Is closing Labs an admission that Google has made crap products?

Google have announced they are closing “Google Labs”, a play pen area of the business where lots of whacky stuff has been piloted over the years. Google’s announcement frames this in the context of putting “more wood behind fewer arrows”.

My feelings towards Google probably reflect those of the minority of the population that have worked in an industry which Google directly affected. 

Twelve years ago, I remember sitting with a Norwegian programmer in Singapore when he showed me the Google website for the first time, and I was full of “Jeez, another search engine? Who cares?” Of course, Google’s results were so much better than anyone else’s that very soon, I did care, and I have probably used Google almost every day of life since. Incredible results, free, friendly. “How great is Google”, I thought.

About five years ago, I joined a middling sized UK internet business that was storming ahead. Mainly, we compared bespoke car insurance quotes for customers and got a commission every time somebody bought a policy. We also compared other financial products, like credit cards, mortgages and so on. In various roles, I ran online marketing and product development for our business. It was here that my love affair with the big G started to wane.

As a marketer, I quickly learnt just how terribly powerful Google was. We invested tens of millions of pounds in television advertising building our brand, but all of this meant almost squat if Google’s search algorithm pushed us off the first page of results. We’d spend half a million or a million a month on Google advertising, and struggle to compete with competitors whose brands and business were weaker than ours but seemed to know something we didn’t about how the whole “Google thing” worked. Thus, like so many other people entering digital marketing in the past decade, began my never ending quest to “master Google” and stop my business getting creamed.

So, Google went from “how great are they” to another part of my mind, the “Woah, this thing is dangerous” part.

Google lost it’s warm, fuzzy feeling when it started feeling like it was sucking money out of us. But I still had respect for what looked like an awesome operation. Billions of pages of data served up every day! A reputation for innovation! And the fabled “half day a week” given over to people to work on their own experimental projects? AMAZING.

But over the years, Google lost that shine too. Google rolled out a few products that to me seemed, well, ropey. Even the successes. 

When Google showed up, Ask Jeeves looked like toast instantly – but when Google Docs showed up, it looked like something some engineers had hacked together over a weekend, and I went running back to beautiful Microsoft.

Gmail was ground breaking when it came out – promising gigabytes of free storage to every user – it was unbelievable. But then, you try the interface, which has panes you scroll in within other windows that scroll, and emails that bunch together in conversations in ways that just seem to bemuse and perplex… When Apple threw out the iPhone, every menu interface demonstrated how to do what Google had tried.

And Android… Yes, there are 500,000 new Android devices activated every day. But so much of that user experience is weak. For instance: Want to buy some apps on Android? The search function is horrendous. (The “Search” function - …?)

Google’s combination of “threatening menace” and “bad product design” really came to a head for me when they purchased a fourth-tier competitor of ours who had really terrible products for nearly £40m. It crystallised how dangerous the big G was and at the same time confirmed they wouldn’t know what a good user experience was if it fell out of the sky, landed on their face and started to wriggle.

And that’s a repeating pattern. Although I still respect (and fear) Google, I’m left with the impression that most of what they’ve produced for a long time has been flawed. And flawed in big enough ways that actually, it’s fair to say that a lot of the end products have been, well, crap.

And conspicuous by absence are the amazing innovations we haven’t seen. Facebook blindsided Google. Then online advertising was shot to pieces when Groupon turned up and started getting small businesses to go online. Worst of all, “search” hasn’t actually really changed. It’s still a list of text results. There’s no sense of grouping or semantics. You can’t search the audio within a video file for something someone says… Put another way, shouldn’t we have a “minority report” interface by now?  

How did the mighty $200-billion-dollar Google miss all this?

Until recently, I thought there were very few people thinking this way. When I gripe about Google stuff being flawed or lame, most people outside of digital marketing just shrug. “Well don’t use it” they say. Right, I don’t – but that’s not the point. The point is: How can such a potentially amazing, super-resourced company be squeaking out bad stuff? Again, most people shrug.

