The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

As I wrote, I'm not complaining. What I am is curious.

I've been told that the reason my post didn't get much traffic, despite the heavy traffic the topic received elsewhere, had to do with the title of my post, "How do you Hide a Shining Light?"

To me this title directly addresses what's in the post. Not specifically Juanita Bynum's travails but the juxtaposition of being a humble celebrity.

Let me also share that no information exists in isolation. Did I ever mention the sign in my office, "Understanding via Diversity"? I was recently corresponding with a friend who was commenting on my level of insight. I wrote that if I do have any kind of insight it probably comes from cross-pollinating fifty different things then seeing what flowers.

So this information on traffic and the title of my post fit in well with something I was told when I attended the AllBusiness.com blogger's conference. I learned that online material needs to have a title that has key words in it that are repeated in the text of the material. What really stuck with me was the injunction to not use "newspaper style headlines because search engines don't like them."

Because search engines don't like them?

And here's where I'll post a NextStage warning. What follows is where your friendly, neighborhood NextStageologist takes a left. I wrote in Media Free? That's easy...and scary. Know why? (Part 3) that I'm what's known as a lateral thinker. NextStage staff has learned to be amused by it and clients have learned they're going to pay a good price for it. You, dear reader, get it for free...

It also makes me melancholy. I feel like Ishi, the last of my tribe.

The underlying thread of this is that we're learning to think the way a search engine wants us to think, not the way humans think about information. At least, if we want to find something or be found we need to think like a search engine. Or how a search engine needs us to think.

There was a time when people were working on algorithms that would allow search engines to understand how we think, to parse our natural language queries and display meaningful results. I suspect those efforts will soon be de reguerre and pointless, unnecessary in our quickly evolving world.

There's also the fact that my training tells me what's happening shouldn't be a surprise. Any one who's studied anthrolinguistics knows that language evolves from the bottom up, meaning that the lower classes always have the greatest impact on the evolution of a language over time. The lower classes usually have greater populations than the upper classes, the upper classes don't move in lower class society but lower classes move easily in upper class society (usually as servants in one form or another) and eventually, what was once something relegated to the lower classes becomes the status symbol of the upper classes (homes on waterfronts, lobster, cabins in the mountains, "gentleman" farmers and regentrification are all examples of this).

Here "greater population" is synonymous with "ubiquity". The internet's -- hence search engines' -- ubiquity teamed with the fact that it serves us allows it to be a great shaper of our thoughts, words and deeds.

Again and anthrolinguistically, another element falls from this.

I was taught as a child that god created man in his own image. I also agree with Voltaire, "If god didn't exist, man would have to create him." Anthropology demonstrates that the deihood has evolved from a very non-human entity to a very homophilic entity. This migration of deity from stranger to self is also an example of that language evolution thing I mentioned above. We shaped our concepts of the deity to match our ability to lingualize it. We, the historically lower class in our relationships to our chosen deities, have linguistically forced those deities to speak our language if they want to be understood, recognized and found by us.

What we did to god, should we not be surprised that search engines are doing to us?

But I'll be danged if want them living in my neighborhood or coming in through the front door.

Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.

Upcoming Conferences:

• IMedia Brand Summit on 9-12 Sept 07
• XChange on 20-21 Sept 07
• DC Emetrics Summit on 14-17 Oct '07
• Society for New Communications Research Annual Research Symposium & Awards Gala on 5-6 Dec 07 in Boston.