I was re-reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers this morning and the name Eric Schmidt popped up in that list of the class of ’55 that shaped the future of Silicon Valley. It was at that point I wondered to myself we will be seeing books being written in 10 to 20 years time that explain how Eric Schmidt single-handedly saved the world-wide web?
After all when he took charge of Google the company didn’t have a business model or a revenue stream and online advertising was in free fall. The dot-com boom had just collapsed after the advertising industry had turned its back on the internet and it looked like putting ads on the menu of web pages was consigned to be one of those failed business ideas that pass on into the realms of the business school history lessons.
It seemed like a good idea at the time but nobody looked at the ads… never mind clicked on them.
Then came along Eric with the simple idea that we’ll aggregate all this content as a hook for the search engine and then pivot it towards advertisers willing to hijack the journey.
Ten years on and online advertising industry is going “gang busters”… at least if you are Google.
Putting aside the question of just how innovative will Silicon Valley prove to be once the Class of ’55 give it away the only question now is can Eric now weave his magic and show us all how to make money out of advertising now that the web is evolving from search to social?
Sadly Eric is no longer at Google to show us how it can be done and from what I have heard neither Twitter nor Facebook have made any moves to embrace his magic touch. So let’s explore what Google may have done under Eric tutelage over the next few years to pivot social.
We’ll begin with the easy one. Twitter.
Primarily because it is the closest thing social media has to Google. Google generates endless lists of our personal likes (i.e. Searches) while Twitter generates endless lists of our social likes (i.e. People who tweet mostly links and occasionally interesting ideas… the rest of it is pretty much noise, a bit like the garbage search results you get in Google)
Now that Google has gone +1 (but why not -1 as well?) the next question is why Google doesn’t pivot Twitter by automating the social list generation process?
For example rather than having to involve ourselves with the rather mechanical and laborious task of Tweeting your status why not let Google automate the whole process behind the scenes. That way when people Google your name they can also see what you have been searching for and what you have +1. The same goes for your location and the videos and images you are publishing or the bar codes you are scanning with your mobile phone camera.
Just like Twitter you could get involved by creating lists of people to follow. But then again Google could automate that process by updating the list every time you do a search. It could also provide automatic lists of ideas or topics and even random “news and entertainment” thread generators. You could also create a list about yourself – a mirror if you like – so that you can see what people are following you and what they are saying.
Close your eyes for a minutes and think about the next logical extension of where Facebook and Twitter is taking Social Media and you will see that the only difference between the Google of yesterday and the Google or tomorrow is that yesterday we generated and explored private lists. Tomorrow we will be using it to generate and share public lists.
So how does Google pivot Facebook? That one is relatively easy. In a world of Brand.Me it just needs to make sure that everyone still believes that being the number 1 page rank on Google is more important than having a Facebook page. Or more simply, so long as the world still recognises that “sure you can preen yourself on Facebook (or anywhere else for that matter) but your Google Page rank is where the world looks first to discover who you are and more importantly what your reputation is” then Google will prove to be significantly more valuable social property than Facebook.
As I have said before Google doesn’t need to be in the social media business. It just needs to aggregate all this social activity and pivot it.
Now I guess most of you would find this to be a horror scenario in relation to privacy. But think about this. Would you be happier in the knowledge that a small group of global computing conglomerates hold all this information about you behind a two-way mirror or would you rather everybody including yourself see what they can see?
I’ll leave you all to ponder on that question while I go and dig out that old copy of Orwell’s 1984…
Postscript:
Undecided if I am somewhat amused or bemused that I posted this within 24 hours of Google releasing the Google + project but again the question needs to be asked does it really need to build a social media platform to pivot social media. After all it pivoted news without creating a newspaper. It’s nice to think A la Carte every now and then but history shows us that online the spoils always goes to the aggregator.
Posted on June 28, 2011
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