Going Social in Search Engines

How can search engines become more social?

By: Lief Larson

Make no mistake about it, social media websites will start to operate more like search engines, and search engines will start to operate more like social networks.  Facebook has a slight advantage on my scorecard because of how much personally identifiable information they retain on each of their users.  This wealth of data allows them to contextually match a query in a way that offers a higher likelihood of relevancy.  But, where social networks fall short is the range of content they can draw upon and display as results.  In short, social media sites are not yet adept at deep indexing the web.

Search engines (think Google & Bing) on the other hand, have vast troves of data indexed.  But, when you are searching anonymously, at best they may be able to deliver results based on geographic relevancy.  When you are logged in they may be able to tap into more information about you to make your search experience more relevant, but the amount of personally identifiable information is a fraction of that contained within your social profile.

It’s been widely covered that Bing is incorporating social data into search engine results.  This assumes that any of the information (e.g. what your network has to say on the subject) has any relevancy to you or your current query. I applaud Bing for working to innovate in this area, but the current use of social in search has barely scratched the surface of what is possible.

Survey: Can you see search engines such as Google and Bing becoming social tools in the future?

They are already headed in that direction	42.34%
Only if these sites develop their own innovative social features	28.47%
Search engines and social media will always be separate	15.33%
Only if they merge with or buy out other social platforms	13.87

Source: SmartBrief SmartPulse

One simply has to ask, “What will the future of search look like?”  For one thing, search results today are what the search engines determine.  You’re relegated to accepting their results and those results are necessarily based on speed.  The majority of results are text with a hyperlink, because to deliver results quickly,  injecting images, videos, and other content would take longer to load and make for difficult consumption by the searcher.  That’s why today both Bing and Google create different search options such as “videos” and “images” instead of just injecting them into a singular search. Both search engines have tested a mix of text and non-text results, but neither has yet figured out a true multimedia results page.

In our experience with social media websites, we (the social user) receive a continuous stream of data, information, links in a multimedia format, but much of it has little relevancy because we do not have the ability to parse it based on relevancy.  Yes, we can limit (hide) posts from those who don’t interest us and keep those who do, but the odds of someone answering the question we have – at the exact moment in time the question pops into our head – is minuscule.  The social stream is good at presenting topics and answers that we’re not currently asking (but that our network presents anyway).

Both search and social can live in a shared space.  The key variable is what I call TR (timely relevancy).  When I have a question, I go to the search engine to ask it.  In some cases I might even ask my social network, thus crowd-sourcing my network for answers whereby they act as the filter.  Bing and Google apply a filter I have no control over.  The way both search and social can live in a shared space is by thoughtfully presenting a wider range of multimedia results that incorporate both the search engine filter AND my network filter.

The problem is that increasingly the game of search and the game of social are governed by privacy rules.  In some instances I may wish to preserve my anonymity.  In other cases my anonymity is protected by default.  The more conscious people become about how we share our personally identifiable information, the more difficult it becomes to achieve a hybrid search engine/social filter. Some thought leaders in this area that I have high regard for talk on the virtues of transparency, but I’ve always argued that it’s idealistic to think that society would somehow become this uber transparent organism when history has shown that privacy (think phone calls, medical history, etc. etc.) has always started in a rather transparent state and gradually moved toward higher levels of privacy protection.  It’s gotten to the point that Congress stepped in.  Even new versions of browser have incorporated new privacy controls and safeguards.

So how do we get more social in search?  One idea is to develop an application marketplace for search engines.  Google and Bing could open up a system for the development community to build social add-on tools that searchers can incorporate into their search experience.  Some apps may turn on/off certain filters.  Other apps may be novel ways to display search results.

Today search is binary in the sense that you either get or don’t get the result you’re looking for.  The idea of applying layers to the search experience is powerful.  I wish I could take credit for it, but I didn’t create this concept.  Yahoo! developed SearchMonkey to address this search paradigm.  To my dismay, SearchMonkey was shut down in October 2010.  Trust me on this, it wasn’t shut down because it was unsuccessful.  Rather, it came at a time when Yahoo! was losing its search market muscle and Microsoft won the right to power the back-end search infrastructure of Yahoo!.

