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Author: Mike Moran

Mike Moran is an expert in digital marketing, especially content marketing areas, such as personalized websites, search, and social media. Mike also has a 40-year background in technology with a dozen US patents, specializing in machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and other AI techniques, as well as search technology.

Mike serves as a senior strategist for Converseon, a leading social listening technology company based in New York City. He is also a senior strategist for SoloSegment, a site search and customer experience software company. Mike is also an executive consultant for the Consultant's Collective and a Program Director for the Conference Board. Mike currently serves as a member of the Board of Directors of SEMPO, is a Certified Speaking Professional (CSP) in the National Speaker's Association, and a Senior Fellow for the Society of New Communications Research.

Mike spent 30 years at IBM, rising to Distinguished Engineer, an executive-level technical position. Mike held various roles in his IBM career, including eight years at IBM’s customer-facing website, ibm.com, most recently as the Manager of ibm.com Web Experience, where he led 65 information architects, web designers, webmasters, programmers, and technical architects around the world.

Mike's newest book is Outside-In Marketing with James Mathewson, covering Big Data and Content Marketing. He is co-author of the best-selling Search Engine Marketing, Inc. (with fellow search marketing expert Bill Hunt), now in its Third Edition. Mike is also the author of the acclaimed Internet marketing book, Do It Wrong Quickly, named one of best business books of 2007 by the Miami Herald. Mike founded and writes for Biznology®, a daily blog devoted to digital marketing.

In addition to Mike’s broad technical background, he holds an Advanced Certificate in Market Management Practice from the Royal UK Charter Institute of Marketing and is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. He also teaches at Rutgers Business School and is a Distinguished Instructor at the University of California Irvine.

 |Mike Moran is an expert in digital marketing, especially content marketing areas, such as personalized websites, search, and social media. Mike also has a 40-year background in technology with a dozen US patents, specializing in machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and other AI techniques, as well as search technology.

Mike serves as a senior strategist for Converseon, a leading social listening technology company based in New York City. He is also a senior strategist for SoloSegment, a site search and customer experience software company. Mike is also an executive consultant for the Consultant's Collective and a Program Director for the Conference Board. Mike currently serves as a member of the Board of Directors of SEMPO, is a Certified Speaking Professional (CSP) in the National Speaker's Association, and a Senior Fellow for the Society of New Communications Research.

Mike spent 30 years at IBM, rising to Distinguished Engineer, an executive-level technical position. Mike held various roles in his IBM career, including eight years at IBM’s customer-facing website, ibm.com, most recently as the Manager of ibm.com Web Experience, where he led 65 information architects, web designers, webmasters, programmers, and technical architects around the world.

Mike's newest book is Outside-In Marketing with James Mathewson, covering Big Data and Content Marketing. He is co-author of the best-selling Search Engine Marketing, Inc. (with fellow search marketing expert Bill Hunt), now in its Third Edition. Mike is also the author of the acclaimed Internet marketing book, Do It Wrong Quickly, named one of best business books of 2007 by the Miami Herald. Mike founded and writes for Biznology®, a daily blog devoted to digital marketing.

In addition to Mike’s broad technical background, he holds an Advanced Certificate in Market Management Practice from the Royal UK Charter Institute of Marketing and is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. He also teaches at Rutgers Business School and is a Distinguished Instructor at the University of California Irvine.

 |Mike Moran is an expert in digital marketing, especially content marketing areas, such as personalized websites, search, and social media. Mike also has a 40-year background in technology with a dozen US patents, specializing in machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and other AI techniques, as well as search technology.

Mike serves as a senior strategist for Converseon, a leading social listening technology company based in New York City. He is also a senior strategist for SoloSegment, a site search and customer experience software company. Mike is also an executive consultant for the Consultant's Collective and a Program Director for the Conference Board. Mike currently serves as a member of the Board of Directors of SEMPO, is a Certified Speaking Professional (CSP) in the National Speaker's Association, and a Senior Fellow for the Society of New Communications Research.

Mike spent 30 years at IBM, rising to Distinguished Engineer, an executive-level technical position. Mike held various roles in his IBM career, including eight years at IBM’s customer-facing website, ibm.com, most recently as the Manager of ibm.com Web Experience, where he led 65 information architects, web designers, webmasters, programmers, and technical architects around the world.

