Google Sucks at New.

I’ve been talking at length about the launch of Google Wave.  As a product, I don’t feel I can judge accurately yet.  As a (soft) launch, I feel very comfortable labeling it a failure.

It’s a failure for a few reasons, the first of these being that Google has never really done anything new before.  And unsurprisingly, new is a hell of a lot harder than better.

*Deep Breath.*

Google search wasn’t new.  Everyone knew what to do with a search box when they came across it.  It was just better - better results, better algorithm, simpler design.  GMail was similar - email was a defined entity, Google just let you have as much space as you wanted, then bridged the gap between email and IM with Gtalk.  AdWords, though a new implementation, was just advertising automated and made relevant.  This was not the first time people had seen a link that would take them to a product for offer.  It was just more relevant.  Better.

Google is very good at better.  Wave, however, is new.

Creating something new also requires that you create a definition.  The key issue that Wave has, is the lack of a one sentence answer for ‘what is it for’.  The best response I’ve seen came from this post by Daniel Tenner, where the value of Wave as a collaborative tool for business uses was brought to light.  Which would be great, if there was any conceivable way for that to be how Wave was going to be used at launch.

If I look at Wave as a tool for crafting a collaborative document, like a complex proposal, it definitely has a home in the work life of many people I know. But a private, invite only beta (the exact same launch strategy as Gmail, recall) is not going to create situations that benefit this use case.

Google’s completely lack of marketing strategy on this one is painful.  And it answers the question that keeps coming up: Does a big company that generates buzz passively need marketing, or advertising, or PR?

Yes.  It does.  Because making something cool IS NOT ENOUGH, if you can’t get people to understand WHY it’s cool.

If I’d been in charge of the Wave launch?  It would have launched in a private beta, but for entire startups.  Let people who enjoy cutting edge collaboration technology figure out the ups and downs of the product.  The same people who are using Google Docs as the main office productivity software would love to use this tool to do what it is apparently exciting for - collaborative document creation.

The benefit to doing this?  Startups of the type we’re discussing would happily talk about the good, and the bad, of the product.  This feedback would allow Wave to turn into something useful, both as a service, and as a set of practices.  Instead of a cute little video, Google could have actually sent HUMANS to explain why Wave was meaningful, so the handful of startups in the beta.  Once they had it down, the knowledge, and the anticipation for a general release, would flow.

[This is the idea I had by myself, in ten minutes.  I guarantee with a few people to bounce ideas off of, and a greater understanding of the technology myself, I could do better.]

Having never really done anything new before, Google assumed they could just release this into the wild, and it would catch on.  All this tells you is that despite an army of geniuses, and despite a great track record in improving the math behind experiences, Google doesn’t understand marketing.

And that is why, every time the ‘is marketing/PR/advertising dead?’ meme pops up for another round, I will point to Google Wave, and suggest there is more to communications than being able to get people to look.

[Thanks to Peter Flaschner for suggesting I blog about this, and for bringing up the AdWords example.]

Quality is Insufficient.

Signal is noise, sad but true.  There is enough good content, enough good products, that merely being good, or merely being great, is insufficient to guarantee success.  Being excellent is a bare minimum, I would hope.

You also need to be visible, be interested, be remarkable (as in, worth remarking on) and be continually refreshing.

Don’t tell me that advertising, marketing, or PR are meaningless.  Because if that was the case, format wars would be won on quality, fashion would collapse on itself, and the modern concept of a luxury brand would be drastically different.

Meaning is a mixture of what is innate in a thing, and what is attributed to that thing, what qualities it is imbued with, whether due to the efforts of the brand, or the efforts of the public.

Pretending you don’t need to take an active role in building awareness, in making that meaning, indicates you’re still trapped in the ‘build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door’ mentality.

It doesn’t hold up so well when there is a nearly unlimited number of established pest control options out there, even if yours is vastly superior.

Tired of the following.

Two blatantly incorrect statements I’ve been encountering, again and again. I’ll dedicate a post to each of these in the near future.

