The Long, Painful Journey to Better Self-Awareness

Date / feb 6, 2013 / Category / Personal, Psychology

Erica and I are sitting on a small bus with 8 other fellow Mozcationers, in transit from Cape Town to a kloof on the Northeastern side of the Cedarburg Mountains. It’s 90°+ outside, and the air conditioning in the bus can’t keep up. It’s a little too uncomfortable to read, and while the scenery is amazing, so is the company. We strike up a conversation about books that moves into comics, games, and random geeky hobbies of all sorts. As the conversation winds down and we turn back to look out the windows, I think for a minute, then tell Erica how amazed and impressed I am at both her passion for these pursuits as well as her complete lack of self-consciousness about them. She doesn’t bat an eyelash about explaining the plot of a super-niche science fiction comic. I’m amazed. And I’m jealous.

I’ve always been ashamed of the enjoyment I get from geekier pursuits. I try to hide the fact that I worked as Wizards of the Coast in college, that I tried to play role playing games in middle school (but couldn’t find anyone to play with me, except my little sister, who was too young at the time to really understand), that I still love computer games (though I almost never play them). It’s so bad that I still feel anxiety, get sweaty, and feel my pulse pound if I’m playing a game on the weekend and Geraldine comes back from a shopping trip. Honestly, what the @#%! does it matter if I play a computer game in my spare time? No one cares.

I’m just afraid they will.

Figuring out why is a quest I’ve been on lately, and it’s one that’s taking much longer and proving vastly more mysterious than I ever suspected.

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Why “Optimization” is a Terrible Way to Think About SEO

Date / dec 17, 2012 / Category / Marketing, Psychology

Sometimes we make assumptions that lead us in the wrong direction. I’ve made plenty, and I’ll continue to make them for as long as I’m alive. And sometimes, we’re inadvertently responsible for wrong assumptions made by others. When that’s the case (and we notice it), there’s an obligation to correct the misunderstanding.

I recently encountered an example of this in some advice related to the SEO field, and how to optimize for rankings. That advice referenced SEOmoz’s own Google Ranking Factors article, which uses a pie-shaped diagram to illustrate “percents” of particular algorithmic factors (like the illustration on the left in the image below).

This visualization, and the conceptual takeaway that the ranking algorithm is a pie chart made up of buckets that can only be filled so much, got me worried that a series of assumptions might lead a lot of folks astray.

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The Uncomfortable Balance

Date / nov 29, 2012 / Category / Psychology, Team

Every CEO, founder, manager, and probably most all of us at some point in our professional lives have asked these two questions:

1. Am I pushing the people on my team too hard?
2. Am I not pushing the people on my team hard enough?

These two nag at me all the time.

There are days when I marvel at what Mozzers have accomplished, overwhelmed by the quantity and quality of work delivered. And there are days when I wonder how we can keep customers at all given the failures, setbacks, and occasional poor decisions we make (usually garnered from the unfair perspective of hindsight). Today, I felt both of those simultaneously.

_{(via xx on Flickr)}

I know that many managers and individual contributors feel this tension, too. My advice on the topic isn’t comprehensive, but I hope it can be helpful:

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The Mathematics of Core Values

Date / nov 27, 2012 / Category / Personal, Psychology

Over the holiday weekend, Geraldine took me to see Lincoln. I’d watched a clip aired during the Daily Show last week that had me excited to see the film, and Fred Wilson’s post sealed the deal.

That clip contained the following quote:

Euclid’s first common notion is this:  ‘Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.’   That’s a rule of mathematical reasoning.  It’s true because it works.  Has done and always will do.  In his book, Euclid says this is self-evident.  You see, there it is.  Even in that 2,000 year old book of mechanical law, it is a self-evident truth that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.

