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Archive for the ‘Google’ Category
May 1st, 2008 by Gord Hotchkiss
All you who have Google stock, take a moment to thank Larry and Sergey. You who have fallen in lust with your iPhone, stop and say a silent prayer for Steve Jobs. And you parents who spent many a peaceful hour thanks to your kids being glued to a Disney movie, face towards Disneyland and bow to Walt himself, may he rest in peace (or a freezer, as rumor has it). Thank God for the product-centric leader, because they are few and far between.
Customer-Centricity: More than Just Words
I have spent many an hour in conference rooms listening to the new “religion” of customer-centricity that has suddenly taken hold of the mega-corporation X, Y or Z. The scripted lines are typically “We are here to serve our customer. We will find optimal strategies to maximize customer experience and revenue opportunities. We embrace good design”
It may sound good in the annual report, but it’s not that easy. When you talk about balance, I hear compromise. Somebody is losing, and it’s almost always your customer. Because as Sergey, Larry, Steve and Walt will tell you, there can only be one person driving this bus. Either it’s your sales manager, or it’s your customer. Come to any intersection and one will tell you to turn right and one will tell you to turn left. Who are you going to listen to?
Now, obviously, Apple, Google and Disney have been known to make a buck or two, so customer-centricity can be profitable. It depends on which route you want to take to get there. If you take the customer’s route, it means having the courage to say no to a lot of people inside your company (and out) along the way. And really, the only person who can say no and get away with it is the leader of the company.
The Product-Centric Leader
Here’s a shocker, coming from me. The more I think about it, the more I don’t believe customer-centricity is the key. It’s not a goal, it’s a by-product. It comes as part of the package (often unconsciously) with another principle that is a little more concrete: Product-centricity. Product-centric leaders, the ones that are obsessive about what gets shipped out the door, are customer-centric by nature. They understand the importance of that magical intersection between product and person, the sheer power of amazing experiences. The iPhone is amazing. Disney classics are amazing. My first search on Google was amazing. Steve, Walt, Larry and Sergey wouldn’t have it any other way. They focus attention on the importance of that experience, and know, somewhere deep down inside, that if they get it right, the revenue will take care of itself.
The other thing about the product-centric leader is that they don’t have to do extensive customer research. They may, and many do, but they already have a gut instinct for what their customers want, because they are their own customer. Larry and Sergey invented a new search engine because the old ones were fundamentally broken and they were fed up with them. Walt built Disneyland because he was tired of sleezy, grimy amusement parks. And Steve knew that some people need a lot more than a beige, generic box because he’s one of them. They have use-centricity baked into their core, because they’re building products they want to use. They don’t compromise in the drive to create a product that’s good enough for them. It’s a happy coincidence that there are lots of other people who also love the product. It’s an intuitive connection that 99.9% of corporate leaders can’t imagine, let alone do.
Managers are almost never Product-Centric
The typical corporate manager has no special bond to the product. Along the line, too many compromises have been made in the name of profitability. Whatever amazement the product may have once had has been sold off, bit by bit, along the way. The sales manager and the bean counters have taken over the steering wheel. They turn out bland, uninspiring products they wouldn’t use themselves. They are not product centric, they’re profit centric, and profit really doesn’t inspire anyone.
I’ve spent a lot of time wondering how so many companies can preach customer-centricity yet continually miss the mark by so much so often. Look at the ones who hit the bull’s eye regularly. It turns out that it’s not so much customer-centricity they’re aiming for, it’s delivering products the leaders are obsessed with because they can’t wait to use them themselves. That’s a key element Good to Great and Built to Last author Jim Collins missed in his Level 5 leadership. Steve Jobs would never be mistaken for Collin’s or Stephen Covey’s ideal leader, but if I were looking for someone who’s going to turn out a product that blows me away, Steve would be my guy.
April 11th, 2008 by Gord Hotchkiss
The frequent flier blitzkrieg continues. This week’s stop, Sydney, Australia for SMX. In the opening keynote, Danny Sullivan asked Google’s Marissa Mayer what keeps her at Google. Her answer was that there are just too many really interesting, really hard questions still to be answered. She likened it to the world of scientific discovery and pegged the current state of search and online as analogous to the 15th or 16th century. Sir Isaac Newton has just discovered gravity.
