Working Three

How Google Wave will hit marketers

Google has changed the world more than once. The company built the world’s best search engine, became the world’s biggest advertising media supplier and is now one of the world’s largest companies – not to mention being the strongest brand in the world, exceeding USD 100 billion in value***. Tempting to rest on your laurels and rely on your cash cows, one might think, but Google know how fast change takes place in the online world. So the company is set to release a product that will change the world again – and its impact may be far more dramatic than anything Google has done to date.

If you haven’t heard of Google Wave don‚Äôt panic. It‚Äôs not yet publicly released.¬† At this stage it is still in the hands of developers and other members of the geek elite. But the conference that Google held at the end of May, and the subsequent YouTube video released, is creating buzz world-wide. Just how Google Wave will impact marketers in the coming months and why, is what this article is all about.

A bit of background

Google has always had a policy of ‘giving away’ some of their most innovative products. Google Maps, Gmail, The Android operating system and Google docs have all been open source and freely available to the public. While this tactic leaves many people scratching their heads is not purely altruistic. It is calculated on the basis that these ‘free’ developments increase internet usage and ultimately helps Google sell their main product. That product is Adwords, Google’s unique method for selling online advertising, generating a constant series of ‘mini-auctions’ every time a search is performed to analyse which advertisers have earned the right to ‘sponsored links’ on every results page.

This concept is an important part of what Google’s famous ‘auction economics’ equation, that has allowed he business to become a media giant.

source: wired (http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_googlenomics)

Wave defined – briefly

There has been a lot of hype around Google Wave already Рand with good reason. In this latest project Google has set out to completely reinvent email, instant messaging and social networking in one move.  This seems like an audacious move – until you see the presentation video. In it the project lead says that email, which is really just a digital form of posted mail, was invented before the world wide web Рeven before the internet as we understand it existed.  Google asserts that email is fundamentally flawed, something that anyone who has emailed multiple recipients and then tried to follow the responses can attest to. On the other hand social networks that are designed around conversation ‘threads’ do not hold the power that email has in terms of exchanging documents and engaging in longer conversations.

This is where Wave comes in. It will enable multi-person conversations in real time – the people you are conversing with can even see what you type character by character, if you so desire. And if you arrive to the conversation late you can rewind and watch it unfold all over again. It will give you the ability to share maps, video images and documents with a simple, drag-and drop interface. Other users can even go and edit what you have written rather than copy everything and respond one item at a time.

Each of these conversations Google calls a ‘wave’. These waves can happen publicly or in multi-lateral fashion, or with just two people – bi-laterally. And each wave can be embedded on a blog or website (I’m betting this Wave will evolve into a site content management system before it’s even released), with spell-check and even instant translation as you go. That’s right – one of the plug-ins already developed draws on available internet data to translate conversations from one language to another, with correct sentence structure, as you type. I’ll discuss the implications of that later.

There is much more to Wave, and now that some developers have got their hands on it there will be much, much more by the time it launches. Needless to say this has the potential to create massive workplace and communication efficiencies (and probably also distractions as a side effect), get people communicating who have never been able to communicate before and generally change the way we interact in the digital space.

Take it. It’s yours.

The next big surprise about Wave is that it is entirely Open Source based. We are not talking ‘kind of’ Open Source where only the geekiest of programmers get to fiddle with it. We are talking ‘completely’ Open Source.  If you are afraid of Google knowing what you are doing then download it, install it on your own servers, customise it and use it in anyway you want. This could easily spell the end of company intranets as they currently exist. When Google said they wanted to change the way we communicate, they meant it.

This means that, as a platform, it has a massive potential. Google have really just made an unbelievably innovative breakthrough. The real magic will happen when the rest of the world gets their hands on it and starts developing new ways of using it.

Get to the point. What does it mean for me?

2009 has been a year of change for the marketing managers of the world. Newspapers in their current form are fading away, TV delivery is changing (if you don’t know about Hulu and how Google is planning on monetising YouTube yet – it’s time to find out. Personalised direct marketing is coming to a screen near you) and social networks have taken off as a marketing mechanism.

If you have not kept up with, and truly understood the implications of social networking, now is the time to knuckle down and learn the new rules. Wave will either massively boost the popularity of social networks, or it will swallow them up. Either way the two-way conversations that are the hallmark of web 2.0 are here to stay and they are only going to get more widespread. Human civilisation is based on social interaction and it cannot be contained.

Don’t be fooled if you think that this technological jump won’t catch on; that’s what some commentators said about email, instant messaging and social networks. They all seem to be doing just fine.

This is a good thing – really

As marketers we are going to have to deal with this change – quickly. The effectiveness of mass media advertising is declining – fast. Direct and completely measurable marketing will be the way the world works. Every touch-point will be data rich.

Brands will have to define themselves differently because niche interests will rise to the surface very quickly. This will be customisation as on a scale never seen before. But, as the saying goes, “where one door closes, another one opens”. There will also be a great potential to understand such special interests, insert yourself into conversations and market intelligently and effectively to niche audiences. The brands that are using platforms such as Twitter already know this well. They are changing policies and communication methods and cashing in on the transparency trend.

What’s even more exciting is that markets that were closed due to language and geographic restrictions and other ways, will open up. Technologies like Wave really have the potential to let brands talk to groups who happen to be into banana flavoured lemonade anywhere in the world.

This is what Seth Godin was getting at in his recent TED talk. Tribes are forming and they’re about to get even better tools. Get used to it. Understand it. Then get out there and give them what they want.

Reference

http://wave.google.com
http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_googlenomics