Bryan Casey
@bryanfcasey
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Tech, web and media | VP of Inbound at @ibm. Also like cooking, nba and other.
New York
Joined March 2010
You gotta admit that “you were four seconds late identifying the mistake we made so we’re taking your medal” is a helluva stance to take six days after the event.
The IOC is making Jordan Chiles give back her bronze medal because the coach’s appeal that got her on the stadium was submitted four seconds late, per @WillGravesAP. She finished fifth originally but moved into third after her coach successfully appealed Chiles’ difficulty score
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Over the last 9 months we’ve deleted close to 80% of the marketing footprint off Tens of thousands of pages. The result is that traffic, conversion and all our experience and NPS metrics are up. It was a gross project but I’ll tell you about it.
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@sneakyjwo That seems like the obvious thing to do. Choosing to strip someone’s medal, who actually won, because rules are rules, just makes it look like your rules and the way you enforce them doesn’t work, which is a you problem. It’s a many dimensional fail.
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@MichaelCPell Well the important difference is that Jordan actually won. They both stink tho.
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Incredible if they were also wrong about the technicality.
USA Gymnastics has submitted additional evidence to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
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First, why do this project at all? . Simple answer. The site was impossible to manage for our teams and way too hard to understand and use for our customers. We were paying for complexity.
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Many people felt like showing the whole of IBM to a new customer considering one product was overwhelming. Understandable impulse. The result was that became a holding company of websites. Sites within sites. Too often a mirror of the org structure.
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That took us just over a quarter start to finish. The minute we finished that we turned our attention to our geo footprint. I will have to return to this thread with a part 2 because I’m on an airplane that’s about to take off. If no one likes this I’m not finishing it 😳.
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@Boenau No one in this vid is even minimally bothered because they’ve all driven or ridden in cars in NYC and know this is how you use a car in the city. No one wants to sit at a light for a half hour.
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@michaelmiraflor The thing is that by the time that happens you are also old. Hopefully in your 50s or even 60s for most people. Who even cares about inheriting anything at that point? . It may make retirement more comfortable or easier for some but not a fabric of society changing thing.
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We schedule 7 all day meetings with every BU. We do all of them in two weeks. Back to back to back. I open the meeting by saying this is not a workshop. We’re going to make 200 decisions in the next 8 hours. By the end of this meeting this (sub)site will be gone.
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The complexity we create is never without some legitimate causes. IBM operates in well over 100 countries and our website had a sprawling universe of /cc-lc/s as a result. Like 160+. Further, we’re a big company. Tens of billions in revenue. Hundreds of products and services.
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NPS of nav on improved by 30% immediately. And the really cool thing was that our experience scores around content quality improved by the same amount. It proved our hypothesis that the structure of the site impacts your perception of everything on it.
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@signulll She probably didn’t want to be associated with anons tweeting abt the singularity and sand gods 24/7. Plus she’s got a hundred million dollars already so who cares.
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We’re going to fix this. The project is called Simplification (codename: just build a normal website) and has three prongs: . - navigation.- core simplification .- geo simplification.
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Everything we did delete got a next best target redirect. No sloppy home page stuff.
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It’s easy to guess why that’s not a great idea but it’s not absurd either. Does it not make sense to put all IBM’s security products in a security chunk of the website?. It doesn’t end up working at scale but you need a better answer for why than lol conway’s law.
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The reason it doesn’t work because all the BUs aren’t as clean in terms of normal market taxonomies as security. Compute and storage is an Infra org but users expect to see compute and storage. So you need to thoughtfully restructure everything, pick the right hierarchies, etc.
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So to recap what we have is an overly compartmentalized website, one that is too BU oriented in its structure and we’ve got 160+ copies of this thing (with varying levels of completeness) across the markets and languages we serve.
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- NPS data says nav on the site is one of the biggest client experience problems in the company .- Our bloated solution/product category footprint (10x bigger than equivalent brands) is the culprit .- Those pages deliver a small percentage of the value and pareto is very real.
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I’m connected! . One thing I didn’t mention was that we didn’t just carelessly delete 1k pages. We kept important things. We consolidated everything we could. We had places where we had 3 pages that could reasonably target the same keyword. Now we have 1.