My hope is that we see this search innovation/evolution come back now that Bing has found its groove and has an opportunity to differentiate from Google (which it is currently doing with – albeit useless – Facebook results).  Speaking of Google, the nearest one can come to getting unique search display results in Google is by designing Rich Snippets.  Rich Snippets are a far cry from a full app marketplace for search results.  In fact, even if you build snippets using the appropriate microdata, microformat, or RDFa, there’s still no assurance by Google that this markup will be displayed in search results, which is likely why the developer community has little motivation to innovate in this area.

In summary, there is a big opportunity to make search more social.  The best way to arrive at this is to append search results with multimedia that incorporate native search engine data with organic social data. Due to privacy concerns this will likely be a challenge, but a challenge the development community would likely undertake if only the search engines would open up results to applications.

Pinky McNamara Passes

By: Lief Larson

Richard “Pinky” McNamara was a gifted businessman, mentor and philanthropist

We don’t usually do obits at Workface, but there’s always an exception.  Richard “Pinky” McNamara passed away yesterday at the age of 78.  Who was Pinky McNamara?  He was a guy who specialized in taking a good thing and making it great.  He was my friend and business mentor, and someone worth looking up to.

In his college years at the University of Minnesota Pinky was well-known football player and three-time letter winner.  After college Pinky developed the entrepreneurial bug, acquiring and fixing failing companies and making them better.  In 1988 he founded an umbrella holding company, Activar, which held many of the companies Pinky had worked so hard to fix.  Pinky added substantially to Minnesota’s business economy and was a major employer here.

Outside of his work life, Pinky was a philanthropist who invested his wealth to make good things great.  His personal and financial contributions are legendary.  He donated tens of million of dollars to the University of Minnesota.  His legacy lives on in the form of the McNamara alumni center that bares his name. More recently Pinky and his brother Bob tagged-teamed to spearhead and championed the funding and building of the gorgeous TCF Stadium.

When I moved to Minnesota in 1996, my first business mentor was Curtis L. Carlson, founder of the wildly successful Carlson Companies (owner of Carlson Marketing, Wagonlit Travel, T.G.I. Friday’s, et al).  Curt passed away in 1999.  Shortly thereafter Pinky took me under his wing as my business mentor.

Pinky and I would meet once a month at the Hotel Sofitel in Bloomington.  This man had little time and plenty of money, yet he was so generous of his time.  While eating breakfast, I would explain my biggest business pains and he would run through scenarios on possible solutions.  He was incredibly sharp and a very strategic thinker.  Best of all, I got him all to myself on a regular basis.

Pinky had Alzheimer’s and was dealing with the side effects (something he did with great dignity and the incredible support of his brother Bob).  As the years went on it became more difficult for us meet, but I still got to come in contact with a man I truly admire at Legend’s Bar or down at the St. Anthony Club where he and his brother Bob would play racquetball.

I’ll miss Pinky often and the thought of him brings a smile to my face.  He was a great business person, a wonderful mentor, and the type of person who had a magical way of taking a good thing and making it better.  I count Pinky as one of the keys to my own entrepreneurial successes and a wonderful example of why mentorship is so important.

Side note: I never had the balls to ask Pinky how he got the nickname Pinky, and even with the announcements of his passing none of the media has done the muckraking into how he picked up the name.  Legend has it that when he was growing up in Hastings, Minnesota as a child, the McNamara family had to stretch their dollars (not much different than my own upbringing).  Each McNamara child was issued a pair of government issued pants for the new school year.  Supposedly Pinky received a pair of red corduroy pants.  Deeper into the school year his well-worn and washed red corduroy pants had turned Pink, and thus the “Pinky” nickname.  I still don’t know how much truth this tale holds, but I’m sure if it’s true, Pinky used it as a lesson that helped him become a better person.

Giving Your Website Visitors a New Choice: Human

by: Lief Larson

If you could give visitors to your website a handshake, what would it look like?

If you’re like most businesses, you’ve invested a substantial amount of time designing your website to inform and educate visitors.  Your captivating and remarkable content has given customers a reason to visit and navigate your site.  If you’re selling a product or service, the final step available to your visitors is either 1) enter into an ecommerce transaction, or 2)  leave their contact information for follow-up by your sales team.

If the “contact us” page on your website is the primary method you use to collect customer information, you’re not alone.  Over 78% of commercial websites use “contact us” pages with form fields.  This method of customer-initiated contact worked fine in 1998, but today customer expectations for immediate contact has surpassed the technology available on most websites.  Especially when the product or service you sell is a ‘considered purchase’ it’s more important than ever that you offer your visitors a way communicate with you at their moment of interest.