Mike's newest book is Outside-In Marketing with James Mathewson, covering Big Data and Content Marketing. He is co-author of the best-selling Search Engine Marketing, Inc. (with fellow search marketing expert Bill Hunt), now in its Third Edition. Mike is also the author of the acclaimed Internet marketing book, Do It Wrong Quickly, named one of best business books of 2007 by the Miami Herald. Mike founded and writes for Biznology®, a daily blog devoted to digital marketing.

In addition to Mike’s broad technical background, he holds an Advanced Certificate in Market Management Practice from the Royal UK Charter Institute of Marketing and is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. He also teaches at Rutgers Business School and is a Distinguished Instructor at the University of California Irvine.

 

Categories
Best Practices Growth Leadership Personal Development

Are You Trying to “Keep Up” with Technology, or Ride It?

Across my 40-year career in technology, I have increasingly heard clients and others express to me their greatest fear, which is that they are not “keeping up” with technology. 20 years ago, I would hear that worry expressed a few times a year. Now I hear it a few times a week.

Honestly, at first I wrote it off. I thought that it was just a few Luddites who didn’t want to put in the effort to stay with the pace of change. But then I started to experience that feeling myself, so it became personal. And uncomfortable. I wasn’t “keeping up.”

And, it wasn’t just a feeling. It couldn’t be explained away that I felt like I wasn’t keeping up, but in actuality, I was doing just fine. No, I was convinced that I was in fact not keeping up. Technology was passing me by. And it started feeling worse than uncomfortable. It started to feel downright scary, because my business was about technology. I started thinking about how I rarely saw any 50-year-old programmers. And I started hearing about how venture capitalists would pour millions into a company founded by a 20-year-old, while companies were laying off middle-aged technologists left and right.

No, this wasn’t my imagination. There was a popular perception out their that technology was a young person’s game, and that most people can’t keep up. And the older you get, the more it’s true.

So, I started thinking about this attitude, and I began to realize that it doesn’t actually make any sense to try to “keep up” with technology. No one tries to “keep up” with a car or an airplane. People can’t do what those technologies do. You don’t need to keep up with them–you need to ride them. Technology is a tool that makes you better, not something you need to outdo, like some kind of modern-day John Henry hammering spikes.

That change in attitude changed the way I approached my job. I no longer cared whether I kept up with all the changes. I just focused on a constant search for tools–things that multiplied my effectiveness, making me better. When I found them, I rode them. And I ignored everything else, reasoning that if whatever I was currently ignoring in fact turned out to be important, then they would be brought to my attention again soon enough, and I could ride them then.

That change in focus also changed who I thought I was. In my first few years as a digital marketing consultant, I was named to a couple of lists as one of the “100 Best Internet Marketers” or some such monicker. And then they stopped naming me, which should have been upsetting, but it wasn’t, because my focus had changed.

I no longer wanted to play the game of keeping up and proving that I was keeping up by speaking on every new development or coming out with a new book that “explained everything you need to know” about some new development. Instead, I wanted to find the most important things to ride and teach my clients how to ride them, too. It was at that point that I changed my focus from consulting to software. Instead of manually analyzing problems and telling clients what to do, I started to develop techniques that automatically collected data and analyzed it, eventually using Artificial Intelligence techniques, because AI was the best technology to ride for the problems that I am trying to solve.

And I don’t worry whether I am keeping up with 5G or IoT or blockchain. They might be very important technologies for me to ride someday, but, for the moment, I am ignoring them, because I don’t judge them to be important technologies to ride in pursuit of the problems I am solving. At some point, I might change my mind because i can see how useful they are for the problems I am trying to solve then. And you know what? They will still be there waiting for me.

The truth is that human beings didn’t evolve at the pace that technology evolves, so none of us are designed to keep up. But the entire history of humans show that we invent tools to solve problems, and if you treat everything in technology as a tool that you should evaluate to see if it is interesting as a solution to a problem you have, suddenly it stops being scary and starts being fun.

I hope you go out and have fun with technology. Go for a ride.