From a timeline perspective, I think Marissa’s analogy works. There’s no doubt we’re at the early stages of something, but what that something is remains to be seen. The difference between us and Isaac Newton is that Newton was exploring the guiding principles of the real, physical world. We’re building a new world up as we go. More correctly, a new world is emerging organically from the efforts and thoughts of millions of people. It’s a world defined in an ethereal middle space, a world of mind spawned musings and accomplishments, shared and propelled one packet at a time. We’re not discovering anything, we’re building something entirely new. At any given moment, hundreds of millions of us are making it up as we go along. It’s a Darwinian experiment on a grand, grand scale.
The other difference is that the physical world afforded us a certain leisurely pace of exploration. Apples have been falling from trees for millions of years before Newton finally got around to wondering why. Even Darwin had the luxury of time to define his theory of natural selection. Not much happens in the way of evolution in any time scale that we can perceive.
But this online witches cauldron we call the Internet moves much quicker. It is a world driven by innovation, and it is the fastest innovators that will not only survive, but prosper. Mindful musing is a luxury we can’t afford. Things move too fast.
Despite the seemingly blank canvas that stretches before us, there are limits to the world we create, and these limits are those imposed on us by our human nature. The virtual world we create must fit within the sphere that defines us as a species. It must not take advantage of our foibles and failings. It must empower the best of us. The human mind is a convoluted, complex mechanism that is only 5% rational. The other 95%, the really fun part that makes us human, brews under the service, messy, murky and sometimes manipulative. And the truly scary part is that we know almost nothing about this dark underbelly of our minds. We’ve discovered much of the world that lives outside our skulls, thanks to Newton, Darwin, Galileo and their scientific brethren. But we’re only beginning to discover the world that sits locked in our 3 pounds of grey matter.
Humans haven’t really changed much in 250,000 years. Yet man’s greatest creation, our society, has changed by leaps and bounds and the pace of that change is still accelerating. The creation of the internet is perhaps the most significant leap forward yet. We are literally redefining the structure we use to build society upon. This, I suspect, changes everything. Our challenge, then, is to use our technology, our passion and our intellect to create a society that breaks the restrictions imposed on us not just by our physical world, but also by our baser human instincts.
I can understand why Marissa Mayer still wants to get up and go to work in the morning. She’s driven by the same thing that drives many of us who have chosen to dedicate our passion to this new online world that is the biggest group project in history.
Maybe, just maybe, this time we’ll get it right.
March 13th, 2008 by Gord Hotchkiss
When I started this series of columns, I had no intention of making it a series. But now, with the 5th (and final) installment, it looks like I may finally break this particular habit. It’s been fascinating for me. Hopefully it’s been equally interesting for you.
We Develop Strings of Habits
In last week’s column, I talked about environmental cueing and reinforcement. Here, cues in our environment (the ubiquitous toolbar search box, for example) trigger a habit, and the expected outcome (the delivery of relevant results) reinforces the habit. This creates a sustaining cycle.
But there’s one other aspect of habits that we should look at. We tend to develop habits as strings of events. One environment cue might trigger a series of actions. The classic example is those who need a cigarette when they have a drink. Some recent research paints a fairly bleak picture of North American society and shows how obsessed we are with habit inducing cues. The “why” question poised was why French people were less obese than Americans, despite a diet high in fat. It turns out that one major reason why is that Americans let external cues, such as which TV show is on, drive their eating patterns. We always have a bowl of Chunky Chocolate Ice Cream while we watch Desperate Housewives. The French tend to eat when they’re hungry, and stop eating when they’re full. For the French, eating is a joy. For Americans, it’s a habit.
Swimming Upstream
As I mentioned before, to break a habit, you have to intercept before the habitual behavior, rather than try to educate and modify after the fact. And the less thought required to execute the behavior, the harder the habit will be to break. If your habit takes a few seconds to do, the opportunities to intercept and kick in the rational brain are minimal. This provides a distinct challenge to anyone looking to usurp Google’s search crown. Searching is becoming easier than ever.
The competitors have to look at that split second that exists between the awareness of the need for more information and the instinctive move to the nearest search box to launch the query. It’s in that tiny sliver of time that the opportunity to break the Google habit exists.
