Original Story: fortune.com
With great power comes great responsibility, and sometimes Google leads us astray.
Google is a godsend for all of us, from those who stutter and stumble through life to even the most knowledgeable of folks looking to confirm their facts and figures.
A well-placed nugget of information courtesy of Google GOOG -1.48% (or Yahoo, sure, or Bing, but come on—you use Google) can prepare you for a challenging conversation or nervy meeting, and it can display for you, stripped bare, any person’s minor errors and major accomplishments.
But with great power comes great responsibility, and sometimes Google leads us astray. Just this week, New York magazine wrote that resisting from Googling a potential date is “the new abstinence.” Here are the seven deadly sins that come along with relying too heavily on the G-force.
Greed: When your thirst for knowledge leads to errors
They say fortune favors the well prepared, but when Fortune managing editor Andy Serwer sat down to dinner with Chevron CVX -1.03% CEO John Watson, preparation backfired. Serwer asked Watson about his position on the board of the San Diego Padres, a factoid he’d picked up doing pre-dinner research on Wikipedia, a page he had been directed to through The Big G. Turns out that’s another John Watson. Oops.
Watson’s team at Chevron has hunted down the original source and the Wiki entry has since been changed, but here at Fortune, a vague feeling of betrayal lingers in the air. After all, where would reporters be without Google? But Google gives preference to Wikipedia, and Wiki now hath poisoned our trust. Or at least Serwer’s.
Gluttony: When you gather too much information
Sometimes, you might go on a rampage and Google everything. Your friends. Your boss. Your boss’s significant other. Their boss. Your friend’s boss’s significant other’s boss’s dog (not that we’ve ever done such a thing). Sometimes you learn things you really didn’t need to know—things you, perhaps, shouldn’t know, but can never quite forget. It’s TMI. It’s a little like the time a Fortune summer intern started to dump names into the Googlesphere only to find out that a college friend’s father was a registered sex offender.
Lust: When researching a romantic interest gets creepy
If you’re single, many of your Google hunts may be fueled by… non-platonic interest. It can include Facebook photo binges, clicking through 10 pages’ worth of search results, and sneaking a peek at someone’s Instagram account (if public). But then when you actually run into, or go out with, the object of your search affections, you face a real dilemma: feign surprise at the personal things they tell you, or acknowledge you already know? Thanks to Google, you already know their college alma mater; their favorite color; their street address; and the exact pattern of their cobbled driveway (thanks, Streetview)… we’ll stop there.
Sloth: When you lazily rely on the opinions of others
Sometimes Google impressions trump first impressions. In a piece on Match.com, author Steve Friedman writes that he once went out with a sex-columnist who decided to cancel their second date after her post-date Google search turned up some of his articles, even though she thought he was sweet and funny in person.
Worse yet, sometimes there is no chance for a first impression. People are relying more and more on online reviews, and as a result, companies or products with low reviews or simply not a large total of reviews don’t get business. Michael Luca, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, released a 2011 working paper that found that a one-star increase on Yelp leads to a 5-9% increase in revenue for restaurants. But what happens to new restaurants that haven’t been reviewed much yet, or restaurants that hire a new chef and up their game? Sometimes, there’s more to reality than what Google can tell you.
Wrath: When you tamper with Google results
Wikipedia is notorious for allowing users to change the text—and, what do you know?—sometimes they do it to suit their own purposes. After Chile beat Spain two-nil in this year’s World Cup, the Wikipedia entry for the Chile National Soccer Team’s page was changed to say, “Dear Spain, LOL. Say bye to the World Cup…… From Chile.” Or take the change from mid-May, when the New York Rangers came back from a 3-1 series deficit against the Pittsburgh Penguins in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. A few days later, the Pens’ Wiki page listed the Rangers as the owner of the team. Malicious, yet creative.
Envy: When you’re jealous of someone else’s Google results
Social media can lead to envy. It can lead, possibly, to depression. In a 2013 study, University of Michigan researchers Ethan Kross and Philippe Verduyn texted people while they were using Facebook, and found that as time on Facebook increased, a person’s mood and overall satisfaction with their lives declined. In other words, Facebook can make you jealous. It can make you feel more alone than connected. Kross and Verduyn didn’t look at other social media networks, but it’s fair to say that looking through lists of other people’s accolades, impressive resumes, and social media clout can just as easily turn you green around the ears.
Pride: When you expect other people to have Googled you
Sure, we live in a world where Googling someone has become more than common courtesy—it’s practically basic hygiene. Business meetings, dinner dates, job interviews: Google, Google, Google them. But when you sit down with someone and find out that they haven’t Googled you, and they have no idea who you are, what you’ve done? Painful. But it shouldn’t be.
Fortune (and Fortune!) favors the bold. Mind your sins. Go forth and Google, sparingly.
SEO Blog. Organic SEO Blog. Search Marketing News. SEO Done Right examines search engine optimization, the most effective form of internet marketing. Breaking SEO news and emerging developments at Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Leading Organic SEO Consultants Peak Positions debunk the many myths, hype, and spin related to SEO and search marketing.
Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts
Monday, March 09, 2015
Friday, September 05, 2014
SONY DENIES PLAYSTATION NETWORK WOBBLES DESPITE GAMER GRIPES
Original Story: TheRegister.co.uk
Updated An unknown number of gamers have been kicked off of Sony's PlayStation Network, but the company is continuing to insist that its service is stable.
Anecdotal reports posted on social media appear to tell a different story, however.
Some customers are currently saying that they are being greeted with a message that reads: "the network is undergoing maintenance."
Others, meanwhile, are making uncorroborated claims that the PlayStation Network is suffering a Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
Updated An unknown number of gamers have been kicked off of Sony's PlayStation Network, but the company is continuing to insist that its service is stable.
Anecdotal reports posted on social media appear to tell a different story, however.
Some customers are currently saying that they are being greeted with a message that reads: "the network is undergoing maintenance."
Others, meanwhile, are making uncorroborated claims that the PlayStation Network is suffering a Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
Friday, November 30, 2012
Holiday Shoppers May be Influenced by Social Media
story first appeared in USA Today
Retailers may have hit record sales over the shopping weekend from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, but the impact of social media campaigns many of them invested in is less certain.
Offerpop, which helps retailers including Amazon, Sears and Walmart run social-marketing campaigns, says it saw a 40% increase in social-media campaigns by its clients for the Black Friday shopping weekend compared with last year.
Yet social media made up less than 1% of online traffic and sales on Black Friday, according to IBM Smarter Commerce, which tracks sales for 500 of the top retail sites. And that's down from last year.
That's based on customers who were referred to a retailer's site through social media and made a purchase right then.
It may not necessarily be a bad thing though, given retailers were using social media more to raise brand awareness than to push sales this year, says Jay Henderson, strategy director for IBM Smarter Commerce.
Target rewarded a number of customers that were tweeting about the company with electronic gift cards over the weekend, spokesman Joe Curry says. It also used an interactive Facebook app to reveal its Black Friday deals by pitting a series of items against each other and asking users to pick which product they thought would go on sale for Black Friday. The game had almost 1 million users in a four-day span, Curry says.
Twitter mentions for retailers also jumped. Mentions of the @DisneyStore handle increased 42% over the weekend, the company reports. And tweets with the hashtag #FairyGodmother, which customers included when they had a question or needed help with a product, were up 40% from last year.
While it may be hard to track how much this kind of social-media activity benefits retailers in terms of sales, Erin Robbins O'Brien, head of business intelligence at Viralheat, a data analytics company whose software helps companies track social-media sentiment, says that most of the retailers they've worked with have all agreed that people talking about their particular store or brand is always going to be better than not.
And social media's influence on purchases is stronger than the IBM numbers let on, she says.
Social media in some way, shape or form is oftentimes one of the first ways someone will hear about something, according to O'Brien.
That was the case for Alan Cavanna, who bought a Dell laptop after seeing a tweet sent out by Best Buy on Cyber Monday.
Retailers may have hit record sales over the shopping weekend from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, but the impact of social media campaigns many of them invested in is less certain.
Offerpop, which helps retailers including Amazon, Sears and Walmart run social-marketing campaigns, says it saw a 40% increase in social-media campaigns by its clients for the Black Friday shopping weekend compared with last year.
Yet social media made up less than 1% of online traffic and sales on Black Friday, according to IBM Smarter Commerce, which tracks sales for 500 of the top retail sites. And that's down from last year.
That's based on customers who were referred to a retailer's site through social media and made a purchase right then.
It may not necessarily be a bad thing though, given retailers were using social media more to raise brand awareness than to push sales this year, says Jay Henderson, strategy director for IBM Smarter Commerce.
Target rewarded a number of customers that were tweeting about the company with electronic gift cards over the weekend, spokesman Joe Curry says. It also used an interactive Facebook app to reveal its Black Friday deals by pitting a series of items against each other and asking users to pick which product they thought would go on sale for Black Friday. The game had almost 1 million users in a four-day span, Curry says.
Twitter mentions for retailers also jumped. Mentions of the @DisneyStore handle increased 42% over the weekend, the company reports. And tweets with the hashtag #FairyGodmother, which customers included when they had a question or needed help with a product, were up 40% from last year.
While it may be hard to track how much this kind of social-media activity benefits retailers in terms of sales, Erin Robbins O'Brien, head of business intelligence at Viralheat, a data analytics company whose software helps companies track social-media sentiment, says that most of the retailers they've worked with have all agreed that people talking about their particular store or brand is always going to be better than not.
And social media's influence on purchases is stronger than the IBM numbers let on, she says.
Social media in some way, shape or form is oftentimes one of the first ways someone will hear about something, according to O'Brien.
That was the case for Alan Cavanna, who bought a Dell laptop after seeing a tweet sent out by Best Buy on Cyber Monday.
Thursday, November 01, 2012
Hurricane Sandy Social Media News Blunders
story first appeared on usatoday.com
The story of Hurricane Sandy unfolded quickly on social media: a poignant photo of soldiers standing guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns, a picture of a giant wave slamming into the Statue of Liberty and a TV report that 3 feet of water flooded the New York Stock Exchange.
