The 10 People Google Will Meet in Hell
Who hates Google? Well, it turns out, quite a lot of folks. It’s a testament to the incredible power of their brand that Google’s reputation is still so stellar, considering the number of groups that are already pissed off at Google.
Here’s a list of ten companies/organizations/groups (upgraded from my previous list of just eight!)that are now ‘at war’ with Google. Each of these is linked to an article supporting the claim!
- Apple
- Microsoft
- eBay
- China
- Newspapers
- Book Publishers
- Radio Stations
- Advertisers
- Web Publishers
- The US Government!
- Bonus! Consumers
That’s a lot of angry people. Of course, there are still billions who love all-things-Google. It will be interesting to see, however, if the collective angst of the above Google foes will eventually find its way into the mainstream.
Buh Bye Blogger!
You would think that blogging software owned and operated by Google would be the default standard for the blogging community. You’d be wrong. Simply put, blogger has less features, poorer SEO, and even worse in-sight search than WordPress. It’s shocking but WordPress just blows away blogger.
So with that in mind, welcome to the new Blogation. You’ll quickly see that the in-sight search functionality works, as do the categories, and the overall usability is much better. Oh, and you can type blogation.net or www.blogation.net, or even http://www.blogation.net and *all* of them will work!
I’ll be playing with the design over the coming weeks, and I’ve got to figure out the RSS feed migration as well. If you’ve got any ideas or suggestions, let me know!
MSN AdCenter – Where Usability Goes to Die
Ugh – you want to know why you are so behind AdWords, team MSN? Let’s start with your absolutely horrid usability. I got an email stating that some keywords and/or ad text was disapproved. I clicked on the message setting in the UI and got this completely useless information (account ID blacked out):
Notice that the message doesn’t tell you which keywords (and/or ad text) was disapproved – you are left to your own devices to hunt through the UI and find the disapprovals. But wait – it gets better – there’ s no report that will show you disapproved data, which means that you have to go through each campaign – one by one – to find the disapprovals. So if you have a couple of hundred campaigns, get ready for a full day of “find the disapproval.”
Rule #1 when it comes to all things paid search: JUST COPY ADWORDS AND YOU WILL BE OK!
Rule #2: Don’t have engineers design your UI.
God help the new MSN/YSM – they need it.
This AdSense Ad Proves that Crime Does Pay Pretty Well It Turns Out
Customer Service in a Rude, Anonymous World
Today I went to Whole Foods to shop for dinner. I love Whole Foods, so much so that I am a proud shareholder (and a not-so-proud investor, who bought the stock at $65). I was pushing a heavy cart of groceries through the store, my son perched in the child seat, and as I came to an intersection between aisles, a Whole Food employee was coming at me in the other direction – there was only room for one of us to make it by. Without missing a beat, he kept on walking, blocking my way and forcing me to wait for him to pass.
This sort of stuff happens so frequently in our society today, that many of you may be wondering why it is even worth noting. I fundamentally believe, however, that tiny acts of rudeness like this can be killers for businesses. I’m sure that this employee had somewhere to go – he may in fact have been on his way to help another customer – but that’s not an excuse. From my perspective, this was a case of an employee in a service business not being polite to a paying customer.
As I said, this is pretty commonplace these days. Employees talking to each other while customers wait, or perhaps talking on their cell phone, giving directions in a store by pointing in the general vicinity rather than walking you to your destination, and generally showing indifference or indignance (is that a word?) to customer complaints. Service is at a premium, so much so that often the most basic customer support amazes us.
I started an SEM agency in 2008 and I’m doing my best to provide my clients bona fide good customer service. In the last year or so, my job has become even more challenging as I’ve started to hire team members. So with that in mind (and I will be sending this to my team members to read . . .) here’s my best practices in SEM consulting customer service.
- The customer is always right, unless he’s wrong, but even then, he still may be right. Every client has different needs and different objectives. As a consultant, it’s important to understand these objectives, but also to question them. Clients occasionally make requests that go against SEM best practices. A consultant needs to bring this up to the client and help them understand the consequences of their decision. If the client still wants to move forward with the original plan, you have to accept this decision. The customer is right, unless he’s wrong, but if he insists he’s still right, he’s right.
