enormous flop.
My Target Market Behaves Differently Than I Do
Rather, readers signed up in droves. Many of them even had
suggestions for the newsletter’s content. Some were actionable and some not so
much; I only wish I had exclusive naked photos of Alexander Skarsgard. (Actually,
I wish I had any naked photos of
Alexander Skarsgard.) But I can send
out weekly lists of the most-commented or most-viewed stories, and I can use
the list to inform readers of new contests or job openings or polls. Yes, polls. They asked to be emailed about
new polls.
Here’s the point it drove home: I am not my target market.
I should have done this years ago. I did not, because I was
thinking like me, and not like my market. When I started this site, I was
living in LA, a 24-year-old with 23-inch blonde hair extensions, and I followed
celebrity gossip like it was my full-time job. I didn’t know what RSS meant. I
just wanted to be the first person alive to know if anything – anything at all – happened in Paris Hilton’s life, and I would have
signed up for any mailing list that could ensure that.
I used to be my target market. I am not anymore. It’s an
adjustment.
Startups That Plan to Be Their Target Market Don't Always Wind Up That Way
I'm facing a comparable issue in another startup. The team is building an iPad/iPhone app called CrowdMap. It allows
multiple users to collaborate on mind maps, hosted in the cloud, in real-time.
It’s a very, very cool product, and it’s being developed by talented,
passionate devs who love mind-mapping and who have used mind maps for years as
part of the GTD and Agile communities.
My responsibility on this team is marketing. Here’s the
problem I keep seeing: Our product is by no means the best pure
mind-mapping app out there. If what you want to do is build mind maps for your
personal use, there are products on the market with sexier UIs and broader
feature sets, products built by companies who have years-long head starts on
us, full-time staff, and are not, ya know, bootstrapped.
None of these existing products allow for the real-time
collaboration available in our product. That’s our differentiator. So we keep
trying to position this product as a mind-mapping application that allows
real-time collaboration.
Adjusting Your Market Mindset
So far, it’s not working as well as we’d hoped. I suspect
that’s because the hard-core mind-mapping market wants hard-core mind-mapping
tools, and they don’t see enough value in the collaborative aspect of our
product to forgo some of the other features our app is lacking.
We need to figure out who our target market is. For whom is
the real-time collaboration most valuable? Is this a product for students,
building outlines together in a classroom? For conference-goers working
together to capture every detail of a speaker’s monologue? For writers,
outlining a book or an article together? We should be asking ourselves who needs to collaborate and brainstorm on-the-go rather than who needs to mindmap.
Embracing and Learning Your Actual Market
Rather than trying to play catch-up to the feature sets of
the established mind-mapping apps, we've learned we need to focus on other markets – markets
consisting of folks who might not be hard-core mind-mappers, but who could
certainly benefit from this collaborative functionality as they brainstorm --
and think about what feature sets they
need.
Despite our initial plan, we have built a product that, when
compared to what we consider our competition, is about collaboration first and mind-mapping
second. Now we need to focus on features that aid in collaboration, rather
than on features that aid in mind-mapping. If we can do that, we have the
potential to take the market by storm. It’s just not the same market we’d
initially planned to take by storm.
We are not our target market anymore.
June 24
My friend Jake is a landscaper. He doesn’t have a Twitter
account, he’s never heard of Foursquare, and he’s never considered building a
tech startup. I saw him about a month ago, and he was thoroughly depressed. His
whole demeanor was one of defeat. He just looked beaten. I was worried, and I
asked him what was wrong.
“I’m lonely,” he said. “I feel completely disconnected from
the world.”
“What do you do all day?” I asked him.
“I dunno. I go to work, I go to the gym, I play Xbox. That’s
about it.”
I gave him a hug and I told him he could always call me if
he wanted to hang out. I invited him to parties. I introduced him to some of my
friends. Nothing seemed to help much.
I saw him again last week, and, this time, he was walking on
clouds. Everything about him was joyful. He couldn’t wipe the grin off his
face. The world was his oyster.
“Ha. You totally met a girl.”
“No!”
“What is it then? What changed?”
He flashed me a sideways grin. “I gave away my Xbox.”
The Addiction
The video games Jake thought he loved had been making him
miserable. He’d spent all his free time playing Xbox, chatting on his headset
to his fellow players from around the world, but it kept him from interacting
with the real world. Over time, he became increasingly isolated by a device
that gave him access to people all over the world.
