These days I’m talking primarily to business leadership, marketing and merchandising teams about the impact of search on improving ecommerce. These teams have different concerns and demands than the technical teams that I’ve worked with for much of my career.
I’m been working on translating my technical knowledge of onsite search into language and terms that ecommerce focused teams use, and vice versa, learning their language and how to convert that back to terms and language that my more technical colleagues are familiar with. I’ve found that listening to podcasts has been a really useful way to make this transition! Here’s some of the ones I’ve found:
The CPG Guys
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-cpg-guys/id1517335575
I started here, as I had a chance to meet Sri at the Shoptalk conference in 2020. The CPG Guys come from the Consumer Packaged Goods perspective, which for me was a completely new world, and it has been really enlightening to see how brands selling products online think.
Sri and Peter have a very entertaining back and forth with each other, and having spent many Saturdays doing woodworking and listening to them, I feel like I’m on a first name basis with them despite having only met Sri for 15 minutes once! I’m sure my first real interaction with Sri in person will be appropriately awkward because of this ;-).
Voices of Search
https://www.voicesofsearch.com/
Ben Shapiro hosts this short 15 minute daily podcast, and it is strongly rooted in the SEO world’s definition of “search”. As an “on site” search guy, calling SEO “search” has always seemed wrong. Despite that, this podcast has been very valuable for helping me understand where most business teams spend most of their time in improving search; which is driving more traffic to their site! Without that traffic coming to the site, I would have anything to work my magic on.
I have found that many of the dilemmas facing SEO teams are mirrored by on site search teams as well: how they collect data, decide on options, discuss strategies with their leadership all provides lessons for me in my work. Not every episode is useful to me, but enough are, and they are short and to the point. I also really like the opening jingle, the various people all asking typical search questions resonates with the search nerd in me!
eCommerce Deep Dive
https://www.orcapac.com/podcast/
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ecommerce-deep-dive/id1505367391
eCommerce teams aren’t only focused on search, there are lots of other concerns that they have! This podcast has been great for helping me understand the breadth of challenges that today’s digital team has, and where search can and can’t help solve those challenges. It helps me understand the conflicts in priority that a team, especially a smaller team, can face.
This is the newest podcast of the three, it started when COVID hit us all.
What books or podcasts or other resources have you found to better understand the needs of business undergoing the omnichannel transformation? Let me know!
Image from Podcast Vectors by Vecteezy