- In a connected world, response time matters, all the time. We all have cell phones and Internet connection at home, so unless we are sleeping or in a movie theater, we’re always available. If a client sends an email or phone call, assess the urgency of the message. Urgent messages should be returned immediately, or within an hour, during the week, and within a few hours on the weekend. Less urgent messages should be returned within a few hours during the week, and by end of day on the weekend. SEM spend doesn’t stop on Saturdays and Sundays – good customer service demands that SEM consultants are paying attention whenever a client’s money is being spent.
- Admit – and compensate – for mistakes. We all make mistakes and sometimes those mistakes cost clients money. Admitting a mistake is important, but I also believe in giving clients credit for our mistakes. In one case last year, my team made a $10,000 over-spend for a client and I compensated the client the full $10K. It hurts to lose that kind of money (I was in Las Vegas at the time, so it made my casino losses seem more manageable), but if you promise to provide a service to a client and you fail to deliver on your promise, you need to take ownership.
- Every customer is the most important customer. If you accept a company as your client, they are your most important customer. Even if you have one client paying you $500 and another paying you $10,000, once you sign a contract with a customer, you are promising to give them the absolute best service, and there is no clause in the contract (at least in my contracts) that states that lower revenue clients will be given less respect than the biggest ones.
- Don’t work with jerks, they’ll turn you into jerks. You can’t give good customer service to jerks, because they will never be satisfied no matter what you do. And you’ll get frustrated and you’ll probably become a jerk yourself. Jerks ruin customer service for everyone.
- The little things matter, a lot. That Whole Foods employee who cut me off today might well be the nicest, most helpful person in the Whole Foods organization, but his tiny decision not to give way to a customer has resulted in an entire blog post discussing a bad experience at Whole Foods (but, please, as I mentioned, keep going there and buy lots of their stock!). Customer service is not about giving someone a fruit basket during the holiday season or answering the phone with a friendly “good afternoon”; its a state of mind, an ongoing quest to delight every customer every day.
I know I have yet to perfect my customer service. This post is most definitely an “aspirational” one because I don’t always deliver the level of service I describe above. But I work on it every day, and I try to instill this same ethic in my team members. And I do believe that simply thinking about customer service every day – making it a part of your identity as my friend Stacy would say, is the way to move down the right path.
Quantifying Brand and Giving Branding Credit to PPC
I had an interesting call with a potential client last month. The company was selling a new consumer technology and the CEO wanted to know whether I thought there was an opportunity market their product on PPC. I started to explain how consumer electronics are marketed through AdWords when the CMO joined the call. The CMO, it turned out, was an old-school brand marketer. The conversation went something like this:
David: If you have a ‘new mousetrap’ type of product, you need to think about advertising on the Google Content Network – it’s a great place to engage users before they even know that they need your product. I think of GCN as a “demand creation” platform, whereas Google Search is more of a “demand fulfillment” medium.CMO: Do you know approximately what percentage of sales comes from direct marketing for manufacturers?
David: I have no idea.
CMO: 7%!
David: OK.
CMO: So the point is, we shouldn’t waste any of our time on PPC because that’s not how you sell products.
David: Do you think you can hit your profit objectives simply through branding?
CMO: Yes, absolutely.
David: OK, go for it.
And that was the end of the conversation. My rule of thumb with new clients is that I never try to “sell” them on the concept of paid search marketing. If they haven’t already bought into the concept, I don’t have the time to educate them on the benefits. And this CMO was clearly part of the flat-earth society when it came to PPC, so there was no point arguing with him.
But the idea that he could actually hit his ROI metrics solely through branding did get me thinking a bit. I’m quite skeptical of most branding campaigns, simply because I suspect that most brand marketers can’t really quantify the ROI of the branding. But this CMO was confident that his branding would be ROI positive, and I can only assume that meant he had some clear metrics in place that would support that thesis.
If that’s the case, its hard to argue with his approach. He knows branding, and he knows how to measure branding, so why should he invest money in a medium he doesn’t understand if he can hit his metrics through his bread and butter approach?
I thought about it a little more, however, and realized that the CMO was missing one other crucial point: PPC can also drive branding and can often be the “last mile” that drives a conversion from branding. Let’s say you spend $1 million on a Super Bowl ad promoting your new “Gizmo Technology.” A day after the Super Bowl, people do a search on Google for your technology and all they see is ads for your competitors. Your branding may have just created a boon for your PPC-savvy competition! I actually saw this phenomenon at work in the mortgage business. When a competitor ran a front page promotion on Yahoo or another huge media buy, we would see an increase in conversions from our paid search!