Except I wonder now if things are changing. Original co-founder, Sergey Brin, is now in the CEO’s seat. This “more wood behind fewer arrows” drive seems to me to be an admission that as a company there have been too many projects that don’t live up to their potential. And too many scattered little projects which probably shouldn’t exist at all (E.g. A Chrome Operating System for PCs AND an Android operating system for phones and tablets?).

Google still frighten me, but maybe they’ll start compensating for the terror by producing great stuff again.

20 million people unsure what to wear

20 million people are now using Google+ and about all of them are trying to figure out what it is for and whether it will likely turn out to be a big success, or whether this will turn out to another “Google Wave” moment.

+Tom Anderson, the founder of MySpace (remember Tom? We were all friends with Tom once),reckons the big difference is going to be in how much control Google lets people keep.Although Facebook offers a system of “lists” to allow people to sort out who they share information with, it hasn’t really taken off. By default, most Facebook users see a select subset of information in their friend-stream selected by a Facebook algorithm, called “EdgeRank”. By contrast, Google have made “Circles” the centrepiece of Plus, making it far easier to selectively share information with friends and view data from larger numbers of people. Tom reckons that if Google leave this control in the hands of users, they will prevail.

CNN reckoned features aside, we’d all switch to Google+ as a way to “reboot” our social networksand ditch some of the losers we’d accidentally befriended over the years. Like moving from high school to college, it’s a chance to reinvent yourself and grow a whole new ego.

For those looking for fame, +Robert Scoble, a dude at server farm Rackspace, thinks Plus has already killed Twitter because it’s copied the “follower” thing whilst throwing in prettier pictures. Twitter is stuck in a world where updates are 140 characters long and anything you broadcast must be sent to every one of your followers. Google+ allows a stranger to “follow” anyone else without sending friend requests, which makes the system similar to Twitter’s default setting already. But using Google+, authors’ posts can include text, video, images and anything else. And more like a blog, posts can attract comments – meaning authors can get straight feedback on what’s working and what’s not. End result – Twitter needs to become a lot more like Google+ or it’s game over.

Much less commented on is the impact that Google+ is likely to have on the other big social network, LinkedIn. Sharon Machlis points out things have gotten out of hand on LinkedIn. Once upon a time, people would only connect with people they really knew and respected, making introductions via friends a valuable commodity. Now people act in a Twitter-like way amassing connections like a status symbol, and the value of introductions is all but gone. So TheNextWebmight be on to something when they say “Google+ … may actually lend itself better to the professional social world than to the consumer one”. Although LinkedIn has 100m users, it hasn’t done anything new since 2003. And with Google+ profiles publicly visible on Google and pretty much containing a complete education and work biography, the advantage of LinkedIn looks less and less obvious.

Most of this commentary is pretty positive for Google+. So why have Google apparently got things right this time, when they didn’t in the past? +Gina Trapani, co-founder of Life Hacker, argues that Google learnt a few lessons from their failures with Google Wave and Google Buzz, the supposed replacements for email and Twitter that Google released over the past couple of years. They’ve integrated the whole thing with email notifications, invested in serious field testing in advance, and they’ve focused on building a product that human beings can use rather than something that developers find exciting.

Personally, whilst all of these points of view are really interesting, I’m still struggling to understand what role Google+ plays in my life. Should this mini-article post go straight into Plus, or on to a blog, for instance? And who should I legitimately share it with on Plus? How do I know what other people want me to share with them? This is kind of like the digital equivalent of not knowing what clothes to wear to a party. Do you turn up in a dinner jacket and black tie just to find everyone in jeans and T-Shirt? Looking at how people I know are using Google+ at the moment, people are going for “middle of road” communications that are not very personal and too business-like – the equivalent of rocking up the party in a jeans-and-suit-jacket combo? Acceptable in most circumstances, but somehow unsatisfying. 