None of it was true.
Social media served as a useful tool for family and friends to keep tabs on each other during the storm, but Hurricane Sandy exposed a dangerous underbelly of social media: False information can go viral.
"There were a lot of rumors going around," said Emily Rahimi, the social media strategist for the New York Fire Department, who writes and monitors its Twitter feed.
She said even though rumors spread on the fire department's social media, it was just as easy to use the site to debunk rumors. At one point, she posted a message that read, "There is much misinformation being spread about #Sandy's impact on #NYC," and pointed people to official city Twitter feeds for accurate information.
Several photos went viral. The photo of the soldiers at Arlington Cemetery was taken in September, not Monday. Others that showed ominous clouds over the New York City skyline were photoshopped, or were screen grabs from a movie, or were stock photos.
A post that the 109-year-old building that is home to the stock exchange was flooded with water became the subject of debate Tuesday after CNN reported it.
In an e-mail, CNN spokeswoman Bridget Leininger said the station's weather correspondent Chad Myers referenced a National Weather Service report that turned out to be incorrect.
The National Weather Service spokesman Chris Vaccaro said the news came from several local New York City media outlets who had posted it on Twitter, though he didn't know which specifically.
The digital news website BuzzFeed identified the original source of the tweet as Twitter user @comfortablysmug, who identifies himself as a Mitt Romney supporter interested in finance and politics. His Twitter feed included other erroneous tweets, including one that all subways would be closed for the rest of the week and that major lines were flooded and another that Con Edison was shutting off all power to New York City. Con Edison corrected the tweet, saying it may shut down service in low-lying areas.
Twitter user @comfortablysmug did not reply to a request for comment. A message posted to the Twitter account late Tuesday apologized, saying, "I made a series of irresponsible and inaccurate tweets."
Without identifying himself by name, the message said he had resigned from the congressional campaign of Christopher Wight, a Republican candidate for the U.S. House in New York.. Wight's campaign website said the candidate had "accepted the resignation of campaign manager Shashank Tripathi."
Debra Jasper, a co-founder of the social media consulting company Mindset Digital, says fact-checking is as quick on Twitter as the spreading of misinformation.
Indeed, posters immediately began asking the source of the information on the flooding at the stock exchange.
Jasper's Mindset Digital partner, Betsy Hubbard, said the other phenomenon occurring more often after a big event is "newsjacking," when someone or a company try to use an event for their gain.
It happened with Hurricane Sandy, too, when American Apparel sent out an e-mail blast for a 20% off sale for people living in the affected states, with a tagline that read, "In case you're bored during the storm."
An immediate backlash followed on Twitter. "I don't care if it's 'relevant,' social media 'newsjacking' is gross and opportunistic," wrote one poster. Another wrote, "American Apparel showing how not to do it with a Hurricane Sandy sale."
"It's not a good idea to try to use these tragic events to your advantage," Hubbard says.
Rahimi, who monitored the department's Twitter account all day Monday and through the night and early morning Tuesday, said more good came out of using social media despite the bad information that circulated. At one point, she said, a rumor spread that the Fire Department headquarters was evacuated. So she set the record straight, sending messages directly to people who had posted the erroneous information.
For the record, the headquarters building wasn't evacuated.
The story of Hurricane Sandy unfolded quickly on social media: a poignant photo of soldiers standing guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns, a picture of a giant wave slamming into the Statue of Liberty and a TV report that 3 feet of water flooded the New York Stock Exchange.
None of it was true.
Social media served as a useful tool for family and friends to keep tabs on each other during the storm, but Hurricane Sandy exposed a dangerous underbelly of social media: False information can go viral.
"There were a lot of rumors going around," said Emily Rahimi, the social media strategist for the New York Fire Department, who writes and monitors its Twitter feed.
She said even though rumors spread on the fire department's social media, it was just as easy to use the site to debunk rumors. At one point, she posted a message that read, "There is much misinformation being spread about #Sandy's impact on #NYC," and pointed people to official city Twitter feeds for accurate information.
Several photos went viral. The photo of the soldiers at Arlington Cemetery was taken in September, not Monday. Others that showed ominous clouds over the New York City skyline were photoshopped, or were screen grabs from a movie, or were stock photos.
A post that the 109-year-old building that is home to the stock exchange was flooded with water became the subject of debate Tuesday after CNN reported it.
In an e-mail, CNN spokeswoman Bridget Leininger said the station's weather correspondent Chad Myers referenced a National Weather Service report that turned out to be incorrect.
The National Weather Service spokesman Chris Vaccaro said the news came from several local New York City media outlets who had posted it on Twitter, though he didn't know which specifically.
The digital news website BuzzFeed identified the original source of the tweet as Twitter user @comfortablysmug, who identifies himself as a Mitt Romney supporter interested in finance and politics. His Twitter feed included other erroneous tweets, including one that all subways would be closed for the rest of the week and that major lines were flooded and another that Con Edison was shutting off all power to New York City. Con Edison corrected the tweet, saying it may shut down service in low-lying areas.
Twitter user @comfortablysmug did not reply to a request for comment. A message posted to the Twitter account late Tuesday apologized, saying, "I made a series of irresponsible and inaccurate tweets."
Without identifying himself by name, the message said he had resigned from the congressional campaign of Christopher Wight, a Republican candidate for the U.S. House in New York.. Wight's campaign website said the candidate had "accepted the resignation of campaign manager Shashank Tripathi."
Debra Jasper, a co-founder of the social media consulting company Mindset Digital, says fact-checking is as quick on Twitter as the spreading of misinformation.
Indeed, posters immediately began asking the source of the information on the flooding at the stock exchange.
Jasper's Mindset Digital partner, Betsy Hubbard, said the other phenomenon occurring more often after a big event is "newsjacking," when someone or a company try to use an event for their gain.
It happened with Hurricane Sandy, too, when American Apparel sent out an e-mail blast for a 20% off sale for people living in the affected states, with a tagline that read, "In case you're bored during the storm."
An immediate backlash followed on Twitter. "I don't care if it's 'relevant,' social media 'newsjacking' is gross and opportunistic," wrote one poster. Another wrote, "American Apparel showing how not to do it with a Hurricane Sandy sale."
"It's not a good idea to try to use these tragic events to your advantage," Hubbard says.
Rahimi, who monitored the department's Twitter account all day Monday and through the night and early morning Tuesday, said more good came out of using social media despite the bad information that circulated. At one point, she said, a rumor spread that the Fire Department headquarters was evacuated. So she set the record straight, sending messages directly to people who had posted the erroneous information.
For the record, the headquarters building wasn't evacuated.
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Microsoft Acquires Yammer
Story first appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Microsoft Corp. has agreed to buy corporate social-network operator Yammer Inc. for $1.2 billion in cash to help it woo businesses with Facebook-like tools that help employees collaborate in the workplace.
San Francisco's Yammer will become part of Microsoft's Office division, and the team will continue to report to the Yammer Chief Executive Officer the companies said Monday, confirming earlier reports of the sale. Yammer was founded in 2008 by the former chief operating officer at PayPal Inc.
Yammer provides features - similar to those found on Facebook - to more than 200,000 companies such as Ford Motor Co. and eBay Inc. The purchase will help Microsoft compete with corporate social features like Salesforce.com Inc.'s Chatter product, as well as startups such as Jive Software Inc. and Asana Inc., run by a Facebook co-founder.
The Yammer deal follows other recent enterprise software purchases centered on social media. San Francisco's Salesforce.com gained social-marketing tools through its $745 million purchase of Buddy Media Inc. earlier this month, and Redwood City's Oracle Corp. recently bought two companies that analyze data on social-media sites. Those are Vitrue Inc. and Collective Intellect Inc.
Microsoft Corp. has agreed to buy corporate social-network operator Yammer Inc. for $1.2 billion in cash to help it woo businesses with Facebook-like tools that help employees collaborate in the workplace.
San Francisco's Yammer will become part of Microsoft's Office division, and the team will continue to report to the Yammer Chief Executive Officer the companies said Monday, confirming earlier reports of the sale. Yammer was founded in 2008 by the former chief operating officer at PayPal Inc.
Yammer provides features - similar to those found on Facebook - to more than 200,000 companies such as Ford Motor Co. and eBay Inc. The purchase will help Microsoft compete with corporate social features like Salesforce.com Inc.'s Chatter product, as well as startups such as Jive Software Inc. and Asana Inc., run by a Facebook co-founder.
The Yammer deal follows other recent enterprise software purchases centered on social media. San Francisco's Salesforce.com gained social-marketing tools through its $745 million purchase of Buddy Media Inc. earlier this month, and Redwood City's Oracle Corp. recently bought two companies that analyze data on social-media sites. Those are Vitrue Inc. and Collective Intellect Inc.
For information on website optimization or for the latest SEO News, visit the SEO Done Right
blog.
For more national and worldwide Business News, visit the Peak News
Room blog.
For more local and state of Michigan Business News, visit
the Michigan Business News blog.
For more Health News, visit the
Healthcare and Medical News blog.
For more Electronics
News, visit the Electronics America blog.
For more Real Estate News,
visit the Commercial and Residential Real Estate blog.
For more Law News,
visit the Nation of Law blog.
For more Advertising
News, visit the Advertising, Marketing and Media blog.
For more Environmental News,
visit the Environmental Responsibility News blog.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Facebook Ads Useful or a Bother?
Story first appeared in USA Today.
Do they really, really like you on Facebook? Or did they click the "like" button because they got something?
The Federal Trade Commission holds a workshop today that will look at how companies should disclose incentives on social-media platforms that allow only short messages or a simple sign of approval.
Incentives for consumers to "like" companies on Facebook fall into a "gray area" that depends on whether the number of likes a company has influences consumers in choosing their products. The FTC's advertising endorsement guidelines require compensation to be disclosed, as with Twitter hashtags such as "#paid."
The National Consumers League's says consumers on social media need the same protections as with traditional advertising. Consumers need to be protected from false and deceptive advertising in new media.
