Content Becomes King Once More – This Time of Search Marketing

Edited transcript of BriefingsDirect[TM] podcast with Media Survey's Sam Whitmore, recorded April 24, 2007.

Listen to the podcast here. If you'd like to learn more about BriefingsDirect B2B informational podcasts, or to become a sponsor of this or other B2B podcasts, contact Interarbor Solutions at 603-528-2435.

Dana Gardner: Hi. This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect. Today, a podcast discussion about the future of marketing -- maybe we can call it Marketing 2.0?

We're going to talk about content creation as a strategic activity, and we're going to talk about what the PR and marketing folks in the field, in the enterprises, in businesses, are making of all of this.

Joining us to sift through it all, we have Sam Whitmore, founder and editor of Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey. Welcome to the show again, Sam.

Sam Whitmore: It’s great to be back, Dana.

Gardner: It’s been two years since we started these conversations. I came to you as a professional providing tools for the media pros, asking, were they making blogs, were they making podcasts, what about RSS? And you weren’t sure. But do we have a new state of the art? Are people into this now? Is it a fad or are we really into something substantial?

Whitmore: It’s as close to substantial as it’s ever been. There are many segments, and we should be careful about generalizing, but in our world are the people that are likely to listen to this podcast. People understand about RSS feeds now. Microsoft Vista, entering the market with Web feeds, moved the marble a little bit -- and it's a very exciting time.

Gardner: I just got back, Sam, from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and was very impressed with the use of RSS, particularly as a machine-to-machine capability. Folks that are creating content, and then creating distribution networks using these within the mashup interface, the rich-Internet application interfaces. RSS is really a very popular tool for developers, and that’s going to hasten its appreciation for those a little higher up the food chain who are thinking about strategies, marketing, outreach, community development and so forth.

Whitmore: We're now getting people to understand the concept of "You don’t have to browse anymore." They still search, of course, probably more than ever before. But think about the two ways that people get their information now. It's either through RSS syndication, or through search. And it’s almost quaint to think back about, "Yeah, I think I am going to go through my bookmarks and see what I haven’t visited in a while." I don’t know anybody who does that anymore.

Gardner: The thing that’s interesting to me, and what’s changed in my business in the last year or so is this emphasis on search. Search, from what some people tell me, is the "new media." When you want something, you know enough about it to start a search. If you're a little bit diligent, you can find just about anything you want. That includes B2B content that describes products, values, and services that companies want you to know about.

What’s been interesting for me is that as I have created content -- some of it of by my own creation and, and other content that is sponsored -- people want help in creating content. As an analyst, I can moderate a panel or discuss something with users, and then make that available to many people. But that content has now become a very powerful force in search, and I did not intend it that way.

I intended this content to be something that had more of an RSS play value. But what’s happened is that the content is a search-ranking benefit for the topics we cover. I will blog about this content on three blogs, and I share it with distribution partners who are often IT media companies like TechTarget and E-Commerce Times. I also share it with direct subscription-based content deliverers to IT decision buyers, including Books24by7, AnalystPerspectives, Gerson Lehrman Group's News, and Insight24.

There are a number of channels that this audio and text content then finds its way into -- where it's tagged, has a different URL, and is associated with a different Web domain. The search engine crawlers and the algorithms that rank content take a look at this content and say, “Wow, it's going across multiple domains, it's been tagged a lot, it’s been put into bookmarks, and linked to -- so it must be highly relevant." And this content tends to move up swiftly in the search ranks.

So, my question to you, Sam, is: Are you seeing search marketing as I am seeing search marketing -- that it is becoming as important as advertising?

Whitmore: In a word, yes. I'll know a lot more in a couple of weeks, because at the end of the month, out in San Francisco, I will be going to ad:tech and hanging around with that crowd. But, it's been building for a while. The investment in search-engine optimization (SEO) and some of the acquisitions that we have seen, such as big, multi-national marketing companies now snapping up the iProspects, and iCrossings, are doing a great job. So, it’s definitely being built into the mix. That’s what Content 2.0 is. And you’ve really staked a high ground in that, haven’t you?

Gardner: I am trying.

Whitmore: So, you tell me. How are you doing with that? Is it driving your business?

Gardner: It is. About 90 percent of my business is now supported through custom podcast content creation. And I even hesitate to use the word podcast anymore, because for me, podcasting is really a means to creating content -- and not an ends. Just as you and I are having a discussion now on the phone, and I can create a transcript from this in about two or three days, that means this content can be widely distributed through multiple modes or modalities across different distribution networks and partnerships. We can even license it to people to use and create more content.

That’s sort of led me to another concept, which I call the "content pyramid." Interestingly enough, I’ve stumbled onto this in the same fashion that I stumbled onto search as an important element. Because I look at software development and deployment strategies as my main domain area for coverage -- and then I am more of a practitioner of Web 2.0 in terms of how I deliver content -- I’ve noticed over the past five years or so, a more strategic approach to software development.

That is to say, there's a new way, instead of small groups off doing their own thing, creating their applications that run autonomously on a monolithic stack of some kind, that have no real relationship to one another, and that at some point I might have to integrate and/or assimilate the data that they contain and create. The idea is to take a strategic overview and to think about applications from an architectural perspective.

The idea is to think of applications from their lifecycle, not just how we create them -- but how we might want to use them in the future, or even sunset them. Then think what we’re going to do with this pile of data that, in many cases, is about the same customer or the same product, but in a different format in a different application? This one-off approach is just not productive, and it’s expensive.

Companies are spending 70 to 80 percent of their IT dollars just on maintenance of these existing applications, and are not doing innovative new things. There has been a whole host of things that have happened around, "Hey, let’s create components, let’s use standards, and let’s develop around a common framework such as Eclipse." So, there’s more of a strategic approach to software.

Ultimately, the goal is a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) where you have lots of different business services that you can then package, mash up, and aggregate to create different processes. Then, you can tear them apart and build them up again. It’s more of a use-reuse, common-repository mentality, and not just one-off production.

Whitmore: All right, so let’s see how you pull this off with content.

Gardner: The idea is to start thinking strategically about your content, instead of having thousands of people around your company, each creating their own content without much interaction, without much coordination, but perhaps a lot of overlap and a lack of reuse, adding to redundancy. That goes for everything from mimeographs to RSS feeds, and all in between.

But when you think about content more strategically, and can plan for and create core content that can be reused and extended across different uses -- like marketing literature, the documentation you provide for your services and products, your advertising, as well as your communications with your investors, with analysts, with the press -- you create more of a coordinated core set of messages and documents and content. We'll be seeing more audio and video increasingly in this mix.

If a company can create this content core and allow people to use it and make it accessible -- in the same way as with the development of software tools and components -- you can better control your costs. You can better control your message, because more of your messaging will be in sync, because it's all coming off of the same core. You can create a lot of this core without having to go through a sixth-month review process, and without taking up your experts’ and your company’s time by forcing them to write 80-page papers.

Maybe this whole notion of the conversation that is prominent in social networking and in Web 2.0 -- of having a series of conversations, capturing it as audio, turning it into text, reusing it across different aspects of your communications, and increasingly, capturing it as video as well -- will allow for a much easier way of gathering knowledge from your experts and users, keeping it on message, and then making that available as a set of core content.

Now, it’s a vision. There is always going to be a lot of need for exceptions, but conceptually starting to think about content strategically to me makes a lot of sense now.

Whitmore: Well, I know that Netflix has somebody in the CCO position, Chief Content Officer, and that they have looked into that as a fundamental principle of communicating to their constituencies, their prospects, their customers, their investors, and people like that. So, it is a good idea.

Gardner: It’s really all about content discussion and community. As more companies outsource and offshore elements of their production and distribution, and as more business services become available off the wire, what is it that’s going to define the business of the future? It’s going to be their relationships, and the way that they foster those relationships is through ongoing content-based discussion.

