David Amerland's Blog: David Amerland on Writing - Posts Tagged "semantic-search"

Writing is the least ‘social’ of any business or creative activity you can imagine. Traditionally, a writer is sequestered (in a manner of speaking) from the world, his book the product of his mind, his writing a struggle with himself to help get his ideas from his head onto the page. The last thing he traditionally needs or wants in that setting are the concerns of possible readers, the contributing thoughts of well-wishers and the odd do-gooder telling him how to write.

I say ‘traditionally’ here, because all of this is changing and I am living proof of that. Before I explain how, or why, let’s examine what a social business is and what it does. The salient point of any business model is a sense of realignment of purpose. From producing a product (and a book, once written, is just that) that is intended to address a particular need in its audience to listening to its potential customers first, understanding what they need and working to produce something they really want.

It sounds simple. It ain’t. It requires steely resolve and the willingness to take a risk. It needs focus to take the professional part of the business that has depth and expertise and blend it carefully with the needs of its target audience without using the latter as a shortcut for all the critical choices only the professional can make.

When I conceived "Google Semantic Search" I knew I was ahead of the wave, my corporate speaking engagements had exposed me to a real need for businesses, entrepreneurs and individuals. My research told me this was coming much faster than anticipated. In the process of writing it, however, I experimented with something new.

I used my extensive following in Google+ to create a real conversation. As I was writing the book, I used snippets from research, data and ideas to seed the stream, to question, entice, guide and even surprise. I was doing two things through this activity: first I was sharing my own sense of enthusiasm for semantic search and a semantic web that will have an impact that goes way beyond the normal search vertical. Second, I was listening, really listening to concerns, ideas and needs. The things my potential audience needed to know, the concerns they had, the issues they were facing.

My conversation flowed naturally. I did not, at that stage, say that I was writing a book, though, at the very last stage of the conversation it became inevitable and had to be mentioned. My intent was to create, as much as I could, a fully participatory experience.

Here’s what happened:

My book writing style changed. Search is a largely technical subject with vast non-technical ramifications. Writing about it has to be a little detached, largely academic, tech-driven approach. I took a different path. I chose to write conversationally, the way, as a matter of fact I was interacting in the Google+ stream.

My book content broadened. I made a few judgement calls. Every book is defined not just by what it includes but also by what it excludes. Frequently, what’s left unsaid is every bit as important as what is being written about. The scope broadened to include the impact of semantic search in marketing and, even, everyday living. I would not have done that without the conversation that had taken place.

My audience and I arrived at the same set of goals. This is a critical step. By closely understanding what their needs were I was able to identify with them. Those who buy my book want to know what’s happening to their digital world, how changes in search affect it and what they can then do to best prepare for it.

Of the three changes the last one, arguably, had the most impact on my writing. By empathising so closely with my readers I was able to write the book they wanted rather than the book I thought they needed. The end results speak for themselves. Riding high on the Amazon best-seller lists across three countries and two continents, Google Semantic Search, got there before publication, even. The emails, reviews and Google+ comments I receive from total strangers who buy it have convinced me that, for me at least, this is now the preferred way to write.

The most striking impact however has been on the process of writing itself. By integrating myself and my journey so closely with my social network contacts the process of writing has been transformed. I am, now, no longer “alone” and writing is no longer “lonely”. It has become social in every meaning of the word.

Google Semantic Search: Search Engine Optimization (Seo) Techniques That Get Your Company More Traffic, Increase Brand Impact, and Amplify Your Online Presence

For a writer words should come easy. They’re the building blocks, after all, that he uses to create constructs that contain the semantics that are unlocked upon reading, which is an unnecessarily complex way perhaps of saying he writes words that mean something to every reader.

So writing a brief, 750-word script for a video on semantic search should have been no problem? Well, yes, except the requirement, this time, was to take the contents of a 240-page book that had taken me eighteen months to research and write and put it into a five-minute video (hence the script) without sacrificing impact or meaning.

There are always two ways to tackle something like this: You build up or you pare down. When it comes to creating semantically dense information, to my mind, only the latter works. Building up means you generalize: i.e. you start off and write 750 words on the subject, but the assumptions you make leave logic holes for the reader that are usually large enough to drive a bus through. It makes for great conversations afterwards but the end result is dissatisfying, like a meal that looks great but fails to satisfy your hunger.

So paring down was the only option and that meant writing. A lot of writing. “Google Semantic Search” was fresh enough in my mind for me to be able to write the first 3,000 words without needing to go back to my notes. Semantic search and the semantic web offer massive practical opportunities and a host of conceptual challenges and these came easy to me, to write. Then came the double-checking, the facts that needed to be inserted, caveats and cautions and all the details. By the time I finished I had 5,000 beautifully written words each of which did something critical and there was no way to pare down.