“I didn’t realize how much it was holding me back,” he told
me. “I was completely chained to it. It made my world so small.”
Seeing this change in Jake made me think about my
relationship with the Internet and with social media. I exist in a self-selected
world where my colleagues (fellow entrepreneurs and social media junkies) constantly
update their Twitters and Facebooks and check in on Foursquare and flip through
RSS readers on their iPhones or iPads whenever there’s a break in conversation –
or, realistically, during the
conversation.
We have our iPhones on the table at dinner. We say things to
each other like “Tell the waitress to come back in a minute, I have to tweet
what you just said” or “Hang on, I’m looking for our location on Foursquare. It
keeps bringing up the Buckley’s in Queen Anne. Why can’t it find the one in
Belltown? Ah, there it is. Now then. What were you saying about being
pregnant?”
Not everyone lives in this world. Among my precious and tiny
cadre of non-tech friends, my obsessive relationship with the Internet is
perplexing, in turns amusing (“You should really see yourself right now”) and
frustrating (“Seriously, can you just put down the iPhone and talk to me?”).
Freedom from the
Addiction
There are few times in my life when I am separated from the
Internet, and they are often forced upon me. Last summer, I stayed with friends
in a one-room cabin in a remote part of Idaho. Cell phones didn’t work and
there was no Internet connection in the cabin, built fifty years ago by my
friend’s grandfather. I’d been very, very apprehensive about going.
We slept and watched DVDs and took the boat out on the lake
and made s’mores over the firepit. I had no access to my 1800 Facebook friends
or the 300 people I follow on Twitter or the ex-boyfriends who need to be
Internet-stalked every single day lest they change their relationship status in
some way that will impact me emotionally (this spans every possible change), or
all the publicists and account managers on email who really, really need me to
tell them today if we can do that
giveaway of their new scented body lotion, or the tech blogs and gossip blogs
and politics blogs and polyvore sets I watch religiously.
It was the most connected I’d felt in ages.
The Medical Opinion
Now for the professional take on all this: Is Internet
addition a real thing?
In 2007, the American Psychological Association chose not to recommend that video game
addiction be added to the edition of the DSM to be released in 2012, citing a
lack of research for evidence to conclude that video game addiction was a
disorder.
In that same year, the American Medical Association declined
to recommend to the APA that they include Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) as
a formal diagnosis in DSM-V, citing a lack of research and unclear definitions
of the associated terms.
Yet, professionals in the field continue to insist that
Internet addictions (and not just porn!) are real disorders that leave lives in
disarray, and they’re pushing to get IAD listed in future editions of DSM.
Does that mean we’re all pathologically addicted to the
Internet and need to quit cold turkey? No, of course not. Look, plenty of us startup
types have a drink or two (or eight) every night at whatever given event we’re
attending. It doesn't mean we all need to check into rehab. (Although we all know one or two people who might want to consider it.)
We all know that every now and then it’s healthy to walk away
from the party for a few days. We regularly need to take time away from drinking beer and eating hot wings and sliders so that our brains and our bodies can recover. Why do we not give
ourselves the same break from the Internet?
How to Recover
Since some of us have trouble conceiving of a life without
Internet access, here are some concrete suggestions for breaking the cycle:
The Family Vacay
Plan a phone-free weekend vacation for your family or with
your friends. At the start of the trip, phones should be collected, stored
somewhere safe, and be turned off throughout the trip. Take a road trip – check
out Leavenworth or Vancouver or the Olympic Peninsula. Go hiking or camping.
See a concert at the Gorge. Try new restaurants. Go back to your hotel and play
board games. Pour a glass of scotch and challenge your brother-in-law to a game
of chess, while your sister and your wife are sprawled out across the living
room reading books. (The real kind, made of paper.) Talk to them without
distractions. Focus on being 100% present for them. Reconnect with the things
that make you human.
The Retreat
Go on an organized weekend retreat. Washington has no
shortage of these. You can find them for men, for women, for couples; there are
silent retreats, yoga retreats, religious and spiritual retreats, health
retreats, you name it. The common denominator here is that you’re not allowed
to spend much time on your cell phone – if you even get service at the retreat
location. Enjoy this time to interact with people, read, exercise, meditate and sleep
without the threat of a nearby computer. Think of it as an opportunity to degauss your brain.
