What If Google Killed Puppies?

Lisa Barone
Lisa Barone
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Posted On:
January 14, 2009
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Hi, I’m Lisa and I’m codependent. Don’t judge me, you are too.

I’m getting caught up after spending the past few days hobbling around Affiliate Summit (you can find coverage for Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3 at Hoffman’s House) and stumbled across an interesting poll recreated by TechCrunch. The question at hand was: “What would make you switch search engines?”

This morning the results looked like this:

[click to enlarge. floss regularly.]

I know now that 58 percent of you are damn liars.

Like I said, I’m what some would call “codependent”. I willingly stay in unhealthy relationships, I invest in losers, and I repeatedly take people back lying to myself that they can change.  Basically, I’m an idiot. And you probably are, too.

The reason you originally switched from Yahoo to Google back in the day was because Google was the far superior engine. It kicked ass at everything it did and was undeniably the best choice. And they’ve done a good job maintaining that awesome. The search results are typically to be trusted, there’s Gmail and GDocs, as well as a whole suite of products designed to make your life easier.  However, the quality of products isn’t why people stay with Google.  How many blind tests have been done to show that the quality of the results is less important than the brand name placed at the top of the engine? I’m pretty sure I’ve read more than a handful over the years.

The truth is you stay with Google for the same reason I’ve stayed with a slew of crappy ex-boyfriends. Because it’s been there for you, because it’s broken in, because it’s socially acceptable, and because it’s really, really pretty.

Adding video to the search results or uncluttering things won’t make someone change. I don’t even know that Yahoo could change enough that most people would care. The only reason people will leave Google is if something drastically different AND better comes along or if Google commits some sort of brand suicide.

I spent some time thinking about it and here’s my list of what Google would have to do to make me leave them.

They’d have to:

  • Leak my Data/Private Information ala AOL
  • Take their “tweaking” of the results WAY too far
  • Start charging me for services like Gmail
  • Sell off the engine/acquire someone else’s and completely murder its relevancy

Aside from that, I think the Google bar code that’s been discretely branded on the back of my neck is safe. I asked Twitter what it would take to breakup with Google and their answers were surprisingly similar to my own.  Well, except for Chris Winfield and Jim Hedger who said Google would have to start slaying puppies and kittens, respectively.  I agree with both of those, assuming they were cute puppies and kittens.

I think we like to tell ourselves that the reason we stick with Google is for the quality of the results. It makes us sound like we’re free and independent thinkers. But we’re not. The truth is we stick with Google because we’ve been told to. And we’ll stay there until we’re told to do something different. If we’re going to be codependent, let’s at least be honest about it.

Or maybe I’m wrong. Would it take anything less than puppy killing for you to abandon Google?

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Love Means Never Having to Fake It

Lisa Barone
Lisa Barone
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Posted On:
December 29, 2008
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Okay, this is probably one of those posts where I come off like a jerk who wasn’t hugged enough as a child, but I’m going to say it anyway. Deal with it.

You can’t automate everything. In fact, some things should NOT be automated.

For example:

  • If you automate your marriage, you’ll find yourself divorced.
  • If you automate your parenting, you’ll find yourself with children who grow up to hate you and put you in a home when you’re 70.
  • If you have your secretary write your girlfriend’s Valentine’s Day card, you’re going to get slapped in the face.
  • If you automate your “thanks so much for commenting on my blog” responses, you’re going to turn me off as a blog reader and I’m probably never going to leave a comment again. Why? Because you’ve annoyed me and made me feel like I’m just another email address. Who needs you?

Okay, so obviously I have an example.

Last week I commented for the very first time on a blog that I really like. The content on this particular blog has been rising steadily and I wanted to send some support their way. I don’t really know the blogger, but I do have a periphery relationship with them.  Basically, we’ve exchanged a few emails.  So last week, I stumbled across a post I really liked and decided to leave them a comment. Shortly after, this winds up in my inbox.

Oh, c’mon.  It’s like a kick to the face.

I get what they’re doing. I get that they’re trying to engage back with the person who took the time to leave a comment.  They’re trying to grow their RSS subscribers. I’m a blogger. I read the same Problogger and Performancing posts that you do.