The problem with this is that it would make for a video that would be 35 minutes long and clearly unworkable. When I suggested to the publishers that perhaps we could tackle this as a mini-series, splitting it all in five minute segments the looks I got were of the kind reserved for those who claim they have met an alien race, that lives amongst us and they mean us no harm.

With tones reserved for talking to imbeciles they patiently explained that the marketing budget in terms of time and effort only went so far and that the point of the video is to explain something well enough to make it accessible and generate interest in the book but not be so detailed that the book itself is no longer necessary (I know it’s kinda obvious when they explain it in two-syllable words, like that).

Paring down is no easy task. Having written 5,000 words I had to now get rid of 4,250 of them and still have what remained make sense. Having done it now, of course, I can claim credit and bask in the accomplishment but at the time I seriously doubted it was even feasible.

What saved me was a chance occurrence. In writing “Google Semantic Search” I had kept copious notes and though I am purely digital these days and hardly ever use paper, one thing I had done when the review copy of my book had been sent to me, prior to publication, was look at it with a reader’s eyes. And on the day of that first flush of seeing all the words, thoughts and ideas finally in a book, I had gone through the paper copy and made a note in the margin, at the end of the book that said: “Twelve points for twelve chapters”. That’s all it said.

Now, I am pretty sure when I wrote that I had a really deep, profound idea that meant something incredible. But when I read it back that day as I flipped through the book looking for inspiration the disconnect of that comment leapt out at me. It made me close it and look at it not as the writer who knows the subject inside out and tries to put in all that knowledge into every sentence, but as the reader approaching each chapter of the book for a very first time.

Each chapter then became a step leading to a better understanding of semantic search. Looking back at my 5,000 words, I was now able to prune back the writing using a broadsword as opposed to a scalpel. What I needed were the major points connecting the twelve chapters of the book, each becoming a step to better understanding the subject of semantic search.

The result of all that pruning was this video: http://goo.gl/ZF4Znl


Google Semantic Search: Search Engine Optimization (Seo) Techniques That Get Your Company More Traffic, Increase Brand Impact, and Amplify Your Online Presence

The writer has always been the product. If you happen to come across a book that you’ve never ever heard of before (and it’s paper) you check out the cover and you read the blurb and then you check out who wrote it. You want to know a little about them, who they are. What makes them tick. Today, you also do a search.

In the days before the web writers were a carefully packaged product. They were allowed to get close to their readers through stage managed events: book signings, talk shows, celebrity appearances and the odd presentation to particular groups.

Just like any other product the way they connected to their audience was governed by Jerome McCarthy’s 4Ps of Product, Place, Price and Promotion. They produced a combination that was paradoxical: they raised awareness of a product without ever intimating about its value. In the best tradition of outbound marketing it was always a case of “we shout the loudest, hence we must be the best”.

Readers wanting to try out a book (and its writer) were obliged to take all the risk. They picked it up, paid for it and hoped that they would like it. It was akin to having to decide to go and see a film full of unknown actors just by looking at the glossy posters advertising it. It could happen but your expectations were low and the chances that you’d be queuing in the streets with your money in hand, unlikely.

The entire way we shop is changing. From the 4Ps that created a behavioural model where we needed to be flooded with advertising in order for a new product to stand out sufficiently for us to then feel we could go ahead and try it, we are transitioning, fully, to a world of 4Es where Product, Place, Price and Promotion are being replaced by Experience, Everywhere, Exchange and Evangelism.

The writer who is not being “experienced” by his potential reading audience (his thoughts, his ideas, his personality and his writing style, even) will now find it hard to break through, regardless of how much advertising he may enjoy. If he is not being encountered “everywhere” (magazines, videos, podcasts, articles and across social media platforms), he is going to find it hard to capture the attention of his audience. If he cannot clearly explain the exchange taking place when his readers part with their money (what is “in it” for me?), he will not find it easy to convince an audience that is well-informed, mobile and empowered, that he is a good bet to take a small risk on and read.

The final transition is the trickiest one. The writer of this new age of ours who has successfully transitioned from Product, Price and Place to Experience, Everywhere and Exchange, will then find that Promotion happens automatically. In the new economy Evangelism occurs because those who have experienced a writer, before even buying into his books, become the writer’s best means of promotion. Their word of mouth, their recommendations, their reviews across online bookshops, become the points through which the writer now finds a fresh audience.

