Google and Relationships

John A. Byrne, Executive Editor at BusinessWeek, spoke at the 140 Characters conference last week and he made some powerful statements about Google and the media industry that offer stark contrast with the views expressed by some other media organizations in recent months:

Google is fantastic because it allows people to discover you. But when people type in a query in that simple little box, they’re agnostic as to brand. They want the information, they don’t care where they go. And so, essentially it’s a machine to destroy relationships that people have with either yourself or your brand…

I think it’s important to think about Google in that way, not in the negative sense, but in the way that makes you to do something to counteract that transactional nature that breaks down the relationships.

And that’s why I think engagement is the single most important thing we need to work on because we have largely been divorced from our audiences…FOREVER, we don’t have enough respect for the people who read us and are even influenced by us. I think we truly need to deeply engage and collaborate with our audience to expand it and to protect it from this major transaction mechanism…

I think this is an excellent way to think about Google, particularly the attitude towards solving the problem Google presents. Although, Google doesn’t necessarily destroy any real relationships as much as it highlights where there were none to start with and creates its own.

Engagement may help, but it sounds like an attempt to build (or rebuild) old relationships that are based on an affinity with news brands by involving users as collaborators. This may help to align the actual collaborators with a particular news brand. It may also improve the perceived value of that content by other users, but I’m not sure it’s enough to help large numbers of users bypass search engines.

Collaboration and other forms of engagement are important because they create interactions. But there are lots of other, user-driven interactions that are already taking place – commenting, bookmarking, posting, tweeting etc. Remembering all of these interactions and by extension remembering and distinguishing between users can lead to real relationships, and it scales.

Amazon knows who I am, what I’ve bought and what I’ve looked at. It uses that information to suggest what else I might like (as well as knowing how to charge me and where to ship etc). Media organizations could do exactly the same thing by knowing what I’ve read, what I’ve commented on, what I’ve shared (as well as where I live etc) to recommend articles and what ever else they can offer me based on what they know about me.

If you truly know your users and have real, learned relationships with them, they shouldn’t need to go anywhere near Google unless it’s to search for you specifically because they need an exact URL.

Posted on June 23, 2009