Searchis Interruptis
So, given the fleeting nature of this opportunity, how do you grab it? One way is to anticipate the need of search before it happens. This is the implicit query work that Microsoft was experimenting with sometime ago. As you work on a task, potential search queries are monitored in the background and are presented to the user. But a constantly shifting window of potential searches would probably drive us all batty.
Another way is to integrate search at an application or OS level, making search even easier and inserting a habit breaking context switch into that tiny sliver of indecision that exists between awareness and Google.
Attack the Weakest Links
But even integration of search at this level won’t be enough. Remember, we tend to give the advantage to the incumbent. We actively look for reasons to maintain the habit, and we ignore information that runs counter to our habitual choice. Even if a search alternative is one click less to get to, that alternative still has to provide a significant reason to switch. They not only have to beat Google at the game of search, they have to do it in a decisive way. For this reason, a competitor has to attack Google’s user base at the weakest point, the ones that are using Google because it’s handy, not the Google loyalists.
True User-Centricity
This brings us to my last strategy for breaking the Google habit: a truly user centric search tool.
Up to this point, verticalization in search has taken one of two forms. Either engines have attacked a topic category (i.e. Business.com and B2B, Lawyers.com and legal services, Expedia.com and travel) or a type of content (i.e. Blinkx and Youtube for video, Technorati for blog posts). These approaches tend to be vulnerable because we are creatures of habit. Generally, we prefer to use one place to launch our searches. We’re already using Google for most of our searches, so if they can provide an equivalent experience to these vertical engines, they can quickly assimilate the traffic and squeeze the verticals out.
This is not as easy as it sounds. Google has yet to provide an equivalent experience in most of their verticals, but now that it appears that the default design of the search results page is no longer a sacred cow, I would expect the functionality gap to close quickly.
But what if we took a different approach? What if rather than verticalizing around a topic or content bucket, we verticalized around a type of user? What if we maximized the search experience for millennial males or female baby boomers? The verdict on personalized search seems to be that a one size fits all solution is a long way off on the horizon, but an intermediate step might be to tailor an engine for a segment that shares similar needs and expectations. By focusing on a niche strategy, you might be able to break the Google habit, one segment at a time. In this way, you might be able to provide the discontinuous innovation needed to catch people upstream, before they get swept away with the Google tide.
March 6th, 2008 by Gord Hotchkiss
Let’s imagine that my ongoing series about the forming of habits (installment 1, installment 2 and installment 3) has so captured your curiosity that you want to find out more. You’re reading this column from your computer. You make the decision to find more information about breaking a habit. Now, let’s slow down time and look at the steps. There, in the upper left of your browser, is the Google toolbar. Or maybe you have the Google sidebar in the lower right of your window. Perhaps you’ve got Google’s homepage bookmarked. Whatever the shortcut, you don’t suddenly stop and think, “Gee, for this search what would be the optimal search engine to use?” No, without thinking, you go right up to the handiest search box and key in “breaking habits”.
It’s all about the Cues….
In psychological terms, what we’ve just described is a stable environment. The layout of your window is something you’re familiar with. You don’t have to think about it, you just do it. And the vast majority of times, this works for you. You have created an expectation of success. The cues remind you, below the level of rational consciousness, that this course of behavior generally produces the desired outcome. And each successful search reinforces that.
This cueing and reinforcement cycle is a powerful factor. Several academic studies (see Verplanken & Wood for a review of the literature in this area) have shown that habitual use has two important lock-in mechanisms that perpetuate the behavior. First of all, expectations of success curb our desire to search for alternatives. All those millions of advertising dollars from Ask or Microsoft and the ads they bought are falling on deaf ears.
Secondly, the one type of information we do pay attention to is information that confirms our habitual bias. Because we have an expectation of success, our ears perk up when we hear things that confirm and reinforce that expectation. We are looking to remain consistent with the habit, rather than break it. This is true even with something as insidious as smoking. Imagine how powerful this would be with a benign behavior like using a search engine. Millions of dollars of TV ads can be trumped by one person telling us that Google is also their favorite engine because it always delivers what they’re looking for.