We now have the ability to distribute content far more widely, but, at the same time, in a more granular sense -- that long-tail concept -- more widely, yet more targeted, and more cheaply than ever. So, you can create a 30-minute movie, put it on YouTube, and almost anyone on the planet has access to it. Anyone, by the way, who does a search on the key issues about your value, your products, or your company gets to the content.

More companies will be making some pretty high-quality, interesting, 30-minute, maybe 15-minute movies. We are already seeing this. There was a great one on SOA that IBM did not too long ago. Are you, as a marketer, going to want to have someone else define your messaging for you? Or are you going to start thinking about doing this yourselves?

Again, IBM is a bellwether in this, at least in the IT space. They’re just creating scads of content. And when you go to Google, if you type in "SOA" or "Services Oriented Architecture," which is an important direction and business opportunity for IBM, the left hand side of the search page, that free-content stuff, is littered with IBM content. Discussions with developers, whitepapers, mentions in press – these are the things that get vetted by the search engine algorithms as being relevant.

Any company that has a strategic direction in which they are taking their business should say, “What are the keywords that relate to our future? What is the content we can create that will drive recognition from those keywords of our value, specifically as an individual company? And how can we create an ongoing process by which we’re feeding that algorithm machine over and over again to retain that high ranking?"

That to me is Marketing 2.0.

Whitmore: That model works hand-in-glove in uber-search environments like a Yahoo!, YouTube, or Google. But in the world that I follow, you've got the IT and tech media really trying to drive their brand, because they don’t want you to go to Google and type in “SOA.” That would be a terrible defeat for them.

Gardner: But, you don’t want to limit yourself to one media company’s input. What these media companies should be doing is the same thing their customers are doing. That is to create the very best possible content on the key subjects of interest of the day, and have them appear high up in the general search ranking. So, when I do a Google search on “SOA,” I’d just as well see an article up there by InfoWorld as one that is from IBM. But either way, if it's good and valuable information, that’s what I’m going to look at.

Whitmore: But as you get closer to, “I've got to make a decision on a reseller or a solution provider or vendor," then I think that I am not going to trust IBM. They are not going to be my goal because they are going to be omitting the stuff about BEA and its competitors.

Gardner: Well, we hope that BEA and its competitors are creating content about their value and that it’s also available. Obviously, buyers will be moving from research, into creating a shortlist, into an RFP process, getting into weighty, detailed discussions, and then ultimately buying negotiations. This Marketing 2.0 approach is completely complementary to a traditional sales, research, and then execution process.

Whitmore: It absolutely is. They can work in parallel, and these IT trade titles and these people that are being rapidly disintermediated need to figure out how to get some of their content to rank well in generic search environments. That brings us back to SEO and the fact that you can subscribe to RSS search results. These people really are getting hammered.

Gardner: We're now leveling the playing field. The best content that is vetted through the algorithmic search process is what’s going to be most prominent. We know that when people do searches, they don’t go more than one or two pages in. Therefore, the IT media, those companies covering IT, need to come up with great content, great columnists, podcasts, RSS, video, whatever it might be, that would show what is voted on as best and vetted.

Whitmore: I have an editorial bias, when I hear the word "content." I think about generic, by-the-pound content. Whitepapers have their place, and product documentation too, but as the 20-somethings and 30-somethings take over the world – and that’s happening – they are not going to accept the same blandness and pseudo-authority that a lot of content has for us.

Gardner: I agree. People need to loosen up, and I've written a number of whitepapers. The way you go about a whitepaper is you do research, you get information, and you do interviews – primary research. And what is an interview? It’s a discussion. Why not just create a great discussion with the experts and put that up, instead of putting it into some sort of a turgid-prose, 80-page tome of which people only read the executive summary?

Why not give the long tail its due, put up a series of five key discussions with the experts you would have interviewed anyway for the whitepaper, let people either read the transcript or glance at the executive summary of each individual interview or discussion, and then pick and choose? To me, that’s just a better way to learn. And it's also a lot easier for the experts as well as the authors. So, it really is a discussion.

There are more young people thinking about community and social networking, and so why not combine all of this into a happy discussion that is also substantive and educates at the same time?

Whitmore: It reflects real people with real attitudes, and not created by the lawyers and the PR people and the conservative forces within companies because that’s simply not going to work. One of my last points questions is, when are we going to see an example of a company relying on "content pyramid" philosophy, and could we prove that they were successful doing so? When are we going to see that?

Gardner: We're seeing dribs and drabs of it. The idea is to look at what’s effective in terms of engagement with your communities. If you can engage your community with a whitepaper from the people doing lead generation, and they get 300 or 400 leads, it’s a success. But when you put something up on YouTube, you get 30,000 to perhaps hundreds of thousands of potential downloads and click-throughs and looks.

The scale is much greater and the cost can be comparable or even lower. You are going to start to see what works in the field. When people recognize that if they are number one or assumed to be in the top several media outlets, they are going to have to be there. Vendors will cultivate the search option too through PR and AR and Investor relations and operate among different channels or distributions of content to reach their end-users and communities.

I can see "search relations (SR)" as another possible definition of people’s approach to this.

Whitmore: That’s a very interesting concept, but from a VP of sales perspective, Dana, I don’t want 30,000 leads. I want the 25 that are in an advanced state of consideration for the product that I sell.

Gardner: Then, you just vet them. You take that 30,000 potential community and bring them down into another level of content that will slough off those who are not interested very much. That’s to say, if they’ll click through and look at a five-minute video, that means there’s mild interest. If they click further down and read a transcript of hear a podcast on a similar topic, but more refined, that shows even more self-selecting and interest.

Then, if they listen to the podcast, you get down to the where it’s a lead generation benefit. That’s where you separate the wheat from the chaff and you get real leads. It's also where the content pyramid works. You need the content to walk them down that path of self-selection.

But, I would rather start with a large universe and work it down, creating brand affinity and relationships with those people, and then find the content and the mechanisms that then bring them to the point where they are ready to sign up for the product or service.

The pyramid is, in that case, inverse – you start wide and you go narrow. But the content creation process should start specific and narrow and then go wide. It has to be two-way discussion. Once you engage the people on a discussion, that’s where you have a myriad of opportunities for bringing them into your business.

Whitmore: Are there examples of people that are prospering with this philosophy?

Gardner: The notion of getting people to a sales-and-marketing activity requires community, affinity, and interest, and you have to lure them in there and then get them to click – whether the click is a download or it’s a lead generation form.

I’d look at some companies that are good at that. I'd again bring up IBM, but I have also noticed that BMC has a very good page, where you can go for information. And this page has got a listing of all sorts of content that has to do with specific values about what they bring their customers.

And they're saying, "Here’s the content that we have created. Here’s content that we found out there that others have created. Here are links to blogs and podcasts that we think are relevant to this. Here’s a download of whitepapers in the traditional marketing literature." It's really just a site or a destination around a topic that’s a subset of their business that people can go to, and then they could get an RSS feed from.

In a sense, BMC is doing their community a service through a knowledge triage around a specific topic that then hopefully will engage the community. So, BMC is a good example. They still have to populate this. People who come back, people who have a subscription to RSS, are going to need something new and fresh coming down their pipe every week or two.

But, they're creating this funnel, qualifying people, and then hopefully getting them into an engagement. It therefore requires these companies to become publishers themselves.

Whitmore: But, most companies don’t have the headcount for that.

Gardner: Why not?

Whitmore: Because usually the executives are going to say, “If I had any spare headcount, I'm going to put it in sales and field marketing and they're not going to get into the publishing business.” They might subcontract it out, but I don’t think they're going to bring it in-house. I’d be very surprised.

Gardner: I was thinking the same thing when I started my business, Sam. I thought that I would be one of those subcontractors – and I am. I basically help people figure out how to make content distributed and keep it credible and valuable. But, I'm seeing more and more companies are actually saying, “We're going to create a studio – a video studio -- inside of our company.”

Whitmore: What kinds of companies?

