I was reading the article in Wired on the Google algorithm. Interesting stuff even if you’re just a web searcher, and for those of us who talk about SEO from time to time, it’s fascinating.
One statement stood out:
The holy grail of search is to understand what the user wants,” Singhal says. “Then you are not matching words; you are actually trying to match meaning
My immediate thought was that he was right about most businesses, not just that of search. The Wired piece details the hundreds of ways Google’s formula manipulates a search to try to get precisely to the point of the user’s question. Their algorithm is a highly refined way of doing just that. My theory is that we all need one.
Many firms go about their business making few or no attempts to gain this kind of in-depth understanding of user wants and needs. You can rest assured that you can count those that have an algorithm to do so based on customer input on your fingers and toes. Yes, I’m aware of marketing dashboards and monitoring of social buzz. Those are both great but think about Google’s formula applied to all that social content, feedback cards, surveys, and other customer interaction. I wonder what nuances would surface?
How about you – got an algorithm? How do you figure out what your customers, partners, and prospects want based on the information you gather?
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Consult Keith 