Recent plugs with perks:
•Target was offering a free "beauty bag" with makeup samples last week in return for a "like." The company has 1.8 million likes on its Facebook page. The company would not comment about how many were received in return for the bags, but a spokeswoman says Target has given away a million beauty bags in this and another Facebook giveaway.
•Amazon was offering $3 instant video credits last week to people who sent out a pre-written tweet for them.
•Mattress Discounters in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia, entered recent buyers into a drawing for a $100 gift card if they hit their Facebook "like" button, posted pictures of their beds and added comments. The page has 492 likes.
A resident of Woodbridge, N.J., clicked "like" on Target's page and tweeted for Amazon to get the freebies, but says social media doesn't affect her shopping decisions. She finds it "irritating" when her Facebook news feed is full of brand-related tweets when it is obvious that they are being paid.
But companies can't rely on loyal fans to spread the word about products, says Christopher Barcelona, of digital marketing agency Resource Interactive. That makes incentives more important than ever.
Do they really, really like you on Facebook? Or did they click the "like" button because they got something?
The Federal Trade Commission holds a workshop today that will look at how companies should disclose incentives on social-media platforms that allow only short messages or a simple sign of approval.
Incentives for consumers to "like" companies on Facebook fall into a "gray area" that depends on whether the number of likes a company has influences consumers in choosing their products. The FTC's advertising endorsement guidelines require compensation to be disclosed, as with Twitter hashtags such as "#paid."
The National Consumers League's says consumers on social media need the same protections as with traditional advertising. Consumers need to be protected from false and deceptive advertising in new media.
Recent plugs with perks:
•Target was offering a free "beauty bag" with makeup samples last week in return for a "like." The company has 1.8 million likes on its Facebook page. The company would not comment about how many were received in return for the bags, but a spokeswoman says Target has given away a million beauty bags in this and another Facebook giveaway.
•Amazon was offering $3 instant video credits last week to people who sent out a pre-written tweet for them.
•Mattress Discounters in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia, entered recent buyers into a drawing for a $100 gift card if they hit their Facebook "like" button, posted pictures of their beds and added comments. The page has 492 likes.
A resident of Woodbridge, N.J., clicked "like" on Target's page and tweeted for Amazon to get the freebies, but says social media doesn't affect her shopping decisions. She finds it "irritating" when her Facebook news feed is full of brand-related tweets when it is obvious that they are being paid.
But companies can't rely on loyal fans to spread the word about products, says Christopher Barcelona, of digital marketing agency Resource Interactive. That makes incentives more important than ever.
For more information on website optimization or for the latest SEO News, visit the SEO Done Right
blog.
For more national and worldwide Business News, visit the Peak News
Room blog.
For more local and state of Michigan Business News, visit
the Michigan Business News blog.
For more Health News, visit the
Healthcare and Medical News blog.
For more Electronics
News, visit the Electronics America blog.
For more Real Estate News,
visit the Commercial and Residential Real Estate blog.
For more Law News,
visit the Nation of Law blog.
For more Advertising
News, visit the Advertising, Marketing and Media blog.
For more Environmental News,
visit the Environmental Responsibility News blog.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Financial Advisers Fear Hackers in Social Media
First appeared on Reuters
Financial advisers may be overlooking one potential threat
in the rush to develop new client relationships through social media: hackers.
Social media websites like Facebook and Twitter can help
financial advisers tap a rich source of potential business. But there are risks
associated -- beyond the fear of someone posting false information about you --
that can compromise an adviser's reputation and computer network. Some
so-called "friends" could actually be hackers working to take over
profile pages or infect users' computer systems with malware, say technology
professionals.
Hackers, for example, could post embarrassing comments using
the adviser's name. They could also try to harvest tidbits of information,
including names, birthdays and photographs, and use them to help create false
identities which could be used to open credit or other accounts. What's more,
an adviser's hacked account can automatically send messages that contain
malware directly through social networking sites. Or an adviser could
unknowingly infect his or her own business network by opening a malware-laced
link sent via message.
The trouble is, most people do not realize these things have
happened until after the fact. Advisers are no different.
"I don't think advisers have given much thought to
protecting themselves from hacking on social media sites," said Korrine
Kohm, vice president at Ascendant Compliance Management, a consultancy in
Salisbury, Connecticut.
Companies typically have filters and firewalls in place to
protect their internal computer networks. But those types of precautions
usually do not extend to applications, or apps, advisers may run on portable
devices, such as iPhones, to access social networking sites, according to Kohm.
Knowing the risks before jumping in can help advisers
protect themselves from security breaches and possible regulatory trouble,
compliance consultants said.
REGULATION AND RISK
The ramifications extend beyond annoying clients or an
expensive tech clean-up.
Advisers must archive posts and messages they send through
social networking for three years, according to recent regulatory guidance. But
hackers could distort those archives by deleting or rewording prior posts, according
to Conrad Jacoby, a senior attorney at Winston & Strawn LLP in Washington.
That could raise eyebrows among securities regulators, said
Jacoby, who advises clients on managing information that is stored
electronically. Altered posts could be embarrassing or violate securities
industry advertising rules.
Social media monitoring and archiving software can help
advisers keep track of their social media communications, including anything
that is removed or altered. That could help eliminate concerns that regulators
may have if a hacking problem crops up.
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn did not respond to emails
from Reuters requesting comment. However, each include security information on
their websites that advisers should review. A Facebook page, for example,
explains threats, such as Koobface, a computer worm, and how to identify them.
LinkedIn audits its system for possible "vulnerabilities and attacks,"
according to its site.
SAVING REPUTATIONS
Compliance programs that raise awareness of social media
issues can help advisers manage hacking risks -- and potential regulatory
trouble, said Glen Gilmore, a social media lawyer and principal at Gilmore
Business Network, a consultancy in Hamilton, New Jersey.
The SEC, in recent guidance, signaled that advisers should
consider social media training "to promote compliance and to prevent
potential violations of the federal securities laws."
Training could include how to recognize sham messages that
may contain viruses, or procedures to follow if a hacker takes over an
adviser's profile page and spouts posts about, say, a new weight-loss
supplement.
Advisers who diligently keep watch over their social
networking profiles are also more likely to avoid problems. Recent guidance to
advisers from Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin
suggested reviewing social networking sites daily to ensure that their content
complies with regulations.
Ongoing reviews of social media profiles can help advisers
tackle problems early when they do occur. That could include telling clients --
quickly -- that an embarrassing message about legalizing marijuana really came
from a hacker.
"Companies have to anticipate there will be
problems," Gilmore said. "But how they handle it is what separates
who masters social media and who doesn't."
Friday, January 06, 2012
More Than One Mark Zuckerburg?
First appeared on Mashable
Facebook has threatened to sue Mark Zuckerberg, an Israeli entrepreneur who recently took the social network founder’s name. The new Zuckerberg, born Rotem Guez, legally changed his name Dec. 7.
Zuckerberg II’s website, MarkZuckerbergOfficial.com, states that he first filed a lawsuit against Facebook in January, after the social network refused to give him access to his profile, which it had shut down.
Zuckerberg (all further mentions refer to the Israeli entrepreneur) co-founded Like Store, a social marketing company, which sells companies Likes for their brand pages. The site states (translated), “Are you sad no one’s visiting your Facebook Page? We have a solution! Need 1,000 Likes? We’ll get them for you. Need 5,000 Likes? We’ll get them for you. Need 10,000 Likes? We’ll get them for you.”
In September, Facebook’s law firm Perkins Coie threatened to sue against Zuckerberg, claiming the Like Store violated the social network’s Terms of Service, by selling brands fans. The threat instructed Zuckerberg to shut his company and never return to the social network for any reason.
Zuckerberg officially changed his name Dec. 7. In the below video of his trip to the Interior Ministry to make the switch official, he says he plans to change his family’s names as well. One week later, Facebook again threatened a lawsuit against Zuckerberg’s still existing Like Store. Little did they know, they were threatening someone with the name of their own founder.
Though legally Facebook can, of course, sue someone named Mark Zuckerberg, it makes for quite the funny tale.
Perhaps anticipating the media attention he would receive, Zuckerberg has set up an Internet campaign for his new persona, including a Facebook Page and Twitter account, @iMarkZuckerberg, suggesting that he’s ready to make a splash with his new identity. His Facebook Page includes photos of his new identification card and passport.
Google Social Media Upsets Little Girl
First appeared in Washington Post
Father Rich Warren sounded off on social media sites Reddit and Google+ about his upsetting morning: He had woken up to find that Google had suddenly, without warning, shut down his daughter’s e-mail account and blog. His daughter had used her Gmail to send e-mail to her grandparents, friends and classmates, and had started the Blogger blog as a class project.
Warren said he believed both accounts were disabled because his daughter was underage. Under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), Web sites collecting information from children under age 13 must take a number of steps to protect the child’s privacy. Warren says he’s not upset with Google for complying with COPPA, but how they went about it.
Back in May, Google seemed to encourage children’s memories be shared on Gmail, YouTube, blogs and other services. In a viral video commercial dubbed “Dear Sophie,” a father is shown creating a Gmail account for his baby daughter, and then using it to send her photos, videos, and messages that chronicle her growing up, so that she can read and see them when she’s older:
The difference between “Dear Sophie” and Warren’s situation is that Sophie’s father did all the actual uploading of information, not his daughter. But how does Google know that? And how did Google realize, after several years of ignoring it, that Warren’s daughter was underage? Why, as Warren asked in his Google+ letter, did the company not inform him or ask his consent before disabling the accounts? And how can parents work to make sure this doesn’t happen to their children?
A Google Support page provides some answers, writing that accounts can get disabled if a child enters a birthday indicating they are not old enough to use Gmail. Warren’s daughter may have filled in that information if she joined Google+.
In one part of his letter to Google, Warren laments, “Remember, we're talking about letters from grandparents and friends. I can't even log in and back them up. They're just gone.”
That’s not necessarily true. Google writes on its support page that accounts can be re-enabled if a parent sends a government ID or credit card information over email or fax to prove their age. Accounts can be re-enabled after several days, or even go back up instantly.
