A friend of mine specializes in the black art known as search engine optimization (SEO), as well as its sibling, search engine marketing (SEM). He has a great analog for thinking about search engines and Internet marketing that I will call the “blind five-year-old” axiom.
Basically, he equates search engines to blind five-year-olds, which is to say that you need to tell them 3-4 times what you want them to do using simple, distinct, consistent terms, and you need to recognize that because they are blind, they don’t care about pictures.
More to the point, since the goodness of optimizing yourself for the blind five-year-old that is the search engine results in “free” organic search returns (versus “paid” keyword search returns via search engine marketing campaigns), unless you have an unlimited marketing budget, in many respects your primary audience is the search engine – not your human end consumer - since SEO is the cheapest lead generation strategy available to you online.
This reality heavily instructs the type of content that you have on your web site, how information bits are structured and presented there, and equally important, your viral marketing efforts.
It is admittedly paradoxical to refer to a search engine as a ‘primary audience’ when ostensibly one of the greatest virtues of the Internet is about empowering the individual and niche interests via long tail, narrowcasting, one-to-one marketing, social networking building and wisdom-of-crowds methodologies.
The ‘paradox’ topic as well as the best practices and outcome goals for SEO/SEM is for a different post, however.
This post is focused on the metaphor of the blind five-year-old and how embracing it changes the definition of the situation in thinking about your personal and/or professional communications and messaging imperatives.
What brought me home to this point was a book that I am reading right now called, “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.”
The book posits that sticky concepts are ones that are simple to the point of being stripped to their very core without being reduced to meaningless sound bite.
Put another way, they do not confuse the tail with the dog or needlessly get sidetracked in describing the tail, other dog parts or dog-ness.
They rigorously focus on finding the ‘lead,’ or first sentence, that compels you to pay attention to the proverbial dog and more importantly, respond accordingly.
How do they do this? Beyond simplicity, they present something unexpected to the audience with a narrative that is concrete, delivered from credible sources, imbued with emotional value and which can readily be packaged up and spread via story-telling vehicles.
Simple and logical in concept, but like any discipline takes clear outcome goals, lots of trial-and-error and attention to detail to make actually work.
I am admittedly pre-disposed to a book espousing such concepts, being a student of Memetics (see “Virus of the Mind”), Malcolm Gladwell’s concept of mavens, connectors and salespeople in “The Tipping Point” and the power of identifying/preserving the core in building companies that stand the test of time (see “Built to Last”).
But the book is an engaging read, and being a fan of trying to boil things down to their core essence, take a picture of them and keep them in my proverbial front pocket, I will submit that you should wear the blind five-year-old axiom for a bit, and focus on defining your lead – be it your life purpose, career goals or unfair advantage that you bring to planet earth – and test out your core message repeatedly with the the blind five-year-old in mind.