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And that’s what we did. In two weeks we redefined what the “core” of would be. After that we held a readout, invited every BU team, and delivered the strategy and schedule for deleting or consolidating 1k pages and deploying a new global nav.
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We need to convince the entire business that it’s Good Actually to blow up all the BU and Geo sites. We started with the core/BU footprint and the argument went like this….
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My goal with every simplification exercise was to get what I needed to solve the bigger picture problem, 80% of what I’d do if it’s just me and excel alone in a room. But I’m willing to compromise enough to keep everyone at the table. Even better if they walk out an advocate.
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We told people we thought that the poor structure of the site was preventing every single team from being more successful. And that we could fix it while putting less than 2% of their results “at risk.” . And that the upside would more than offset that small downside.
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Three months later it was live. The new global nav was deployed to all 160+ locales on day 1 (because those still exist). It carries over 100,000 distinct urls across all of the supported geographies.
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@Stammy Another good example of current mgmt designing the experience for themselves instead of 99% of users.
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People bought the story. Project is a go. We go into data mode. Inventory entire footprint. We build a set of performance and SEO kpis for every page. Put prelim keep/delete/consolidate recommendations for every page. Create prelim new taxonomy.
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I love Jon Stewart but an absolutely canon clip about how it’s easy to look smart short-term as a cynic.
2024: Jon Stewart asks head of FTC how BigTech was allowed to get so big. 2012: Jon Stewart laughs at Facebook for buying ‘lame’ app called Instagram
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@basedsystems Pretty crazy for a company with 3,000 hospitals and 4.6b arr. Sounds like umich project was crazy or all these numbers are made up, who knows.
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And unlike other “simplifications” we had no intention of trading volume for quality. Our goal was to cut in such a way where we thought we’d be net better across every KPI by the time we were done.
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Which brings us to the next point that bad translation is worse than no translation. We did a reasonable amount of user research on this and not surprisingly people hate bad machine translation. It destroys trust and credibility.
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The “build a normal website” codename was funny but important. It’s easy to convince yourself why some change is impossible. The better mindset is assuming it is possible and being creative enough to figure out how.
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A lot of chatter about design thinking in the wake of layoffs at ideo. The issues with design thinking were less with the actual practice and more with what corporations tried to turn it into, which was a belief that you could turn innovation into a manufacturing process.
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The traffic impact was non-existent. We put very little at risk. We handled those things with care. Plus we’ve been growing organically anyway. The net was basically zero impact on traffic or conversion.
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Knowing where to give and where to hold the line is the real key and something for a different thread on a different day. Now we turn to the geos….
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One other thing I’ll mention is that I’m no religious zealot. Every BU leader is someone I need to work with. We need to get this done and have other teams not feel like they got burned, that they hate what we’re doing.
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AI Overviews aren’t just good. They’re necessary for the long-term health of the web. It is time for a thread about AI, search and really the (nearish) future of publishing and the web. (and plz subscribe to the podcast at the end in case all our traffic goes to zero). RANT….
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@zachweinberg I think it’s simpler. Most of the famous VCs are intolerable. So they create the public perception of an industry much bigger than them.
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@ImpemboGanecue @max_oats As someone that works in SEO there is absolutely nothing that makes me more insane than how far you have to scroll on recipes to get to the recipe.
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For langs vs country/langs we ended up moving from mostly country to mostly langs. We were having lots of duplicate content problems because the site was so big we couldn’t consistently localize so content was identical across locales.
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SEOs will post an ahrefs graph getting 127 monthly visits and be like follow me to learn how to deliver transformative business results.
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@RolfHaltza Understand you are trying to hide racism under some pseudo-intellectual analysis but it doesn’t quite land because it’s also completely wrong. Everyone knows that most of these companies have improved dramatically under present leadership.
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We built a “locale service” that provides both inferred and user provided data around country, lang and currency preferences. Apps on are still adopting it but it will enable us to provide country context (pricing, chat routing, etc) on global pages.
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The result was that our us-en site was effectively our global english site and we were just pretending it wasn’t. We did user country to country site analysis for everything and found most people weren’t landing where we wanted.