Gardner: Well, Red Hat, for example, recently had a job posting that they are looking for someone who has experience as a video producer. And they are going to start doing this in house, I suspect. I expect to see the same thing from other companies.

Whitmore: That’s interesting, because they live in a viral world. And Apple’s the same way.

Gardner: Their goal is to get people to download the code that then leads to support and maintenance. That interests business.

It will be a mixture. Some companies aren't going to be interested in being in the content business. They’ll outsource the whole thing. Other companies will say, “Listen, it just makes more sense for us to make this a core competency. We'll still use traditional media, but we're going to create our own media too.”

Let’s think about the numbers here. Let’s say you're a $5 billion-a-year company, revenue-wise, in the IT space. You and I have worked for large IT publications. What was the total editorial budget?

Whitmore: Back in my day? It was at least $1 million.

Gardner: Let’s say you could create an entire weekly news publication that’s the best in its field for a couple of million a year, and you're a $5 billion company. Wouldn’t you throw $750,000 or $1 million at a core competency of content creation, and perhaps soon dominate your space for content, and dominate all of the keyword searches because you're putting up the best, most interesting content?

Whitmore: If I had strong enough leadership, I would.

Gardner: If I were spending five times that much on just advertising -- and half of that advertising was wasted, but I didn’t know which half it was -- wouldn’t I take some of that money and devote it to my own content creation competencies? This is no-brainer. Any company, after a certain critical mass of size and revenue, should look at -- among their marketing spend and advertising spend -- their content creation spend.

Whitmore: Being a student of media, I have observed a collective lack of will across most segments most of the time. When you see the exceptions to this, that’s when you see a feature story. That’s when you see a Q&A. The journalists are out there beating the bushes to find people with spines who do something other than what's expected of them.

Gardner: You know as a former journalist -- and I should say you're still a journalist in what you're doing -- when you beat the bushes, there are always stories out there. There is another thing that's interesting, there's something called News@Cisco, and Cisco Systems created it like a newsroom.

Whitmore: I love that site. That is the absolute archetype for vendor publishing, as far as I'm concerned.

Gardner: There it is. You can go in and say, “We want to talk to you. We're just fine in the field -- whether it’s a sales person, an engineer, another blogger, an evangelist -- what's news and interesting and happening in the communities that affect Cisco? Let’s talk about it. Let’s publish it.” There's plenty of great stuff in there.

Whitmore: Well, that’s a good place to send people. It’s newsroom.cisco.com I believe or is it news.cisco.com?

Gardner: Or you could just go to Google and type News at Cisco, right? I mean, why even think about the site? You go to the search engine. It’s the same way that your clients and prospects are going to find your stuff.

Whitmore: Well, I guess I’m old school and I never realized it. I tried to think of the destination but you're right, I don’t need to, and that sort of makes your point.

Gardner: You can call it lazy but, darn it, it works, it’s productive. If you use search, not just for search, but for navigation, that’s just another reason to look at that as a place you have to be.

Well, we've been having an interesting discussion. I want to thank you Sam, but we're out of time. We have covered some Marketing 2.0, maybe even some press release 2.0. I've been tracking what folks like Shift and Edelman and some of these other firms are doing, where they create a whole slew of rich content that becomes available when a press release or a news event happens, I think it’s very similar thinking to what we've been describing.

Whitmore: That’s right, a content stack. We probably don’t have the time to get into that, but here are the two things, the two litmus tests, that I would point to regarding this social media press-release thing. Number one, who are the vendors using this approach and do they continue to use it once they have started? Do they stick with it?

The other thing is, are journalists publicly saying, "This helps me do my job better and I'm inclined to write longer or richer pieces when I'm communicated to in this new way?" When I start to see critical mass in both of those areas, then we’ll know that the trend is taking hold. Until we see that, I'm still skeptical

Gardner: Well, I would offer one more opportunity for how it could be gauged as a return on investment, and that would be when you do a search on a company. If any of those pieces of press release 2.0 content actually start rising up, then it’s served its purpose too.

Whitmore: You've done it to me again. I didn’t think of "search" first.

Gardner: "Search" -- it’s the new media.

Whitmore: Even though I started with it in this podcast interestingly enough.

Gardner: Search and RSS, yeah.

Whitmore: That’s right. Well, Dana, I enjoyed it as always. It’s great to talk with you.

Gardner: Right, we've been talking here today with Sam Whitmore. He is the founder and editor of Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey at mediasurvey.com. or, heck, just go to Google and type in "Media Survey" or "Sam Whitmore," and you’ll get there.

This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you have been listening to BriefingsDirect. Thanks.

Listen to the podcast here. Produced as a courtesy of Interarbor Solutions: analysis, consulting and rich new-media content production.

If any of our listeners are interested in learning more about BriefingsDirect B2B informational podcasts or to become a sponsor of this or other B2B podcasts, please fill free to contact Interarbor Solutions at 603-528-2435.

Transcript of Dana Gardner’s Podcast on Marketing 2.0 with Sam Whitmore. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2007. All rights reserved.

Transcript of BriefingsDirect Podcast on Future Trends in Search and Advertising

Edited transcript of BriefingsDirect[TM] podcast with Dana Gardner, recorded Jan. 23, 2007.

Podcast sponsor: ZoomInfo.

Listen to the podcast here.

Listeners of this podcast are invited to learn more about B2B advertising opportunities with ZoomInfo. Just go to www.zoominfo.com/adpodcast to learn how Zoominfo's business search portal provides a rich online B2B advertising opportunity.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect Podcast. Today’s discussion focuses on the future of search and search marketing; and how businesses, corporations, companies, marketers, can better avail themselves of the tools that are now available through search.

We'll discuss the incredible power that’s now being leveraged through access to people’s information, company’s information, market collateral and data -- a rich trove of information. Now is the time to figure out the best way to approach it and to leverage it.

Joining us on this call are an analyst and an executive from ZoomInfo. Let me introduce Shar VanBoskirk, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. Welcome to the show, Shar.

Shar VanBoskirk: Hi, Dana. Thanks so much for having me.

Gardner: Also Bryan Burdick, chief operating officer at ZoomInfo. Welcome, Bryan.

Bryan Burdick: Thanks, Dana. Thanks for having me.

Gardner: We want to look at where we are, but, more important, where we’re going with this whole notion of search as applied to marketing and business -- getting things done in a new and innovative way. I suppose that in order to know where you’re going, you have to have a strong sense of where you are. I’ll throw this out to either of you. What is the state of search marketing, and how did we get to this point? I’m principally interested in business drivers and technology drivers. What has gotten us to this point of where people are starting to look at search for business purposes?

VanBoskirk: I can start off. I’ll just weigh in by saying that what has made search so popular today is that it's proven both very effective at getting users to take action, and very effective at giving marketers a way to measure their effect on advertising and consumers. If we look at the history of the interactive medium specifically, around 1999 advertisers were really looking for the next big thing. They had gotten a good result and a good return from display ads, but no one was very clear about what was the sweet spot of the online channel. Overture had a couple of attempts with some paid search ads, and the people who gave it a try realized that they could put some money in and see some immediate returns. That's the kind of cost effectiveness that has lead to the boom that we see today in search marketing.

Gardner: Overture is part of…

VanBoskirk: Now part of Yahoo!

Burdick: I agree with that, and also would add to it that one of the business-model effects of search engine marketing is the ability to very cost effectively try new things. You can try new keywords, see how they work, get immediate response, understand the ROI, do more of what works, and try new things along the way.

Gardner: So, it seems that advertising online and in all the other modalities and channels for advertising often required a gut instinct as to what was going to work and what wasn’t. You could see what went in at one end and you could just look at the results, but figuring out how they came together was sort of guesswork. It seems to me that search, using contextual ads and keywords, removes the guesswork and it gives you clarity and visibility into the thought process that brings people from research to an actual business decision. Does that make sense?