Warren’s post sparked hundreds of comments, in which many Google users argued about whether the online giant should be at fault or not. Several parents, saying they’d had enough with Google’s attitude toward child usage, suggested using different, more kid-friendly e-mail providers altogether.
Update, that afternoon:
A Google spokesman responded to request for comment on Warren’s letter, saying:
Asking for age information helps us provide features like age-appropriate settings to our users, who are interacting more every day with the people they know. Under our policies, Google doesn’t allow users who are under the age of 13 to have Google Accounts, unless they are using Google Apps for Education accounts through their school. This is similar to a lot of online services, as it's very complicated for many providers to offer better solutions for children that meet the relevant regulations. It's not as simple as just asking a parent for consent to let their child have an account — there are associated implications for data and privacy involved.
We know that this data is important to people, and we want to help by finding the right solutions. We're also working on designing special safety settings for teens.
Regarding the [“Dear Sophie”] video, the email address in the spot belongs to the Dad... The implied understanding is that the girl in the story does not have access to the account, but that she will have access to it “someday.”
Friday, November 05, 2010
Success Tips for Social Media Customers
Forbes
Social media usage continues to grow explosively. Not surprisingly, businesses want to leverage social media for customer acquisition and retention, as well as brand building. Providing good customer service to the social consumer is emerging as a critical imperative to achieving these objectives since social media is also a natural venue for customers to air their grievances.
While going social in customer service makes sense for many businesses, it might pay to be "antisocial" first, meaning a deliberate approach to social media customer service will maximize the odds of success. It is not uncommon for businesses to simply rush into social without giving themselves adequate time to assess the need, develop a strategy, formulate policy and practices, and put the required technology, process and people infrastructures in place. The Web is rife with examples of poor social practices caused by rushing in.
Here are five "antisocial" steps businesses need to take before making the social plunge, in order to avoid such missteps and the resultant damage to their brands:
1. Do I really need to be social? Social media is best suited to address customer service queries of low-to-moderate complexity. Complex queries will involve significant back and forth and one-to-one communications that are often not relevant to the broader community.
2. Get picky about the venue. One size does not fit all when it comes to social media. As an example, social "clubs" like supplier-moderated or third-party-moderated forums are more appropriate for B2B businesses, for instance, than broad social networks like Twitter and Facebook. The more complex the products and service interactions, the better is the fit for focused media like forums and traditional one-to-one communications. Moreover, answers to complex queries do not lend themselves to the character limitations of a medium like Twitter, further limiting the fit. Pick the medium that makes sense for your business and prioritize your investments accordingly.
3. Get picky about the people. It is important to prioritize social customer service based on the financial and influence value that the social customer brings to the business. The Pareto principle applies here as well--a minority of social customers is likely to add the most financial value and wield the most social influence. Businesses are better off focusing on these high-priority customers before expanding their social efforts to the broader market.
4. Don't be impulsive. The speed of social can thrill or kill. The velocity of market influence and the resulting brand enhancement, or damage, is exponentially higher in social media than traditional one-to-one communication channels. This applies to business brands (e.g. "United Airlines broke my guitar" incident) or personal brands (e.g. Tiger Woods). Furthermore, customers often go social with their complaints when traditional customer service channels fail.
So, there's less room for error in social customer service, and the speed and quality of responses need to be much higher in social media than in traditional channels. Make sure your organization has the policies, technology, knowledge, process and people in place to provide high-speed, high-quality customer service that is required by social media before jumping in. No social is better than bad social!
Furthermore, organizations need to make sure that they do not create a social interaction silo that is disconnected from traditional interactions of the social customer with the business. Cross-channel amnesia on the part of businesses is a common problem in traditional media, and customers wouldn't want to see it extended to social media as well.
In fact, a Pan-European survey of 4,000 telecom subscribers in 2010 revealed that customer service basics such as getting knowledgeable and consistent responses within and across traditional one-to-one communication channels was more important to them than social customer service or access to human agents.
5. Research before you leap. While social engagement and interactions take time to prepare for, businesses should start monitoring social networks suited to their business sooner rather than later. This will help them identify opportunities they could leverage and issues they need to defuse, as well as make the internal business case for implementing social customer service and obtain funding.
A final word
Social customer service can enhance customer experience and brand loyalty. However, an "antisocial" wet-foot-first approach rather than an "ultra-social" jump-headlong approach will increase the odds of success.
While going social in customer service makes sense for many businesses, it might pay to be "antisocial" first, meaning a deliberate approach to social media customer service will maximize the odds of success. It is not uncommon for businesses to simply rush into social without giving themselves adequate time to assess the need, develop a strategy, formulate policy and practices, and put the required technology, process and people infrastructures in place. The Web is rife with examples of poor social practices caused by rushing in.
Here are five "antisocial" steps businesses need to take before making the social plunge, in order to avoid such missteps and the resultant damage to their brands:
1. Do I really need to be social? Social media is best suited to address customer service queries of low-to-moderate complexity. Complex queries will involve significant back and forth and one-to-one communications that are often not relevant to the broader community.
2. Get picky about the venue. One size does not fit all when it comes to social media. As an example, social "clubs" like supplier-moderated or third-party-moderated forums are more appropriate for B2B businesses, for instance, than broad social networks like Twitter and Facebook. The more complex the products and service interactions, the better is the fit for focused media like forums and traditional one-to-one communications. Moreover, answers to complex queries do not lend themselves to the character limitations of a medium like Twitter, further limiting the fit. Pick the medium that makes sense for your business and prioritize your investments accordingly.
3. Get picky about the people. It is important to prioritize social customer service based on the financial and influence value that the social customer brings to the business. The Pareto principle applies here as well--a minority of social customers is likely to add the most financial value and wield the most social influence. Businesses are better off focusing on these high-priority customers before expanding their social efforts to the broader market.
4. Don't be impulsive. The speed of social can thrill or kill. The velocity of market influence and the resulting brand enhancement, or damage, is exponentially higher in social media than traditional one-to-one communication channels. This applies to business brands (e.g. "United Airlines broke my guitar" incident) or personal brands (e.g. Tiger Woods). Furthermore, customers often go social with their complaints when traditional customer service channels fail.
So, there's less room for error in social customer service, and the speed and quality of responses need to be much higher in social media than in traditional channels. Make sure your organization has the policies, technology, knowledge, process and people in place to provide high-speed, high-quality customer service that is required by social media before jumping in. No social is better than bad social!
Furthermore, organizations need to make sure that they do not create a social interaction silo that is disconnected from traditional interactions of the social customer with the business. Cross-channel amnesia on the part of businesses is a common problem in traditional media, and customers wouldn't want to see it extended to social media as well.
In fact, a Pan-European survey of 4,000 telecom subscribers in 2010 revealed that customer service basics such as getting knowledgeable and consistent responses within and across traditional one-to-one communication channels was more important to them than social customer service or access to human agents.
5. Research before you leap. While social engagement and interactions take time to prepare for, businesses should start monitoring social networks suited to their business sooner rather than later. This will help them identify opportunities they could leverage and issues they need to defuse, as well as make the internal business case for implementing social customer service and obtain funding.
A final word
Social customer service can enhance customer experience and brand loyalty. However, an "antisocial" wet-foot-first approach rather than an "ultra-social" jump-headlong approach will increase the odds of success.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz: 'Creepy' Facebook is Biggest Rival
USA Today
Yahoo shouldn't be such a hard company to figure out. It's one of the oldest and best-known content providers on the Web. Its news, information, entertainment and communications services attract more than 170 million U.S. visitors each month.
Yet many investors consider Yahoo to be a mystery.
Its stock has lost 15.4% of its value in 2010 as Yahoo failed to show significant gains in page views and ad sales. The big question on Wall Street is whether Yahoo is too scattered and stodgy to fend off powerful competitors led by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and AOL.
Concerns grew last week as Yahoo lost three executives who were trying to freshen its content and attract new fans — including people who use smartphones to access the Web.
No wonder all eyes in the digital world are on Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz.
She was a surprise choice to manage one of the industry's toughest turnaround challenges in January 2009. The move to Yahoo capped a long career in Silicon Valley that included 14 years running Autodesk, a computer-aided software design firm.
Bartz, 62, has spent much of her time cutting costs, and deals, as she tried to sharpen Yahoo's focus on services that appeal to advertisers. For example, last year she agreed to let Microsoft's Bing power Yahoo's search engine. And this year Yahoo bought Associated Content, which assigns news stories to freelancers based on data about subjects that interest Web users.
It's been a long journey from the farms of Minnesota and Wisconsin, where the tart-tongued executive was born and raised, to Yahoo, which is expected to generate $6.5 billion in revenue this year.
Bartz shared her views about Yahoo, prospects for the Internet and the economy with USA TODAY's David Lieberman at the 12th USA TODAY CEO Forum on Sept. 29 at Georgia State University.
The interview took place in front of an audience. Here are Bartz's thoughts, edited for length and clarity:
Social media
Q: Did you guys miss the boat on social media?
A: Social does not just equal Facebook. Social is how people interact anywhere. During the State of the Union address last January, we had so many people commenting the first couple hours that our site went down. That's a social interaction. E-mail is a social experience.
What I don't like is when somebody says, "The only way you find social is (the way Facebook operates)." Did we miss the boat on exactly how they do it? Of course we did. Everybody did.
Q: Who's your biggest single competitor?
A: Facebook — not today, but they could be. If they keep going, they will have the vault of information on everybody in the world, and that's valuable.
Q: Valuable, to the point of being scary?
A: Yes, creepy. I don't care to find an old boyfriend. One time, just to see if they got fat and bald, but then leave me alone. But I'm old.
Advertising
Q: You're introducing new forms of display advertising, including one that makes people feel as though they're turning pages in a magazine.
A: Too much of the advertising (on the Internet) is static and feels old-fashioned. So we like to work with the advertisers to say, "Let's kind of get in there and mix it up. Let's get people jolted awake again."
One of my favorites: Purina Puppy Chow has a little puppy walking across the top of the screen. I sit there like an idiot because it's cute, and I happen to like puppies. It drags the bowl. When Disney did their advertising for Alice in Wonderland you went to the front page, you open it up and this hole appears and you are sucked into it and you are in Wonderland. People clicked on that ad four and five times to replay it. It was fun.
