Marketing Type

Human Search

In an appropriate follow-up to my previous post -- the bit about the Church of the Algorithm -- below is a story on some of the folks who are placing bets on the opposing idea: that human subjectivity, harnessed collectively, will in the end offer a superior filter for information than any algorithm.

Wikipedia founder says to challenge Google, Yahoo (Reuters)

Note that one of Wales' backers is Amazon.com.

Is it me, or are we seeing the evolution of a new strand of Manichaeism?

Google@Work in Richmond

Update: 3-09-07.  Neither I nor my laptop battery are cut out for live-blogging, I fear.  What follows is an expanded version of yesterday's post.
_________________________

In another lame attempt at live-blogging, I'm currently in Richmond, VA, listening to Cyrus Mistry, a Product Manager for Google Enterprise, hard-sell the Google Search Appliance, a small, easily-installed box that gives search inside a company the speed and intelligence of Google itself. He makes two excellent points:

• Back in the old days, 70% or more of the data within an enterprise was structured and thus easily searchable: the content people created required fixed fields of data (name, department, etc.). That equation has changed radically: the content being created by employees and teams within organizations now exhibits much greater variety: web pages, blogs, presentations, podcasts, docs.
• Most of the innovation taking place right now in web applications is in the consumer realm: Flickr, YouTube, FaceBook, etc. Software innovation for businesses (jabbing at Microsoft) has stagnated. That leaves a big opportunity for Google to step in. [And makes me wonder if Google has considered buying Salesforce.com.]

The other general sales pitch was simply for Google Enterprise, the same suite of applications available from Google to all of us, but with high level implementation support. As mentioned in a previous post, I'm a big fan of Google's mail and calendar applications, and the new start-page and domain administration tools (including Blogger and Google Docs & Spreadsheets) effectively allow anyone to establish a sophisticated Intranet in no time.  [See my start page.]

Interesting to note that the Enterprise sales team does not mention Blogger as part of the suite of tools (afraid to scare business customers?), but every department within Google is now, as far as I can tell, using Blogger as a communication tool for development work. [You can view feed of posts from all Google blogs here.]

Quick impressions that confirm my impression of the Google mindset:

• A young, smart product manager who seems incredibly pleased with himself but utterly oblivious of his audience. Over and over, he interrupts himself to bark at his team members, "Time? Time? How am I doing on time?"
• The Google team is obsessed with speed and usability. The number one reason more people use Google is its speed.
• Obsession with relevance. The Enterprise team runs relevance tests "all the time." They have complete confidence that Google delivers the best results. It does.
• Church of the algorithm (see this  previous post). Asked about an issue related to incomplete meta-tag entry in documents, one Googler went off on a tangent about why people would always fail to correctly categorize information. In a mock whisper: "You can never rely on people. You can trust algorithms."
• "Some people worry about Google having access to all their mail." The presenter brushed past this as if addressing a child fretting about bogeymen. I love Gmail, but his tone made me wish Cory had been in the audience.
• "We use 100 algorithms" to determine relevance. And KFC uses "11 secret herbs and spices" in its chicken.
• I asked about Page Creator (which in the case of  my account is still broken, by the way) and when it might be given commerce features--something that might compete with Yahoo Stores. The speaker alluded to the add-ons that have been developed by third parties, and to Google Checkout, but otherwise seemed anxious to move on. My guess is that this is coming down the pike.

Pump Up the Google Base

Google's service for listing items for sale, Google Base, has so far shown no sign that it will evolve into an eBay- or CraigsList- slayer. But Google is on the right track with its latest move to add thousands of real estate listings to Google Base, as reported by ars technica: Google gets deeper into real estate listings

When we sold our house last summer, I undertook four main approaches to market the listing:

1) Paid local alternative real-estate company My Dog Tess to list the house in the MLS.
2) Listed the house on Raleigh's CraigsList, linking the ad to a simple web site describing the house and including photos (using the free Google Page Creator  application).
3) Created a Google Base listing.
4) Ran targeted AdWords listings on global searches like "Chapel Hill house for sale," and local searches for phrases along the lines of "for sale by owner."

We ended up in the enviable position, two weeks later, of having three couples bidding against one another on the house. One of the three buyers came through CraigsList, one through a Realtor, and the third through word-of-mouth.

No offers or showings (that I know of) arose from the Google Base or AdWords listings. But the potential is there once real estate buyers and sellers become more broadly aware that these tools exist, and they would be made especially potent by Google's extensive (and expanding) mapping and imaging technology. 

My suspicion is that the only reason Google hasn't yet purchased the real estate web site Zillow.com is that it will roll out the same functionality very soon.

 

 

Google lets advertisers block delivery by IPs

Previously I've written that Google drives its advertisers up the wall because it offers them so little influence. That's true: trying to reach Google as an advertiser is akin to (what I imagine to be) the experience of an average Catholic writing to the Vatican. But a brief story in the WSJ today reminds me of an important caveat to that characterization, which is that Google systematically (in its own time) addresses the demands of advertisers by introducing new features. Here are two good examples:

Google Gives Advertisers More Say on Placement (WSJ - subscription)
Google to enhance tools to fight click fraud (ITWorld - free)

Singing for your sup-PR

This sounds an awful lot like the sort of thing our team did for Lulu over the past couple of years: a pitch-perfect example of unconventional PR from Yahoo in the form of a singing news program. "Yahoo! News to tilt to a lilt" (The Hollywood Reporter) [For the record, the Naked News was taken]

I suppose this stunt accomplishes the purpose of keeping Yahoo's name in the memetrackers as Google rolls out yet another set of powerful, free gizmos, but in the end Yahoo is never really short on buzz. They make, and have always made, very savvy acquisitions (Flickr, del.icio.us), and they associate themselves with terrific content. Where Yahoo! has failed and continues to fail is in delivering a better core product: search and advertising tools.