Enter Stage Left — Chat
In the early 2000′s software products came online that allow customers to initiate text chat at your website.  The main problem with text chat (there are now over 100 text chat products available) is there has been little to no evolution; the text chat tools available for your website are essentially the same technology available a decade ago.  Your customer is asked to chat, if you’re lucky the customer clicks, a pop-up window opens up, then (hopefully) someone from your team responds quickly to answer their questions.  Text chat still works reasonably well for support scenarios, but for sales is falls far short.  Ironically, most of the chat tool vendors don’t even use their own technology at their website.  If you’re in a scenario where text chat could improve your website, by all means use it.  But, consider for a moment some of the drawbacks and limitations of current text chat solutions:

• Is engineered to funnel all customers into a single call center
• Is designed for how the company can benefit (but dismisses the all-important customer need-state)
• The visitor/customer never really knows who they’re talking to
• Is relegated to your website only
• Is relatively expensive
• Is not designed to accommodate real-world buying/selling scenarios

Enter Stage Right — Customer-initiated Engagement
If the focus of your website is to increase meaningful sales engagement with visitors, you may want to “sales-team-enable” your website.  The concept here is that you give visitors to your website an entirely new choice: real humans.  As you know, customers like choice.  By presenting your sales team to customers at the point of interest, you both help the customer to self-select and engage the right person on your team AND introduce the selling skills of your sales team to the customer at the earliest possible point in the research/decision process.

Over 70% of commerce still happens in the offline world; for most commercial transactions the key ingredient is the personal relationship developed between buyer and vendor.  Nevertheless, the changing landscape of how and where customers do their homework has changed in recent years, with technology enabling a shift of 89% of customers performing their pre-purchase due diligence online.  We know customers are researching our products and services online.  The question is how to replicate the same buying/selling experience they would receive in the offline world?

If you are looking to sales-team-enable your website you should investigate the tools, options and providers carefully.  This is a decision that should be though through to ensure that it takes into consideration both how it can help your sales team be more effective in reaching customers online and how provide an incredible experience for customers.  Workface has asked the following questions of the technology we’re developing and these same questions may be useful to you when you look to sales-team-enable your website:

• Is there value in providing tools to the sales team that allow them to connect with visitor on a 1:1 basis?
• Can a combination of text/audio/video chat help us replicate our offline sales techniques on the web?
• Will allowing the customer to control the tempo of engagement increase the number of engagements?
• Will empowering the customer with the ability to self-select the right person to engagement improve the rate of engagement and visitor satisfaction?
• Should these same engagement tools be available in locations outside our website (such as social media, third-party websites, search engines)?
• Do the tools help address the visitor/customer needs?
• Do the tools help improve inbound marketing and help the sales team get found by customers?
• Do the tools help get more leads, faster?
• Does the solution empower the individual sales agent?
• Does the solution provide short-term recognizable return-on-investment?
• Is the solution additive (not cannibalistic) to current sales methods?
• Does the solution improve perception of the company/brand? (brand humanization)

New Workface Intro Video

A quick word of thanks to Tanner Thompson on the Workface team.  He just created a new Workface Intro Video.

Workface Releases New Website and Engagement Toolbar

We have a couple of announcements today.  First, we have updated the http://www.workface.com website today.  Written in HTML5, the new website is designed to load fast, be more informative, and easier to navigate than our legacy website.  Second, we have deployed a major refresh to the Workface engagement toolbar.

1) New Workface Website

• Written in HTML5
• Loads much faster than the old website
• Better layout and usability
• More content and sections to help inform and educate visitors about Workface

2) New Workface Engagement Toolbar

• A new way to engage and interact with visitors to your website, and get your sales/support people to customers quickly
• Fully customizable: titles, messaging, colors, number of people available for engagement
• Automatically fits to width of your visitors browser
• Maintains it’s position, even when a visitor is scrolling
• Deployed in javascript and flash
• Displays your people as “online” when they’re web connected
• Instructs your visitors to “send a message” when your people are offline

If you’re interested in trying Workface at your website, please visit www.workface.com for a free trial.

Customer Service Taken to a Whole New Level: Customer Exaltation

by: Lief Larson

Q: Who has probably shaken more hands than the U.S. president and spent more face time with customers than a used car salesman?