Sheer Willpower
If you think you can do it, just turn your damn phone off
for the weekend. Don’t check email. Don’t check Twitter. Don’t turn on your
computer, not even to jot something down on your calendar or to check what’s
going on at TechCrunch. If you manage to do this successfully, please volunteer
to coach others in your methodology.
Taking My Own Advice
This weekend, I’m headed to Mexico, to a beach town just
outside of Rocky Point, where I won’t have Internet or cell phone
access. I
can’t wait. I’m giddy with excitement. Not just excitement over tanning
on the
beach and swimming in the ocean and eating the special kind of Mexican
food
that’s actually cooked in Mexico, but also to disconnect from the
Internet and
plug in to my life, to have the freedom that comes with discarding these
social
tools that add such incredible value to our lives and then trap us.
Finally, thank you to my friend Oona for suggesting the topic for the post. Oona is new to the startup world, although by no means new to kicking ass in the tech space. It's been years since we first bonded, when she picked me up at 7 am to run the Jingle Bell 5K, and then encouraged me to keep my pace as I slipped and panicked, running on streets that were mostly thin sheets of ice. Of all the help we give one another in our blossoming Seattle startup community, perhaps the most valuable is the occasional encouragement to get the hell away from our computers and go for a run alongside other humans.
June 17
Over the past several months, I've spent a lot of time knee-deep in organic SEO: attending conferences, reading books, grilling the experts, stalking Vanessa Fox on the Internet. You know, the usual. I thought I'd distill my subsequent wisdom down to the three most useful things I learned -- things that wouldn't have been obvious to me before sloshing through SEO-land for far longer than I'd hoped to.
1.
The search engine terms that send you traffic
are not always a representation of your search engine strength.
This is such a common mistake, and it’s one I made over and
over and over again before I had a light bulb moment. I pored over my Google
Analytics data and assumed that the keywords that were popping up in my search
engine referral log were the only keywords for which my sites were ranking, or
at least the majority of the keywords for which they were ranking.
This was not at all the case. These were the keywords that
produced the search engine results that
people clicked on.
I finally sat down and compared what Google Webmaster tools
listed as my search queries to what Google Analytics listed as my referral
keywords. There were some major discrepancies.
For instance, a category page on my celebrity gossip blog
was ranking well for “Katy Perry,” but the title and description it was
displaying was about Katy’s long-ago fling, Benji Madden. As a result, the
click-through rate was below 10%. Similarly, a page on my women’s issues site
was ranking well for “Bristol Palin,” but the title and description were about
abstinence. When I tweaked them so they focused on Bristol’s television
campaigns and print ads for abstinence, the click-through rate shot up. People
wanted to see and hear Bristol talk about her pet causes – they didn’t actually
want to read about abstinence.
I had to think about how my page titles were phrased, what
my meta descriptions said, and, most importantly, what searchers wanted when they typed in those
keywords. If I was providing the
information they wanted, but I wasn’t making that clear in the title and the
description, some tweaks were in order.
This leads me to my second point.
2.
Use organic search terms to segment your market.
Your website doesn’t have to serve only one market. This
is true if you’re an ad-supported website (like the ones I run) or if you run a
website with the goal of driving a purchase. An analysis of the search terms
for which you rank – and for which your competitors rank – can help you further
segment the market and determine where you fit in.
Let’s say you run a website that sells widgets. You assumed
your target market would be women ages 30-45 searching to buy widgets for
themselves, but when you analyze your organic search terms, you realize that
you’re ranking for “anniversary gift” and “best widget for my girlfriend.” Then
you analyze your main competition and realize that they’ve targeted their SEO
for “graduation gift” and “widget for college student.” They also seem to be
targeting “fubars,” a potential substitute for the widget.
(You can often get a sense of your competition’s SEO targets
just by scanning the tags on their page source, but if you want a more detailed
analysis, you can invest in a professional SEO tool.)
By looking at organic search data, you’ve just uncovered three
new active markets without investing very much time or money in market
research.
Now, not only can you tweak your SEO for these markets, but
you can change the experience the user has on your site based on the search
term they’ve come from, regardless of the page they land on.