Categories
Marketing Personal Development Technology

AI Improves Your Website as More People Use It

Plenty has been written about how AI gets smarter with experience, the way people do. If you perform a task 100 times, you are faster and better at that task the 100th time than the first time–and AI models have that same quality. The more experience they have (usually expressed as the more data they have seen), the more patterns the models can recognize to make better sense of each new thing they see. I do a lot of work with AI models around website customer experience–often focused on how web users search and navigate company websites. The AI models reveal insights of where web users get stuck, or, more happily, which content seems to answer their needs.

That’s very powerful, but even more powerful is connecting AI models to automated actions. You see, if all the models do is to provide better insight to humans, those models are useful, but they will always be gated by the time and cost of humans taking actions on those insights. I have heard clients express to me in frustration that “the last thing [they] need is another dashboard”–even a smarter one populated with keen AI insights, because it still leaves them with more and more manual improvements to make.

What if the models could directly drive updates to the website that make it better?

My recent work with SoloSegment [full disclosure: I am a Senior Strategist and partner with SoloSegment] has opened my eyes to how AI can lead to immediate and continuous improvement of a website. You can use behavioral data to make searches on the site more successful. You can recommend content based on what has worked for others in the past. In other words, your website becomes more autonomous–a living, self-improving entity–that gets better the more people use it.

None of this means that you don’t need people to do the vast majority of the tasks of creating content, improving design, and all the rest of the things we do for our websites. But, for the first time, there are some things that humans don’t need to do, because the AI models, coupled with automated actions, can make some of the improvements in hands-free fashion. I don’t know about you, but this feels like a breakthrough to me, where we finally have linked the intelligence of the models to quickly and automatically improving the customer’s experience. And I can’t help but think there is much more to come.

Categories
Best Practices Marketing Personal Development Technology

Your Response to AI Is Actually a Personality Test

I am working with large companies on their use of Artificial Intelligence all the time, and it is possibly the most polarizing technology I have ever been involved with. Some people believe that AI will give us all a life of leisure, with machines doing more of the work so we don’t need to slave away for 40 hours a week. Others are spooked because they think that AI is coming for our jobs. What seems hard for each of those groups is that they are both essentially projecting the same thing–it’s just a question of whether they are optimistic or pessimistic personalities.

I see the same thing with my own clients–AI is equally polarizing, but this time it is around its effectiveness. Some are AI skeptics, talking about how the technology is over-hyped. Others believe it is magic, and will buy anything with those two magic letters. Both views are right–and wrong. AI just isn’t very simple.

Businesses should always be looking to improve their return on investment, which means choosing the simplest technique that solves the problem. Sometimes that’s AI, but often it’s something simpler, cheaper, and lower risk, so we should start there. Many folks are surprised when I say that, because they expect me to be pushing AI for everything, but I don’t see how that makes any sense. I spoke with a potential new client who was so taken aback that as we were leaving, they said to us, “Gee, we speak to a lot of vendors, but thanks for surprising us.”

If you are listening to vendors blathering on about that 5G blockchain kind of AI, it’s time to stop listening to buzzwords and start looking for competence. If it sounds too good to be true, it is. If your spidey sense starts to tingle every time they start talking about neural networks, listen to that inner voice. AI is no different from every other kind of approach out there. Used appropriately, it can be a huge benefit to your business. But you should be asking questions if your vendors wave their hands and can’t really explain why AI is needed and exactly why it works better. Don’t pay surge pricing for the flavor of the month.

Categories
Best Practices Growth Leadership Personal Development

Why Your B2B Content Marketing Isn’t Ready for Personalization

I am blessed to have a number of B2B companies as clients–each one wants me to help them with their content marketing. And I am luckily able to help them all, except there is one thing they all seem to want but don’t know how to deliver–truly personalized B2B content recommendations.

They see Amazon do it. They see other B2C companies do it. But why is it so hard for B2B?

The main reason is that B2C companies don’t personalize content recommendations so much as they personalize product recommendations. They watch what you (and everyone else) buys and they can determine what you are interested in, and which products relate to those interests. Amazon knows that if you buy one book on Civil War History that you will likely buy another. But if your B2B company sells one of your products to a client, its likely they are done. They don’t need another one.

And that sale is excruciating. What happens after the sale isn’t your concern. You want to accelerate making that sale in the first place. That’s why you want to recommend content. But how do you do it?

