Interview with Mike Moran

Mike Moran is a freelance consultant and public speaker who also serves as Chief Strategist for Converseon, a leading digital media marketing agency based in New York City. Prior to this position, Mike spent 30 years at IBM, rising to Distinguished Engineer, an executive-level technical position.

Mike is the co-author of the best-selling 2005 book Search Engine Marketing, Inc. (along with fellow search marketing expert Bill Hunt), which is now in its Second Edition (2008). Mike is also the author of the acclaimed Internet marketing book, Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules, named one of best business books of 2007 by the Miami Herald.

You are the author of “Do It Wrong Quickly,” which has received great reviews on Amazon.  What are some of the key focuses?  What would you like people to come away with after reading it?

My book is designed to help those with some background in marketing or in the Internet learn what works in Internet marketing. Too often, we make people feel stupid about not knowing all the latest and greatest, when the simple fact is that even we experts are frequently confused about what is happening–we just don’t like to admit it. My book tries to help people adapt what they already know to the big things moving on the Internet, along with a lot of practical advice on how to do it. Even the title, “Do It Wrong Quickly,” is just a cheeky way of getting people to adopt experimentation in their marketing rather than the old focus-group laden long project that is necessary with expensive traditional marketing. That is what the book is about–helping you see that most of what you know is still true and that you need to adapt to some differences to do the best you can.

How did you get into search?

It started on a galaxy long ago and far away. OK, OK, it was at IBM in the 1980s. I was one of the inventors of an electronic book program long before Adobe Acrobat (now Adobe Reader) and we actually pioneered the first commercial linguistic search engine–it could find “mice” when you searched for “mouse” because it knew it was the same word. It did that in dozens of national languages and I was bitten by the text retrieval bug.

I spent many years working in enterprise search (my last job at IBM was as a Distinguished Engineer for IBM’s search and text analytics products) but probably my favorite job was at IBM’s Web site, ibm.com, where I worked on the site search engine, search marketing, and many other initiatives.

In your days with IBM and Converseon, what are some of the greatest challenges you’ve faced?

Probably my biggest challenge has been setting up and operating the search marketing efforts at IBM. Back in 2001, no one really was looking at search at large corporations. My search background taught me some of what I needed to know, but I hired Bill Hunt to help me fill in the gaps between understanding search technology and the search marketing business. (Bill later became my co-author for our book Search Engine Marketing, Inc.) It was soon clear to both of us that knowing what to do was the easy part. Getting thousands of people to do those things across 90 countries and millions of Web pages was an organizational nightmare. It took us a while, but we honed the corporate governance approach that led to success, and which is still the backbone in my work with large companies today at Converseon.

What’s been your greatest success/proudest moment in search?

I’m not sure that the history books will be littered with great moments in search after we pass from the earth, but I do know what I remember the most. I remember the first time we optimized a page at IBM, waited for weeks (remember, it was 2001) and then saw it suddenly appear on the first page of search results on several major search engines. That was the moment where I said, “OK, this stuff might actually work.” I knew we were on our way.

How do you keep current with search changes?

Gee, I don’t even know that I can claim that I do keep current. I follow lots of blogs and talk to people all the time, but the pace of change is dizzying. I think there are lots of people who keep up better than I do. I try to help large companies to focus on the things that aren’t changing–good content, page optimization, links, and–most of all–a way to measure sales from search, both online and offline. Most of my clients can’t change the behaviors of thousands of people in a company based on what Google announced yesterday, so I help companies focus on the things that are not changing, which works pretty well.

Where do you see search moving in the future?

I think the biggest change is going to be personalized search. You see signs of it on a small scale now, but it’s going to really take off, especially as mobile Web usage accelerates. You will get search results for you and I will get them for me and they won’t always be the same. You’ll also see phones and other devices that run searches for you, based on your past behavior. (If you stop for coffee every morning, then your phone can search for a coffee shop no matter where you’re going that morning.) I also see search becoming far more integrated into other forms of Internet marketing. You already see it entwined with social media, but you should expect even more integration.

As you’ve focused primarily working at an in-house level, what are some of the advantages/disadvantages of working with an agency?

I think that most large companies shouldn’t be thinking about a black-and-white question of in-house or outsource, but rather consider what tasks are best done in-house rather than outsourced. At IBM, I used a hybrid model, where I hired consultants to help with strategy, best practices, thorny problems, training, and other things that would be difficult for me to staff in-house. (The moment I found someone good to do that job, and agency could come along and double his salary and he’d be gone.) But I never hired consultants to do the heavy lifting of updating content, or fixing redirects, or other things that are much better done by the in-house team. Different companies might make different decisions about which tasks belong with which team, but it’s rare that I find a company that makes a good decision wholesale in one direction or the other.

What advice would you offer to a company looking to start their own in-house marketing effort?

It’s essential that you have in-house people that know your customers and your offerings and can stick with your efforts to provide them continuity. Focus on what tasks make sense to be done in-house because you want the expertise inside the company, because it is more efficient and cost-effective to do it internally, and because you can hire or train those skills and retain them. Start small–part-time efforts that show profitability right away are preferable to hiring a big team and having nothing to show for it. And make sure that your focus is on measurability–you must be able to show how much money you are making. If you can’t do that, you’re not ready to make a big investment.