The Steve Rubel Stream

Photo credit: Karen Wickre via Danny Sullivan

The following was cross-posted on the new Edelman Digital web site. 

Another month, another visit to Silicon Valley – my home away from home – and, with it, another visit to the Googleplex in search of insights. This time I chatted with Karen Wickre, who oversees Google’s growing armada of blogs and Twitter embassies.

Google, perhaps more than any other company, has a culture of openness. Often a company’s culture shapes its communications strategy. And that’s certainly the case with Google. So social media comes naturally.

Karen first launched Google’s corporate blog back in 2004. Today the company has digital embassies for virtually every product. This armada spans dozens of blogs, Twitter profiles, YouTube and more recently Facebook.

Back when the Official Google Blog launched, posts were conservative. Wickre, a former tech journalist, told me over breakfast that early items were almost whimsical, focusing on the food at Google (which I can assure you, rocks).

While the blog still features some trivial fare, no one could call it – or any of Google’s other digital assets – a light weight. In fact, the opposite is true. Google uses its armada to take on hard issues likeChina, public policy and privacy. And it largely eschews press releases, unless they are financial or material to shareholders.

While Wickre doesn’t oversee all these embassies, she serves as a beacon for the teams that manage them – subject matter experts like product managers, engineers and marketers. Like a good coach, she provides templates and best practices and answers questions as they come up. Wickre, in the meantime, is turning her attention to how the company can strategically use its own Buzz product.

Wickre is one of an emerging breed of professionals that companies hire to manage/lead companies down the social media path. Not nearly enough credit goes to people like her. These individuals are often the ones who have to effect change – with the help of partners like us.

Google, perhaps more than any other company, is a model of social media success. One reason is that they tap into the three key trendsthat I wrote about earlier. They are real-time, visible and data driven. However, what they do best is embrace using multiple messages, formats and stories.

I subscribe to a fire hose feed for all the Google blogs as well as their Twitter and Facebook embassies. On any given day you will find a wealth of news, tips and stories that are tailored to specific interests. Only care about Gmail? There’s an embassy for that. How aboutpolicy? That too.

However, Google’s social media success goes beyond just having lots of teams engaged. Each venue slants the content to the reader/viewer’s needs and utilizes different formats – short form, long form, video, images and more. The end result is that Google creates massive surface area that make them hard to miss in an age where information choices are ubiquitous.

The takeaway here for companies is that, when possible, they should consider creating several blogs and – more likely – digital embassies inside existing communities. One Twitter presence might not be enough. The same goes with Facebook. (Note that this is just one approach and not the only one. Some advocate centralizing content into a single place. There are pros/cons to each.)

Businesses today need to consider having multiple streams that are mapped to high priority interests. This creates surface area and lots of entry points for stakeholders to get engaged. What’s more, the content should be “hand crafted“- eg tailored to each community. And these spaces should be managed by identifiable employees who are subject matter experts.

This is how I am tailoring my own content. I use Twitter for sharing/conversing around links and news. My new Facebook community is for discussions and sharing insights and observations. While my Posterous blog site is for essays, videos and the occasional digital doodles.

Now scaling might intimidate some. According to a recent Smartbrief survey, time is the chief obstacle to engaging in social communities. However, if a business makes social media a team sport, as Google does, anyone can succeed.

UPDATE: A couple of notes to clarify this post. First, the chart above, which I pulled from compete.com, shows the top sites that Facebook drives traffic to. Also the headline has been updated to reflect that Facebook is driving more traffic to portals than Google. The San Francisco Chronicle story, linked below, notes that Facebook is only starting to encroach on Google for other sites. The trend, however, still holds.

We're at the beginning of a major shift in how we find, consume and interact with information. If the 2000s was the Google decade, then the 2010s will be the Facebook decade. Already, you can see the writing on the wall - pun intended. Case in point: a search for "google decade danny sullivan" pulls up his Facebook note higher than a blog post (an item I wanted to include here for context). But that's nothing. Look at the data.

"The online social landscape today sort of feels to me like search did in 1999. It’s a mess, but we don’t complain much about it because we don’t know there’s a better way.

You might be sick of hearing this from me, but strongly believe that Facebook is the next Google. It took me a while to "get religion," but now I have it. Just as Google brought a simple way to search the web, my observation is that Facebook is poised to do the same for organizing and - this is key - centralizing social content

Google will continue to dominate "pull." But Facebook will aggregate content, make it social and rule "push." Using our social circle it will surface content that we care about just when we want it - and allow us to comment on it all. As more people use Facebook to connect, share and create, a network effect takes over - and the system get even smarter.