1. If consultants were actually right, they would be out creating their own products instead of working with others.

2. Advertising, marketing and PR are unnecessary, if you have a good enough product.

The Importance of Perception.

Last night I mentioned, on twitter, that I find Keira Knightley exceedingly attractive.  The few responses I got were judgemental, to say the least.  The word ‘anorexic’ was thrown around, which I personally find distasteful (Aside: in general, calling every thin woman anorexic is the same as wandering around calling every heavyset person a disgusting pig, with a nice dollop of insisting they have deep mental problems on top.)

This is a reaction I have gotten several times regarding admitting I find Knightley, or any woman of a similar body type, attractive.  Other common responses include a reference to ‘real woman’ which indicates that thinner females are somehow not female enough, or accusing me of chauvinism and/or causing eating disorders due to finding certain women attractive.

The thing I find funny, however, is this: If I mention that I find Natalie Portman attractive, I won’t hear a single thing about what is wrong with her.  Why is this interesting? Mostly because of this quote, from Knightley’s wikipedia entry:

Knightley appeared in several television movies in the mid to late 1990s—as well as ITV1’s The Bill—before being cast as Sabé, Padmé Amidala’s decoy, in the 1999 science fiction blockbuster Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Knightley was cast in the role due to her close resemblance to Natalie Portman, who played Padmé; the two actresses’ mothers had difficulty telling their daughters apart when the girls were in full makeup.

The big difference is public perception of the two, despite the fact that at one point, they were close enough in appearance to be considered doppelgangers.  But when mentioning finding Natalie Portman attractive on twitter, the irked response wasn’t there.

My guess is that it comes down to the associations made in tabloid culture.  Portman is more likely to bring to mind her extreme acting talent, her Harvard education, or her work with the UN.  She is also unquestionably certified as acceptable by most of my peers, who are, to be fair, twentysomething urbanites.  And yet, when I bring up Knightley, someone who is allegedly interchangeable from a physical standpoint, the first things that comes to mind are likely the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, and how thin she is.

I don’t know if either of these women struggles with an eating disorder, but I find it interesting that one is instantly assumed to, while the other is generally just praised for being so awesome.  If public perception of the overall traits of a person, is the major separation between a thin woman being called anorexic or not, maybe we can understand why so much work, money, and importance is put on public image.

[End Note: I have a personal problem with assuming someone’s body type is inherently the result of mental illness, an eating disorder, a physical problem, or a lack of self-control.  It not only trivializes a serious issue, it also encourages exactly the behaviour it is supposed to discourage, by insisting people have to be ‘broken’ in order to look the way they do.]

On Metrics.

Measurement is a weapon.

The decline in advertising is at least in part due to the impact of meaningful metrics.  Comparing Nielsen TV ratings to clickthrough information and demographic breakdowns for online advertising is like comparing a StarTAC with an iPhone.  All this information has done, in my opinion, is expose an inconvenient truth - most advertising is not as impactful as anyone would like.  When all you know is eyeballs, it’s a lot easier to pat yourself on the back than knowing that 98% of those eyeballs moved on in less than a second.

My personal pet peeve is media impressions as a measurement of PR effectiveness.  I understand we need something, but impressions are generally a stack of assumptions that willfully ignore the reality of how people interact with information.  For example a commuter paper would argue that it has a circulation of X, and Y readers per copy (or pass-along).  Multiplying these numbers would give you the assumed impressions for an article in said paper.  This ignores that not every reader reads the entire paper, or finishes articles they start, or actually gets to reading the thing at all.  And it has no concept of driving action due to the article.

Metrics are important, but let’s not ignore the truth - the attention industries have been using bullshit metrics for years, as a false measure of success.  As we enter a time when actual, valid and valuable measurement is becoming more and more common (online, through digital cable and streaming tv, etc), it makes perfect sense that we’d be seeing a decline in ad revenue.  We’ve all been lying about how much it was worth for far too long.