However, I can’t help but think this person (and lots of others. I’m not singling him/her out, by any means) is missing the point. This automated response isn’t going to earn you any goodwill with me. It doesn’t make me want to go back and leave another comment. It doesn’t make me want to go subscribe to their feeds. It makes me feel like you’re better than me and are far too busy to actually interact with me.

And let’s be honest, unless you’re TechCrunch, how many new blog commenters do you really get per day? You can’t spend two minutes crafting each one of them an email that at least looks authentic and original?  It’s not that hard. Or at least use Joost de Valk’s Comment Redirect plug-in to send them to a ‘personalized’ Thank You page. Don’t invade my email. My email is personal. And Joost is hot.

Either engage or don’t. Don’t pretend. I don’t need any more fake relationships in my life.

If you’re going to “welcome” your new commenters, then welcome them. For real. With a real email.

If you’re going to engage in social media. Then freakin’ engage in it. Don’t launch a bunch of sock puppet accounts and pretend you care when you don’t.

You just have to pick one. If you care about me as a reader or a customer, then make every interaction you have with me real. If you loved me, you wouldn’t have to fake it.

[I'm sorry. I feel better now.]

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Keep Innovating or Prepare To Be Run Over

Lisa Barone
Lisa Barone
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You’re getting soft.

You’re sticking to what was once big and you’re not moving beyond that. You’re not hungry.You’re not forward-thinking. You’re out there sitting in the pit of fake celebrity and you don’t even notice the others coming up around them to steal their glory. It’s kind of ridiculous how badly you suck.

You have to keep moving forward.

I have to ask. TechMeme has met TechFuga, America needs a reboot, Sphinn is reusing the same titles, and you’re ending 2008 still preaching the same gospel you used in 1998. Isn’t it all starting to feel a little old?

I can feel myself getting bored and restless. I’m looking for things to poke you with. Both to wake you up and to help amuse myself. Hell, Michael Gray is still picking on BlogHer because he has nothing else to get upset and outraged about. He’s trying to find the passion to care about something. About anything.

There’s going to be a lot of Top 10 posts over the new few weeks. Lots of posts reflecting on what happened in 2008. Fake awards to congratulate some of last year’s finest. It’s fun, the whole patting ourselves on the back thing. We get to talk about how smart and funny we were last year. Problem is, while you’re harking back on the good times of 2008, the smart people are looking forward. They’re looking at 2009, 2010 and 2015. They’re making goals and plotting the course for how they’re going to get there.

As cliché as it sounds, right now is a very good time to figure out what your goals are for the new year, both personal and professional, and start coming up with very actionable steps for how you’re going to get there. If New Year’s resolutions have taught us anything, it’s that they’re meaningless unless you account for the “how” of it. You want to lose 20lbs? Awesome, so does everyone else. How are you going to get there? You want to expand your business and overtake a new sector? Cool. How are you going to get there? You want to be become a better company than you were last year? Good for you. How are you going to get there?

If you don’t take the time to document the “how”, you fail.

Every time.

Innovation thrives in the building of sandcastles. Your place in the industry and the world is not permanent. If you don’t innovate and keep moving, you’re going to get left behind. We’ve seen it happen time and time again in corporate America and yet we never think it can happen to us. We’re incredibly dumb.

  • We write that one awesome blog post, we got a lot of links, and then we sit back and keep referencing it ad nauseum.
  • We create that one tool that got a whole bunch of attention, and then we let it sit.
  • We figure out how to get sites to the top of the search engines today, and then we stop building on that knowledge.
  • We become known for doing something and then never evolve beyond that one thing.

Your contentment allows you to be pigeon-holed into being boring.

If you’re still harking on-page SEO techniques only, maybe it’s time to step out of the €˜90s and become competitive again. If you’re TechMeme, maybe it’s time to take a look at TechFuga and ask yourself why people are excited about them. Maybe it’s time to stop focusing on the €˜A-list’ and €˜celebrity’ tech blogs and start paying attention to sources like FriendFeed and Twitter if that’s where news is really breaking and being discussed. If you’re a company working your butt off to keep up with your competition — maybe it’s time to start being proactive, instead of reactive.

