Insights from Nebo

There are three types of people in the world: those who hate Excel, those who really hate Excel and those who realize you can run the world if you're an Excel master.

Once upon a time, in a millennium long long ago, Nintendo ruled the land and America was a Pokénation. Back then, kids used to make fun of me for my buckteeth and Pikachu blankets, and my mom used to fight me for the Gameboy Color so that she could play Pokémon Pinball until her hands were sore at night. Those were the days.

Despite that I was the avidest of Pokémon trainers in my childhood, I never thought that adorable idiot animals that can only say their own names would make a major comeback. But lo and behold, the Pokéssaince is in full bloom, but this time, it isn’t Nintendo that we owe our thanks to.

Niantic Inc. is the company that’s inspiring a nation to get out there, stare at their phones and bump into walls. It’s the name that popped up as I booted up Pokémon Go for the first time last Saturday. As a Poképurist, I was immediately skeptical upon seeing the foreign balloon-boat-neutron logo.

Who were these strangers, and what were they doing with my Pokeymen?

Although my digital marketing career started on the “driving website traffic” side of the equation (a noble task, to be sure!), over the past few years, my passion and attention has shifted to a “get more traffic to convert” viewpoint. (I outlined the reasons for my change in focus in an earlier post, Why More Traffic Is The Lazy Marketer’s Answer.)

In the process of building out a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) team and evangelizing CRO to anyone who will listen, I’ve noticed some common mistakes that confront marketers who are just dipping their toes into the waters of optimization and testing.

It’s been 20 years since I built my first website and 12 years since starting Nebo. And while I’ve learned a lot over the course of my career crafting digital experiences and teaching interactive design, writing a book wasn’t something that I had planned to do.

The story of how I came to write a book began in May of 2014. I had just finished giving a talk at Web Visions in Portland, Oregon on the topic of Changing Behavior by Design.

On June 26, 2015, 46 years after the Stonewall Riot, the Supreme Court ruled same-sex marriage to be legal in all 50 states. For some, this day meant love between two people — no matter their gender — was now a fundamental right recognized by the federal government. Or something like that. For me, I called in gay at work (it’s a thing) and spent my day on the gayest street in Atlanta, drinking away as Facebook post after Facebook post had people on their knees (get your mind out of the gutter).

Imagine this: You get on your laptop or mobile device and Google “bike brand reviews.” Normally, you don’t go past the first few results, and you almost never click to the next page. But this time you do. Eventually you reach the tenth results page, and once there, a fresh set of ten more pages populates, then ten more after that, and so on (mind you, this is just for bike reviews!).

What does this mean? Your search journey is essentially a microcosm of the age we find ourselves in as consumers, with access to incredible amounts of information for just about everything — the Information Age.

As far as the marketing world is concerned, this has incredible implications. The Information Age is altering the way marketers devise their strategies, most notably when it comes to positioning.