Burdick: It really does, and it also really shortens the time cycle of that whole process. You can try keywords and paid-placement advertisings on Google or Yahoo!, or wherever, today and get results literally in a day, sometimes even in hours, depending on the overall volume.

VanBoskirk: I think search works, because it catches people at the point where they are raising their hand for information and for marketing messages. So, the guesswork of advertising that search doesn’t apply to was always assuming, "Hey, maybe my user is interested in my product or if I catch them at this time, it looks like they might be really responsive." Search took all that guesswork away, because it basically said, "I, as a user, am actively searching for more information about something I’m interested in. If you, Mister Advertiser, can actually give me the information that I want, I’m going to respond to that."

Gardner: When we think of search, we often think about people looking for maybe medical information. "I’ve got a wart on my hand. How do I get rid of it?" or "How do I get rid of the fleas on my dog?" -- consumer research and questions. I think more and more we’re seeing search being used for real business research. People could have $20 million or $30 million budgets and be looking for procurement efficiencies and new avenues for finding products, services, personnel, partners, and ecologies. How does this translate into business? Did the consumer use lead to the business use, and is business catching up? Is that what’s going on?

Burdick: We’re definitely starting to see some of those trends. Consumer advertisers were certainly the first to adopt, and jumped on to the search-engine marketing and advertising bandwagon. In a lot of ways, it goes back to their ability -- as Shar was just saying -- to present a very targeted message, and get an immediate response and ROI, whereas the B2B sales cycle tends to be longer.

As the model is proven out on the consumer side, B2B advertisers are starting to find ways to leverage those same technologies and those same avenues. New avenues are developing. We see new vertical search engines that are really targeting the business consumer or the "prosumer," as the case may be, and delivering even more targeted results to the B2B searcher.

Gardner: I suppose companies think of this in two ways. One being, "I want to use search to improve how I gather information, research, do business, find partners, and find suppliers." But they're also saying "I want all the people who are looking for my goods and services to be able to better find me." What should companies be doing now in order to be better found?

VanBoskirk: The fact is that 71 percent of users are using search engines to find Websites. So, thinking about your question of which came first, the business need or the consumer behavior, I think the answer is that we’re all users of the Web. Whether we’re using it for personal or business reasons, search has become just a natural way for us to begin finding information. What that has led to then is a need to capitalize on that behavior, whether you are a B2C marketer or B2B marketer. There are similar best practices for both.

I always tell marketer clients to think first about their natural search engine optimizations. So, really they should be thinking, "Is the content on my site related to the searches that my users are doing for me, and is it presented in a way that’s easy for Web crawlers to get around?" That’s work that, if you do it once, can pay off for you for years to come.

Then, you can think about some paid search ads that might be really related to the specific, more timely searches or the specific offers and timed programs that you might be running. They should think of all within this notion of, "Who is my user? What are they looking for from me? What is the language that they’re using to conduct that search or to find that information?" You need to understand who those users are, how you can optimize your site to meet their needs, and then look at the paid search ads. It’s the same best practice that works for either a consumer or a B2B marketer.

Gardner: I suppose a consumer doesn't need to have a presence on the Web in order to use it, whereas for a business, their presence, and the amount of content, trackable media, and information that they put out is what’s going to help them get into this mode of being a part of online commerce.

VanBoskirk: That’s an interesting question, because we’re seeing a lot more consumer-generated content appearing in search engines. While it’s true that you have to have some sort of Web presence to appear in search results, what you have to do to create a Web presence is much different today then it was even a year ago. You might actually have information that is about one consumer talking to another consumer about a product, as opposed to that product’s Web page appearing as the most relevant search result in a search results page.

Burdick: That raises the ante for businesses that need to control brand image across the Web, and need to control their digital image. It’s not just about what goes up on their own Website, but, as Shar was saying, it’s about what the blogs are saying. It’s about what the press is saying. It’s about what review sites are saying.

As search engines go to the next generation and do things like semantic search, like we’re doing here at ZoomInfo, we actually are able to aggregate that content across these entities and pull together a complete picture of people and companies. That same technology will start to apply to other entities and other search engines down the road.

Gardner: So, whether I’m a business buyer or a consumer, when I do a search on "buggy whips," I’m not just going to see results from Acme Buggy Whips Co., I’m going to see chats and blogs and all the information about the state of buggy whips.

Burdick: Right, and it will move from buggy whips as a keyword to buggy whips as a concept or entity. A great example that I like to use is, if I search for "enterprise router" on one of the traditional consumer search engines, I’m going to get lots and lots of results. They will include everything from Enterprise Rent-a-Car to the latest episodes of Star Trek, including a lot of results about enterprise routers. They’re looking at those as keywords versus a more semantic search that understands that an enterprise router is a product. "Here are the companies that sell enterprise routers" is the kind of result you get from a semantic engine like ZoomInfo.

Gardner: So, the search can be better for me if it knows that I’m a business user in a business mode.

Burdick: Exactly. Again, "router" is a great example. If I search for "router," as a consumer I might be interested in a woodworking tool, but if I’m doing it for my business perspective, I’m clearly interested in networking connectivity or the like.

VanBoskirk: Bryan is touching on the next phase of search and the next phase of search marketing that a lot of marketers haven’t yet prepared for. If we look at the most sophisticated marketers today, they’re very good at understanding the broad suite of keywords that they need. They’re probably purchasing a lot of keywords, and they’re maybe even doing some smart bid management to figure out how much they should be paying for certain keywords, based on the profitability of the traffic that they’re getting from each of those term.

What’s next is this notion that Bryan’s talking about around creating an increased relevancy in the results. It’s not determined by some sort of magic algorithm that counts how many mentions of a word are on a page or how many links are linked to that page. It has a bit of a learning embedded in it.

It can understand that if this user has searched for these things in the past, we know that this is the type of user they are, or other people have found satisfying results from these types of searches or these types of results. We know that they’re going to be the most relevant for people who are just like them. There’s a lot of evolution that’s happening that we're going to see evolving in 2007 around figuring out how to increase the relevance of search results.

Gardner: I suppose for consumers there is generally some reluctance to put too much personal information out there that might help them in their searches, but might have detrimental effects otherwise. For businesses, that are in business mode, they might be a little bit more willing, and it might be in their best interest to get more information out there about what kind of business they are, what sort of activities they’re involved with, what their direction is. Is that what you’re alluding to, that the companies can start sharing more information, and therefore empower search and marketing through search among and between different businesses?

VanBoskirk: Sure, the most important information is less personally identifiable information and more relevant information about the types of searches you’ve done. It might be just a catalog of the history of your searches. On some of the social search sites you can actually vote or tag pages that have answered a need for you in a past search. So, on del.icio.us, which is a part of Yahoo! you can actually tag pages that you feel are related to a search. Go back to the example of enterprise routers. I do that search. I find a couple of results pages that are really going to meet my needs. I tag them "business routers," but then I do another search that has something to do with my "Star Trek" interest and I tag those pages "Star Trek."

Now, I’ve got them cataloged in my own del.icio.us page, and somebody else who wants to use del.icio.us can view my tags and realize, "Hey, this is someone who likes Star Trek. I’m going to check out the pages she found that were related to her interest in that particular topic." It’s less about actually giving up personal information about you as a searcher and more about just being willing to share the searches that you’ve done, and even voting for pages that you felt like were relevant answers to your question.

Gardner: So, either voluntarily, or as part of the process, we’re creating a layer of metadata on top of the search activities that then makes the next search activities even richer and more powerful.

VanBoskirk: Exactly.

Gardner: One of the things that’s interesting to me about this business approach for the future of search in marketing is that it’s not just for the big subjects. It can be for something extremely specific.

For example, suppose I’m an engineer designing a cell phone, and there is an integrated circuit that I just want for a very specific task on a very tiny circuit board I’m designing. If I want to make sure that it’s a supplier that’s trusted and so forth, I can do a very discrete search on the SKU, on the actual number of the circuit, almost like taking a serial or model number and then finding out who’s got them and where. This could be very discrete in terms of how search can aid commerce. Is that sort of a long-tail effect we should expect?