The Forgiving Habitual User
Further, even when we have a less than ideal experience, our expectation framework tends to “cut it some slack”, mentally averaging out the experiences and rounding it up in the incumbent’s favor. We become pretty forgiving of our habitual choice and hyper-critical of the alternatives.
So, given the formidable odds against breaking a habit (remember, in most cases, habits are good things that reduce our need to think through everything, so evolution has a vested interest in keeping them in place) there are still circumstances when it can happen.
Ch..Ch..Ch..Changes…
One of these is when there’s a disruption to the stable environment. When we have to adjust to a new circumstance, we’re also open to new cues that go into the new environment. In the non virtual world, this would be moving to a new home, especially in a new city or starting a new job. In the virtual world confined to our 21 inch monitor, it would be buying a new computer, upgrading our operating system or switching to a new browser. Any of these events, or a combination of them, offers an opportunity to search providers to make themselves one of the new environment cues. There’s been a disruption in the typical flow that used to lead to acting without thinking, so there’s an opportunity to cause people to think about the alternatives.
One tremendous opportunity to get in on the ground floor of our adaption of a new environment is presented by our increasing use of mobile. The even smaller real estate on the mobile screen represents a tremendous opportunity to put a stake in the ground and start the habit forming cycle. Google already has a head start in this area, but it’s far less than what they’ve established on the desktop.
Next week, more ways for competitors to disrupt the Google habit, including what it might take to overcome the incumbent’s advantage.
February 28th, 2008 by Gord Hotchkiss
What will it take to beat the Google Habit? There’s billions of dollars that hang on the answer to that question. My last two columns looked at the nature of habits and how they can lead to an advantage for incumbents by “locking in” customers or users.
Before we look at some possible answers, it’s important to understand how and why previous attempts at breaking habits have fallen short in an area where far more academic work has been done: health care ( Verplanken & Wood, 2006).
Educational campaigns have proven to have little effect on changing habitual behavior. In fact, studies have shown that these campaigns can actually trigger an increase in the unwanted behaviors! Oops, that wasn’t supposed to happen.
The frustration of physicians who are battling unhealthy lifestyle choices in their patients was perfectly summed up in an address given by John McKinley to the American Heart Association over 30 years ago:
Start Swimming Upstream
“You know,” he said, “sometimes it feels like this. There I am standing by the shore of a swiftly flowing river, and I hear the cry of a drowning man. So I jump into the river, put my arms around him, pull him to shore and apply artificial respiration. Just when he begins to breathe, there is another cry for help. So I jump into the river, reach him, pull him to shore, apply artificial respiration, and then just as he begins to breathe, another cry
for help. So back in the river again, reaching, pulling, applying, breathing and then another yell. Again and again, without end, goes the sequence. You know, I am so busy jumping in, pulling them to shore, applying artificial respiration, that I have no time
to see who the hell is upstream pushing them all in.”
This has led to a reexamination of the “downstream” method of altering behavior; trying to rationally convince people to change their behavior after it’s already become a habit, for example, with education campaigns. The fundamental problem here is you’re trying to apply a rational solution to an irrational problem. We don’t think about habits, we just do them. That’s the very definition of a habit.
The Strength and Cost of Habits
There are two other components in habitual behavior that have to be understood, the strength of habit and the cost of executing the habit. Both factor in how hard the habit will be to change. Strength of habits is how closely they’re tied to our personal beliefs, good or bad. If we stop at Starbucks every day because we absolutely love everything about Starbucks, that’s going to be a very hard habit to break. Smoking ups the ante actual physical addiction.
Also, how much does it cost us to continue the habit? It I have to go 4 blocks out of my way to go to Starbucks that has a personal cost to me. If it’s right on my way to work, that’s different.
Habitual Use of Search
So, let’s wrap this week’s column up with a summary of what we’ve learned about habits and apply it to search:
- You typically can’t change habits by a rational appeal after a habit is formed. This explains the failure of every television campaign for search engines looking to grow market share.
- The strength of habit is a big factor in how likely the habit is to stay in place. So, if you’re looking to steal users from Google by breaking their Google habit, you’re going to be looking to the ones that use Google because it’s handy, not the ones that have 6 Google t-shirts hanging in their closet.