On top of that, on AdWords and GCN, you can drive millions and often billions of impressions for pennies. I had a client that got more than one billion impressions at a CPM of less than $.10. That’s a lot of eyeballs for a little cost. The next generation is going to spend more time on the computer than they will watching TV or listening to the radio. If you aren’t placing your brand front-and-center on Google and Facebook, you are probably missing the biggest mass medium opportunity there is.
So I’m not against branding per se, and I am impressed by anyone who can measure the impact of their branding dollars. But branders have to meet us direct marketers half-way and acknowledge that PPC can and should be a significant component of their branding campaigns. Relying on branding alone in an Internet age just won’t cut it anymore.
I *Still* Don’t Get Twitter
What’s the value of Twitter? As I see it, there are a few use cases:
1. It’s a real-time search engine. News spreads quickly as people retweet stories, and you can ask a question in Twitter and often get rapid-fire responses.
2. It’s a marketing vehicle. Businesses can tweet a promotion and see it virally re-tweeted across thousands or millions of tweeters.
3. It’s a way to keep up with friends. You get snippets of info from friends and colleagues that require little to no effort to read or to write.
All this is well and good uses. My concern is that they aren’t really sustainable use cases. For example, as a marketing vehicle, I think it will be hard to keep Twitter from becoming a giant spam honey pot. Right now people actually respond to some marketing tweets. A few years from now, after the novelty has worn off, the click-through rate (CTR) on Twitter marketing messages will plummet the same way we’ve seen CTR plummet on email and banner ads. And spammers will enter Twitter in droves and try to deluge all of us with spam tweets.
You can argue that email and banner ads are still big business, and I agree. But let’s make one thing clear about both email and banners – both of them monetize a useful technology – in the case of email marketing, it works because people use email, and banners are effective because people read Web content. So Twitter marketing will only work if there is a primary usage to Twitter beyond just marketing. If Twitter becomes inundated with marketers and spammers shouting at users, the utility of the tool is diminished. So for Twitter to build a long-term use case, the marketing has to be ancillary to a primary usage.
What about keeping up with friends? I find this argument to be weak. Compared to Facebook, the functionality of Twitter is limited. Facebook is a rich medium to share thoughts, photos, videos, and interests with friends – Twitter is 140 words and a cloud of dust. I think a lot of people use Twitter right now out of novelty, but ultimately (unless something changes), I think people will return to Facebook as their primary medium for communication with friends.
So that leaves us with ‘real time search’ or ‘information discovery.’ Word does travel fast on Twitter. There’s value there. But the value ultimately is at a “meta” level. By that, I mean that it really doesn’t matter if you or me or another friend of mine tweets about a specific story, what matters is that there is an overall surge of activity around a particular story, link, phrase, etc. You can think of Twitter as a human directory of news. When millions of people are tweeting and retweeting information, the aggregation of those individuals becomes a powerful way to deliver real-time news.
That’s interesting as a concept, but there are some problems. First off, if Twitter ultimately becomes a “wisdom of the crowds” news service, how is it really different that Digg or other similar services? Secondly, if and when ‘real time news discovery’ via Twitter becomes a meaningful channel of information, it is subject to manipulation. Just as Digg and other human-powered sites have ended up being manipulated by heavy users or outright optimizers. Digg’s solution to this problem – build an algorithm to impact the results. But once you build an algorithm, you start to lose the original purpose of your tool – the human-powered results.
So there you have it – its a bad excuse for Facebook, the marketing component will be abused by spammers, and the discovery component will become a victim of its own success. I still just don’t understand how Twitter will be a major player two years from now!
Google is to Angel Investing What Amazon is to Private Equity
For those of you not in Silicon Valley, to understand this column, you have to understand the terminology of venture capital investing. Broadly speaking, there are three types of venture-based investments in start-ups:
- Angel investing: typically made by individuals or small firms, angels invest in companies based on an idea, a team, or a demo. The risk is very high but the return (when there is one, is astronomical). The amount an angel invests ranges from as ‘little’ as $25,000 and up to $1 million or slightly more;
- Venture capital: Professional firms of venture capitalists make investments in new companies that are a little further along the path to success than an angel investment. This can mean that the company already has released a product, or has clients, or is actually profitable. Venture capital firms usually invest at least $1 million and will sometimes invest $15 to $20 million in a company.