Here's an example. In my newsfeed today I saw an item from CNN about Sarah Palin. Within minutes it had dozens of comments. Some 20 minutes later it had 300 comments. Now that pales in comparison to the 2775 comments (as of this writing) that the actual story on CNN.com has. However, over time through Facebook Connect, I suspect this to become more cohesive so that you can follow the conversation in either place.

   

Click here to download:

Facebook_Will_Centralize_the_S.zip (76 KB)

Facebook has done an extraordinary job at making social elegant, simple and organized for millions. Couple this with the search deal with Bing, I believe they will be a force to be reckoned with - one that challenges Google on every turf.

Change happens slowly.

Photo credit: Cinefil on Flickr

If you threw me on a desert island (one with internet connectivity) and said that I could use only one website, it would be Gmail.

For the last five years Gmail has become the most indispensable tool in my communications and productivity system. I've even found a full-fledged Twitter client, Twitgether, that integrates into Gmail.

My use of Gmail is unorthodox in that I also use it as a massive database -- a backup brain and more. For years now I have been e-mailing myself articles that I think I might need later. Along the way, Gmail gives me a preview of what the algorithmic, personalized future of advertising and media will undoubtedly resemble.

The 2010s (or "the Tens" as it might be called) will be the Data Decade. Companies that understand how to harness it will win. Those that don't will perish. The same goes for marketers.

The Harvard Business Review highlighted this issue in its recent list of breakthrough ideas for next year: "When a 12-year-old can gather information faster, process it more efficiently, reference more diverse professionals, and get volunteer guidance from better sources than you can at work, how can you pre tend to be competitive?" wrote Bill Jensen and Josh Klein in the January 2010 issue. The article outlined a bank that was having trouble parsing its massive amounts of data into reports that senior executives could actually use. The breakthrough idea? "Work hacking," or working creatively to get your best data and information.

And that's what Gmail has done. Google has built an ingenious search-advertising business -- it's all about intent. You need to enter a query before you are served with relevant ads. However, over the next decade, trusted sites such as Gmail will have learned enough about us that they will start to surface media, social and advertising content before we even ask. This is why I believe Facebook will succeed wildly. Like Google, they are data-driven, using what they call "the lens of friends" to connect us in real-time with products and services. This was one of Facebook's takeaways from the recent Le Web conference: We increasingly discover online content not just by algorithms but via this lens.

Google understands it's all about data. And Gmail is where you really can see a glimmer of where they will continue to shine in "the Tens" and how all those free services around the search engine will add up to revenues fast. Here's a simple example.

Recently I became fascinated with the work habits of Thomas Jefferson (a hacker and data geek if there ever was one). I am particularly intrigued by his fondness for stand-up desks, which are exactly what they sound like. As someone who already sits for much of the day, the thought of standing at the computer instead of sitting when I get home is actually appealing. So I began e-mailing myself articles on the topic that I found on websites. A few days later the little news ticker in my Gmail inbox began to show me ads for stand-up desks, which I have clicked on and have used in my research for what I might end up buying for my apartment.

Think about that: Gmail surfaced high-value information in the form of ads even when I wasn't searching for it. That's an early view of what the Data Decade will look like.

One of the great untold stories is just how much Facebook and Twitter are growing off-site. Facebook announced they reach 60 million through Facebook Connect. Meanwhile nearly half of Twitter's activity takes place away from Twitter.com - they reported. Both platforms are quietly becoming a social operating systems for the web, not just their own sites.

Second, nowadays no two people see the same Internet. This was a key point that Facebook made, saying that we increasingly discover online content not just by algortihms but via the "lens of friends." Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd brought this to life through rich, moving stories. Google's Marissa Mayer went a step further saying that the future of news is a "personalized news stream." This trend has major implications for marketers and PR pros who are accustomed to reaching everyone the same way - it's simply not possible anymore.

Finally there's a ton of energy around the live web. It feels like everyone from Google to governments gets its import. Perhaps Queen Rania of Jordan summed it up best when she said: "real time is the new prime time."

Le Web was a great conference. If you can, I recommend trying to go at least once. Not only was the content good but the networking was too. I got to meet many European startups that are all quietly innovating.

"Imagine you're a tourist and you arrive at this place and you want to know more about it,” said (Google Product Manager Hartmut) Neven on a visit to the Santa Monica pier in Los Angeles the show off the technology. “All you will have to do is take a picture of the sign. We send the information up to the serverand we recognize this as the Santa Monica pier. The idea is you see something that interests you, you whip out your camera phone, take a picture of the object of interest, and this will trigger a Google search."