We spend a lot of time optimizing the navigation of websites
(“For Grads”, “Anniversaries”, and “Just Like a Fubar!“), assuming searchers
will land where we expect they’ll land. This is a very, very useful practice,
and most definitely something you should be doing. But if your site gets a lot
of traffic from search, it makes sense to take it a step further and actually
use the search term to determine what content the site displays.
For instance, if a user comes in to your home page using a search term
containing the word “girlfriend” or “wife,” you might want to make sure you
display a picture of a woman gratefully kissing her male companion, widget in
hand. If a user comes in using a search term containing the words “college” or
“graduation,” perhaps a college kid high-fiving his awesome widget-bearing dad
would be more appropriate. If your user comes in on any variation of “fubar,” consider
using a portion of the site to do a simple and favorable comparison of fubars
to widgets.
3. Always Be Testing
I stole this from REI’s Jonathon Coleman, who gave a
fantastic presentation on organic search at the Online Marketing Summit earlier
in the week. (You can check out the slides here.)
It’s a good mantra: Our SEO failures and successes should be
quantifiable. It helps to have more specific goals than “I want to sell more
product” or “I want more traffic.” A clearer goal would be “Over the next nine
months, I want to triple the number of widgets I sell to the anniversary-gift
market as a result of search traffic.”
Now that you have a clear goal, you can start making
actionable, testable decisions. We like to overlook the “actionable” and
“testable” parts and just make decisions. I know I do. I make a lot of decisions. I make them quickly
and I make them all the time, and, as
a result, they are not always good decisions. More tellingly, though, I usually
don’t have any idea if they were good decisions or not, because I’ve set up no
clear path for action and test.
For the goal above, I could break it into two portions:
a)
I want to double the amount of search traffic I
get for anniversary-related searches
b)
I want to improve conversion rates from
anniversary-related search by 20%.
Okay, cool. Those are actionable goals that you can test
against. Now, take a break from being proud of yourself for creating actionable
goals that you can test against, and actually set up the tests. (This is
another part where I have trouble.)
You can use Google Analytics and multivariate testing to
test against both of these goals, or, if you want to get fancier, try a
professional SEO solution like SEOMoz or Optify or any other one of the eight
billion SEO analysis companies that multiply in Seattle every time it rains. Know
your baseline and track your actions against changes to your baseline. If you
want to show off, make a bunch of changes over a span of time and run a
regression on the data. (Seriously, though, don’t do that.)
We all know how to
do this kind of data analysis – everyone here took a lot of math in school –
but I’m always surprised at how few entrepreneurs do. We like to be making decisions and doing things and changing the whole world asap, not
measuring boring results. But there are so many ways to quantify search-marketing
decisions, to see what works and what doesn’t. There’s just no excuse not to do
so when you consider the relative payoff.
Now, will somebody please volunteer to call me every morning
and remind me to do all the things I just told you to do?
June 10
Let’s face it: Most of us don’t like Microsoft. A lot of us
have worked (too hard and thanklessly) for Microsoft, or been laid off by
Microsoft, or been passed over for a job by Microsoft, or had a Microsoft
product crash on us just as we were trying to save some really important data, or just flat-out blame Microsoft for the
fact that the 520 is a parking lot after 3pm.
When Bing launched, it felt like a punchline – was the aging behemoth of Microsoft really going to bumble through an attack of the agile Google, and in the search space? But the more I learn about Bing, the more I see how
Microsoft plans to win this battle in the long run, or at least be
competitive.
Bing Outperforms Google on Crucial Indicators
Let's go through a few stats:
Since the first of the year, the celebrity gossip website I
run has seen an average
of 2.62 page views per visit.
60.75% of the visits this year so far came from search.
Users coming in from search engines averaged 2.74 page views per visit – this
is about 4% above the site average.
If you pull the search engine data apart, some interesting
trends emerge:
Google represents 41.67% of the site’s traffic -- 69% of search engine traffic -- averaging
2.81 pages per visit.
Yahoo represents 0.45% of the site’s traffic -- less than 1% of search traffic -- averaging
2.48 pages per visit.
Bing represents 0.85% of the site’s traffic – 1.4% of search
traffic -- but users coming in from Bing average 3.37 pages per visit. That’s
nearly a 30% improvement on the site’s average, and a 20% improvement over
Google. When you’re running a website that doesn’t sell a product – a website
whose revenue is dependent on advertising sales – page views per visit is your conversion. A 20% bump matters. (Ask.com, although it sends a tiny amount of traffic, comes the closest to Bing's page view benchmark, at 2.95 pages/visit.)