Q: These sound very intrusive to me. Sometimes I want to look at the screen and see what I want to see. I don't want the dog.
A: You can click on any of these and say, "Don't show me this."
Q: You are making me do extra work.
A: Oh, excuse me, please. You are getting a lot of value. This is not like a free lunch here. We just opened a data center in Buffalo, and in its first phase it has 50,000 servers. That is not cheap. So the very fact that you get all this great information is part of the deal.
But we have something called an Ad Interest Manager. You can say, "Don't ever show me an ad again" or "Don't show me this kind of ad or that kind of ad." Less than 1% of the people elect not to.
Q: Consumers also buy TiVo so that they can skip past the ads.
A: If people really don't want ads, they can go find their information however it is they want. It's a free world on that matter. What I'm saying is, I don't think you want bad ads.
Q: You've said that Apple exercises too much control over the ads on its devices, and you said that can't last. Why?
A: If you want to run an ad on the iPad, it has to be approved by Apple. I don't think it is for us to say this ad isn't pretty enough and to go through this whole back-end process of approval. I don't think in the long run that's going to work. Advertisers will have other options.
Leadership
Q: What qualities does a leader need to be able to turn a company around? That's basically what you have been asked to do, right?
A: Yes. Any leader needs to be constantly interested in what's going on in the world, and constantly ready — even when things are going well — to change. In the case of a company as large as Yahoo (you have) to be honest about its shortcomings and be maniacal about how to get it better.
Q: You had no background in computer design when you went to Autodesk. You had no background in media when you went to Yahoo. Did that help or hurt?
A: It's both. You have a freshness of having new eyes, but you also don't have the grounding. So you have to accommodate that with listening, learning, being willing to ask questions that might appear to be less than brilliant, and enjoying the business.
I would never do anything that I didn't enjoy. That's the whole thing. I couldn't go run a fruit business. That wouldn't do it for me. As long as you are inspired by it, you can learn anything.
Q: What do you look for when you hire people?
A: I hire very high-level people, and so you are really checking to make sure they have a cultural fit and that sort of thing.
When you are talking about hiring somebody in their first, second, third job, you really are looking for excitement, some humbleness. So: eagerness to learn, eagerness to be involved in whatever the company is doing — and being willing to do the work you have to do at entry level.
Q: How do you avoid groupthink?
A: Go talk to people at all levels in the organization and honestly ask their opinion. If you sit there quiet and interested, it comes out.
Q: They will say to you, "Carol, I think that you are making a big, big mistake"?
A: Yes. I don't shoot people. In fact, I would shoot people that wouldn't take a risk.
Somebody showed me a slide to prove they were risk-taking and the top of the slide said "calculated risk." So I said, "OK, you already know it is going to work, right?" "Oh, yes, it will work." That's not a risk. That's just not a risk.
Connected TVs
Q: A lot of Internet-connected TVs offer Yahoo Widgets — apps that make it easy for viewers to do things like get sports scores or watch certain videos from the Web. What are the prospects for that business?
A: There's a whole lot of interesting tectonic plates moving around. When you have a nice, large screen, there's a lot you can do with it. And Yahoo wants to be there.
Q: How concerned are you about Google TV, a new service that also provides an interface for TV viewers who want to access the Web?
A: It is not a slam-dunk. There's a lot of cable companies that want that business. There's a lot of TV makers that want Internet applications. So it is pretty hard whenever there's a new market forming to say, "Oh, that's the leader." It takes awhile to settle out.
Q: About 86% of the country gets video from cable or satellite providers, and 2% get it from the Internet. How long will it be before that changes?
A: There's different kinds of video. If you are asking me whether the half-hour (TV) show and the hour show is going to be all consumed on the Internet, I don't think (that will happen) for a long time. It is going to take awhile to overcome the foothold that cable has.
Q: How about for people who don't need 200 channels and just want to watch some news, a little bit of entertainment, maybe some sports?
A: There's 220 million websites, not 220 channels. It's too much. You want to have a place where you can trust what the news is or trust what sports is and get your job done.
Q: Could you envision a Yahoo TV newscast?
A: We have that now, in a way. We have updates on Tech Ticker, one of our most popular shows. We have Primetime in No Time, which basically tells you in three, four minutes everything that happened in prime time. We have Daytime in No Time, which tells you what happened on all your soaps and Oprah and all that.
People flood to that stuff because who has got time to look at all of it? And those three- and five-minute video shows are very popular with the advertisers.
What is Yahoo?
Q: Yahoo has great assets, but some people say they don't know what the company does or where it is going.
A: That exists in New York City and about 30 miles outside Silicon Valley. The rest of the world seems to know.
Yahoo is the largest media company in the world. We are twice as large as the nearest competitor. We do it through innovative technology and bringing people information they need to manage their lives. We serve up — and these numbers I hope will astound you — 10 billion ads a day.
Q: Where do you feel that Yahoo has a weakness?
A: There's three big places that people go on the Internet: Facebook, Yahoo, Google. We play to our strengths, which by definition means we have weaknesses in other areas.
Q: In January you gave yourself a B-minus for the first year. How about this year?
A: I'm off the grading thing. I'm just going to declare that we are pass-fail, and I pass.
Q: Would you have hired someone like you to be CEO?
A: Let me answer a question you didn't ask. Am I the perfect person for the job at Yahoo? No. Am I good for the job? Yes.
The economy
Q: What's your forecast for the economy?
A: Was there the word "economist" on my business card?
Q: You have to have some idea, to make a business plan.
A: Of course you do. Now let me be serious. Last year, we said, by the third or fourth quarter of 2010, things will be better. This year, we are saying, by the third or fourth quarter of 2011.
We can't seem to get stability around employment, housing — all those issues that are making consumers less confident than they should be.
To be honest, we don't understand what goes on in Washington. A lot of rules keep changing. That erodes confidence. It is far from a healthy, vibrant economy.
Q: Is that a commentary about President Obama's handling of the economy?
A: I am actually a very private political person, so I would not like to comment on that.
Q: How will you vote in California? Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is the GOP candidate for governor against Jerry Brown and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina is the Republican against Sen. Barbara Boxer?
A: I'm voting for Meg and Carly, absolutely.
Local
Q: You are starting a local news operation for San Francisco. Tell us about your plans to offer local information.
A: We all live in a place. You live in small communities, and you are very interested in what happens in those communities from police blotters to what happened in the city council or the neighborhood watch. It is interesting to the consumer.
And it is interesting to the advertiser because it is the ultimate target. Statistics are 95% of our purchases are (made) within 2 miles of our house, 5 miles of our house.
Q: There are a lot of people in local news. AOL has Patch. Local newspapers, radio stations, TV stations are online. Where do you fit in?
A: We have partnerships with local publications and an association with newspapers. They send us news feeds. We send viewers back to their dot-com locations. So we actually are very symbiotic with people like that.
But to answer more the spirit of your question, why can we succeed? I will give you the CEO answer: We do a better job. A better job in being a partner with local advertisers. A better job partnering with people actually writing from the community, not about the community. We have a lot of experience in this.
Regulations
Q: Can you clarify your position on net neutrality — the idea that Internet providers shouldn't be allowed to cut deals to transmit information from some Web services faster than others?
A: Everybody should have equal access (to the Internet). But we have to work out a system whereby folks that laid fiber and put the (broadband) infrastructure in get value for that.
I'm not sure that I'm smart enough to figure the answer out. But I don't think that two companies, or just the government, get to decide. People have to come to the table, get off the end positions and be more practical.
Q: Rules should apply equally to wired and wireless?
A: I think so.
Q: The Federal Trade Commission is looking at the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. In 1998 it barred Internet companies from collecting data on kids under 13. Should it apply to phones, gaming consoles and interactive TV?
A: Of course. Listen, anything that can protect our children from bad people, we have to do.
Q: Should it include teens?
A: I would have no problem with that.
News
Q: Yahoo is one of the Web's most popular news sources. What distinguishes your news from Google's or AOL's?
A: We not only license news feeds (for example from Reuters and the Associated Press), we also have our own editorial voice. We have human editors watching what seems to be interesting people, and feature that more prominently. So we are constantly tweaking what is delivered.
For instance, on our front page we have a module called "Today," which is what's happening. Every five minutes we serve up 32,000 different variations depending on what you seem to be interested in. So it is very personal. It is engaging.
Then we just bought a company called Associated Content: 380,000 writers, bloggers, in all the towns and cities who also contribute to this news feed. So it is a combination of what people can do and what machines can do.
Q: Do you ever say, "Look, folks, here's something that you may not be interested in but you really ought to know"?
A: Absolutely. Listen, just because enough people weren't reading about the oil spill, we wouldn't pull it off the page. That's again what editors are for, that's what people's brains are for, to make those kind of judgment calls.
Q: What's the basis for those judgments? The judgment you'd make for the National Enquirer would be different from what you'd make for The Economist.
A: Yes. We are neither the left voice nor the right voice. We try to be the center voice.
We are just selecting news that people actually have liked to read about. It is not our job to round people out. It is our job to be balanced and have a voice that is balanced and is dependable and trustworthy.
Q: News organizations regularly run stories that antagonize some advertisers. How do you handle that?
A: We try not to antagonize our advertisers. Please, we never want to antagonize you. And we are careful. For instance, we have very, very intense technology that scans for nudity and bad words.
But when you have as many users as we do, almost 170 million in the U.S., everybody has opinions and (some) tell me that we should not have written this story and that story. But it isn't about doing something untrustworthy.
Q: They used to say that Katharine Graham was a great CEO at the Washington Post because she loved the newsroom. That's not your background, but do you love the newsroom — or is it just a business?
A: What I like is the technology and how we can serve up information that, while we are global brand, feels very local and personal.
Mobile
Q: Where does mobile fit into your strategic plan?
A: We are just neck and neck with Google for mobile installations in the U.S. We don't have an operating system, but we have Yahoo Mail, Messenger, Finance — all those things. Mobile is huge for us, especially in emerging parts of the world where the only on-ramp to the Internet is going to be through a small screen. They are not going to have a desktop or laptop at home. But for the developed world, I don't think you are going to let this (small) size screen be the only ramp on to the Internet.
