Google techologies
Google, branding, and the beauty of zero
Aug 13th
If you were in a discount shoe store and saw a beautiful new pair of Nike tennis shoes on sale for $11.99, how would you react?
If you’re like me, you would conclude something is wrong with the shoes! Nike has spent millions to groom and nurture their brand and cutting the price only diminishes their premium image.
So what would you think of the brand image of a product that has a price of ZERO?
This was the subject matter of a little “twit-à-tête” between myself, my friend Steve Dodd, and a few others on Twitter yesterday. I had suggested in my last blog post that small businesses need a free, cross-platform social media metrics dashboard.
That started a round-robin of tweets (yes, pun was intentional) regarding why it had to be free and the impact that price would have on brand equity. Steve’s comment was: “Why should comprehensive measurement tools be free? In my opinion, if they are monetized other ways, their credibility tanks.”
Steve is a keen intellect and when he speaks, I listen. Certainly using my Nike example as a model, he’s absolutely right.
But then I thought about the revolutionary, brand powerhouses like Google, Facebook and YouTube. For you and me, the price of their products is zero, yet they have convincingly nurtured an extremely strong brand in the mind of consumers.
Consumer products in the same price range as Google would be a paper towel in a public restroom, a salt packet at McDonald’s and a toothpick. Think about THAT as a weird business model!
Can you think of another example in history where a company carved out a premium product image (like Google) with a price of nothing? Have we entered a new era of marketing where, in some cases, a brand image can be completely disconnected from price?
Google Wave changes the game for small business
May 29th
There were a couple important new technology releases this week but the most significant for the small business owner is Google Wave. Why? This platform provides a powerful communication and collaboration tool you can use with internal and external stakeholders for FREE.
Google Wave brings together email, chat, photo/document sharing, and many collaborative features that would be very useful to a business on a shoestring budget. It opens the door to business channels that major companies are paying millions of dollars to achieve with expensive enterprise software solutions.
Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave.
That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.
Here is a worthwhile summary: http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-guide/
This technology could be so far-reaching and important I’ll turn to the commentary of an industry expert. This commentary comes from industry analyst Jeremiah Owyang and his blog Internet Strategist:
- Google Wave is about bringing together the Web 2.0 lifestyle to become a workstyle.
Google’s apporach is significant because it will enter the workforce without having to go through IT management. This undercuts players like Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and SAP as it grows from the groundup –another groundswell like google docs and yammer. - This also impacts Cisco, Webex and Webex connect who is also trying to try new delivery models to the enterprise.
- Existing smaller collaboration vendors and community platform vendors with enterprise focus will be part of the developer ecosystem and can extend their features to the Wave platform.
- Google is pushing real time collaboration, and traditional email is asynchronous, yet don’t expect everyone to be interacting in real time, all the time.
- This is a missed opportunity for LinkedIn who launched their platform but has not exploited as they’ve only hand selected a few partners.
It’s midnight. Do you know where your ad is?
May 11th
I love history and was scanning a website about Medieval Europe when I noticed this ad for Bob Evans family restaurants … embedded in the middle of an article about the Black Plague, the most devastating disease in history. I wondered … was this to introduce their new farm-fresh “plague on a plate” value meal? Hey, can I have some ketchup with that?
Obviously this is a disastrous placement for the restaurant and it made me wonder … how did it get there in the first place? And if I were the marketing manager for Bob Evans, what could have been done to prevent it? I sought the opinions of some trusted professionals:
Ludmila Zadayannaya is a marketing manager for Russia’s Ekodar and had this to say: “The advertisment was placed through some service, such as Google AdWords. The advertisers chose an option of CONTENT TARGETING in the advertising network without specifying places.
“In this case they could not control the location of their ad at the page … somehow the key words for the ad agreed with the key words of this website, or before visiting this website, you had searched for something connected with restaurants/ food/ Bob Evans, etc. … as a result, the advertising system ‘decided’ that the ad about Bob Evans restaurant would be relevant to the content of the page or to your previous search request, and it showed the ad to you. The fact that the ad is shown in the middle of the text about the Black Plague is entirely the fault of the site owner.”
Stephen Rowe of Dirextion adds this comment: “It really depends on what type of a campaign Bob Evans was running. By that I mean, was it run of site, run of network, behavioral targeting, etc. The reality is that no matter what type of campaign that they ran, if the campaign was not managed correctly, this type of thing will happen. That is why the agency needs to speak with their service providers to determine the potential pitfalls of any particular buy.
“Further, it is one of the pitfalls of relying entirely on the optimization programs without human interaction. Advertising is a business of nuance, and to date I have never seen the level of nuance in a computer program that a human being has. It all goes back to Advertising 101, The right message in the right place at the right time. When someone develops the program to do that, then we can plug into the program and not worry about monitoring it.”
Thanks to Stephen and Ludmilla for these insights! With the inherent danger of having your ads run in the wrong places, how would you ever know unless it shows up in a blog like this? You probably wouldn’t. One way I try to prevent this happening for my clients is that I rarely choose the “content” option. This way I have much more control over the keywords associated with the advertisement.
Improve your Google-self
Apr 22nd
Whatever shows up on Google is the permanent public record of your life … until now. Here’s a chance to not let your past public indiscretions completely define your online personal brand!
Yesterday, Google released a new product called Google Me. If you simply enter the word “me” in the Google search bar, you’ll be given an opportunity to establish a profile on YOUR terms and contribute to your online identity.
The easy set-up includes a chance for a short bio, interests, personal information and your website address. However, it does NOT cleanse your search results in any way. Your new “profile” probably won’t even be the lead search result, but it does give you a chance to tell your story YOUR way! It’s the Burger King of apps.
As a service to you, gentle reader, I made myself a guinea pig and tested this service on day one. I googled myself today and the new profile made the first page of results at number 10, squeezed between a different Mark Schaefer in Knoxville and a real estate transfer from last year. It’s the only one with a picture in the search results.
The only downside I can see — the more info you submit in your profile, the more Google is collecting about you, which will allow more targeted ads, etc. I chose to be pretty sparse with my bio information at this point — none of the fields are “required.”
Go forth and set the record straight for future generations!
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