The top ten search terms across the search engines are
comparable, but most of my search traffic comes in from a giant range of
long-tail terms.
I checked the stats of another large website I’ve written
for in the past, just out of curiosity. Since the beginning of the year, Google
searchers have averaged 2.71 pages per visit to that site, while Bing searchers
have averaged 3.06 pages per visit – about a 13% improvement. (Yahoo searchers
average 2.36 pages per visit.)
Bing is outperforming Google, by a significant margin, on a key metric.
Janet Miller of Search Mojo backed me up on this observation during her talk at SMX Advanced, adding that Bing also consistently outperforms Google in time on site.
Why Does Bing Do Better?
So why does Bing outperform Google and Yahoo so notably in terms of page views per visit? There are plenty factors to consider – the
demographic of the user for each search engine, the relatively tiny sample size
for Bing, indexing of images, UX. Janet Miller points out that the way Bing displays results, using the "Document Preview," is preferable to Google's SERPs.
But there’s also the possibility –
distant as it may seem – that Bing has actually built a better search engine,
one that is more likely than Google to serve users with pages that have value
for them, that better answer the question they had in mind when they typed
their query into the engine. And that would be huge.
I’ll add that I hear anecdotally from my non-techy friends that
they prefer Bing. “It’s just prettier,” I hear again and again. “It looks nicer.” Is it possible that the
ultra-stark, uber-functional UI that Marissa Mayer has championed for ten years
is finally starting to lose its appeal with a generation of searchers taught by
Apple that a UI can be beautiful and
functional? And that it should be?
Bing Attempts to "Demystify" SEO, Starting with Webmaster Tools
On Wednesday, I attended Bing’s session at SMX Advanced called “Bing Webmaster Tools at a Glance” (mostly because it was free). I figure that Bing is, to some extent,
unconquered territory. The average webmaster may have stumbled his way through
creating and submitting a sitemap to Google at some point in the past ten
years, but how many of us have even logged into Bing’s webmaster tools? This is a space where some serious ass can still be kicked by those who take the time to figure it out.
Plus, recent figures indicate that Bing represents 9.43% of
U.S. search traffic at this point – why does it account for only 1.4% of my
search traffic? Clearly there’s room for improvement here. (Perhaps one source of the discrepancy:
Google has 77,660 images from my website indexed; Bing has 80.)
The speaker at the SMX session was Eric Gilmore, the Group
Product Manager for Bing. He’s a Microsoft vet, but only recently moved into
search. “SEO 101 is still really, really hard,” he said. “It’s hard for the big
players, let alone the little guys.” He says the search industry is “ripe for
innovation,” and that Bing’s goal is to demystify the process of SEO to create
user value.
To accomplish this goal, Bing tore down their existing
webmaster tools and is building a new set from scratch. The new tools will
launch this summer, but we got a demo at the SMX session. The home page
delivers time-sensitive messages to the webmaster – crawl errors, etc – and
displays graphs for clicks, impressions, pages indexed, and pages crawled. There’s an “index explorer” that allows a webmaster to spot gaps in Bing’s
indexing of their site, and to also see where they might be “overindexed” – for
example, if expired sales listings are still being indexed. The UX is
straightforward and navigable and the Support button is always visible on the
left side of the screen.
The sense I got from the developers – who got a word
in here and there – was that the app had far deeper and broader capability than
what we’d seen in the quick demo. When I asked whether Bing planned to make a real go at Google Analytics, I was told that they had "nothing to discuss right now ... stay tuned."
The message I took from the presentation was that Bing was
willing to work harder and listen more carefully to their customers to create a
superior search engine experience, and to allow webmasters and SEOs to help
them drive user value. They’re the underdogs here – they’re the startup gunning
for the big player in this space – and they know their behavior as a search
team has to reflect that.
Eric gave us his email address and encouraged us to use it, so I’ll pass it on to
all you to test how genuinely interested he is in user opinion: It’s Eric.Gilmore@microsoft.com. If you
have suggestions for what you’d like to see in Bing’s webmaster tools – what
could help you do a better job in analyzing your organic search approach for your startup --
drop him a line.
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