Matt Hunter

Future of SEO: Links don’t matter – people do

Search is advancing rapidly. In recent months we’ve seen some significant changes in how search engines rank content. The link profile of websites is becoming less important, and social data matters more and more. According to a recent survey of search experts by SEOMoz, social interactions, Facebook “Likes” and the volume of people hitting a site may be more important for how a site ranks than is the actual content on the site. 

Commentator Steve Olenski recently drew some of the connections between other developments. Google search results are now not only personalised to logged-in users, but also take account of the people in the users social circle, favouring content that friends and people followed on Twitter may have mentioned or recommended. A recent Wharton seminar tried to coin the term “Web 3.0” to describe the change: a shift from an internet of data to an internet about people.

SEO is dead?

If “old” factors such as the links pointing at a website are becoming less important and search results are being determined more by how people interact online, what is the future for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) companies and experts?

Some people claim “SEO is dead”. All the old techniques to game the system no longer work, or have such a short shelf live they aren’t worth chasing. Building a high-ranking website today is only possible using a range of “white hat” tactics –add great content, cultivate great user communities, build great products - that have more to do with running a great business than they do exploiting Google per se.  If you believe this line of reasoning, search experts who used to conduct link building and content building campaigns with great bravado should really just step aside and let social media, PR and product development experts run the show.

Same game, different pieces

But I have another view. SEO isn’t dead, it just needs updating. If search engine rankings are increasingly determined by people rather than links, SEO techniques need to follow. Here are the big differences in mindset between “link SEO” and “people SEO”. The two main ideas are:

1.      Attract social interactions – not links
In the old world, links to websites were a proxy for votes from people. Today, people vote directly using “Likes, “+1s” and “Tweets”; and the amount of time spent on site. The job of SEOs will change from acquiring links to acquiring Social interactions.

2.      PeopleRank, not PageRank
Google used to calculate the importance of a website based on the number of inbound links and the importance of the sites they came from (PageRank). Now, Google monitors the authority of individuals using and talking about a site and determines their social importance based on their own followings (PeopleRank).

Not link farms – people farms

• Once these basic rules are understood, old ideas can be updated for the new world. The most interesting idea is the “people farm”: a resource of millions of virtual users that an SEO can call upon to generate +1s and Likes and Page Impressions, driving sites up in search rankings.

• In the old days, SEO developers would create “link farms” and “link wheels” with links mutually reinforcing one another. In the new era, SEOs will build communities of “virtual users” to fake social interactions en masse.
  
• Whereas link farms required SEOs to develop lots of different web properties, “people farms” will require SEOs to install spam-bot applications on millions of home PCs, controlled using centralised servers or peer-to-peer strategies.
  
• Whereas link farms had to be disguised by adding links to properties outside of the spam network, “virtual users” will disguise themselves by surfing regular websites and even interacting with real human users
  
• SEOs used to try to buy a mix of links of different PageRanks to ensure a natural looking link profile on a website. Now, SEOs will need to ensure they gain a range of users (real and virtual) with different levels of PeopleRank

·         Google used to track the speed with which links were acquired to gauge whether they were natural or not. Today, the pace with which sites attract +1s and Like will be a sign of natural or forced growth.

Other techniques have their “people”-SEO equivalent. Whereas once SEOs purchased links from high PageRank sites, now they might purchase Tweets from high PeopleRank celebrities. (see http://Adl.y for an example in action)

Can people-based SEO really work?

Cultivating fake social interactions with “people farms” and celebrity endorsements won’t be a total answer. Until now, ranking content based on links and the votes of millions of web users has relied upon the “wisdom of crowds”.  People farms follow in this tradition. However, as Google personalises search to the individual and the interactions and tastes of each individual’s community become key in governing their personal results, Google are leaving “crowds” behind and embracing the “wisdom of friends”.  

The next challenge for black hat SEO therefore is just to infiltrate Google with virtual users who can spoof millions of votes, but to infiltrate the friendship circles of every individual user…

A spy in every Facebook and Google + account? Impossible?

Time will tell.

