Commentary
Why Google Doesn't Get the "Friend Thing"
- by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, June 1, 2011
Now that he has been put out to pasture as executive chairman, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has plenty of time to mull over his tenure in the top spot and -- rather remarkably -- pontificate in public about his successes and failures. While this may not be what Larry Page and Sergey Brin had in mind for his post-CEO career, it sure makes for interesting reading; indeed, I think Schmidt's most recent statements illuminate some of the reasons that Google has failed (so far) to plug into the social media phenomenon.
Speaking at the D9: All Things Digital conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, Schmidt admitted that Google had missed "the friend thing," meaning the rise of social media, and with it all the potentially useful information that can be gleaned from people's social contacts. Part of this is due to obstinacy on the part of Facebook, which has refused to partner with Google for search, but I would venture it ultimately reflects an internal, cultural dynamic at Google that has unfolded over time. Indeed, Schmidt continued: "In the online world you need to know who you are dealing with. I clearly knew that I had to do something and I failed to do it."
The choice of words is revealing: Schmidt reduces social media, in all its complexity, to a "friend thing," and imagines it as something to "do" -- rather than something to, say, build, cultivate, nourish, or grow. This tendency to simplify and objectify social media is still apparent in Google's strategy today, and it is the reason that Google will continue to fail to gain traction with its social media efforts.
One thing you can say about Mark Zuckerberg, for all his alleged personality flaws, is that he has been involved with Facebook from the very beginning, overseeing its growth from a few dozen members at Harvard to the global phenomenon it is today. As such, he understood the basic impetus driving adoption and use of the social network -- which meant not only realizing that people wanted to socialize online, but understanding how and why, which in turn informed decisions about what new products to introduce. It's worth noting that many of Zuckerberg's innovations, while rejected at first as intrusions into privacy, have since become some of Facebook's most popular features. In other words, he has guided Facebook's development with an eye to utility and demand (even when the demand wasn't conscious).
Also to his credit, Zuckerberg didn't seem to be in a rush to monetize Facebook during the crucial growth period from 2005-2007, instead focusing on building the user base and expanding its functionality. Monetization -- through advertising and the unexpected windfall of virtual goods sales from partners like Zynga -- came later, and almost seemed to flow naturally from Facebook's popularity.
Long story short: Zuckerberg created Facebook based on the "friend thing," and then helped advertisers sort through the mountains of user-generated data to find what is useful to them. Google's approach, as enunciated by Schmidt, is effectively the opposite: they want to advertise to people and have seen enough from Facebook's example to realize that they somehow have to "do" the "friend thing." But this utilitarian attitude is incompatible with real social media success: social media isn't a "thing" to be "done" but a world to be built and explored by individuals and companies alike. Likewise, trying to tack social on to Google's existing services probably won't get anywhere because it's not based on an understanding of users' true needs and desires; it's trying to reverse engineer a process of organic growth that can only go forwards, not backwards.
Erik Sass is editor of Publishers Daily. You can reach Erik at eriksass@gmail.com.
"But this utilitarian attitude is incompatible with real social media success: social media isn't a "thing" to be "done" but a world to be built and explored by individuals and companies alike." The intersection of search and social media is what is interesting and will grow, but this article misses the mark by being wed to social media "success." Email with a face.
it strikes me right at this moment that what google failed to get was monetization.
what facebook gets is how to produce a freakishly marketable commodity ("friend"-networks); zuckerberg has surrounded himself with a crew that gets really, really excited about finding new ways to make facebook more important to advertisers and users.
all google seems to get really excited about is helping people do things.
"Google's ... not based on an understanding of users' true needs and desires"
Facebook has collected factoids about users, but that's far from providing an understanding of their true needs and desires. In fact, for having such a large user base even those factoids can be surprisingly thin. Advertisers can segment by demographics and still get a reasonably large prospect pool, but try adding an interest (even one as basic and broad as "Music") and the pool narrows sharply. One can only conclude that there are more holes in Facebook's user data than Swiss cheese, and that it has a long way to go before matching even the compiled databases most direct marketers are familiar with. And even those familiar established entities certainly don't provide any kind of deeper motivational understanding of the consumer.
Social media is in its infancy, and Google missed the inception, and the chance to build a valuable knowledge base. But customer insight can be obtained in many ways -- social media may not be the best shortcut to marketing's Holy Grail, either.
For someone to 'label' what may in the future be referred to the origin of the global paradigm shift in how we as a species interacts, governments conduct themselves or face immediate consequences and even the accountability of faceless corporations that in the past have acted as sociopaths - it displays a clear ignorance of what is happening here or just a plain narrow minded view of how things used to be and the hopes that all this will go away. For as long our species have been alive there has been a strong desire to belong. It's in our DNA. Be it from the caves sticking together for survival, appropriation or companionship our species has an unending desire to part of something and to have a platform to be heard. Today's social fabric in its many varieties online delivers this opportunity to individuals and companies alike. The great leveler indeed.
In response to the comment about Google not getting monetization... On the contrary...Google is monetization. Their PPC model gave them profitability when Facebook was building audience. The difference is that even Facebook's advertising is constructed in a more social vein, i.e. sponsored stories. I see it as the difference between paid and organic growth -- organic being more tied to social activities.
The fundamental difference between Google and Facebook is that Google is an engineering company and Facebook is a social engineering company. They have completely different core competencies and that's reflected in EVERYTHING they do. They should embrace that and move on to getting more value from who they are, not try to be everything to everyone. Monetization comes from a core competency, not from add-ons.
Your article prompted me to write my own opinions on this -- I've been presenting them for the last 6 months so now they're finally in print :) http://www.thesocialmarketingdiva.com/2011/06/eric-schmidt-ex-ceo-of-google-has-it-all-wrong-google-vs-facebook/