A: United Airlines Captain [John Doe]

On Wednesday, April 27th I was bound from Chicago to my home in Minneapolis on United Airlines flight 169.  As we were boarding the plane I saw a suited man facing the line of passengers. This unassuming fellow was thanking every man and woman approaching and delivering an earnest handshake.  He was giving soft knuckle rubs to the tops of the heads of younger passengers and imparting a kind “hello” to the children.  ‘Who in the world is this guy and why does he care?’ I thought to myself.  Drowning in a curious state, it was finally time for me to be confronted by this gatekeeper of the plane door.  Suddenly a hand came at me like a half Karate-chop and I unconsciously found my hand meeting his in a handshake that was warm, firm and inviting.  He looked me in the eye and said, “Thank you very much for your business.”

Listen.  I’m leaving Chicago after a get-in-kick-butt-get-out business trip of 36 hours.  All I’m thinking about are the million emails sitting in my inbox back at the office awaiting responses.  I’m not in the best of moods. One of my dress shoes sprung a leak and it was raining cats and dogs in downtown Chicago.  By the time I got to the train for O’Hare my sock was soaking wet.  I never sleep well in hotels and I’m feeling exhausted. I’m flying on standby, which means I’ll be crammed into a middle seat back in coach.  Now I’ve got this guy thanking me for my business?  What gives!?!

In the back of the airplane we had issues.  A mother and young daughter (maybe 2 or 3 years old) were booked in seats three rows apart from one another and the young girl was having none of it.  Apparently the captain’s good will hadn’t rubbed off on her; she was screaming at the idea of being apart from mom.  Next thing I know all these passengers are playing impromptu musical chairs in the back of the plane so mother and daughter don’t have to be separated.  I had that same feeling come over me as the first time I watched A Miracle on 34th Street.  People were just being incredible humans.  Next there was the skinny girl who was trying to get her bag — presumably she was a traveling brick saleswoman — into the already stuffed overhead compartment.  No sooner than two seconds later several people were shuffling bags around, making room for her bag, ripping it from her feeble arms, and placing it in the slot with barely an 1/8 inch to spare.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve seen kindness on an airplane before, but not like this.  On prior flights people helping others was more an act of necessity than chivalry; people think to themselves ‘the sooner I help that person the sooner I can sit down, the sooner the plane is airborne, the sooner I’m back on terra firma’.  No, this was something different.  People were truly inspired to pass along, I believe, what was conveyed in that handshake upon boarding the plane. [John Doe] had given us a do-good virus.

As I’d anticipated, I was placed in a middle seat.  The flight was painless. We landed 58 minutes later in Minneapolis.  Upon landing I noticed my elderly Hmong neighbor was fumbling through what barely passed as a purse.  She finally pulled out the object of her desire: a business card.  The name on it was in English, but was obviously a Hmong name.  I asked the woman, “Do you speak English?”  She shook her head in a “No!”  I promptly dialed the number she’d retrieved from her satchel on my mobile phone.  The woman who answered greeted me in a “Hello”, then I passed my phone to the elderly Hmong women who smiled and started talking to the other end in very speedy Hmong.

While the plane was unboarding I had a few minutes to contemplate that the airline pilot, Captain [John Doe], would go through his pre-flight checks, run to meet-greet-thank every single passenger, then successfully fly and deliver everyone to their destination. This wasn’t customer service, or even customer experience, it was something more.  To me he is to customer appreciation what Captain ‘Sully’ Sullenberger is to crash landings: a thoughtful expert.  I was so impressed by his selfless gratitude to his passengers that I had to meet him.  While I was exiting the plane I thanked him for thanking me, snapped a photo, and asked for his business card. The good news is that I have the photo here, the bad news is that I somehow misplaced his business card and thus the [John Doe] identity.

The moral of this true story is that we can all make a unique impact with our customers.  Not only does incredible customer service make a customer feel like they’ve made a good buying decision, but as my blog post shows, it can be carried on by those same customers in the form of more goodwill.  [John Doe], whatever skies I’m flying in the future, I hope to have a Captain just like you.  You’ve set a new bar above customer service or customer experience: I watched you practice customer exaltation. [Author's note: several of the definitions of "exaltation" include: 1) the act of exalting, 2) a state of feeling of intense, exhilaration or well-being, 3) A flight of larks, so I thought this term phrase "customer exaltation" was most fitting.]