You likely aren’t ready. (I’m sorry.)

There are three things you need to recommend content:

Information about the visitor to your site. You probably don’t have any. Sure, you might offer registration, but how many clients actually register? What incentive do they have? And how many registered clients even sign in each time they come to the site? Do you drop cookies so they automatically sign in when they come back? What information do you ask them for? Do you use any Visitor Identification technology to get information about those who don’t register? If you don’t have good answers to these questions, you aren’t ready.

Information about the content on your site. You probably have even less of this, if that’s possible. You probably have no taxonomies that have standardized tag values for topics, industries, and other critical metadata. Or if you do, it hasn’t been updated in decades. And you are hoping that author manually tag the content correctly–which you know isn’t working. You have no automation applied to any of these problems to standardize the findability of content on the site. And you have no automated process to match content to visitors–whatever you are doing is using manual rules in your CMS or Marketing Automation system. So, either it doesn’t work or it doesn’t scale. You don’t think that is how Amazon is doing it, do you?

Information about what is working. OK, this one is something you have right? For every piece of content, you have bounce rates and exit rates in your web analytics system, where you also know every link that is clicked on every page, and the cookie ID of the visitor who did it. Great work, honestly. But where do you use that data? Do you use it for content recommendation, or does it just lay dormant in your analytics system waiting to be displayed on a dashboard? Information that gains meaning when it hits the analyst’s eyeball isn’t helpful when you are trying to scale. You need information in a form for automated processes to act on.

If you have all of these problems (and maybe even more), you might be tempted to throw away your whole marketing stack and buy everything from one vendor, because, surely, they have integrated all of these pieces together and now it will just work. Well, I haven’t seen it. This isn’t strictly a technology problem. You might have all the technologies you need, but you don’t have the processes to acquire clean data and the automation to put those technologies to work at scale.

If it seems daunting, you can throw in the towel, but you can make this work. You just have to stop believing in magic technologies and start believing in well-engineered processes and experts to make them work. You can do B2B content recommendation at scale without breaking the bank. You just need to be willing to step back and solve these three problems that are getting in the way.

Categories
Health and Wellness Marketing Technology

AI Automates Tasks, Not Jobs

I keep reading scare-mongering over how AI is going to make everyone unemployed. Some others say that it will give us a life of leisure. Maybe we should all stop to realize that both are saying the same thing–we are just learning who are optimists vs. pessimists.

But both of these points of view gloss over the real truth–AI doesn’t eliminate very many jobs completely. Yes, if self-driving cars come to pass, Uber drivers and truck drivers are at risk. But no matter how much automation is applied to Quickbooks, we will still need accountants–they just might not be entering and analyzing the transactions anymore.

AI, in general, automates tasks, not whole jobs.

The reason for that is that what we have today is called Narrow AI–it can be better than humans at discrete tasks, such as chess or Go or Jeopardy. It can make predictions within small spheres. But we are nowhere near General AI, where the judgement of a human across many spheres is possible. Humans need to be guiding all automation, especially AI, for the foreseeable future. So, while there will be some jobs that get largely automated away, we will likely still need humans to do parts of those jobs and there will likely be new jobs created we don’t even dream of yet.

In 1790, 90% of the US workforce were farmers. 200 years later, in 1990, less than three percent remained on the farm, yet we didn’t experience 87% unemployment. And that doesn’t even take into account the massive growth in population or the major expansion in the workforce as women joined.

We found other things to do.

No one knows what will happen in our AI future, but you can expect that it won’t be as bad as people fear nor as great as they expect. After all, if I had told you 20 years ago that you would willingly carry around a device 24×7 that allows your boss to call you any time of the day or night and know that you could be reached, you’d have labeled me a nutjob.

But we all carry our cell phones religiously and would fight to keep them if pressed. So, we are often better at seeing the downside of new technology than the upside and we should imagine that AI will probably turn out the same way.

Categories
Marketing Personal Development

Why Machine Learning Should be in Your Present, Not Just Your Future

I have spent the last 40 years on the cusp of various technologies. (It’s a trick. If you are on the cutting edge, there are no experts, so you get to call yourself one.) Now I am an expert in Marketing and AI. (See what I did there?)