- And finally, you’re going to have to look for a way to catch a user before the use Google by intercepting them upstream. The reason Yahoo has been able to maintain it’s market share over the past few years has a lot more to do with the scope of their presence and the fact that they can put a Yahoo search box in front of more people before they can get to Google than it has to do with the quality of the search experience. And that’s also why Microsoft’s share has eroded as more and more default home pages are being switched from MSN.
Next week, in the series that may never end (talk about habit forming), we look at how challengers to the Google search crown can hope to break the habit. Hint: all the clues point in one direction: upstream!
February 21st, 2008 by Gord Hotchkiss
In last week’s Search Insider, I introduced the idea of habits, and why they can be hard things to break. This week, I want to explore how search engines can be habit forming as well.
Cognitive Lock In
Habits form and stay formed because there is usually a cost associated with discontinuing the habit. In a commercial interaction, this is referred to as the “cost of switching”. These are the lock in mechanisms that companies hope will keep you from walking across the street to their competitors. In theory, the cost of switching on the internet should be negligible, creating a frictionless, “perfect” market. There’s no financial penalty. The internet erases geographic boundaries. And this should be especially true in search. After all, other search engines are only a click away. But researchers ( Johnson, Bellman and Lohse, 2003, Brynjolfsson and Smith, 2000) actually found the opposite to be true. It seemed that customer stickiness can actually be greater online. So, if it’s so easy to switch, why aren’t more people doing it?
It appears, based on research ( Zauberman, 2003), that there’s another cost of switching, the cost of learning new interfaces. This has been called “cognitive lock-in”. As you become comfortable navigating through a site, the cognitive cost of learning new interfaces tends to build your loyalty and keep you “locked in” to the site. This happens in the real world as well, and could explain my wife’s seemingly irrational loyalty to the bad grocery store I described last week. She knows where everything is. She knows where to park. And she knows who to argue with when products don’t meet her standards (as well as how to get her point across..it’s an Italian thing). It may not be great, but it’s familiar!
Will Differentiation Increase the Power of Lock In?
A recent study ( Murray and Haubl, 2007) found that cognitive lock-in comes from habits of use as well as habitual choice. Both are relevant in the search space, but let’s put habitual choice aside for a moment. Habits of use form when we become familiar with using a product, the actual mechanics of how it fits us in realizing our goals. We know how to use Google, for example, and how to refine it to get the results we’re looking for. We know which links take us where, which tabs to hit and even through we never use it, the “Feeling Lucky?” button reminds us we’re on Google. When Google tried to remove it, based on lack of usage, there was a huge user backlash.
This sense of familiarity meant that until recently, all search engines looked the same. The same ten blue links, the same treatment of sponsored ads, the same basic layout. But in a recent set of interviews with all the major engine’s design and usability teams, it was made clear that we can expect more differentiation amongst the engines. Ask’s departure was just the first step in this.
It’s not just a Tool, it’s a Badge
But it’s not just the utility of an engine that increases lock-in. There’s also habitual choice. This comes from our lock-in to a brand. We always drink Coke, we always drive a Honda, we always fly Southwest, we always search on Google. Yes, even something as utilitarian as a search engine engenders brand allegiance. We identify with brands because they help define us as individuals. And this has happened to varying extents in the search space.
There Will Never be Another Google in Search
So, you might say, if Google became a habit, what’s to stop another engine from also becoming a habit? Well, first of all, it won’t be nearly as easy for a new player as it was for Google. Think back to when you first used Google. No one engine had established itself as the user’s choice, creating the “lock-in” effect. I used to hop back and forth between 4 or 5 engines, depending on my objective and the closest engine at hand. I’d perhaps start at Infoseek or AltaVista, and if I didn’t get a great result (which was pretty much always true) I’d try Excite or HotBot. Then, finally, in desperation, I’d sort through the hierarchal jungle that was Yahoo! No engine had become a habit.
Google’s genius was in providing pretty good results for a wide variety of searchers. Suddenly, I didn’t have to hop from engine to engine, because 9 out of 10 times Google provided better results. By the time the rest of the engines had closed the gap, I was already locked in. Now, arguably, other engines provide better results for certain types of searches. But Google is habitual. It’s going to be an uphill battle for the competition. In fact, Google is such a habit; its name has even replaced the word “search”. We now “Google” it.
