I try to make as much time for events as I can, to meet interesting people, to listen to people with different points of view and to generally squeeze as much juice out of my mind grapes as I can.  One of the events I always enjoy, and I’m not just saying this because I happen to organize it, too, is Social Media Breakfast Ottawa.

Since we started the event, we’ve intentionally strayed away from social media because while there’s a lot to be said about social media, there is only so many times you can hear it.  As a result, we’ve tried to draw from a different group of speakers with varying backgrounds to shape how we think about digital marketing in general.

Today’s speaker – David Nicholson – spoke about game theory, and the “gameification” of business. It was a great talk with a lot of interesting tidbits, but as is usually the case, the most interesting moment of the talk for me came over dinner the night before.

While discussing the new landscape of game development, David mentioned that online game developers are spending huge dollars on data analysts to guide the development of their games. For giants like Farmville or Frontierville, the entire job is to take a loss leader (the game) and generate money through virtual goods, which means that creating the best game dynamic in the world, the best new level, the best twist on gameplay doesn’t matter in the least unless it drives the desired action. If your users don’t use it, it’s a waste of time, plain and simple… even if you think they should use it the way you lovingly crafted it for them.

Think about how we create websites – how we create experiences – for our users, our customers, our members. More often than not, we create based on how we want people to use our site, rather than how they actually use it.

The reason is because humans are hard-wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain.  It feels good to make the logo bigger, to add more calls-to-action and make sure that there are lots of links to our website in all of our emails, but how much does that actually move the bottom line?

Conversely, poring over data, challenging our assumptions and listening to our customers is hard work and can tell us we’re doing the wrong thing, that we don’t understand what our users want, and make us feel bad and bad at our job.

The trick is that the games industry relies on these changes to directly impact the bottom line. They don’t get paid unless their experience generates the right behaviour to make dollar signs happen. Marketing is closely related to the bottom line, but the path from A to B is far more circuitous, so we’re much freer to indulge our marketing id, and ignore the marketing superego who’s just begging you to spend a little more time looking at your analytics.

Before you can create great design, you need to know where you want it to lead, and how you’ll know when you get there. You can choose to be finished anytime you like – the question is whether you wait until you’re happy or until your users are happy.

If you’ve ever been to an old city and tried to navigate through its downtown, you know intuitively what “paving the horse trails” means.  Ottawa, bless its heart, is home to a downtown that is a mess of narrow one-way streets, and no less than four unconnected Wellington Streets.  The result is painful to navigate at the best of times, and chaos at the worst.

The reason for this, in part, is because at the time when we decided to make the big jump from colony to capital city, there was no need for anything more.  The population was less than 1% what it is today, and since cars didn’t, well – exist, it was hard to plan for them.

Earlier in the millenium, the web was made up of horse trails – loosely connected conduits of HTML pages. We had no idea that incredibly powerful tools like Youtube and Facebook were about to dominate the web. Marketers had to make it up as they went along, compromising for people still on dial-up connections, and the idea that software would one day allow us to manage huge dynamic websites for practically nothing wasn’t even on the radar.

But even now, in 2011, some of us are still building sites based on that outdated way of thinking and basing decisions on the decisions of the past. Worse, some are spending considerable amounts of money to revise websites without getting down to the very foundation of site’s architecture. Shiny new design is draped over a rotting infrastructure, and while the site may look better, it’s still fundamentally broken.  The result is a site that’s painful to navigate at the best of times, and chaos at the worst.

That’s what happens when you pave the horse trails.