- Private equity: Private equity firms invest large amounts of money in established companies. The expectation is lower returns but lower risk. Private equity companies are usually looking to put anywhere from $10 million to $100 million or more into a company.
I’m sure my friends in the venture community will disagree here and there with my categorization, but hopefully everyone will agree that this is ‘directionally’ correct.
When I say that Google is like an angel, then, what I mean is that Google makes a lot of small bets and expects some of these to succeed but many of these to fail. Think of all the Google product releases in the last few years (I am not going to attempt to list all of them). Some of these releases have had great adoption in the market, others have failed miserably and quickly faded into obscurity. To quote a college friend of mine referencing his dating strategy, ‘if you swing at the ball enough times, eventually you’ll get a hit.’ That seems to be the Google M.O.
Now compare that to the way Amazon releases products. Amazon releases very few new products. Over the last few years, the things that come to mind for me are Kindle, Mechanical Turk, Cloud Hosting, and Warehouse/Inventory management. Amazon’s success rate for their product releases seems much higher than Google’s, but of course they also release many fewer products.
If you agree with my analogy, the next question to ask is this: which strategy is better? My sense is that Amazon has the proper strategy. If you look at Amazon’s product releases, they are all interconnected to Amazon’s core businesses. Kindle obviously works well with Amazon’s book selling, and the various AWS products all help merchants to better integrate their products and services with the Amazon Marketplace. Google, on the other hand, has products that often seem hard to reconcile with their core businesses. Corporate email (Google Apps), Nexus One (cell phone), Chrome (browser) – yes you can certainly make arguments that they will eventually help Google sell ads, but its hard to see how all of this together is part of a grand scheme.
The irony here, is that this is the very same disjointed “attack all opportunities” approach that gave Google the chance to dethrone Yahoo; Yahoo was far too willing to cede search to Google and focus on email, media, job boards, and a variety of other distractions. Amazon is driven by one goal – be the best at ecommerce. Google has so many projects going at once, that they appear to have released two mobile phones – the Android and Nexus One!
There are plenty of angel investors who have done very well financially – just ask Google’s original angel, Ron Conway (known as the “godfather of Silicon Valley” for his role in so many successful start-ups). Angel investing, no doubt, is ’sexier’ than private equity and is probably more an adrenaline rush to boot. At the end of the day, however, the short-term rush of many small victories is no match for a calculated, long-term strategy.
Nexus One, or More to the Point, Nexus $1
I see three possible downsides to Google’s launch of the Nexus One phone.
First, they risk pissing off their cell phone partners who have been pushing “Droid.” They seem to have come to some sort of agreement with these partners – for now – but surely there is some behind-the-scenes anger from HTC, T-Mobile, etc.
Second, Nexus One is not search related, nor is it about “organizing the world’s information”, unless you consider your phone’s address book to be part of that mission. The farther Google moves away from their core competency, the more diluted they become as a business.
But thirdly, and perhaps most importantly – and I think this has been lost on most pundits covering this story – is the fact that this is the first time that Google is directly selling something to consumers. The ‘droid was “powered by Google” which meant that if it broke, you complained to T-Mobile. The Nexus One, however, is sold directly by Google. That’s a big difference.
It’s one thing to get questionable search results on Google.com, or to have an over-zealous Spam filter on Gmail, or to get bad directions from Google maps – these are all free and consumers understand that ‘you get what you pay for.’ But now that Google is actually making money directly from consumers, the game changes. If something goes wrong with Nexus One – say a major bug – consumers will direct their ire at Google. The invincible Google brand could be at stake here.
Of course, if Google succeeds with Nexus One, this could also be a stepping stone for many more direct-to-consumer paid products, like laptops or SaaS solutions (I’m thinking TurboTax and of course any Office product). Google does need to diversify away from search revenue after all.
Intelius, Not So Intelligent
Type in virtually any first and last name into Google and you’ll almost certainly see an AdWords placement from Intelius with the alluring headline “We found [David Rodnitzky].” You are then sent to page where you can pay money to get information about this person, though I’m not entirely sure how accurate this info is, since this is clearly an auto-generated ad.
Today, however, I saw an Intelius ad that didn’t quite hit the mark, though it did hit the “Mac.” See below:
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