So, where does that leave the competition? I have some ideas, but they’ll have to wait til next week.
February 14th, 2008 by Gord Hotchkiss
My wife Jill was the victim of another drive-by “why-ing”, and I, of course, was the perpetrator.
There’s a small specialty grocery store where we live that Jill visits every week or two. And almost every time, she complains about the experience. Outdated stock is repackaged. Food is rancid. The staff is surly. But she keeps buying there. After listening to another long winded vent, I dared to go where no man should go. I asked her “why”.
There were a number of reasons that she gave. It’s on the way on her daily route. Parking is convenient. Prices are low. But the biggest reason was one she didn’t express, because she didn’t know it. It had become a habit. And habits are tough things to break.
Why We Have Habits
Like almost everything else, habits are a way we cope with the world. They’re cognitive short cuts so we can save our brains for more appropriate work. And most times, they work pretty well. When things work the same way the majority of times, we don’t have to think about them every single time. We relegate them to habits. It’s why we have such difficult times with door knobs, even when we’re given instructions (“push” or “pull” – and thanks to SI reader Peter Simmons for the example). Our brain is in short cut mode, so it’s not taking the time to read signs. Based on the shape of the door handle, the presence or absence of push plates, whether we’re entering or exiting and other cues, the brain makes a decision to push or pull without really consulting our conscious mind. We won’t even see the sign (which would engage our consciousness) unless we don’t get the result we expect.
Habits are grooves worn in the brain, and they tend to be relatively durable because of that. The rule of thumb seems to be about 3 weeks. So, if you moved a light switch from the right side of the door to the left side, it would take about 21 days before your brain stopped telling your right hand to turn on the switch.
The Hand is quicker than the Brain
Here’s the important part of that circuit (the one in the brain, not the one that turns on the light). The loop between the brain and the right hand is an unconscious one. It’s made of synapses firing on autopilot. At a conscious level you know the switch is on the left side, but the conscious loop is slower than the unconscious one. It’s the laziness of the brain at work. If we don’t have to think about everything, why should we? So your right hand is already patting the wall looking for the switch before your rational, thinking brain catches up and says, “It’s on the other side, idiot”. This has to happen a couple dozen times before the new groove in your brain is established and you can go back to not thinking about turning on the light switch.
Why Incumbents usually win
Now, in my typical, roundabout way, I am getting to why this is important in search. If we think about habits, it starts to become clear about why Google has such a huge market share advantage. I’d like to introduce another idea called the “incumbency effect” When it refers to politics, the incumbency effect means that once you win an election, you have a greater chance of winning subsequent elections for the same office. This is due to several factors that give you the edge in the eyes of voters: familiarity, experience in the role, access to funding and the ability to call in favors racked up during the previous term. All things being equal, incumbents are tough to beat.
But in other arenas outside politics, the incumbency effect can also be driven by the fact that habits are formed. It’s not just the rational reasons why an incumbent can be tough to dethrone; it’s also the irrational ones. The incumbent has worn a groove in our brain. And to knock off an incumbent, with all these things in their favor, you can’t just be a slightly better alternative. You have to be significantly more attractive. Either the incumbent has to screw up badly, or you have to offer a dramatic improvement over them.
As per usual, my weekly allotment of words has ran out before my idea, so I’ll pick this up next week, when we look at the incumbency effect and a parallel concept, cognitive lock in, and how they’re playing out in the world of search.
October 30th, 2007 by Jody Nimetz
Can you imagine if Google was around in the 50's when television was in its infancy or prior to that when radio came across the airwaves? We all know that Google dominates online advertising with their Google Adwords program (a pay per click program where advertisers/webmasters can create their own ads and bid on placement for their chosen keywords) and their Google AdSense program (a contextual advertising solution to web publishers/site owners that delivers text-based Google AdWords ads that are relevant to site content pages. You earn revenue by showing ads that are relevant and targeted to your website's content.).
So I would like to throw this out there. What if Google set their sights on traditional marketing media such as television and print? Hear me out, wouldn't this be an interesting approach? Focus on the Internet and on online advertising, which is how Google makes money Think about this; Google dominates the online ad space so everyone else is playing catch up and just when they are not looking, Google reverts their focus on traditional forms of marketing media such as television and print.