United Airlines pilot who shakes the hands of all passengers

The Dark Web

http://thenextweb.com/location/2011/04/06/the-unlit-social-graph/

I really like this article.  At this point I don’t think it exposes Facebook.  I would counter that Facebook has built a web onto itself, one where they make all the rules and the light always stays on.  And frankly history tells us that plebs like to be ruled (whether or not they think they’re being ruled is for a different discussion).

I had to ask myself in the context of the dark web, how does Workface play?  My conclusion is that there is still an assumption (mistaken) that the network connection between nodes is somehow built but never pulled assunder.  The irony of this article is that the author himself admits that he would never be facebook friends with those whom he wished to have connections with.  In short, he asked for unfettered access to the network without wanting to form a connection.  Context may help escape that vacuum (context like geography) but not all nodes use the same method to apply themselves to context (some want anonymity, some want to use different and non-standarized technology).

Where I think Workface comes in is that we’re living under a different set of assumptions.  We assume that no lasting business or friendship connection should have to occur for a consumer to find the right business person (sales, support, et al) and connect for no longer than the time required to receive the value of immediate need.  In this way (99% of the time) the node creates their own context for a limited social connection.

I think the dark web will stay that — a dark web — from a utilitarian standpoint.

And so it begins…

Yesterday, on February 28th, we introduced the Workface Customer-initiated Engagement Platform at DEMO Spring 2011 in sunny Palm Desert, CA.  We’re were really excited to introduce the Workface platform and we wanted to take a few minutes to chronicle the experience at DEMO.

• Our team arrived in Palm Springs the morning February 27th, took a taxi to Palm Desert
• Spend the afternoon rehearsing our presentation and getting our station in the pavilion set up
• Spent time with the producers of the event (they were all very polite, helpful and professional)
• Attended the pre-event reception, then went to the CEO dinner (the fresh California-grown fruits and vegetables were incredible)
• THE BIG DAY. We were up early practicing.
• At 10:15am we went into the staging room, then green room.
• Delivered our DEMO presentation at 11:15am. (watch it here!) [NOTE: We had a major technical problem live on stage.  We immediately moved to "plan B" without skipping a beat.  We talked with a number of people after our presentation and we only found one person who realized that we had an issue.]
• Spent the afternoon meeting with DEMO attendees at our pavilion station D32 (1pm-7pm).
• Article on New York Times covering Workface
• Attended the CTO/CIO dinner (7pm-9pm)
• Spent the first half of the day on March 1st attending Day 2 of DEMO presentations (9-11am)
• Met with prospective customers and partners (11am-3pm)
• Article on CIO named Workface as one of the five stand-out cloud products for the enterprise @ DEMO
• Attended the last round of DEMO presentations (3-5pm)
• Worked the Workface exhibit, met with more people (5-7pm)
• Pulling down the Workface exhibit (7-8pm)
• Attended the reception, closing out DEMO Spring 2011

Some general thoughts and notes on the DEMO experience:

• The crew supporting the event went the extra mile to ensure all demonstrators and attendees were taken care of.
• It’s great to see such a vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem. Teams/companies came from all over the world.
• The facility is nothing short of amazing, and the setting of the snow-capped mountains of Palm Desert are breathtaking.
• The food/drink at the event was five-star.
• The angels and vc’s were here in flocks.
• The demo presentations on the 28th were off the original schedule, which caused some problems
• It was extremely difficult to find fresh drinking water other than when the food was out (hey guys! we’re in the desert)
• The internet network worked very well; consistent, reliable.
• We had the opportunity to meet hundreds of kind, thoughtful human beings. DEMO was great!

Thank you to:

• Jereme Allen & Kurt Menne, the face of the technology behind Workface
• Tanner Thompson, for greeting each and every person at our exhibit with a smile
• Arthur Ventures, who empowered us to reach this next milestone in our business lifecycle
• Matt Marshall, producer of DEMO, who delivered an incredible event.
• Jackie DiPerna, who managed DEMO.  She did nothing short of an inhumanly incredible job with DEMO!

Update to Workface.com Website

We’ve made an update to the Workface.com website this week, including numerous UI design changes.

The Official Blog of Workface.com

Welcome all.  The Workface.com team will be making blog posts from http://workface.wordpress.com.