Q: If you get a Google Android phone, all the Google applications just work. You are drawn into their world. Does Yahoo need a device of its own?
A: It isn't Google that gets to do that: It is what the carrier wants to do. By the way, there are many instances around the world where what comes up are Yahoo applications, not Google applications, even on an Android phone. The only one that actually controls that precisely is Apple.
Q: So will we start seeing deals between Yahoo and some carriers?
A: Sure. We have deals now with carriers. A lot of it is international, but we power AT&T's website. We are really all over the place. If you are a Yahoo Finance advocate, you want Yahoo Finance in your mobile phone. So people's habits can stay with them.
ABOUT CAROL BARTZ
Born: Winona, Minn.
First big break: The president and managers of a bank where she worked while in high school helped her to get a college scholarship. "Without their help, I probably wouldn't be where I am today."
College: University of Wisconsin, B.S. in computer science.
First job after graduation: Selling automated banking services. "I drove around in my go-go boots to small towns and tried to convince little banks to automate."
Best advice: From her grandmother, who raised her on a farm. "I was in the machine shed with my brother. We heard a rattlesnake above us and ran for Grandma. She grabbed a shovel, knocked the snake out of the rafters and chopped its head off. Then she said, 'You could have done that.' And you know what? She was right."
Currently reading: Allegra Goodman's novel The Cookbook Collector.
Favorite movie: Right now I'd say the Swedish version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
Current music playlist: Jack Johnson.
Sports: Golf.
Passion: Gardening. "It's the way I calm down."
Yet many investors consider Yahoo to be a mystery.
Its stock has lost 15.4% of its value in 2010 as Yahoo failed to show significant gains in page views and ad sales. The big question on Wall Street is whether Yahoo is too scattered and stodgy to fend off powerful competitors led by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and AOL.
Concerns grew last week as Yahoo lost three executives who were trying to freshen its content and attract new fans — including people who use smartphones to access the Web.
No wonder all eyes in the digital world are on Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz.
She was a surprise choice to manage one of the industry's toughest turnaround challenges in January 2009. The move to Yahoo capped a long career in Silicon Valley that included 14 years running Autodesk, a computer-aided software design firm.
Bartz, 62, has spent much of her time cutting costs, and deals, as she tried to sharpen Yahoo's focus on services that appeal to advertisers. For example, last year she agreed to let Microsoft's Bing power Yahoo's search engine. And this year Yahoo bought Associated Content, which assigns news stories to freelancers based on data about subjects that interest Web users.
It's been a long journey from the farms of Minnesota and Wisconsin, where the tart-tongued executive was born and raised, to Yahoo, which is expected to generate $6.5 billion in revenue this year.
Bartz shared her views about Yahoo, prospects for the Internet and the economy with USA TODAY's David Lieberman at the 12th USA TODAY CEO Forum on Sept. 29 at Georgia State University.
The interview took place in front of an audience. Here are Bartz's thoughts, edited for length and clarity:
Social media
Q: Did you guys miss the boat on social media?
A: Social does not just equal Facebook. Social is how people interact anywhere. During the State of the Union address last January, we had so many people commenting the first couple hours that our site went down. That's a social interaction. E-mail is a social experience.
What I don't like is when somebody says, "The only way you find social is (the way Facebook operates)." Did we miss the boat on exactly how they do it? Of course we did. Everybody did.
Q: Who's your biggest single competitor?
A: Facebook — not today, but they could be. If they keep going, they will have the vault of information on everybody in the world, and that's valuable.
Q: Valuable, to the point of being scary?
A: Yes, creepy. I don't care to find an old boyfriend. One time, just to see if they got fat and bald, but then leave me alone. But I'm old.
Advertising
Q: You're introducing new forms of display advertising, including one that makes people feel as though they're turning pages in a magazine.
A: Too much of the advertising (on the Internet) is static and feels old-fashioned. So we like to work with the advertisers to say, "Let's kind of get in there and mix it up. Let's get people jolted awake again."
One of my favorites: Purina Puppy Chow has a little puppy walking across the top of the screen. I sit there like an idiot because it's cute, and I happen to like puppies. It drags the bowl. When Disney did their advertising for Alice in Wonderland you went to the front page, you open it up and this hole appears and you are sucked into it and you are in Wonderland. People clicked on that ad four and five times to replay it. It was fun.
Q: These sound very intrusive to me. Sometimes I want to look at the screen and see what I want to see. I don't want the dog.
A: You can click on any of these and say, "Don't show me this."
Q: You are making me do extra work.
A: Oh, excuse me, please. You are getting a lot of value. This is not like a free lunch here. We just opened a data center in Buffalo, and in its first phase it has 50,000 servers. That is not cheap. So the very fact that you get all this great information is part of the deal.
But we have something called an Ad Interest Manager. You can say, "Don't ever show me an ad again" or "Don't show me this kind of ad or that kind of ad." Less than 1% of the people elect not to.
Q: Consumers also buy TiVo so that they can skip past the ads.
A: If people really don't want ads, they can go find their information however it is they want. It's a free world on that matter. What I'm saying is, I don't think you want bad ads.
Q: You've said that Apple exercises too much control over the ads on its devices, and you said that can't last. Why?
A: If you want to run an ad on the iPad, it has to be approved by Apple. I don't think it is for us to say this ad isn't pretty enough and to go through this whole back-end process of approval. I don't think in the long run that's going to work. Advertisers will have other options.
Leadership
Q: What qualities does a leader need to be able to turn a company around? That's basically what you have been asked to do, right?
A: Yes. Any leader needs to be constantly interested in what's going on in the world, and constantly ready — even when things are going well — to change. In the case of a company as large as Yahoo (you have) to be honest about its shortcomings and be maniacal about how to get it better.
Q: You had no background in computer design when you went to Autodesk. You had no background in media when you went to Yahoo. Did that help or hurt?
A: It's both. You have a freshness of having new eyes, but you also don't have the grounding. So you have to accommodate that with listening, learning, being willing to ask questions that might appear to be less than brilliant, and enjoying the business.
I would never do anything that I didn't enjoy. That's the whole thing. I couldn't go run a fruit business. That wouldn't do it for me. As long as you are inspired by it, you can learn anything.
Q: What do you look for when you hire people?
A: I hire very high-level people, and so you are really checking to make sure they have a cultural fit and that sort of thing.
When you are talking about hiring somebody in their first, second, third job, you really are looking for excitement, some humbleness. So: eagerness to learn, eagerness to be involved in whatever the company is doing — and being willing to do the work you have to do at entry level.
Q: How do you avoid groupthink?
A: Go talk to people at all levels in the organization and honestly ask their opinion. If you sit there quiet and interested, it comes out.
Q: They will say to you, "Carol, I think that you are making a big, big mistake"?
A: Yes. I don't shoot people. In fact, I would shoot people that wouldn't take a risk.
Somebody showed me a slide to prove they were risk-taking and the top of the slide said "calculated risk." So I said, "OK, you already know it is going to work, right?" "Oh, yes, it will work." That's not a risk. That's just not a risk.
Connected TVs
Q: A lot of Internet-connected TVs offer Yahoo Widgets — apps that make it easy for viewers to do things like get sports scores or watch certain videos from the Web. What are the prospects for that business?
A: There's a whole lot of interesting tectonic plates moving around. When you have a nice, large screen, there's a lot you can do with it. And Yahoo wants to be there.
Q: How concerned are you about Google TV, a new service that also provides an interface for TV viewers who want to access the Web?
A: It is not a slam-dunk. There's a lot of cable companies that want that business. There's a lot of TV makers that want Internet applications. So it is pretty hard whenever there's a new market forming to say, "Oh, that's the leader." It takes awhile to settle out.
Q: About 86% of the country gets video from cable or satellite providers, and 2% get it from the Internet. How long will it be before that changes?
A: There's different kinds of video. If you are asking me whether the half-hour (TV) show and the hour show is going to be all consumed on the Internet, I don't think (that will happen) for a long time. It is going to take awhile to overcome the foothold that cable has.
Q: How about for people who don't need 200 channels and just want to watch some news, a little bit of entertainment, maybe some sports?
A: There's 220 million websites, not 220 channels. It's too much. You want to have a place where you can trust what the news is or trust what sports is and get your job done.
Q: Could you envision a Yahoo TV newscast?
A: We have that now, in a way. We have updates on Tech Ticker, one of our most popular shows. We have Primetime in No Time, which basically tells you in three, four minutes everything that happened in prime time. We have Daytime in No Time, which tells you what happened on all your soaps and Oprah and all that.
People flood to that stuff because who has got time to look at all of it? And those three- and five-minute video shows are very popular with the advertisers.
What is Yahoo?
Q: Yahoo has great assets, but some people say they don't know what the company does or where it is going.
A: That exists in New York City and about 30 miles outside Silicon Valley. The rest of the world seems to know.
Yahoo is the largest media company in the world. We are twice as large as the nearest competitor. We do it through innovative technology and bringing people information they need to manage their lives. We serve up — and these numbers I hope will astound you — 10 billion ads a day.
Q: Where do you feel that Yahoo has a weakness?
A: There's three big places that people go on the Internet: Facebook, Yahoo, Google. We play to our strengths, which by definition means we have weaknesses in other areas.
Q: In January you gave yourself a B-minus for the first year. How about this year?
A: I'm off the grading thing. I'm just going to declare that we are pass-fail, and I pass.
Q: Would you have hired someone like you to be CEO?
A: Let me answer a question you didn't ask. Am I the perfect person for the job at Yahoo? No. Am I good for the job? Yes.
The economy
Q: What's your forecast for the economy?
A: Was there the word "economist" on my business card?
Q: You have to have some idea, to make a business plan.
A: Of course you do. Now let me be serious. Last year, we said, by the third or fourth quarter of 2010, things will be better. This year, we are saying, by the third or fourth quarter of 2011.
We can't seem to get stability around employment, housing — all those issues that are making consumers less confident than they should be.
