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.