Sound far fetched? Well maybe it's not as "out there" as you think. In fact Google has already began down this path. I have heard various rumours and read countless articles on Google looking to expand its wings into areas such as TV advertising, in newspapers and other print destinations.
Ever heard of Google TV ads? Probably not, but they exist. Google is smart enough to figure out that users spend a lot of time watching TV so improving the relevance of advertising information on that medium is important. The goal of Google TV ads is to:
- Deliver more relevant ads to viewers and provide better reporting for advertisers
- Bring more advertisers to TV and help inventory owners
- Create efficiencies in the existing model
We're not the first to throw out this theory of Google becoming a traditional marketing machine. Earlier this year, the NY Times had an interesting article about Google's ambitions in the advertising world. The article points out that may in the traditional markets may indeed fear Google:
Many in the radio industry are determined to keep Google at arm’s length, suspicious that its technology-based approach will turn their business into a commodity and take away the relationships with advertisers that stations have spent years building.
While analysts and traditionalists will question whether Google will be successful in this arena, you can be sure that if anyone can do it, Google just might be the one entity that can be successful in the television and print advertising space. Google has the ability, the passion, the innovation, the resources and the drive to change the way advertisers market their products via these traditional source. Factor in Google's mission to make the world a more "relevant" one by organizing the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful and you might just have the secret sauce to dominate all forms of advertising.
Google: The Ultimate Answering Machine?
Yet there are those who continue to bash Google and look to exploit the search giant. Google just keeps on innovating and pushing the envelope on the advertising world. Is Google the closest thing that the Web has to an ultimate answering machine? Well this can be debated as there are other such as ASK that are working to provide a tremendous user experience when they search for information. The fact is Google, even as an online advertising pioneer, seeks to ultimately provide the best possible user experience for both the end user and the advertiser.
If Google has indeed set their sites on traditional marketing media, their strategy is an interesting one. Dominate the online advertising space and then go back and look at traditional marketing channels that include newspapers, television and radio. In 10 years, Google may just become the ultimate advertising resource, and for many may indeed become the ultimate answering machine when it comes to advertising.
Original Post: SEO-Space: What if Google Focused on Traditional Media?
September 28th, 2007 by Jody Nimetz
As part of best practices for video optimization, it is recommended that you create and submit a transcript for users and the search engines. In fact Google states that users will be able to find your video more easily if you add a transcript to each video file you've uploaded via your Video Status page.
Here are a few tips/hints for incorporating the use of transcripts with your video.
Create a Keyword Rich Title for your Transcript
Include a brief introductory paragraph/synopsis that describes the subject matter of your transcript (and video).
Publish Your Transcript - first off be sure to publish your transcript. Consider adding the transcript to your site or blog. Displaying a transcript of your video can help improve your rankings for your chosen keywords at Google and the other engines. Search engines love content; placing an actual transcript on your site is a great way to add content that is unique to your site.
Use a Video Transcription Service - there are a number of services that can help you with video transcription. A simple search in Google returns these results for video transcription resources.
Format the transcript so that it is time-coded - a time-coded transcript breaks the script of the video into manageable segments. The time of each segment should be listed in the following format: HH:MM:SS.mmm. Save the transcript as a .txt file. According to Google the format should be as follows:
HH: Hours starting at 00
MM: Minutes starting at 00
SS: Seconds starting at 00
mmm: Milliseconds starting at 000
Your time-coded transcript would look something like this:
9:54:50.000
Words said between 09:54:50.000 and 09:54:53.000
9:54:53.000
Words said between 09:54.53.000 and the next segment.
9:54:54.000
Words said at 09:54:54.000
If possible, try to incorporate the use of transcripts with your video. It is important to understand that adding transcripts can be time consuming and you really need to do your homework to determine if adding a transcript is a viable option as you submit video. From an SEO point of view, there is benefit in that a transcript provides an opportunity to add fresh content that is unique to your site based on video that you have uploaded. If you cannot provide a full transcript of your video, consider adding a Video Synopsis to each of your videos possibly on your video sitemap page.
The practice of online video optimization is still new to many. Adding a transcript is just one way to help users find your videos. Begin with Google video and look to other resources to see which ones return the best results for your site.