External links:

SEOMoz on social in search
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/social-annotations-in-search-now-your-social-network-rankings

Steve Olenski
http://ht.ly/1dN8Ht

Ad.ly on paid-for Tweets:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/13/ad-ly-in-play-as-social-sites-look-for-celebrity-connections/

Wharton on Web 3.0:
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2808

Fine line between extortion and reputation management

An emerging new breed of firms seem to specialise in creating bad content about people and businesses online and then charging to help the problem disappear.

If you are worried about dodgy office party photos or other misdemeanours appearing in Google search results for your name, you can hire an online reputation management company to try and remove the evidence.

But reputation management often looks a lot like an old fashioned mafia protection racket.

Old school bad guys
In the old days, you’d get a knock on the door and some friendly if rather large gentlemen would come in and suggest you might want to pay some insurance money to keep bad elements away from your home or business.

Digital bad guys
Today, you’re likely to get an email from a reputation management firm, informing you that your good name is currently being attacked on a consumer complaints website which ranks highly in Google. “Would you like to get this removed? That’ll just be a few thousand dollars up front, and maybe a few hundred a month forever”. What’s more suspicious – the reputation management firm is affiliated to the site hosting the offensive content.

Sounds ridiculous? This is the scenario described by a large number of people aggrieved with the consumer complaint website “Rip Off Report”.

Rip Off Report are a fairly typical Web 2.0 company, hosting comments from members of the public. However, in an untypical fashion, many business owners and individuals find themselves facing hateful, bile-filled comments in the user section, which many feel amounts to slander. And as Rip Off Report use some quite aggressive search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques, these damaging comments appear prominently in Google.

The law protects publishers such as Rip off Report so that charges of defamation won’t stick. Under US law (Communications Decency Act Section 230), publishers are not responsible for the comments posted by users on their sites. Hosting allegedly libellous content is not a crime.

To have content removed, plaintiffs need to obtain a court order to force a publisher to hand over web logs, so that they can identify the person who first posted the content. Then they need to successfully prosecute the individual for defamation, and obtain a second court order ordering the take down of the libellous content by the publisher.

Even after all this, the plaintiff may find that the libellous content has spread, being repeated on other sites. At this point things get even worse from a legal perspective. Thanks to another recent interpretation of Section 230 (Barrett Vs Rosenthal), the re-publication of data online is all but immune from prosecution, unless it breaches intellectual copyright or federal law.

Rip Off Report’s track record in court makes it pretty clear that their actions don’t break the letter of the law. So if the law can’t help, what can people do?

There are really only 3 options.

#1 Hire the guys who made the problem to solve it
Rip Off Report offer conciliation services, for a fee. These offer to help broker a peace between the member of the public who posted a comment on the site and the aggrieved party. For a greater fee, there is a “corporate advisory programme” which offers to help turn the whole episode into a positive (somehow).

If the idea of paying Rip Off Report to make the problem they facilitate go away leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, there are other options.

#2 Try to talk down your critics
Sites such as Rip Off Report grant a (limited) right to reply on site. This isn’t always a great idea. Your reaction can start a dialogue, attracting other people to post. As more people post to a thread, it’s more likely to rank prominently in a search engine, starting a horrible doom loop.

#3 Hire an online reputation management or search optimisation firm to help
Professionals like probably suggest the best way to get the negative comments off the front page of Google is to create lots more positive content about you or your brand and push this to the top of the rankings instead. For a fee, expect them to create biographies, YouTube videos, blogs and microsites aimed to take over the search term you care about. Success is hit-or-miss: No one can guarantee getting to the top of Google.

A note of caution:  there appear to be business connections between several online reputation management firms and sites such as Rip Off Report. If you go to an independent-looking firm, check over their website for tell-tale signs that they may be cosy with the opposition (Hosting Hyperlinks to RipOffReport.com are a dead giveaway).

The industry isn’t all bad
Rip Off Report’s business model might not be illegal, but it certainly leaves people with a bad taste in their mouths. In defence of the reputation management industry, it should be noted that most firms offer much simpler services are not engaged in playing both gamekeeper and poacher. 