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@Boenau They aren’t bothered because everyone in this vid knows how to drive and how to walk in nyc. The pedestrians aren’t mad at the cars because they’d behave the same way if they are driving. There’s some intersections/times of day you need to handle like that.
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There’s just no consensus on what good is or what users expect. We cane into the project with only a few things we had to do. - make the site easier to manage.- not harm global performance . We did a lot of research and analysis.
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@yishan Millions of people work in tech. It has all the same credential/careerist issues as everything else. You’re better off just saying it’s everyones job to ultimately think for themselves. You can also think for yourself without pretending to be a thought leader on everything.
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We sought to answer a few key questions… . - only langs vs country/lang combos.- which langs/countries .- translation quality .- translation pervasiveness.
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For our geo sites we really didn’t see outstanding role models or any market consistency. Some sites like gcp and aws are relatively simple. SAP as a ton. HubSpot does only a few langs but does them comprehensively (like translating product screens level comprehensively).
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We are still on this next phase of the journey but we decided that the lang approach would give us the simplest orientation and was aligned to the way our users actually experienced the site.
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To recap…. - We went from 165 locales to 10 langs .- Support langs in web we don’t elsewhere (campaigns, media, assets, etc) .- Bias toward translation quality vs high volume of machine translated content.
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The net result of all this was… . - better performance for us (traffic, conversion).- better experience for users (nav, task completion, overall perception of site and content quality).- easier to manage site and more agile team (fewer things, better).
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@Jason @AnkerOfficial I live in an apartment and sit at kitchen table and will be doing an important presentation while my three year old son sits next to me yelling that he wants someone to take all the slightly burnt edges off his English muffin. While on wifi. With no headset at all.
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I can retire now.
From supporting more users in Search Console Insights to announcing Interaction to Next Paint in Core Web Vitals, @JohnMu covers the latest news happening in Google Search. 📰. Tune in to this month's episode 👉
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@Boenau If you don’t live in NYC what you see is someone blocking a cross walk. No one who lives in NYC sees that. As long as there is room between cars to walk it’s fine.
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And as someone very focused on international SEO right now, I never understood how you’d ever earn a legitimate link to a terrible translation. And if you can’t earn any links, you’re not going to accomplish much in unbranded traffic. So translations need to be good.
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Twitter deciding that Harvard and other Ivys are done is just peak Too Online. In the real world the smartest and most ambitious kids are gonna keep going to the world’s best schools. And graduating with a leg up.
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And just like core simplification we were more pragmatic than dogmatic. We let some teams hold onto local campaign and event experiences. We didn’t want 50 pages to stop us from doing what we wanted to do with 50,000.
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@tjparker So many of these moves were intuition, maybe even dogma, masquerading as being data driven. Data driven is one of those terms where 90% of ppl that profess to embrace it have no idea what it means.
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@TimKPaine @jgreco @ohadsamet I know it feels good to say this but it’s ok to acknowledge that lots of people make more money than you. There are thirty thousand ppl in nyc with income over $1M a year. Best to just find a life you are happy with.
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There’s a point in every marketer’s life when they realize “contact us” converts 50x better than basically everything else. And the channel source of that behavior is branded organic traffic. And so the only thing that really matters is are more ppl thinking about my brand.
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@daniellgoldstei HubSpot. Zapier. Datadog. Canva. Atlassian. Adobe. Every B2B tech company? TechTarget’s entire business model is based on it. Nearly every media property. The entire food vertical. Same with travel. Stack Overflow. Every training site?. Amazon????.
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We explored the borderline moral argument that we should comprehensively support at least one official lang in every country we do business but the economics are untenable. Like no chance in hell unless you are doing garbage machine translation.
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Well I’m a VP now. Which is pretty cool. The thing I’m most proud of is that we started this team with 3 ppl like 6 years ago. And we bottoms up built a team and program that has become a large % of IBM’s reach. 100% organic. Climbing a ladder is one way to do your.
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@AlecStapp I thought this tweet was sarcastic because the line suggests we will be back to normal in a few years.