To be honest, we don't understand what goes on in Washington. A lot of rules keep changing. That erodes confidence. It is far from a healthy, vibrant economy.
Q: Is that a commentary about President Obama's handling of the economy?
A: I am actually a very private political person, so I would not like to comment on that.
Q: How will you vote in California? Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is the GOP candidate for governor against Jerry Brown and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina is the Republican against Sen. Barbara Boxer?
A: I'm voting for Meg and Carly, absolutely.
Local
Q: You are starting a local news operation for San Francisco. Tell us about your plans to offer local information.
A: We all live in a place. You live in small communities, and you are very interested in what happens in those communities from police blotters to what happened in the city council or the neighborhood watch. It is interesting to the consumer.
And it is interesting to the advertiser because it is the ultimate target. Statistics are 95% of our purchases are (made) within 2 miles of our house, 5 miles of our house.
Q: There are a lot of people in local news. AOL has Patch. Local newspapers, radio stations, TV stations are online. Where do you fit in?
A: We have partnerships with local publications and an association with newspapers. They send us news feeds. We send viewers back to their dot-com locations. So we actually are very symbiotic with people like that.
But to answer more the spirit of your question, why can we succeed? I will give you the CEO answer: We do a better job. A better job in being a partner with local advertisers. A better job partnering with people actually writing from the community, not about the community. We have a lot of experience in this.
Regulations
Q: Can you clarify your position on net neutrality — the idea that Internet providers shouldn't be allowed to cut deals to transmit information from some Web services faster than others?
A: Everybody should have equal access (to the Internet). But we have to work out a system whereby folks that laid fiber and put the (broadband) infrastructure in get value for that.
I'm not sure that I'm smart enough to figure the answer out. But I don't think that two companies, or just the government, get to decide. People have to come to the table, get off the end positions and be more practical.
Q: Rules should apply equally to wired and wireless?
A: I think so.
Q: The Federal Trade Commission is looking at the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. In 1998 it barred Internet companies from collecting data on kids under 13. Should it apply to phones, gaming consoles and interactive TV?
A: Of course. Listen, anything that can protect our children from bad people, we have to do.
Q: Should it include teens?
A: I would have no problem with that.
News
Q: Yahoo is one of the Web's most popular news sources. What distinguishes your news from Google's or AOL's?
A: We not only license news feeds (for example from Reuters and the Associated Press), we also have our own editorial voice. We have human editors watching what seems to be interesting people, and feature that more prominently. So we are constantly tweaking what is delivered.
For instance, on our front page we have a module called "Today," which is what's happening. Every five minutes we serve up 32,000 different variations depending on what you seem to be interested in. So it is very personal. It is engaging.
Then we just bought a company called Associated Content: 380,000 writers, bloggers, in all the towns and cities who also contribute to this news feed. So it is a combination of what people can do and what machines can do.
Q: Do you ever say, "Look, folks, here's something that you may not be interested in but you really ought to know"?
A: Absolutely. Listen, just because enough people weren't reading about the oil spill, we wouldn't pull it off the page. That's again what editors are for, that's what people's brains are for, to make those kind of judgment calls.
Q: What's the basis for those judgments? The judgment you'd make for the National Enquirer would be different from what you'd make for The Economist.
A: Yes. We are neither the left voice nor the right voice. We try to be the center voice.
We are just selecting news that people actually have liked to read about. It is not our job to round people out. It is our job to be balanced and have a voice that is balanced and is dependable and trustworthy.
Q: News organizations regularly run stories that antagonize some advertisers. How do you handle that?
A: We try not to antagonize our advertisers. Please, we never want to antagonize you. And we are careful. For instance, we have very, very intense technology that scans for nudity and bad words.
But when you have as many users as we do, almost 170 million in the U.S., everybody has opinions and (some) tell me that we should not have written this story and that story. But it isn't about doing something untrustworthy.
Q: They used to say that Katharine Graham was a great CEO at the Washington Post because she loved the newsroom. That's not your background, but do you love the newsroom — or is it just a business?
A: What I like is the technology and how we can serve up information that, while we are global brand, feels very local and personal.
Mobile
Q: Where does mobile fit into your strategic plan?
A: We are just neck and neck with Google for mobile installations in the U.S. We don't have an operating system, but we have Yahoo Mail, Messenger, Finance — all those things. Mobile is huge for us, especially in emerging parts of the world where the only on-ramp to the Internet is going to be through a small screen. They are not going to have a desktop or laptop at home. But for the developed world, I don't think you are going to let this (small) size screen be the only ramp on to the Internet.
Q: If you get a Google Android phone, all the Google applications just work. You are drawn into their world. Does Yahoo need a device of its own?
A: It isn't Google that gets to do that: It is what the carrier wants to do. By the way, there are many instances around the world where what comes up are Yahoo applications, not Google applications, even on an Android phone. The only one that actually controls that precisely is Apple.
Q: So will we start seeing deals between Yahoo and some carriers?
A: Sure. We have deals now with carriers. A lot of it is international, but we power AT&T's website. We are really all over the place. If you are a Yahoo Finance advocate, you want Yahoo Finance in your mobile phone. So people's habits can stay with them.
ABOUT CAROL BARTZ
Born: Winona, Minn.
First big break: The president and managers of a bank where she worked while in high school helped her to get a college scholarship. "Without their help, I probably wouldn't be where I am today."
College: University of Wisconsin, B.S. in computer science.
First job after graduation: Selling automated banking services. "I drove around in my go-go boots to small towns and tried to convince little banks to automate."
Best advice: From her grandmother, who raised her on a farm. "I was in the machine shed with my brother. We heard a rattlesnake above us and ran for Grandma. She grabbed a shovel, knocked the snake out of the rafters and chopped its head off. Then she said, 'You could have done that.' And you know what? She was right."
Currently reading: Allegra Goodman's novel The Cookbook Collector.
Favorite movie: Right now I'd say the Swedish version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
Current music playlist: Jack Johnson.
Sports: Golf.
Passion: Gardening. "It's the way I calm down."
Monday, August 16, 2010
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.: Google and the Search for the Future
The Wall Street Journal
The Web icon's CEO on the mobile computing revolution, the future of newspapers, and privacy in the digital age.
To some, Google has been looking a bit sallow lately. The stock is down. Where once everything seemed to go the company's way, along came Apple's iPhone, launching a new wave of Web growth on a platform that largely bypassed the browser and Google's search box. The "app" revolution was going to spell an end to Google's dominance of Web advertising.
But that's all so six-months-ago. When a group of Journal editors sat down with Eric Schmidt on a recent Friday, Google's CEO sounded nothing like a man whose company was facing a midlife crisis, let alone intimations of mortality.
For one thing, just a couple days earlier, Google had publicly estimated that 200,000 Android smartphones were being activated daily by cell carriers on behalf of customers. That's a doubling in just three months. Since the beginning of the year, Android phones have been outselling iPhones by an increasing clip and seem destined soon to outstrip Apple in global market share.
True, Apple sells its phones for luscious margins, while Google gives away Android to handset makers for free. But not to worry, says Mr. Schmidt: "You get a billion people doing something, there's lots of ways to make money. Absolutely, trust me. We'll get lots of money for it."
"In general in technology," he says, "if you own a platform that's valuable, you can monetize it." Example: Google is obliged to share with Apple search revenue generated by iPhone users. On Android, Google gets to keep 100%. That difference alone, says Mr. Schmidt, is more than enough to foot the bill for Android's continued development.
And coming soon is Chrome OS, which Google hopes will do in tablets and netbooks what Android is doing in smartphones, i.e., give Google a commanding share of the future and leave, in this case, Microsoft in the dust.
Can it all be so easy? Google's stock price has fallen nearly $150 since the beginning of the year. Financial pundits have started to ask skeptical questions, wondering why it doesn't give more of its ample cash back to shareholders in the form of buybacks and dividends. Some suspect that all that temptation merely encourages Mr. Schmidt, along with founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page—the triumvirate running the company—to splurge on gimmicky ideas that never pay off. Fortune magazine recently called Google a "cash cow" and suggested more attention be paid to milking it rather than running off in search of the next big thing.
But to hear Mr. Schmidt tell it, the real challenge is one not yet on most investors' minds: how to preserve Google's franchise in Web advertising, the source of almost all its profits, when "search" is outmoded.
The day is coming when the Google search box—and the activity known as Googling—no longer will be at the center of our online lives. Then what? "We're trying to figure out what the future of search is," Mr. Schmidt acknowledges. "I mean that in a positive way. We're still happy to be in search, believe me. But one idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type."
"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions," he elaborates. "They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."
Let's say you're walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, "we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are." Google also knows, to within a foot, where you are. Mr. Schmidt leaves it to a listener to imagine the possibilities: If you need milk and there's a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk. It will tell you a store ahead has a collection of horse-racing posters, that a 19th-century murder you've been reading about took place on the next block.
Says Mr. Schmidt, a generation of powerful handheld devices is just around the corner that will be adept at surprising you with information that you didn't know you wanted to know. "The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating—that serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically," Mr. Schmidt says.
Mr. Schmidt obviously has an eye to his audience, which this day consists of folks with an abiding devotion to the newspaper business. He speaks in sorrowful tones about the "economic disaster that is the American newspaper." He assures us that in the coming deluge trusted "brands" will be more important than ever. Just as quickly, though, he adds that whether the winners will be new brands or existing brands remains to be seen. On one thing, however, Google is willing to bet: "The only way the problem [of insufficient revenue for news gathering] is going to be solved is by increasing monetization, and the only way I know of to increase monetization is through targeted ads. That's our business."
Mr. Schmidt is a believer in targeted advertising because, simply, he's a believer in targeted everything: "The power of individual targeting—the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them."
That's a bit scary when you think about it. But for investors and executives the big question, of course, is which companies will control these opportunities. Google may see itself as friend and helper to the media business, but it also clearly sees itself in control of the targeting information. Says Mr. Schmidt: "As you go from the search box [to the next phase of Google], you really want to go from syntax to semantics, from what you typed to what you meant. And that's basically the role of [Artificial Intelligence]. I think we will be the world leader in that for a long time."