Finally:  What goes around, comes around

For a slight sense of justice and some more perspective, you can read some of the (potentially libellous) allegations made against Rip Off Report directly on another, competing complaints website – ComplaintsBoard.com.

Matt Hunter

Blood diamonds threaten industry reputation again

“Blood diamonds” are once again threatening the reputation of the entire diamond industry, as diamonds from Zimbabwe are being allowed back on to the market.

In the late 90s, diamonds started to get a bad name due to their connections with conflicts around the world. Civil wars in Sierra Leone, Angola and Liberia were fuelled by the profits earned running mines with forced (slave) labour. With billions of dollars at stake, diamonds seemed to become the very cause of civil wars. In Angola, Private Military Companies (mercenaries) from South Africa such as the now-defunct group “Executive Outcomes” were rumoured to be fighting for diamond commissions (a scenario later dramatized in the Hollywood movie, “Blood Diamond”)

In an effort to save the industry’s reputation, world diamond producers and governments agreed to ban sales from conflict area and established the “Kimberly Process” to help make this happen. The Kimberly Process establishes a paper trail for each diamond, from the mine it is found at to the finger it eventually adorns, proving its origin and assuring the buyer that it is not a conflict diamond.

Since 2002, the Kimberly Process has helped take conflict diamonds off the market, reduce human rights abuses in developing countries and protect the reputation and value of diamonds.

All of these achievements are currently under threat. The chairman of the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme has unilaterally decided to allow sales from Zimbabwe’s Marange diamond fields. These fields have allegedly recently been the scene of the massacre of 200 civilians. Revenue from the fields – worth up to 15% of Zimbabwe’s GDP – will also help support a regime widely reviled for human rights abuses.

Diamonds are perhaps the ultimate branded good. Diamond producers make huge efforts to ensure their small, shiny rocks remain desirable. The supply of diamonds on to the market is controlled to ensure a rarity premium holds. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on advertising, creating new traditions such as the “diamond engagement ring” and “trinity” gifts.  Huge defensive PR campaigns work to convince people that a man-made diamond is a “synthetic” and somehow less real or romantic than an identical stone plucked from the ground that costs five times more.

Diamonds rely on trust and reputation. If (when) this breaks down, diamonds, like second hand jewellery, become all but worthless.

It will be interesting to see how the largest diamond producers cope with this threat. Expect, first of all, a battle to preserve the image of the Kimberly Process. If order cannot be restored and Zimbabwe continues to be able to sell its diamonds with KP certification, expect a modest defence from producers. If consumer groups raise the pressure, many larger producers are likely to walk away from Kimberly and rely on their own defences.

Diamond mining giant De Beers has for years been developing defences to protect itself in a crisis such as this. Not only does De Beers operate its own branded retail outlets which it hopes will immunise itself from attack, De Beers has also been developing “Forevermark” (http://www.forevermark.com)  the first attempt to produce “branded Diamonds”. Forevermark works as a kind of private Kimberly Process and a vintage mark all at once, giving a guarantee that diamonds are conflict-free and also that diamonds are of “the highest quality”. So, if you are going to propose, don’t pop the question and get caught short with some scatty, regular diamond – show you really love her by giving “Forevermark”.

Whether defences such as Forevermark will prove necessary or sufficient to uphold the value of diamonds, time will tell. In the meantime, all eyes remain on Kimberly Process chairman, Mr Yamba. 

Will diamonds stay a girl’s best friend, or will they go the way of the mink stole?   

Online reputation management after Ryan Giggs

Individuals wishing to shape their public image have historically relied on a range of techniques developed within the public relations (PR) sphere. PR practitioners have a range of tried and tested techniques for interfacing with the and taming the media: Pre-arranged press releases are routinely used to supply journalists with "low hanging fruit" that can readily be translated into coverage favouring a given client; and bilateral relationships are cultivated between leading writers and figures of interest, ensuring the steady exchange of information in return for sentiment bias. 