If you want to be innovative and forward-thinking, you have to get out of your own head. Remember what your goals were before you were weighted down in the day-to-day BS.  Hire creative people and then draw the greatness out of them. Hire folks that think differently than you do. Put them in groups and challenge them to release their talents.

Get out of your own way.  Give yourself the time to be creative and to fully think of ideas. That means sometimes tuning out Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, YouTube and all the other places that are stealing your attention. The Internet lends itself to creativity but it also opens up a world of mass distraction where we divide our day up into 10 million snippets spent on 10 million things. You can’t come up with and nurture a great idea when it’s stuck as one snippet of a million. You have to spend time molding them or you’re going to wind up with a dud (kidding, moms!).

Successful companies aren’t the ones that are the most intelligent or creative. They’re the companies who never lose the fire to succeed.

It’s like that kickoff call we’ll have with clients. When we talk to them to figure out what their goals are and where they want to be. Not just today, but in the long term. That’s always the most exciting part of a project for me. The dreaming & planning stage. Where you decide what you want and then we lay out a course to help you get there. It’s awesome.

There’s a new year approaching. Keep moving forward.

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My Love/Hate Relationship With Marketers

Lisa Barone
Lisa Barone
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Posted On:
November 25, 2008
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Like a link ninja, I, too, lead a double life.

By birth, I’m a 20-something addicted to social media. I’m am connected to Twitter every second, I log in to Facebook 2-3 times a day, I Stumble, I Reddit and I altogether have no life because I’m too busy writing about my life on all the social media platforms.

By trade, I’m a marketer. I know the power of social media sites. I know how important it is to leverage communities and to build brand and attention by word of mouth. I’ve seen what can happen when you do social media right. I know the thrill of the kill. I get it.

The problem I face is that my two personalities often conflict. The 20-something in me wants social media to be pure. I want to be able to trust that everything I find on Reddit is there because the community put it there, because they find it valuable. I want to be able to trust that the relationships I’m forming are authentic and genuine.  I want to know that the person I’m interacting with is not a robot designed to be my friend and feed off my insecurities and my need for community approval.

The marketer in me thinks that 20-something described above is nothing but naive. The marketer in me still isn’t okay with fake avatars, but understands the fine line between selling a product and selling your soul. My marketer personality is willing to toe that line to get the word out and help clients find success.  It knows how powerful it is to have brand evangelists and community-think on your side. I know the links, attention and branding social media can bring.

And this has caused a constant struggle in my brain, especially when services like Be-A-Magpie are released.

If you haven’t seen it yet, Be-A-Magpie is the newest pay per post idea. Here tweeters are paid on a cost-per-thousand basis to insert ads into their Twitter stream. Be-A-Magpie analyzes your Twitter stream for keywords and then delivers ads in your name, on your account. The service will auto-determine the number of ads to place in your Twitter stream, but users can change it if the default (one ad for every five organic tweets) is too much or too little. You basically get to decide how much of a sellout you’d like to become: Enough to buy a cup of coffee or enough to make the audience who once respected you start spitting in your general direction.

While the marketer in me sees the effectiveness of a service like this, the 20-something wants to kick it in the face until Be-A-Magpie takes their slimy third-party service and gets out of my Twitter. (What? Too much?) You see, for me, when it’s battle between marketer and 20-something, the human 20-something part of me always wins out.

The human Lisa genuinely hates this idea. Probably because I care and invest too much in the communities I belong to. But my Twitter feed is me. It’s authentic and it’s genuine. If you follow me on Twitter (bad marketer, bad!), you know that. I share it all. For me to start putting ads in there and taint the waters is almost offensive. And I don’t like the idea that I’ll now have to question other people’s motives. Did they really like that movie or was that a for-pay tweet? Was that really the best Mexican place they’ve been to EVER or did they just sell their soul a little bit? There’s some solace in the fact that all for-pay tweets will contain a #magpie hash tag but how much do I trust that it’ll stay there? Not too much. And it’s still going to make me question people’s agenda. Don’t make me question you. I get enough of that in real life.

And why the #magpie hash tag? Is it so that the Twitter audience can identify tweets that you were paid for or is it really there with the hope that it’ll keep #magpie on Twitter’s trending topic list? See how you’ve already made me question you?