I actually have been working in text analytics since the 80s and was first exposed to machine learning in IBM Research in the 90s, so I have been doing this for a while, if that counts for anything. So I am used to hearing people talk about how AI is the future. And it is.

But it’s also the present.

Sometimes, it’s just how you talk about it. I remember early in my career, I did what I thought was a knockout presentation on some new superpower technology, and as the audience was filing out, a few people came up to speak to me afterwards. They were all very excited and all agreed as one person breathlessly said to me, “Wow, you are really a visionary.”

Except that’s bad. Because that means that they didn’t think they needed to do anything about that technology for three years. So if every time you hear about machine learning it sounds to you like Big Data 5G Blockchain, then you are missing the power of the present.

Machine learning can take the data you are sitting on and start predicting outcomes that you needed to wait to have happen. We are working with clients to predict the bounce rates of new pages without having to wait three months to see what they are. You can imagine applying the same approach to exit rate, social shares, inbound links, and any other content metric.

Think about what an advantage that is. Rather than suffering with poorly-performing pages for months until the data stabilizes, you can make changes presuming that those pages will perform the way similar pages have in the past. So make them look like better-performing pages instead. But do it now, not months from now.

That is what machine learning does. It takes all the data that you already have and speeds up the correct decision. That speed is your competitive advantage. Or at least it is your competitive advantage if you are using machine learning now. Conversely, if you think AI is the future, then it might be your competitor’s advantage now.

Categories
Marketing Personal Development

You Already Have a Personalized Web Page on Your Site

OK, I don’t know for sure if that headline is right about you, but let’s just see. You probably are interested in personalizing your customer experience–most companies are–but you are put off by the complexity and expense. So, it might surprise you that you likely already have a personalized page on your website.

It’s your site search results page.

Every person gets to put in a different search and they get back a list of (we hope) relevant results. So, it truly is personalized.

Now, you might be worried because you’ve never thought about your site search as delivering personalization–and because you know that page is probably not as good an experience as it should be. If you are truly serious about personalization, site search is the easiest place to start, for several reasons:

You’ve already paid for it.

You don’t need some fancy whiz-bang new technology to bring in, so you don’t need to justify a big expenditure and you don’t need to run a great deal of risk. You just have to get more value out of what you already are paying for it, which is usually an easy sell.

You can drive great business value from improving just this one page.

On most sites, the site search results page is one of the busiest pages on the site–usually in the top ten and sometimes neck-and-neck with the home page for most visited.

Your best customers use it.

Studies show the site searches convert anywhere from 43% to 600% more than non-searchers–and its probably not because your site search works so well. Instead, it is because your best customers–the ones most convinced to buy from you–stick around and use site search when less-qualified prospects abandon your site completely. Improving site search targets your best customers when they are ready to buy.

It can be the basis of more personalization.

Imagine if your site search engine was so good that it provided excellent results for your most popular searches. You could suddenly start using the search engine as a content recommendation engine, where the words on your page pick out the teasers for related content, similar to how Google AdSense works, by putting relevant ads on a page. If you’ve been struggling with conversion rate optimization, up-sell, and cross-sell, this is where you can start.

With personalized customer experience all the rage, you can take the first step in that direction by measuring the effectiveness of your site search and improving it. Who knows? Once you have your first personalized experience delivering value, maybe it will be easier to justify that big personalization investment.

Categories
Leadership Marketing Personal Development

How Do You Find Market Fit For Your Product?

I’ve worked with several high-tech startups in the marketing space–some of whom have had more success than others. The ones who have succeeded the most have an obsessive focus on market fit–that elusive quality that makes clients want your product. I’ve learned a way of doing this that applies to startups and to large, established companies alike.

There are many ways to find market fit, but I find too few startups focused on fit. Instead, they take the “Field of Dreams” approach–“If you build it, they will come.” These companies tend to be founder-led rather than market-led. They pursue a dream, and the smart ones succeed in selling that dream to the market. Maybe it takes a pivot or two. Some run out of money before they run out of pivots.

I’ll admit that a lot of folks don’t think there is any alternative.