In conjunction with incorporating transcripts with your online video, the following links to other Google video resources offer a great place to learn more about uploading video content.
Google Video Resources
How Do I Upload Videos?
http://video.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=41219
Where and How Do I Upload Video Content?
http://video.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=58409&ctx=sibling
Google Video Help Center
http://video.google.com/support/
September 25th, 2007 by Jody Nimetz
Over the past six months the viral spread of popular social community Facebook has generated great discussion in the blogosphere. When Facebook was made available to the general public a number of months ago many were opposed to it. Then the "it's not just for kids" viral thing happened and now everyone and their dog is on Facebook. Facebook is not just for kids. I was speaking with Enquiro CEO Gord Hotchkiss the other day and he mentioned that he receives more invites from industry professionals via Facebook than he does from LinkedIn. That's an interesting thought as traditionally very few business executives (or businesses for that matter) participate in social communities outside of LinkedIn. Many businesses feel that there is really no value in participating in social networks. The open distribution platform of Facebook may suggest otherwise.
There is value for businesses via Facebook. Everything from brand lift to reputation management, Facebook is becoming a great tool for business owners to drive consumer engagement. In fact, Facebook has generated so much interest that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have all been reportedly trying to acquire part of the social community that has become so popular in 2007.
So amidst rumors of Yahoo being ready to acquire Facebook and Microsoft to buy a minority stake in Facebook for a half a billion dollars, should Google fear Facebook? Facebook is still an emerging Web property, but many believe that Facebook will become even more popular in the future due to their open development platform. Currently Facebook allows developers the ability to build applications off of its platform. Google is said to be gearing up to give developers in its network the ability to pull Orkut data outside of Google and into third-party applications via the APIs. So is Google worried about Facebook at all?
Why Google Fears Facebook
Think Google feels Facebook is not a threat? Well think again. Here are a couple of reasons as to why Google fears Facebook:
- Facebook has experienced a quick rise to the "top" - Facebook is currently the second largest social network on the Web, behind only MySpace in terms of traffic. There is strength in numbers.
- Facebook is the most viral software distribution platform ever
- Facebook is addicting!
- As reported on Googlewatch by Clint Boulton, "Facebook has made no secret of the fact that it wants to go public and will likely allow its search box to return keyword-driven results to generate greater online advertising dollars, which would pose a serious threat to Google."
- Facebook is not some little startup, many believe Facebook's value to be in the $8-12 billion dollar range.
- There are nearly 3,400 applications on Facebook with about 100 million installs. These numbers are not small potatoes.
- Microsoft continues to acquire a stake in Facebook. Bill Gates said at the start of the year that Search is a number one priority. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Microsoft needs to do something drastic to compete in the online advertising game. Furthering the existing Microsoft/Facebook partnership might be drastic enough to present some serious competition for Google.
Still think that Google is not worried about Facebook? Well then why was there a so called secretive and highly confidential meeting at Google's headquarters in Mountain View the other day. Topic au jour? The "Facebook Issue". The threat with Facebook is that by enabling keyword search on the site, Google's "keyword search advertising model" faces a serious threat for the first time in it's history. Google is currently the most convenient provider of keyword search driven ads. This is their bread and butter. According to a posted comment by Lee Lorenzen on Techcruch, "… Google’s dominance in search (and its by product keyword-driven CPC advertising) is threatened when there is another search box staring at, and being used by hundreds, of millions of users for hours each day (i.e., Facebook’s people/group/app search box that will have 200+ million users by Dec. 2008 and will be the dominant Social Network in the most lucrative advertising markets in the world)."
The threat from Facebook may indeed be real. Is Facebook a serious threat to Google? When you start holding confidential meetings to discuss a strategy to diffuse the situation. I would say the Facebook issue is already a serious threat. If Google has done their homework correctly, they understand that Facebook works to keep their users on their site and not on a search engine or other social community. Who do you trust more? Your friends and family (via Facebook) or a Search Engine (Google)? Where will you be spending your time online? In a community with friends and family or on a plain white Google results page? It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the next few months and years.
I will say this, very few companies are as innovative and as creative as Google. While they have enjoyed phenominal growth and profit over the past five years. If anyone has the power, knowledge, resources and technology to stay on top it is Google.
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enquiro research