Burdick: Definitely. In fact, the search engine marketing space has evolved, as both advertisers and searchers have gotten more sophisticated, and that long tail has continued to get longer and longer.

The other thing that it’s driven is the proliferation of more vertical search engines, because it's relatively simple for somebody who’s developed a new search capability to drive into a particular vertical and start to monetize that right away. With the different ad networks that exist out there, even if you haven’t put together an ad sales force on your own, you could put Google AdSense or one of these other networks up on your site very quickly and start to monetize that. This is going to drive more people to have more niche sites available for the targeted search needs.

Gardner: It sounds like this could hypothetically scale down to a single buyer in the world and a single seller actually finding each other.

Burdick: One of the things that Shar and I were actually taking about a couple of weeks ago was: Is there a future where eBay meets Overture, and you actually have classified ads being placed by individuals in a search engine marketing type of a format?

Gardner: Now, let me understand this. If I go out and do a “search,” in a sense I’m also offering an auction saying, "Here is what I’m looking for. Who is ready to bid on it?"

Burdick: Potentially.

Gardner: What do you think of that, Shar?

VanBoskirk: One of the nicest things that search marketing introduces is level playing field for the little guys to compete against the big guys. It provides a way for a small local advertiser to find the customers that are actually engaging in information that they can provide.

Not a lot of other media can do that. You’re limited in how much television you can afford, and there is no way that a small local bank can compete against Citibank. In this case, a small local bank could actually buy more specific keywords for their target audience in their geography than could a large national bank. Why couldn’t an individual seller of apartments available in particular areas, or used equipment, use search as a way to reach out to people who are willing to find their specific product?

Burdick: You’re already starting to see some of that evolution, particularly in the help-wanted space. Companies like Indeed and SimplyHired, and some of the other job-board aggregators, have started to put together pay-per-click models that are driven off the same types of platforms, the same auction-based model as the consumer advertising in the traditional search engines.

Gardner: Let’s take one of the points we made earlier. We have more visibility into what’s actually taking place in this marketing-to-sales activity. Then, we’ve got this long-tail effect, where I don’t need to take an ad out on the super bowl for $2.5 million. I can find my audience for fairly short money. If we combine these two, can’t even very small mom-and-pop shops demonstrate an ROI for an advertising or marketing approach on the Internet, even if we’re only talking about a few hundred dollars? Is it that granular?

VanBoskirk: It could be. We haven’t seen a real solid local effort from any of the big players. Google and Yahoo! have been really working to develop a local presence and local set of marketing services for individual local advertisers. I don’t think it’s quite there, but as we see smaller search engines unfold, they may be more niche focused on a particular type of user or on a particular vertical or industry.

Also, as we start to have mobile search unfold, where I’m traveling through a certain area and I’m searching for information, we’re going to start to see local opportunities play out in a bigger way for some of these mom-and-pop advertisers. They can purchase keywords on national search engines today, but the commerce opportunity may be more difficult for them. If I’m in San Francisco and I see a paid search ad for a regional restaurant in Boston, they may show me the ad, but they’re probably not going to get my business.

Gardner: So, it's a waste of time and waste of money.

VanBoskirk: This year we’re going to see some more opportunities that will actually help realize that local opportunity for the local advertiser better than it has been to date.

Gardner: Another major trend is globalization. While there’s local commerce that might aid and abet certain business, there are other businesses that are happy to be expanding their potential market to anywhere, anybody that can find me. I can put it on a UPS or a FedEx truck and it’s off, out my front door and it’s in your front door two days later. Is this business opportunity and a long tail and globalization somehow related?

Burdick: I think that it is. In the B2B world, where you’re really not trying to reach a local consumer, you’re trying to do business anywhere in the country or the world. As different vertical search engines evolve and create more targeted inventory, those companies are going to be able to better leverage the keywords in those vertical search engines, versus competing for the same keyword in the consumer engines, where they're competing with the consumer advertisers.

Gardner: Because they’re doing this through search and contextual ads, they’ve got more visibility. They can say, "Wow, I just spent a $1,000 on keywords, but I generated $4,000 in new business from customers that I never knew existed."

Burdick: The model will be slightly different in the B2B space than it has been in the consumer space. The consumer space really is about direct marketing, it’s about driving a transaction. I’m Circuit City. I buy the keyword "DVD player." I’m trying to sell a DVD player. In the B2B space, there will be some of that, but it’s largely going to be more lead generation. I’m looking for somebody who is interested in the product category that I’m trying to sell.

I’m trying to bring them in as a lead, send them more information, and not necessarily close a transaction online right then and there. You’re also going to find that the number of searches, done in the B2B space are smaller in terms of total number of transactions, but the transaction value is a lot larger.

So, I think as B2B -- and Shar, you might have some numbers around this -- but as the B2B advertisers move online, the opportunity is actually bigger in the B2B space. A smaller number of transactions, but bigger dollars per transaction.

VanBoskirk: I can chime in too with some stats to support that. We know that 46 percent of B2B marketers use search engines during the awareness phase of their purchase process. If you think of the purchase funnel going "awareness - consideration - preference - purchase," consumers typically use search engines in the consideration phase. I already know what I want and I’m just going out to compare one provider to another. Or, I’m going out to do a little bit more research around price and features.

In the B2B environment, people are engaging with search engines before they have even created their shortlist. They’re actually using search engines to help them decide who they should be conducting additional research with, and then that research could happen online, through a sales call, or through any kind of the regular in-person sales channels that a business marketer might leverage.

Not only is the opportunity for the end transaction greater in a B2B environment, but it exploits the channel more completely. It’s not just relying on, "I’m researching the product, get me while I’m doing that and get me to buy," it’s actually using the medium to brand a company and introduce a new brand into a market. It’s using the medium to provide information and help a user research the product.

It may even be using the medium to qualify users. They’re actually going to be able to determine, "Is this the person making the decision on the product, or is this just the person who is the research assistant doing a little bit of the homework to pass on the info to their boss who’s actually the one buying the product.

Gardner: So, we’re really automating a marketplace regardless of geography, regardless of budget. We’re really matching up buyers and sellers, but with this much more powerful insight into when they show up and what caliber of seller are they. Do you want to put a sales person on this call or not, or do you just want to zap them a brochure URL of some kind? This is really almost an extension of what we’ve know as commerce. Right?

VanBoskirk: The risky thing in taking that perspective is that search engines are still, first of all, a tool for finding information. We can’t completely turn them into a marketplace, because consumers are pretty savvy these days too, and they know that they’re being used as a marketing audience when they’re conducting searches. They’re also aware of declining value in search results. The more ads they see or the more they feel like they’re being promoted to, the less relevant they feel like the results are.

The caution kind of lands on the marketer to understand that this is an extremely valuable medium for reaching very targeted customers, but that they have to actually facilitate the user accomplishing their goals, to get them the information they need. If that’s to provide information or if it’s enable a purchase, both are valid user goals that the marketer sometimes doesn't want to acknowledge. They’re focused on purchase. We have to hang on to this notion that the search engine is still a user tool for finding information. It's not just a marketplace between buyers and sellers.

Burdick: That actually points to a really interesting evolution that we’ve seen particularly in paid-placement ads. When you think back to 1999 or 2000, when Goto, now Overture, was just rolling out, and others started adopting this paid-placement model, there was huge uproar about "How could you put sponsored links above natural organic search results and the relevance of those?"

Overture, Google, and the others were really smart about saying, "We’re going to make sure that these advertisers, these sponsored links, are relevant to the user." Now, you actually find that for certain types of searches people view those ads as the most relevant results -- "That’s exactly what I was looking for." Shar points out that advertisers need to be careful not to go too far the other way on that.

