About a week ago, I was sit­ting at a board room try­ing to find an “apples to apples” com­par­i­son for a CMO of a huge com­pany to help val­i­date mov­ing money from tra­di­tional brand build­ing chan­nels into search. We had run dozens of mod­els, com­piled mul­ti­ple spread­sheets and put together at least 6 dif­fer­ent slide decks. In the process we did our level best to suck all the life out of the exer­cise and reduce it to a col­or­less dis­cus­sion based solely on num­bers. We were try­ing to find that elu­sive for­mula that would allow us to com­pare the impact of a dol­lar spent on search vs a dol­lar spent on TV. It was a vari­a­tion of a con­ver­sa­tion that I’m sure we’ve all had mul­ti­ple times in the last year. I guess it was a sign that dig­i­tal has come of age. We were try­ing to sub­ject it to the same BS that had propped up TV and print for decades. But in the process, we were miss­ing some­thing crit­i­cal. And I found that some­thing crit­i­cal on the streets of San Francisco.

When I started in search, I used to get kick from the fact that thanks to what we did, a small Mus­tang after-market parts retailer could out­rank Ford for key­words like “Mus­tang parts” and increase their online busi­ness by 10 times in under a year, even­tu­ally out­strip­ping their tra­di­tional bricks and mor­tar busi­ness that had been around for decades. Or that a small boat man­u­fac­turer in Kelowna, BC could rank num­ber one for “boats” and sud­denly start get­ting inquiries from around the world. Online made things pos­si­ble that had never been pos­si­ble before. And that was pretty cool.

Those sto­ries are still hap­pen­ing and being talked about, it’s just that they’re not hap­pen­ing at the board­room tables I’ve been hang­ing out at lately. But then I ran into Tim and Daniel, and their story restored my faith in online marketing.

Tim and Daniel are just a cou­ple guys that hap­pen to love their city (San Fran­cisco) and wanted to find a way to afford the sky rock­et­ing rent that allows them to con­tinue to live in this city. So a lit­tle over a year ago, they started a bike tour com­pany and started tak­ing tourists through the streets of San Fran­cisco, point­ing out the lit­tle nooks and cran­nies that give the city it’s color. They’re both pretty per­son­able guys and the tours ben­e­fited from their obvi­ous pas­sion for their sub­ject. They can bring Haight-Ashbury or the Cas­tro to life in a way that no tour book or bus tour ever could. They reduce San Fran­cisco to a street level, inti­mate love affair, exactly the way the city should be seen.

Now, as cool as that is, the story wouldn’t be worth telling unless peo­ple actu­ally dis­cov­ered the tour, allow­ing Tim and Daniel to keep doing it. And that’s where the Inter­net comes in. Right now, their tour is the num­ber one ranked tour on Trip Advi­sor, with 145 reviews, all of them “excel­lent.” And so, because of this feed­back, they top a very long list of things to do in San Fran­cisco. They prob­a­bly won’t get rich, but they will keep the busi­ness rolling and keep pay­ing the rent. And that’s not a bad out­come for being able to do the thing you love. I asked Daniel what the impact of the pos­i­tive rank­ing on Trip Advi­sor had been and he was pos­i­tive but real­is­tic, “It’s been pretty awe­some, but as I keep telling my mom, it’s an algo­rithm and it might be gone tomor­row. But we’re enjoy­ing it while we can.”

Excel­lent advice. Enjoy it while you can. And when the big busi­ness of search seems to suck all the fun out of life, remem­ber that guys like Tim and Daniel are still stoked about what it can do for them.

That’s why I got into the biz.

Orig­i­nally pub­lished in Mediapost’s Search Insider February 23, 2012


Biography / Resume : Gord Hotchkiss is the founder and senior vice president of Enquiro, now part of Mediative. He is renowned in the industry for his expertise when it comes to understanding online user and search behaviour. He and the Enquiro team have built a solid reputation for being the leading experts when it comes to understanding what happens on a search portal and why. Before Enquiro, Gord was chairman and director of SEMPO (The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization), he worked as a columnist for MediaPost and Search Engine Land, and he was a regular speaker at industry conferences and events. Gord is also the author of The BuyerSphere Project: How Business Buys from Business in a digital marketplace.