Google Wants To Make Running A Business Cheaper

Today Google officially launched Google Apps, the bundle of services that it hopes will compete with Microsoft and the stranglehold MS Exchange and Office have on businesses. While the bulk of this functionality has been available from Google for months, the official launch is still big news in the technology world. It should also come as big news for anyone thinking of starting a business because Google's bundle of services can drastically reduce the technology investment you need to get an organization up and running.

Bug-Eyed Marketing has taken advantage of Google's domain management services for the last five months or so. The email application, which is basically Gmail at your own domain with a customizable webmail interface, is brilliant: much better and easier to manage than email services at any company for which I've ever worked. Just this week I added email aliases -- essentially mirrors of our existing email accounts -- at Bug-Eyed's new domain (which I should point out is no more ready than our current domain for public use). Yesterday I also began to trick out a Bug-Eyed gateway page for all our accounts. It, too, is superior to anything we ever managed to devise at my last company.

The Apps sign-up page also introduces a promising new domain acquisition service from Google. Although I'm not sure what the cost will be, I would love to move my business (I have 63 registered domains) away from GoDaddy, an interesting but in the end unavoidably slimy company.

Google Calendar, another element of the bundle of services, is also easy to use and in my opinion better than most commercial products.

Google Page Creator, which I considered using to build the Bug-Eyed Marketing site but ended up using just as a temporary placeholder, is on the other hand NOT ready for prime time. Not only is it terribly restrictive and incompatible with many of Google's other services for web masters (including, bizarrely, the AdSense program), but it has shown serious stability problems in my experience. I did use Page Creator to make a simple for sale page with photos when we sold our house this past summer, but the application is not nearly robust enough yet to use as a real commercial web site. It certainly offers a quick way to post simple pages, which can be handy, but is not nearly up to snuff at this point.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets (formerly Writely) is supposed to be the big competitor to MS Office. I've tried hard to use this application in my day to day work since it launched last summer, but apart from occasionally offering superior version control on documents with multiple remote collaborators, I still rely on the much more powerful software installed on my computers for spreadsheets complex documents and presentations--either Office (on my laptop) or OpenOffice (on my desktop). OpenOffice, which is an open source (and thus free) set of applications, has about 95% of the functionality I use in MS Office. I like it a lot and recommend it to other business people without reservation, something I can't say about most of the other open source apps I've tried.

PhysOrg.comGoogle Apps vs. Microsoft Office
PC World - 3 hours ago
Google has let people with domain names use Gmail as their e-mail solution for awhile, and a free version of Google Apps (under the what-a-mouthful name ...
Small firms offered premium Google Apps ZDNet Asia
Businesses to buy into Google Apps Premier Edition? ZDNet.com.au
DecisionOne Becomes a Google Apps Premier Edition Services ... CNW Telbec (Communiqués de presse)
Computerworld Australia
all 395 news articles »

Yahoo! on the march

The WSJ reports today that Yahoo! continues its aggressive strategy of becoming the definitive new old-media company by pitching advertisers on moving more of their marketing spend away from television to the Internet: Yahoo Tries to Protect Turf from  TV Rivals (subscription).

I don't disagree in principle, but the differences between the strategies of Yahoo! and Google remain striking.

Google places its faith in the idea of a dispassionate, all-seeing power that elevates no one, predicts no winner, and offers no special access. It's an amazing, cult-like vision of an absolute democracy whose order is kept by pure reason, by algorithms that police the state like omniscient robots. Google is maddening to advertisers because they can exercise so little control over it. And yet, it is Google where the vast majority of the ad dollars are spent.

Yahoo!, on the other hand, stays busy spinning and predicting, placing bets here and there, trying to use the Internet to deliver a new, better model of the strategy television networks and movie studios and publishers have used to enrich themselves for almost a century. Yahoo! tries to create content, to identify hits, encourage one group over another and to sell advertisers on their ability to manipulate audiences. From an advertising perspective, I used to gnash my teeth over their damnable humanity when I would compose a series of search ads that upon submission were placed into an invisible queue that was reviewed, in a leisurely fashion, by idiots who would send me an automated notice days later informing me that my chosen search terms had been deemed to be insufficiently related to the page I was advertising. They were mistaken, but they were human. I remember getting one of these reviewers on the phone once and having him attempt to lecture me on the importance of relevancy when an identical ad to the one in question was converting searchers into new customers on Google at about 7% (which is high for those unfamiliar with search engine advertising). Add to that the fact that I had probably been managing paid search ads about twice as long as the young man I was chatting with had even been in the workforce. Google, for all its many maddening qualities, has never been that stupid.

Something else that crossed my mind as I read the WSJ story above is the affirmation of a sense (inspired by my previous, very limited, dealings with Yahoo!) that they have too many executives. This is, I am sure, a problem Google will acquire soon enough. [disclaimer: I own shares of Yahoo!, but wish I owned shares of Google.]