Gardner: So trust is an essential ingredient or people won’t go back for more. It won’t become a marketplace. It will be gamed. It will be jaded. Now, we’ve seen many attempts at gaming these systems already. Is there a necessary "Switzerland" of B2B online commerce that can, in a sense, protect and provide some neutrality to the goal of this commerce, and therefore be trusted by both the buyers and sellers?

VanBoskirk: A part of that is the focus on increasing relevance that we were talking about earlier. Google will maintain that its goal is to organize the Web and to continue to always focus on providing user relevance. It does that now through kind of a formula of figuring out which sites are the most related to keyword searches that are being done. But, there are a lot of other ways to add relevance.

Bryan was talking about what ZoomInfo is doing around creating entities and some intelligence around what is actually meant by the search. There are also a lot of these tagging and voting technologies, understanding who is searching for the same type of information.

Rather than thinking about a board, if you will, that will determine who is trustworthy and who is not, that community of searchers will weed out the folks who are just not generating relevance for them. They will force search engines, like they are with the big guys, Google and Yahoo!, to reevaluate what they’re doing to determine relevance. If the big guys can’t adjust to it, then a lot of smaller search engines are going to come into mainstream use, simply because the results that they provide are going to be a lot more relevant. It will be the user community that determines that, rather than an entity on high that kind of establishes, "These are the good guys -- these are the bad guys."

Burdick: The whole premise of search engine marketing is that the market forces are so efficient to begin with that they will weed out the wheat from the chaff very quickly.

Gardner: Okay, so we’ll have a market force that can help segment search into different niches for B2B relevancy, and we’ll have a self-monitoring effect in that people won’t get burned twice, and they know how to exercise and vote with their attention, with their dollar, with their business. So, what’s the opportunity for a company like ZoomInfo? How do you enter into this with a preferred business search and marketing capability. What’s the secret sauce that you have?

Burdick: Our secret sauce is actually this semantic search model that I was talking about before. In one sense we're similar to regular search engines in that we have crawlers and spiders that go out on the Web and find information. But, then we’ve got a series of about 15,000 different natural-language processing (NLP) algorithms that can understand the content and then create relationships between the entities, even relationships that aren’t explicitly stated anywhere on the Web.

A simple example would be, we know that this person is the CEO of ZoomInfo. We know that ZoomInfo is located in Waltham, Mass. Therefore, we know that this guy works in Waltham, Mass., even though that content was never stated anywhere. That’s a simple example of what we mean by semantic search that allows us to create these connections between entities.

The net result of that is when you come into something like the zoomlist.com, which is our preliminary company search product on the Web. You can do a search for "venture capital," find all 2,800 companies in the U.S. that are in the venture capital business, and it automatically creates drill downs into different types of venture capital. Were you interested in life sciences or technology or different branches of venture capital, the search engine and the algorithms completely, automatically drive all of that. There’s no human involvement in creating those links.

Gardner: So, a lot more context around what's going on, taking advantage of what metadata and other inference materials are available. Shar, where do you think this can go? What would be the next steps in the evolution of this B2B, Internet-based and search-based marketing?

VanBoskirk: We’ve talked a lot about the relevance need, and this is poised squarely in that. We’re going to see a lot of change this year, just in the name of helping to refine search engine results. Most users are feeling like it’s almost too much now to search the entire Web. I don’t really need the entire available universe of information. What I need is an answer to my question. It’s almost as if the search engine becomes a bit of a concierge, and the Zoom model is poised very well for that.

We’re also going to see an exploration of other media, and how search can help catalogue information that’s available in other media. Bryan and I were talking about this a couple of weeks ago, as well. The mobile opportunity for search is poised to take off this year.

We see a lot of helpful examples in that space too. I might be doing a mobile search, and I’m looking for Bank of America ATMs, when I’m traveling somewhere, and I get an ad for a Wells Fargo ATM. That's a keyword-based ad that they’ve purchased that’s just like you would place on a online search, but it’s related to the mobile search that I provided.

So the next place for Zoom and for any search engine is to think about what happens beyond the Web. Are there ways that the same sort of search capability can move into other media that also needs the same functionality, the same type of cataloging and information provided back? Why not extend the kinds of information searches that we’re doing on the Web into other media that we’re using just as actively.

Gardner: What would be some other examples of media that a company might be able to bring into this to add even more context, to make them a richer source of information and therefore a contextual relationship through search?

VanBoskirk: A couple of thoughts come immediately. Mobile is here now. We also see RSS content being searched and being used as place-to-place contextual ads.

Gardner: You mean like podcasts?

VanBoskirk: Podcasts, RSS feeds, if you’re getting actual text content delivered to you. I think television is the next logical place for search to go. That one’s not here yet, but as people start to store digital files of video on their cable boxes or on their digital video recorders, we’re going to want to search that information. So, there will be another kind of catalogue that will evolve, where we can search information. Why not allow that to be sponsored and have paid search ads that are adjacent to the video content you’re storing as well.

Gardner: So, more opportunity to bring rich content into this mix that can help provide a richer contextual binding of interest, between perhaps buyers and sellers in a B2B sense or even just discovery, just information.

VanBoskirk: Sure.

Gardner: Very interesting. Well, thanks. We’ve run out of time. We’ve had a very enjoyable and deep discussion about the future and some of the implications for search and marketing and B2B, and how B2C is morphing and providing some tools to business. Joining us on this discussion we’ve had Shar VanBoskirk, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. Thanks for joining, Shar.

VanBoskirk: Thanks very much, Dana.

Gardner: Also Bryan Burdick, he is the chief operating officer at ZoomInfo. Thanks, Bryan.

Burdick: Thanks, Dana. This was great.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect Podcast. Thanks for listening.

Listeners of this podcast are invited to learn more about B2B advertising opportunities with ZoomInfo. Just go to www.zoominfo.com/adpodcast to learn how Zoominfo's business search portal provides a rich online B2B advertising opportunity.

Listen to the podcast here.

Podcast sponsor: ZoomInfo.

Transcript of Dana Gardner’s BriefingsDirect podcast on future trends in search and advertising. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2007. All rights reserved.

Transcript of BriefingsDirect Podcast on Music Search Technology and Implications

Edited transcript of BriefingsDirect[TM] B2B informational podcast on music search with Sun Labs, recorded Jan. 10, 2007.

Listen to the podcast here.

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Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect. Today, a discussion with Paul Lamere, a staff engineer at Sun Microsystems Labs and principal investigator for Search Inside the Music.

This interesting research project is taking search to quite a new level. Instead of using lists of data about the music author, album, or composer, Search Inside the Music actually digs into the characteristics of the music, finding patterns, and then associating that with other music.

The possibilities here are pretty impressive. I want to thank Paul Lamere for joining us. Welcome to the show, Paul.

Paul Lamere: Hi, Dana. Thanks for having me.

Gardner: I had the opportunity to see your presentation face-to-face when I visited the Sun Labs’ campus in Burlington, Mass., back in December, 2006, and it really had me thinking for a few days after. I kept coming back to it and thinking, “Wow! What about this and what about that?” I thought it would be good to bring this to a wider audience and to use the medium of audio, seeing as it is so germane to this project.

Let’s get a little historical context. Tell us how you got involved with this project, why music, and how does that relate to IT in general?

Lamere: Okay, as you know, I work in Sun’s research lab, and our role as researchers is to be the eyes and ears for Sun. We’re trying to look out on the distant horizon for Sun to keep an eye on the interesting things that are happening in the world of computers. Clearly music has been something that's been greatly changed by computers since Napster and iTunes.

So I started to look at what's going on in the music space, especially around music discovery. The thing that I thought was really interesting is looking at Chris Anderson’s book and website, The Long Tail. You know, music is sort of the sweet spot for the long tail; the audio is a nice conveniently sized packet, and people want them. What we’re seeing right now is the major labels putting out 1,000 songs a week. If you start to include some of the independent labels and the music that's happening out on MySpace and that sort of thing, you may start to see more like 10,000 songs a week.