In terms of how things used to happen this is truly disruptive. We have gone from a centrally controlled point of presentation of a writer and his books, where we used to be told that this was indeed, “the best thing, since sliced bread” to a place where a writer and his readers share an aligned purpose: the exploration of similar themes. Concerns that resonate and meet on the common space provided by a book. That makes the writer a true creation of his audience, rather than believing (like we used to) that he would be a fully-formed product in search of an audience.

There is a revolutionary retooling of value in this approach that is in total keeping with our experience of the 21st century world: we used to be told a writer was ‘great’, ‘a must-read’, ‘unmissable’, because his publisher (who would use their own detailed, exhaustive, selection process to discover a writer) told us so. We used to be told. And now we decide for ourselves based on the value of the writer and his books to us. The smartest writer in the world, writing the most technically proficient book is worthless if what he does is of no value to the reader, and that value now, must be provided by the former before the latter gets to the point of reaching out and purchasing a book.

Google Semantic Search: Search Engine Optimization (Seo) Techniques That Get Your Company More Traffic, Increase Brand Impact, and Amplify Your Online Presence

Every book is an enterprise in the fullest sense of the word. It starts off with the same cadre of dreams, passions, expectations and intellectual justifications that every business does. It has an expected target audience that helps shape its content, a delivery vehicle that defines the product and it goes through, prior to publication, the same business plan vetting process that a start-up is subjected to (though we call it editorial selection).

All of these elements create a blueprint which ought to make the job of writing (the execution stage), easier. It doesn’t. Just like any business, in the process of getting the idea from the dream stage to the market reality a whole lot of decisions need to be made and a truckload of compromises will have to be accepted.

Is the ‘packaging’ going to be blue or red? Is the content going to be sophisticated and high-brow or conversational and matter-of-fact? Do we need each chapter to be a fixed length or can we vary each as necessary (chapter homogeneity is employed to establish reader familiarity with navigation). Do we need to have questions? Do the answers have to be prescriptive? The list goes on and on and on and the choices made, at each point, betray the writer’s prejudices and passions, his (or her) understanding of the audience needs and the willingness to take on the editorial machine that wants a product that comfortably fits in within all its other corporate products because, damn it, the publisher also projects branding through each book in a series.

Of course the way out of all this is ‘easy’: make the guiding principle the reader. Think of the reader’s needs first and let that be the ultimate litmus test. The fact that (just like businesses) some books fail and other books succeed more than the rest suggests the dynamic is different each time, when it comes to implementation.

At the so-called ‘ground level’ where you make things happen perspective is easily sacrificed to expediency. In order to get something done, the closeness of action (the act of writing, the setting up of a business) involve its own set of pressures. How you solve that has to come down to each writer, each time, each business person, in each business, every time it is set up. But there are some key takeaways that are universal and can help.

Decide your core guiding principles from the very start. What is it you want your business to really do? What is this book intended to address? You need to exercise honesty to achieve that. Within the confines of your head, when you are drawing up plans, everything sounds perfect. Nothing can be perfect all the time. Externalize the core principles (in writing SEO Help: 20 Semantic Search Steps that Will Help Your Business Grow, for instance I had to print out a card that said: “Practical application is key. The theory isn’t.”. As much as I want to explain how I arrived at a particular set of practical principles and how exciting the concepts behind it are, I didn’t. Or rather, to be truthful, there were chapters when I did and then I had to go back, cut all that out and rewrite them.

It takes a lot of discipline to go back and undo work you have wrought with loving care and attention. It requires you to have a split personality inside your head, with a voice that acts as an overseer and tells you: “This is great but … this is not what we have set out to do.”

You have to overcome fatigue. Writing a book (or setting up a business) takes a lot of energy and effort. When you are in the thick of it, about halfway through, you begin to lose focus. Suddenly you becomes conscious of the fact that you have as far still to go as you have travelled. You begin looking for shortcuts. You start wondering whether anyone would really notice (or if it matters after all) if this part here or that small part there is not pitch-perfect when, after all, it kinda does the job anyway.

We all know the answer to that of course. The things we invest ourselves the most in are the ones that do best. Value is always the result of hard work. Highly structured processes require an attendant decrease in entropy in any system.

How you get through that patch is where the magic lies. I give pep-talks to myself (yeah, nothing very dysfunctional in that, really). Businesses try to have an independent observer, an adviser or some kind. Ultimately however it comes down to those basic principles which means that the really hard work in terms of thinking is done before anything even begins.

And just like a business will, thrive or fail based upon its success of finding customers so will a book, ultimately, work or not by finding (and keeping) readers.