Between here and there, though, the company faces ever-growing legal, political and regulatory obstacles. The net neutrality debate, which Google has led, has taken a sudden turn that has many of its former allies in the "public interest" sector shouting "treason."
What was most striking about the set of net neut "principles" Google produced this week with former antagonist Verizon was that they didn't apply to wireless. "The issues of wireless versus wireline gets very messy," Mr. Schmidt told one news site. "And that's really an FCC issue, not a Google issue."
Wait. Isn't the future of the Internet wireless these days? Isn't wireless the very basis of the new partnership between Google and Verizon, built on promoting Google's Android software? But Google has now broken ranks with its allies and dared to speak about the sheer impracticality of net neutrality on mobile networks where demand is likely to outstrip capacity for the foreseeable future.
If that weren't about to become a sticky political wicket for the company, it also faces growing antitrust, privacy and patent scrutiny, fanned by a growing phalanx of Beltway opponents, the latest being Larry Ellison and Oracle. "There's a set of people who are intrinsic oppositionists to everything Google does," Mr. Schmidt acknowledges resignedly. "The first opponent will be Microsoft."
Mr. Schmidt is familiar with the game—as chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems in the 1990s, he was a chief fomenter of the antitrust assault on Bill Gates & Co. Now that the tables are turned, he says, Google will persevere and prevail by doing what he says Microsoft failed to do—make sure its every move is "good for consumers" and "fair" to competitors.
Uh huh. Google takes a similarly generous view of its own motives on the politically vexed issue of privacy. Mr. Schmidt says regulation is unnecessary because Google faces such strong incentives to treat its users right, since they will walk away the minute Google does anything with their personal information they find "creepy."
Really? Some might be skeptical that a user with, say, a thousand photos on Picasa would find it so easy to walk away. Or a guy with 10 years of emails on Gmail. Or a small business owner who has come to rely on Google Docs as an alternative to Microsoft Office. Isn't stickiness—even slightly extortionate stickiness—what these Google services aim for?
Mr. Schmidt is surely right, though, that the questions go far beyond Google. "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites.
"I mean we really have to think about these things as a society," he adds. "I'm not even talking about the really terrible stuff, terrorism and access to evil things," he says.
Not that Google is a doubter of the value of social media. Mr. Schmidt awards Facebook his highest accolade, calling it a "company of consequence." And though "there is a lot of hot air, a lot of venture money" in the sector right now, he predicts that one or two more "companies of consequence" will be born among the horde of new players just coming to life now.
A skeptic might wonder whether, despite present glory, Google itself might yet prove a flash in the pan. The company has enormous technological confidence. Mr. Schmidt describes how YouTube, its video-serving site, almost "took down" the company in its early days, thanks to the swelling outflow of video dispatched from its servers to users around the globe. Salvation was the "proxy cache"—lots of local servers around the world holding the most popular videos. "The technology that Google invented allows us to put those things very close to you," says Mr. Schmidt. "It was a tremendous technological achievement."
But with YouTube, as with lots of Google projects, there remains the question of how to make money. Google captured the search wave and shows every sign of positioning itself successfully for the mobile wave. As for the waves after that, your guess may be as good as Mr. Schmidt's.
But that's all so six-months-ago. When a group of Journal editors sat down with Eric Schmidt on a recent Friday, Google's CEO sounded nothing like a man whose company was facing a midlife crisis, let alone intimations of mortality.
For one thing, just a couple days earlier, Google had publicly estimated that 200,000 Android smartphones were being activated daily by cell carriers on behalf of customers. That's a doubling in just three months. Since the beginning of the year, Android phones have been outselling iPhones by an increasing clip and seem destined soon to outstrip Apple in global market share.
True, Apple sells its phones for luscious margins, while Google gives away Android to handset makers for free. But not to worry, says Mr. Schmidt: "You get a billion people doing something, there's lots of ways to make money. Absolutely, trust me. We'll get lots of money for it."
"In general in technology," he says, "if you own a platform that's valuable, you can monetize it." Example: Google is obliged to share with Apple search revenue generated by iPhone users. On Android, Google gets to keep 100%. That difference alone, says Mr. Schmidt, is more than enough to foot the bill for Android's continued development.
And coming soon is Chrome OS, which Google hopes will do in tablets and netbooks what Android is doing in smartphones, i.e., give Google a commanding share of the future and leave, in this case, Microsoft in the dust.
Can it all be so easy? Google's stock price has fallen nearly $150 since the beginning of the year. Financial pundits have started to ask skeptical questions, wondering why it doesn't give more of its ample cash back to shareholders in the form of buybacks and dividends. Some suspect that all that temptation merely encourages Mr. Schmidt, along with founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page—the triumvirate running the company—to splurge on gimmicky ideas that never pay off. Fortune magazine recently called Google a "cash cow" and suggested more attention be paid to milking it rather than running off in search of the next big thing.
But to hear Mr. Schmidt tell it, the real challenge is one not yet on most investors' minds: how to preserve Google's franchise in Web advertising, the source of almost all its profits, when "search" is outmoded.
The day is coming when the Google search box—and the activity known as Googling—no longer will be at the center of our online lives. Then what? "We're trying to figure out what the future of search is," Mr. Schmidt acknowledges. "I mean that in a positive way. We're still happy to be in search, believe me. But one idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type."
"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions," he elaborates. "They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."
Let's say you're walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, "we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are." Google also knows, to within a foot, where you are. Mr. Schmidt leaves it to a listener to imagine the possibilities: If you need milk and there's a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk. It will tell you a store ahead has a collection of horse-racing posters, that a 19th-century murder you've been reading about took place on the next block.
Says Mr. Schmidt, a generation of powerful handheld devices is just around the corner that will be adept at surprising you with information that you didn't know you wanted to know. "The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating—that serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically," Mr. Schmidt says.
Mr. Schmidt obviously has an eye to his audience, which this day consists of folks with an abiding devotion to the newspaper business. He speaks in sorrowful tones about the "economic disaster that is the American newspaper." He assures us that in the coming deluge trusted "brands" will be more important than ever. Just as quickly, though, he adds that whether the winners will be new brands or existing brands remains to be seen. On one thing, however, Google is willing to bet: "The only way the problem [of insufficient revenue for news gathering] is going to be solved is by increasing monetization, and the only way I know of to increase monetization is through targeted ads. That's our business."
Mr. Schmidt is a believer in targeted advertising because, simply, he's a believer in targeted everything: "The power of individual targeting—the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them."
That's a bit scary when you think about it. But for investors and executives the big question, of course, is which companies will control these opportunities. Google may see itself as friend and helper to the media business, but it also clearly sees itself in control of the targeting information. Says Mr. Schmidt: "As you go from the search box [to the next phase of Google], you really want to go from syntax to semantics, from what you typed to what you meant. And that's basically the role of [Artificial Intelligence]. I think we will be the world leader in that for a long time."
Between here and there, though, the company faces ever-growing legal, political and regulatory obstacles. The net neutrality debate, which Google has led, has taken a sudden turn that has many of its former allies in the "public interest" sector shouting "treason."
What was most striking about the set of net neut "principles" Google produced this week with former antagonist Verizon was that they didn't apply to wireless. "The issues of wireless versus wireline gets very messy," Mr. Schmidt told one news site. "And that's really an FCC issue, not a Google issue."
Wait. Isn't the future of the Internet wireless these days? Isn't wireless the very basis of the new partnership between Google and Verizon, built on promoting Google's Android software? But Google has now broken ranks with its allies and dared to speak about the sheer impracticality of net neutrality on mobile networks where demand is likely to outstrip capacity for the foreseeable future.
If that weren't about to become a sticky political wicket for the company, it also faces growing antitrust, privacy and patent scrutiny, fanned by a growing phalanx of Beltway opponents, the latest being Larry Ellison and Oracle. "There's a set of people who are intrinsic oppositionists to everything Google does," Mr. Schmidt acknowledges resignedly. "The first opponent will be Microsoft."
Mr. Schmidt is familiar with the game—as chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems in the 1990s, he was a chief fomenter of the antitrust assault on Bill Gates & Co. Now that the tables are turned, he says, Google will persevere and prevail by doing what he says Microsoft failed to do—make sure its every move is "good for consumers" and "fair" to competitors.
Uh huh. Google takes a similarly generous view of its own motives on the politically vexed issue of privacy. Mr. Schmidt says regulation is unnecessary because Google faces such strong incentives to treat its users right, since they will walk away the minute Google does anything with their personal information they find "creepy."
Really? Some might be skeptical that a user with, say, a thousand photos on Picasa would find it so easy to walk away. Or a guy with 10 years of emails on Gmail. Or a small business owner who has come to rely on Google Docs as an alternative to Microsoft Office. Isn't stickiness—even slightly extortionate stickiness—what these Google services aim for?
Mr. Schmidt is surely right, though, that the questions go far beyond Google. "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites.
"I mean we really have to think about these things as a society," he adds. "I'm not even talking about the really terrible stuff, terrorism and access to evil things," he says.
Not that Google is a doubter of the value of social media. Mr. Schmidt awards Facebook his highest accolade, calling it a "company of consequence." And though "there is a lot of hot air, a lot of venture money" in the sector right now, he predicts that one or two more "companies of consequence" will be born among the horde of new players just coming to life now.
A skeptic might wonder whether, despite present glory, Google itself might yet prove a flash in the pan. The company has enormous technological confidence. Mr. Schmidt describes how YouTube, its video-serving site, almost "took down" the company in its early days, thanks to the swelling outflow of video dispatched from its servers to users around the globe. Salvation was the "proxy cache"—lots of local servers around the world holding the most popular videos. "The technology that Google invented allows us to put those things very close to you," says Mr. Schmidt. "It was a tremendous technological achievement."
But with YouTube, as with lots of Google projects, there remains the question of how to make money. Google captured the search wave and shows every sign of positioning itself successfully for the mobile wave. As for the waves after that, your guess may be as good as Mr. Schmidt's.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)