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Broadening Our Thinking on the Practice of Conversion Rate Optimization

Date / nov 18, 2012 / Category / Marketing, Psychology

Many times when businesses invest in improving online conversion rates, the practice goes something like this:

1. Brainstorm a list of things that can be changed in the conversion process or on the landing page
2. Determine which are easy to build/test
3. Create a set of A/B or multivariate tests to run through them
4. Allow winning changes to remain

Unfortunately, this process diminishes what CRO can achieve. It’s my belief that conversion rate optimization needs to be a practice that’s separate from funnel optimization or landing page optimization (though it can certainly encompass those). But CRO is bigger and broader, and it deserves to have influence on every part of the business – from the product to the customer service to the marketing and beyond.

We’re trying out a new format of video at Moz (which we may do more of on the Moz Youtube Channel), and in this 19 minute one, I use a presentation I’ve given a couple times this year against a whiteboard backdrop to tackle the big picture of CRO.

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Where Does Creativity Come From?

Date / nov 11, 2012 / Category / Personal, Product, Psychology

I love discovering that long-held wisdom or cultural beliefs are mythology. Ideas are so often what hold people back from achieving greater potential – and freedom from the prison of those ideas can create revolutions that make us all better, stronger, and wiser.

This weekend I watched some videos on the site Everything Is A Remix that changed my preconceptions about what it means to be creative, what an inventor is, and how brilliant new ideas come to be. Much like Simon Sinek’s talk on Getting to Why, this video has the potential to be a touchstone for many of us who operate in the fields of marketing and technology.

Some of my big takeaways after watching include:

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You Must Choose Metrics, But Choose Wisely

Date / oct 24, 2012 / Category / Data, Psychology, Startups, Team

I had lunch with Thomas from our production engineering team today. During our chat, we talked about the future of the company’s organizational structure and plans to split into feature-focused teams after a big launch we have planned for 2013. Thomas noted that in his previous role with Amazon, teams were judged directly against metrics for the features on which they worked, and this had both good and bad elements.

_{“choose wisely, for while the true Grail will bring you life, the false Grail will take it from you.”}

The good is obvious – a feature team that not only knows what they’re building and why, but can also see the progress and transparently share that to their teammates, managers, and the rest of the company is far more likely to succeed. They can focus on the problem, test, analyze, improve, and have all the positive emotions associated with measurable goals, to boot.

The bad is less obvious.

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24 Things I Know Now That I Wish I Knew Then

Date / oct 15, 2012 / Category / Personal, Psychology

I really liked Rae Hoffman’s post from last month, Entrepreneurial Lessons: 48 Things I Know Now That I Wish I Knew Then. And, while I don’t agree with everything on her list (at least as it applies to the experiences I’ve had), I felt compelled to take up the format she’d presented and do something similar.

_{(via waltërcin on Flickr)}

Unfortunately, I don’t have 48 lessons to share, but I can pitch in half that – 24.

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There is No Work/Life Balance

Date / oct 9, 2012 / Category / Personal, Psychology

I recently started getting some CEO coaching help from Jerry Colonna, at Brad & Amy‘s recommendation. The first session was introductory. The second one was revelatory.

We talked about the Ireland trip (which Geraldine wrote about here). It was a really tough one, and it shook our marital relationship more than I thought was possible. When Jerry and I talked about it, he brought up his blog post on the work/life balance problem, which I finally read tonight.

It was good timing. Maybe even life-changing timing.

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The Missing Narrative

Date / oct 3, 2012 / Category / Marketing, Psychology

I love the Green Bay Packers. I love the history of the team. I love that the town of Green Bay’s (population 107,00) residents own the team rather than a billionaire in a big city. I love the stories of struggles and near-bankruptcies they faced in their history and how the sale of shares that would never be repaid nor pay dividends, saved the team from financial ruin time and again.

_{(I visited Lambeau Field today for the first time and bought a jersey)}

If I name a successful brand – McDonalds, Ford, Guinness, Starbucks, Google, Boeing, Coca-Cola, Apple – chances are good that all of their loyal fans, most of their occasional consumers, and even a good number of non-customers can recite a version of that brand’s narrative (how they began, what they stand for, maybe even a founder’s name or a specific anecdote). There’s an odd correlation with brand narratives and successful brands.

I’ll give another example.

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