Obviously, the stance I’m taking here is nothing new. Many of those who are passionate about social media are not a fan of systems like these. Social media expert Jeremiah Owyang conducted a test of Be-A-Magpie to see how his audience would respond to it. He was kind
enough to share the results with us:

  • Positive Reactions 7, or 14%
  • Unsure Reactions 14, or 29%
  • Negative Reactions: 20, or 41%
  • Unfollow (very negative) 7, or 14%

Fifty-five person of those who responded had a negative reaction. Seven were so offended they unfollowed him.

As a 20-something who cares about the communities I play in, I don’t want ads in my Twitter stream.  As a 20-something who is also a marketer, I don’t want ads in other people’s Twitter streams. I’m not naïve enough to think that everything someone posts or links to is a real vote, but I’m not willing to open things up even more, either.  I also don’t like the idea of a third-party company coming in and trying to invade Twitter like they created it. Social media used to be about finding interesting things and sharing them with people “like you”. Why do marketers always have to come in and ruin everything for the rest of us?

There’s lot of discussion about the ethics of Magpie happening on FriendFeed, and of course, Twitter.

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An Open Letter to Big Brands Everywhere

Lisa Barone
Lisa Barone
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Posted On:
November 20, 2008
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Big Brands of the world,

You should be embarrassed. You should be so embarrassed that you are under your desk rocking back and forth because rocking is the only way to express how absolutely embarrassed you are.

You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? Of course you don’t. For you to know you’d actually have to be paying attention to what’s going on around you, and we both know that you’re not.

I didn’t have time to comment on this yesterday (too much work and such), but according to HitWise, 1 in 10 brand searchers are led away from your site in the SERPs when they do a search for your name. In fact, for one unnamed appliances and electronics retailer, 34 percent of searchers are led away. Do you realize how large that number is? Or maybe it doesn’t seem like a big number as your rolling around in your pile of money? However, consider how many people search for your name every day (you actually can track that, you know…) and then do the math. It’s actually a very large number, especially when the rest of us are feeling a recession and watching once-untouchable brands go belly up.

The HitWise numbers mean that you’re being so careless with your reputation in the SERPs that you’re letting a person primed and ready to buy from you slip out of your grasp. And they really are looking for you. They typed your name into their search box.  And yet somehow you’re borking the transaction by letting thin resellers outrank you and steal your thunder.

I know. Life used to be far simpler. This Internet thing wasn’t always as big as it is now. For awhile there, you only had to compete with commercials and phone books. And in the phone book, when someone goes to look you up, your competitor doesn’t get to clobber them over the head and steal them away. On the Internet, however, they have their very own gold-plated, personalized mallets.

But that’s still no excuse. There is no reason why your big corporate site should be getting schooled by an affiliate reseller. You need to take back control. Resting on your laurels is the best way to fail. It’s the best way to turn your brand into a joke as mom and pops start stealing your rankings and your business.

But the news from HitWise isn’t all dire. The numbers show that companies that take the initiative to protect their turf win big.

“We found that steps taken to tighten the reins on travel agencies to prevent agencies and resellers from capitalizing on the airlines’ brands appear to be working. Traffic from searches for a portfolio of the top American Airlines brand terms three years ago made up nearly 4% of visits to Travel Agencies. That is down to less than 1% for the four weeks ending September 27th, 2008.”

That’s money.

You must make sure that people who are looking for  you, get you. You don’t want to lose out on easy conversions. It’s like losing Game 7 of the NBA Championships on bad free throws. Athletes get shot for that in some countries. .

Do a search for your name right now and see what it looks like. What are users seeing? Would you click on your listing? How about if you didn’t own it?

You need to dominate that brand page. If that means picking up one of the paid spots so that your competitors get bumped out, do it. If that means creating a sizable social media presence so that you’re ruling the first SERP for your name, then you do it. I don’t know how anyone can justify losing 44 percent of their traffic to a reseller site. For the mathematically challenged, that’s almost half.

Sounds like someone needs some reputation management services. Feel free to give us a call.

Forever Yours,

The Lisa

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