I have long counseled another approach that is almost diametrically opposite the Field of Dreams approach. I somewhat cheekily refer to it as the “Dream of Fields” approach–“If you come, we will build it.” I have been doing this for many years, and it fits squarely into the Lean Startup methodology that is all the rage now. But even Lean Startups usually start with an idea–with an expected solution to a presumed problem.

I am suggesting something different. Most companies start with an expertise in solving several problems. They, in fact, can make a living providing consulting solutions for those problems, not because that is the business that they want to be in, but because they can make money solving problems and start to find the products within the consulting. There is a danger of going too far in this direction and just providing one-off consulting for all customers, but a little discipline can help with that.

By taking this approach, you force your software to at least solve the problem of the first few customers, and you likely learn a lot about generalizing the solution along the way. You also learn a lot from customers who don’t buy your product, because maybe you have something missing that would speak to an even larger set of customers.

To me, this can be a simpler path to market fit because you start out at least fitting one or two clients. The pivots might still be required, but they are less dramatic and less forced. They feel more like responses to newly-discovered opportunities than retreats from previous failures.

And it’s even easier for large companies to do this than small ones, because their trusted relationships help them find the right early customers more easily.

See if it works better for you.

Categories
Growth Personal Development

How Differentiation Beats Marketing Tactics Every Day

I work with a lot of large companies on their content marketing strategy, and they are always expecting some new technology, a different take on their data, or some exciting new AI technique. What they aren’t expecting is for me to ask them about their differentiation.

Differentiation somehow seems quaint in these modern times. With all the bits and bytes flying around in digital marketing, such old-fashioned marketing seems unimportant. But it’s actually more important than ever.

Here’s why. Content marketing isn’t a victory of technology or analytics or anything else except messaging. Content marketing is the salesperson who never sleeps, who overcomes every objection, and who is there for every prospect who wants to find your product. But you don’t win content marketing on volume. You can’t just make more and more of it and expect people to find it and reflexively buy.

Instead, content marketing is about creating messaging that the people who should buy from you will find. And who are those people? The ones that you are differentiated for.

The problem is that most marketers don’t really understand the full meaning of differentiation–it’s not just more than mere difference. It’s a difference that a particular market will pay for.

And that is where content marketing needs to start. You need to understand your personas, and your buyer journey, but without understanding your differentiation, you won’t know which personas to target. You won’t know what to say at each buyer journey step. And you certainly won’t be persuasive enough to get anyone to buy.

With all the content out there, you can’t just keep creating more messaging targeted at more people with more problems. Instead, you must be more targeted. You must focus on exactly the problems your best customers have. By satisfying them, you create the case studies that persuade even more. Only by doing so can any of the exciting digital marketing tactics make an impact. Your differentiation is the core of your strategy–it drives the tactics.

So, yes, it is important to understand your product. But it is more important to understand how your product is more perfect for your ideal customer than your competitors’. That’s the power of differentiation.

Categories
Marketing Personal Development

Three Cheap Ways to Know What Content Your Customers Want

There are time-honored ways of determining customers needs, ranging from surveys to focus groups. And your organization probably has spent years using these and other methods to determine how to deliver want customers want through your products and services. But do you know what content they want?

That question has become critically important with the rise of content marketing. We often know what product features our customers care about, but we aren’t sure of which content subjects will draw them to our products. And the traditional surveys and focus groups won’t answer the question, because they are too expensive to use for this purpose.

Instead, we present three cheap ways to know what your customers are interested in, so you can provide that content to them:

1. Web and other content analytics. Start with the content you already have. Which pages are visited the most? Which lead to conversions? Which emails get opened? Which social shares are clicked? Start with understanding which content is already performing and identify those subjects as ones to tackle more.

2. Search keywords. What are your customers searching for? Yes, look at Google Trends or other keyword tools to find out big trends, but how about your own customers using your site search? Do you know even what those subjects are? You might be surprised that you aren’t covering some of the most important subjects.

3. Social conversations. What are people talking about? Better, what are they complaining about? Those problems are what content marketing can solve. How do you listen to social conversations?

These digital methods of listening to what your customers want are:

  • Cheap
  • Up-to-the-minute
  • Unprompted

That last one is especially important because surveys and focus groups get answers only to the questions that are asked. Knowing what people are thinking about before you ask tells you what they will be searching for–which is how your content marketing attracts.