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Hey Google…F*** Social.
During my corporate days, my team attended several leadership workshops led by John Maxwell. Over the next few years I realized that John became my favorite leadership/motivational speaker. His ability to draw in an audience and keep a story moving is great- since I left corporate America, I miss his workshops.
Early on in one of his workshops, he explained something that had everyone from my team looking at each other wondering if we should stick around because clearly this guy was off his rocker. He said that everyone does something 80% well – whatever that thing is. Yet in life we try to work on the other 20% – why? For those of you who have worked in a corporate environment, you know what this means. Your yearly progress reports always want you to work on the areas that your boss thinks you need to improve on. But Maxwell said this really makes no sense – what would happen if you focused on the 80% and made that part absolutely amazing? If we work on the 20% we aren’t good at, the best we can do is probably a passing grade, but if we focus on the things we do really well, we would own those areas. Take a minute and think about that concept…
I sit at my desk and day after day I read another blog post or journalist explaining that Google either needs to get into social to compete with Facebook or they are doing a crappy job with the efforts they have put forth to-date. Today Google soft-launched Google+ which Danny Sullivan calls a Facebook competitor. So here’s what I propose…
GOOGLE…FU** SOCIAL.
I am dead serious – stop trying to fix the 20% that you aren’t good at and focus on the 80% that made Google the powerhouse company that it is. I get that Facebook is the sexy social marketing superstar right now and you are a boring utility company and want to feel sexy – forget it – it’s your 20% and it’s a short-term play anyway. And guess what – the utilities stick around for a long time.
Why not kick even more arse in the areas you already do? Why not move us forward on those areas (and guess what +1 isn’t what I mean in terms of moving forward). Google has the financial and human resources that can accomplish these tasks – give us the next generation ad product, office product, maps product, etc. Fix the enormous spam issue on YouTube, clean up the sites you messed up (like this one) in the Panda release. Clearly you believe in looking forward with your launch of Android.
Lastly, if you do want to launch a social network of some sort, I’d suggest waiting until late 2012 when the term “friend” returns to its roots and leaves the current definition of “person who I can market to”. The problem today is that social is more about marketing and creating the largest network rather than networking with only a person’s friends and family. In many of the reviews I’ve read today of your + product, it seems you want to focus on just the close, personal network. Frankly that will last a week – the marketers will want into those circles and once that happens, you won’t be any better than the mess that is a person’s Facebook friends list.
So please Google, put on the horse blinders and focus on making your 80% amazing for the next decade.
I agree that it’s a fad – but it won’t go away, just like YAHOO.
Look at the history of internet and socialism, it always evolves and changes.
Kudos to whoever catches the next paradigm shift ;)
I like that: FU** SOCIAL :)
I believe facebook is another fad that will go away.
cheers!
“the marketers will want into those circles”
And who is it that pays Google so they can provide all these services to us? Marketers.
I think Google is concerned that their 80% is starting to become less relevant – and potentially less profitable.
I agree. Seems to me this is the issue, unless I have something wrong about how the revenue stream flows. The rest is mostly noise. Google makes their money on ad revenue. If people are looking at Facebook pages instead of Google search results or gmail pages or whatever vehicle Google uses to get their ads in front of your eyeballs, Google is losing revenue.
They decided to compete with Apple because they wanted to make sure that they were strong in the rapidly emerging mobile space. Smart move. They can not afford to ignore Facebook either, core competency or not, because if they do, the next-gen ad product might not have their name on it.
But google’s future is inherently social…for them to continue to be good at what they do, they’ll have to embrace social. The 80% that they’re good at today will only be considered good tomorrow, if they embrance social…Google’s future is inherently social.
Think about it – their crawlers already take into account social mechanics, how often people cite links to bring results to the top. The new way of citing links is citing them socially, they’re already crawling bit.ly links to include them as those are indicators of what should be on the top of their search results.
For them to be good at search in the future, they’ll have to be social.
Second, think about the other products they’re very good at (part of the 80%) – gmail, google docs, google calendar – those are all inherently social products!
Lastly…they already have the best social graph in the world….people’s email….so why don’t they put it to good use?
If you say social enough, does that make it believable? :)
Their search has become more and more of a mess because they have let in factors they never should have. I will try to address this in another post but look at Bing – they run these ads 24 hours a day on tv – telling me how great Bing is now that they show me results that my “friends” prefer.
Bull – first of all – what % of facebook users only have their friends in their lists? While I am sure that it’s not as high as if you talk to startups or tech bloggers, once one person/brand/whatever has infected a user’s list, it’s no longer meaningful.
Second, I don’t really care what my friends like when I am searching. If i want my friend’s advice for a pizzeria in London, I will ask my friends. When I am searching, I am looking for the best results for me.
And just because someone is my friend (let’s assume real friends), why does that mean that Bing knows I want their results first or edited? Most of my real friends don’t like the same music I do – so why should they influence the results I am provided?
I think there is a difference between the word social and the term social. You are right, gmail has a social graph – didn’t Google try this already with Buzz?
I’ll admit I’m very curious because this new effort has so many different components to it. I think you are probably right but I’ll reserve judgment until I can take it for a test drive.
There is a short window between something great being created on the Internet and it being coopted by aggressive marketing teams.
I think until we return friends to friends, new social concepts have little chances to work. I am betting you a hot bagel and a schmear that Pete Cashmore will have “add mashable to google+” all over mashable within 2-3 days. That will be your first sign that this won’t work.
Had Facebook stayed closed to friends, it would have been way more powerful but wouldn’t have made the cash that it has. So I get that it is a hard decision.
I know Google hasn’t made some of the best decisions, but quite honestly they have some of the best integration if you work in the Googlesphere. I mean, you can’t get all this stuff with Microsoft or Apple for free. You get social integration, blogger, chat, talk, voice, gmail, docs, music, to only name a few. Though I won’t say Google is perfect, case in point, Chromebook but they have my attention because they can pull it off. I like having an alternative and not having all my friends be confined in one mass group, such as Facebook. I don’t like it when my supervisor can spy on me or my co-workers based on him friending somebody. I don’t like it when I have to deal with the inordinate amount of bullsh!t chatter and whines. I don’t care about horoscopes, but I have to endure reading about somebody else’s when I never check mine. I don’t care you checked into BJ’s and bought a Pizza, when I’m starving right now. Facebook sucks!