Lobbying by powerful individuals and PR groups has also resulted in legislation and codes of practice which make a range of topic areas off-limits to mainstream media. Intrusion into areas of the personal lives of individuals can only be permitted on grounds of "public interest", which can itself be made subservient to privacy concerns of others if the well-being of individuals related to the news item can be shown to be at risk if made public. 

However, developments online are weakening the ability of individuals to manage their reputation. "Web 2.0" technologies such as Twitter, Blogger and a thousand other social websites, have allowed millions of ordinary members of the public to publish to the Internet - not only with ease, but often also with high levels of anonymity.

The plurality of publishers puts practical limits on the establishment of direct bilateral relationships to court favour. The capability offered to ever user to re-publish and re-disseminate content through "re-tweets" or "liking" content makes it more likely that contentious content will reach mass audiences. This rapid re-publishing and proliferation of content across social platforms can also make tracking the origin of egregious content difficult. Where slanderous, libellous or privacy-infringing content is published, legal re-course may be of limited use. Legal options become impractical where the number of "publishers" listed at fault may include hundreds of thousands or millions of individuals.

In the UK, the failings of traditional methods to constrain online communications were made starkly apparent through the Spring of 2011 as the prominent footballer, Ryan Giggs, attempted to curb coverage of his private life through a series of so-called "super injunctions" against the press. These court mandates required press outlets to refrain from covering a number of stories pertaining to Giggs' sex life and possible marital impropriety. Although these orders effectively gagged mainstream print and broadcast media from divulging details of matter, comment concerning Giggs abounded in the online arena. Tweets naming Giggs as an adulterer were circulated on Twitter. 

Within days the Twitter account originating the news had thousands of followers, the information had been re-Tweeted (re-published) between hundreds of thousands of other Twitter users and independent user generated comment referring to the story was appearing on Facebook profiles and bulletin boards across the Internet. In desperation, or perhaps indignation, lawyers representing Giggs continued to file legal proceedings against Twitter and attempted to launch legal proceeding against the owner of the Twitter account perceived to be the origin of the breach. 

Nonetheless, the weight of public disclosure had it's own effect. The ineffectiveness of legislation to curb online public discussion itself became a news-worthy story in its own right, magnifying attention on Giggs' case. With the story elevated to discussion in the House of Commons, the failure of the status quo was ultimately acknowledged. Giggs' lawyers withdrew their application for court mandated injunctions and Giggs' representatives came to address the allegations directly with the press.

The Giggs event starkly illustrated the limits of conventional reputation management techniques. Methods employed by Giggs which may have proved effective just years before (or indeed might still prove effective in other European countries, if the contemporaneous case of International Monetary Fund Director Dominique Strauss Kahn is to be considered), failed spectacularly in 2011 Britain. Not only was Giggs unable to suppress the news of his impropriety but his efforts to do so served only to augment the ultimate level of public attention garnered.

These developments call into question the ability of public relations practitioners to manipulate coverage to any degree comparable to that which they have historically enjoyed. The emerging conventional wisdom appears is that are no realistic option to control the spread of information online, leading some to proclaim that “reputation is dead” (Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions). 

However, the scenario may not be so bleak. There are still steps that can be taken to preserve online reputations, and for those with the funds, these methods may be more effective than many people might believe possible. For fees starting from a few hundred pounds per month to tens of thousands per month, it’s possible to bring a range of intense techniques to bear upon major search engines, website hosts and social networks to change what people see, and perhaps what people believe. 

Engaging firms is not low risk. As the area of online reputation management booms, we are seeing a predictable surge of companies repositioning themselves as specialists. PR agencies, search engine optimisers and law firms are all jostling for space. Judging quality is difficult. There are also worrying networks emerging with dubious ethics – firms which seem to manufacture crises in people’s personal reputations and then use sisters companies to sell reputation management services to the victims.

Online reputation is not dead, it’s just far more convoluted than most people think.

More in a later post.