Chris Anderson said, “The key to The Long Tail is just to make everything available.” Now imagine not just every indie artist, but every kid with a drum machine in their basement and a PC putting on their tracks, and every recording of every performance of "Louie Louie" on the Web, and that same thing happening all over the world and sticking that on the Web. Now we may start having millions of songs arriving on the Web every week.

Gardner: Not to mention the past 800 or 1,000 years’ worth of music that has been recorded in the last 50 or 100 years.

Lamere: That’s right. So, we have many orders of magnitude, more music to sift through and 99.9 percent of that music is something you would never ever want to listen to. However, there is probably some music in there that is our favorite songs if we could just find them.

I’m really interested in trying to figure out how to get through this slush pile to find the gems that are in there. Folks like Amazon have traditionally used collaborate filtering to work through content. I’m sure you’re familiar with Amazon’s “customers who bought this book also bought this book,” and that works well if you have lots of people who are interested in the content. You can take advantage of the Wisdom of Crowds. However, when you have…

Gardner: They are working on the "short head," but not the long tail.

Lamere: That’s right. When you have millions of songs out there, some that people just haven’t listened to, you have no basis for recommending music. So, you end up with this feedback where, because nobody’s listening to the music, it’s never going to be recommended -- and because it’s never recommended, people won’t be listening to the music. And so there is no real entry-point for these new bands. You end up once again with the short head, where you have U2 and The Beatles who are very, very popular and are recommended all the time because everyone is listening to them. But there is no entry point for that garage band.

Gardner: Yes. When I use Amazon or Netflix and they try to match me up, they tell me things I already know; they haven't told me things that I don’t know.

Lamere: That’s right. Did you really need to know that if you liked The Beatles, you might like The Rolling Stones? So, we’re taking a look at some alternative ways to help weed through this huge amount of music. One of the things that we’re looking at is the idea of doing content-based recommendation. Instead of relying on just the Wisdom of Crowds -- actually rely on the audio content.

We use some techniques very similar to what a speech recognizer does. It will take the audio and will run signal processing algorithms over it and try to extract out some key features that describe the music. We then use some machine-learning techniques basically to teach this system how to recognize music that is both similar and dissimilar. So at the end, we have a music similarity model and this is the neat part. We can then use this music similarity model to recommend music that sounds similar to music that you already like.

Gardner: Yes, this is fascinating to me because you can scan or analyze music digitally and come out and say, this is blues, this is delta blues; this is jazz, this is New Orleans jazz. I mean, it’s amazing how discreet you can get on the type of music.

Lamere: Yes, that’s right, and the key is that you can do this with any kind of music without having any metadata at all. So, you can be given raw audio and you can either classify it into rather rich sets of genres or just say, "Hey, this sounds similar to that Green Day song that you’ve been listening to, so you might like to listen to this, too."

Gardner: Fascinating. So once we’re able to get characteristics and label and categorize music, we can scan all sorts of music and help people find what is similar to what they want. Perhaps they’re experimenting and might listen to something and think, “I wonder if I am interested in that,” and do all kinds of neat things. So, explain the next step.

Lamere: Well, there are lots of ways to go. One of the things that we can do with this similarity model is to provide different ways of exploring their music collections. If you look through current music interfaces, they look like spreadsheets. You have lists of albums, tracks, and artists and you can scroll through them much like you would through Lotus 1-2-3 or whatever spreadsheet you are using.

It should be fun; it should be interesting. When people look for music, they want to be engaged in the music. Our similarity model gives people new and different ways of interacting with their music collections.

We can now take our music collection and essentially toss it into a three-dimensional space based on music similarity, and give the listener a visualization of the space and actually let them fly through their collection. The songs are clustered based on what they sound like. So you may see one little cluster of music that’s your punk and at the other end of the space, trying to be as far away from the punk music, might be your Mozart.

Using this kind of visualization gives you a way of doing interesting things like exploring for one thing, or seeing your favorite songs or some songs that you forgot about. You can make regular playlists or you can make playlists that have trajectories. If you want to listen to high-energy music while driving home from work, you can play music in the high-energy, edgy space part of your music space. If you like to be mellowed out by the time you get home, you have a playlist that takes you gradually from hard-driving music to relaxing and mellow music by the time you pull into the driveway.

Gardner: Now, for those who are listening, I’m going to provide some links so you see some of these visualizations. It’s fascinating because it does look like some of these Hubble Telescope cosmos-wide diagrams where you see clusters of galaxies, and then you’re shown the same sort of visualization with clusters of types of music and how they relate.

If we take the scale in the other direction -- down into our brains and with what we know now about brain mapping and where activities take place and how brain cells actually create connections across different parts of the brain -- there is probably a physical mapping within our brains about the music that we like. We’re almost capturing that and then using that as a tool to further our enjoyment of music.

Lamere: That’s an interesting idea.

Gardner: Now, I’m looking here on my PC at my iTunes while we’re talking and I’ve got 4,690 items, 15 days of music, and 26.71GB. And it turns out -- even when I use shuffle and I’ve got my playlists and I’ve dug into this -- I’m probably only listening to about 20 percent or 30 percent of my music. What’s up with that?

Lamere: Yes, exactly. We did a study on that. We looked at 5,000 users and saw that the 80-20 rule really applies to people’s music collections: 80 percent of their listening time is really concentrated in about 20 percent of their music. In fact, we found that these 5,000 users had about 25 million songs on their iPods and we found that 63 percent of the songs had not been listened to even once. So, you can think of your iPod as the place that your music goes to die, because once it’s there, the chances are you will never listen to it again.

Gardner: I don’t want it to be like that. So, clearly we can use some better richer tools. Is that right?

Lamere: That’s right. Shuffle play is great if you have only a few hundred songs that you can pick and put on there, but your iPod is a lot like mine. It has 5,000 songs and it also has my 11-year-old daughter’s high-school musical and DisneyMania tracks. I have Christmas music and some tracks I really don’t want to listen to.

When I hit shuffle play, sometimes those come up. Also with shuffle play, you end up going from something like Mozart to Rammstein. I call that the iPod whiplash. A system that understands a little bit about the content of the music can certainly help you generate playlists that are easier to listen to and also help you explore your music collection.

So you can imagine instead of hitting shuffle play or just playing the same albums over again, you could have a button on your iPod, or your music player, that lets you play music you like. That’s something that is really needed out there.

Gardner: So, instead of a playlist, you could have a "moodlist." For example, I’m stressed and I need to relax, or I really want to get pumped up because I’m going to a party and I want to feel high-energy, or I have the kids in the back seat and I want them to relax. Your mood can, in a sense, dictate how you assemble a playlist.

Lamere: That’s right. Imagine that a few years from now, (it’s not hard to extrapolate with the new iPhone), we’re going to have wireless iPods that are probably connected to a cloud of millions of tracks. It’s not hard to imagine all of the world’s music will be available on your hand-held audio player in a few years. Try using shuffle play when you have 500 million songs at your disposal; you’ll never find anything.

Gardner: I don’t have the benefit of a DJ to pick out what I want either, so I’m sort of stuck. I’m not in the old top 40 days, but I’m in the 40 million tracks days.

Lamere: That’s right.

Gardner: Now let’s look at some practical and commercial uses. Professional playlists assemblers who are creating what goes into these channels that we get through satellite, cable probably could use this to advantage. However, that doesn’t strike me as the biggest market. Have you thought about the market opportunity? Would people be willing to pay another five dollars a month to add it to their service so they have all their music readily accessible? How do you foresee it commercializing?

Lamere: I’m sure you’ve heard of Netflix. They are probably one of the biggest DVD shippers and one of their biggest advantages is their recommendation engine. I’m not sure if you’ve heard about the Netflix contest. Any researcher who can improve their recommendation by just 10 percent will receive $1 million from Netflix. I think that really represents how valuable good recommendations are to companies trying to deliver Long Tail content.