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@buccocapital Not sure in the history of the world has anyone needed to delete the app more than this guy.
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@paulg I remember I think freshman year of college I got a B- on an essay because professors said it was well-written, fine argument but I wasn’t asserting anything new. It’s simple but the most important feedback I ever got. Realized I’d been writing book reports not essays.
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Finally, we landed on web being the superset of translation activity for two reasons… . - assets, demos, emails, etc are all nice to have but if the web isn’t translated you’re just not visible at all.- the most important content needs are served via web (eg pricing).
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It was a good thing we did because we had complicated issues with cascading/overlapping redirect rules (is an old, big site) that left some things initially broken and in need of remediation. But by the time we got to India and UK it was smooth.
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@sriramk Tech has a lot of prominent actors that embarrassed themselves and the industry the last few days. It’s easy to understand how we end up with haters when these are our ambassadors. Some politicians and journos responded poorly too, but the call is coming from inside the house.
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We had to execute this change across 3 CMSs. We went one platform at a time and worked through “waves” of country footprints at a time. We were deleting 5 sites a week for most of 1H 2023. We started with small markets and worked our way up to UK, India, etc.
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@vincentweisser @ilyasut Underrated thing about Ilya is that he is an insanely compelling public speaker.
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@mrexits The impact of trump on this graphic is crazy. The parties were within 15 points before him. Not the same but occupying same reality. Then the next year it’s a 60 point delta, hard swings from both sides.
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@rhein_wein Great thread. Best ways Ive seen to keep folks like this is to….a) help them fly through bands .b) get into leadership/mgmt faster than they would at better paying cos so those cos feel like step backward in responsibility and scope .c) perks (masters, wfh, travel, etc).
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“You can’t delete that page. It’s very relevant and being promoted across seo, web, events, sales and more.”. Sir this page has 7 views YTD.
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We only made modest changes to our lang support. We pulled country level revenue data for all IBM, created a little lookup of official langs in every country and just built a table to figure out what we needed to cover to support most of our audience.
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@loganbartlett Ya but without kids I’d have probably lived life like I’m permanently in college and then died at like 45. Now I’m sitting here eating a salad cause I have to live forever. So it’s really a short vs long-term optimization when ya think about it.
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That said, one very clear finding that we haven’t found a way to consistently operationalize is that the “translation imperative” is much higher in double-byte langs (Korean, Japanese, Chinese) compared to say Spanish or German. Ideally you would do more in those markets.
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@paulg Well we have all seen lots of other CEOs of tech companies not do any of this stuff and be extremely successful. If Satya Nadella or Tim Cook made the same criticisms that regular ppl are making would it be ok then?.
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By the end we had nice real-time dashboards and we could see the minute traffic within a market flipped from one footprint to another. All that visibility, and doing it one block at a time, helped us make sure we didn’t screw anything up.
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@jaltma It’s a midwit meme case. Lots of reasonably senior ppl actually don’t know what they are doing. Just means knowing what you’re doing is even more valuable than you thought. But if you think can win without expertise, its a low-ceiling trap.
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However in practice that is tricky because now you have at least two dif translation depths. It’s just more cognitive overhead. Oh this thing that works in Japanese doesn’t in German. We need two plans now. Not impossible but harder.
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We may bring back some country sites in the future when we feel better about automation (currently adopting a new CMS!) but we think this will give us a better foundation to work from.
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We officially decommissioned our old CMS this week. It had ~100k pages at peak, we still had ~15k pages live when we turned it off. Despite vanishing that much footprint I was expecting sub 1% traffic hit. Data rolled in and it was 8%. Or was it?.
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@michelleefang It’s funny how often sf ppl talk about “parties.” . It’s like a social scene that never evolved beyond college.
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I think we deserve some sort of SEO final boss trophy for ranking number 1 on “artificial intelligence” right now.
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Anthropic should be running a massive consumer advertising campaign right now. The size and growth rate of the api tells you about the behavior of ppl in the know. The size of the app vs chatgpt tells you about the behavior of ppl not in the know. Gotta go tell ppl.
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@nikitabier Listen Vice President doesn’t mean what it does in tech you may not be speaking with the right people.
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