Amazon has built their business around helping connect people with their content as well. The same things are going to happen (or are happening now) within the music world. There is a lot of value hooking up to people with music; getting them into the Long Tail.

Gardner: Can we easily transfer this into a full multi-media experience -- video and audio? Have you tried to use this with tracks from a movie or a television show? Is there an option to take just from the audio alone; a characteristic map that people could say, "I like this TV show, now give me ones that are like it?" Is that too far-fetched? How do we go to full multi-media search with this?

Lamere: Those are all really interesting research questions. We haven't got that far yet. There are so many interesting spaces to bring this -- for instance, digital games. People are interacting with characters, monsters, and things like that. Currently, they may be in the same situation 50 times because they keep playing the game over and over again.

Wouldn’t it be nice to hook up to music that matches the mood and knows changes or may even push the latest songs that match the mood into the games, so that instead of listening to the same song, you get new music that does not detract from the game? There are all sorts of really interesting things that could happen there.

Gardner: I saw you demonstrating a 3D map in real time that was shifting as music was going in and out of the library as different songs were playing. It was dynamic; it was visual; there were little icons that represented the cover art from the albums floating around. It was very impressive. Now, that doesn’t happen with a small amount of computer power. Is this a service that could be delivered with the required amount of back-end computational power?

Lamere: Yes. We can take advantage of all of the nifty gaming hardware out there to give us the whiz bang with the 3D visualizations. The real interesting stuff, the signal processing and the machine learning when dealing with millions of songs, is going to use vast computer resources.

If you think music is driving a lot of bandwidth now in storage and computation, in a few years when people start really gravitating toward this content-based analysis, music will be driving lots and lots of CPU cycles. A small company with this new way of content-based recommendation can rent time on a grid at a per-CPU hour rate and get an iTunes-sized music collection (a few million songs) in a weekend as opposed to the five or 10 years it would take on a couple of desktop systems.

Gardner: Interesting. The technology that you’ve applied to music began with speech. Is there a way of moving this back over to speech? We do have quite a bit of metadata and straight text and traditional search capabilities. What if we create an overlay of intonation, emphasis, and some of the audio cues that we get in language that don’t show up in the written presentation or in what is searchable? Does that add another level of capability or "color" to how we manage the spoken word and/or the written word? With my podcasting, for example, I start with audio -- but I go to text, and then try to enjoy the benefits of both.

Lamere: Right. These are all great research questions; the things that researchers could spend years on in the lab. I think one interesting application would be tied to meetings; work meetings, conference meetings, just like when you visited Sun last month.

If we had a computer that was listening to the meeting and maybe trying to do some transcripts, but also noting some of the audio events in the meeting such as when everybody laughed or when things got really quiet. You could start to use that as keys for searching content in the meetings. So, you could go back to a recording of the meeting and find the introductions again very easily so you can remember who was at the meeting or find that summary slide and the spoken words that went with the conclusion of the talk.

Gardner: Almost like a focus group ability from just some of these audio cues.

Lamere: That’s right.

Gardner: Hey, I’ve got something that you could take to the airlines. I tend to sit on planes for long periods of time and after my battery runs out, I am stuck listening to what the airline audio provides through those little air tubes. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were audio selections that were rich and they really fit my mood. This is a perfect commercialization.

Lamere: Yes, you can have your favorite music as part of your travel profile.

Gardner: This could also work with automakers. Now that everyone has found a way to hook up to their iPods or their MP3 equivalent in their automobile, the automakers can give you what you want off of the satellite feed.

Lamere: Definitely.

Gardner: There are many different directions to take this. Obviously you’ve got some interest in promoting Sun’s strategic direction. There must be some other licensing opportunities for something like this. Is this patented or are you approaching it from an intellectual property standpoint? If our listeners have some ideas that we haven’t thought of, what should they do?

Lamere: When you’re in the labs, the people who run the lab really like to make sure that the researchers are not tempted by other people’s ideas because it can make it difficult down the road. If people have some ideas they want to send my way, it’s always great to hear more things. We do have some patents around the space. We generally don’t try to exploit the patents to charge people entry into a particular space.

Gardner: Since this does fall under the category of search, there are some big companies out there that are interested in that technology. We have a lot of Google beta projects, for example, such as Google News, Google Blogs, Google Podcasts, and Google base. Why not Google Music?

Lamere: Google has two -- I guess, you may call them Friday projects -- on their labs site around music. One is Google Trends, and the idea there is they’re trying to track which music is popular. If you use Google’s instant messenger, you can download a plug-in that will also track your listening behavior. So every time you play a song, it sends the name of the artist and the track to Google and they keep track of that. They give you charts of top 100 music, top 100 artists, whatever. The other thing they have is a Music Search tailored toward music.

If you type in Coldplay or The Beatles, you’ll get a search result that’s oriented toward music. You’ll see links of the artist page and links to lyrics but, interestingly enough, they haven't done anything in public to my knowledge about indexing music itself. This is interesting because Google has never been shy about indexing.

Its mission is to index all the world’s information, and certainly music falls into that category. They haven't been shy about going up against publishers when it comes to their library project, where they’re scanning all the books in all the libraries despite some of the objections of the book publishers. But for some reason they don’t want to do the same with music. So, it’s an open question. But probably they’ll be announcing the Google Music Search tomorrow.

Gardner: At least we can safely say we’re in the infancy of music search, right?

Lamere: That’s right. I see a lot of companies trying to get into the space. Most of them are trying to use the collaborate filtering models. The collaborate filtering models really require lots of data about lots of users. So they have a hard time attracting users because until they get a lot of users, their recommendations are not that good. And because their recommendations are not that good, they don’t get a lot of users.

Gardner: The classic chicken-and-egg dilemma.

Lamere: Yes, it’s called the "cold start" problem.

Gardner: I firmly believe in the "medium is the message"-effect, and not just for viewing news or getting information. When I was getting my music through the AM radio, that characterized a certain way that I listened and enjoyed music. I had to be in a car, or I had to be close to a radio, and then I might avoid sitting under a bridge.

Then I had my LPs and my eight tracks and they changed from one song into an album format for me. We’re going back a number of years here. I’ve been quite fond of my iPod and iTunes for the last several years and that has also changed the way I relate to music. Now, you have had the chance to enjoy your Search Inside the Music benefit. How has using this changed the way you relate to and use music?

Lamere: That’s a good question. I agree that the media is the message, and that really affects our way of dealing with music. As we switch over to MP3s, I think listening to music has shifted from the living room to the computer. People are now jogging with their iPod and listening experiences are much more casual.

They may have access to 10,000 tracks. They’re not listening to the same track over and over like we used to. So I think over time music is going to shift back from the computer to the living room, back to the living spaces in our house and away from the computer.

I try to use our system away from the computer -- just because I like to listen to music when I’m living, not just when I’m working. So I can use something like Search Inside the Music to generate interesting playlists that I don’t have to think about.

Instead of just putting the shuffle play on The Beatles, I can start from where I was yesterday, and since we were eating dinner, let’s circle around this area of string quartets and then when we’re done, we will ramp it up to some new indie music. You still have the surprise that you get with shuffle, which is really nice, but you also have some kind of arc to the listening.

Gardner: So you are really creating a musical journey across different moods, sensibilities, and genres. You can chart that beyond one or two songs or a half-dozen songs into a full-day playlist.

Lamere: That’s right.

Gardner: Very interesting. Well, thanks for joining us, Paul. We’ve been talking with Paul Lamere, a researcher and staff engineer at the Sun Microsystems Research Labs in Burlington, Mass. We’ve been discussing Search Inside the Music, a capability that he’s been investigating. A lot of thoughts and possibilities came from this. Paul is the principal investigator. I wish you well on the project.

Lamere: Thanks, Dana. It’s been great talking to you.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You’ve been listening to BriefingsDirect. Come back next time.

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Transcript of BriefingsDirect podcast on music search with Sun Labs. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2007. All rights reserved.