Newsflash. Once again, for the 4th year in a row, our WPP sister firm Millward Brown Optimor has named Google the world’s #1 brand of any kind. Surprise, surprise, surprise.
Interestingly, our company recently did a far less scientific piece of research among our own employees that also said something uniquely enlightening, though entirely different, about Google.
Members of our media/experience team circulated a one question internal survey asking everyone to list their three favorite media sources. The intention was to use the results in an orientation session to show how diverse our own media preferences are. And the results confirmed it, with nearly 125 “top 3″ sources collectively named.
But what jumped out at me was not the variety of unaided answers. Nor the overwhelming dominance of CNN (see Wordle results below, kudos CNNers), across almost every department in the agency (other crowd favorites were ESPN, MSN, Fox News, ABC, Wired, along with one medium, radio).
Mighty Google looking more like David than Goliath
What jumped out, rather, was in fact, what didn’t jump out; Google.
Think about that a minute. In a world where Google plays such a pervasive role in so many people’s lives, in an industry that’s been pretty much turned upside down by the immense power of Google itself, a relatively small number of us “industry insiders” think of Google as a “media source.”
While I suppose this shouldn’t be totally surprising, I found seeing it so clearly to be pretty enlightening.
To be quite clear, this doesn’t lessen Google’s omnipresent and ever-expanding role in pretty much everything. But it does lead me to say this; Google is not media.
What is Google then? A tool? A platform? An aggregating oracle? The Gutenberg Press of the next millennium?
Personally, I think it most closely resembles a medium. Though this doesn’t exactly fit either, since I think in the technical sense, the Internet is the medium.
One thing is certain, though. As Marshall McLuhan pointed out (for those in the Google generation not… errr… um… experienced enough to have been forced to study this in college, see this great clip I caught the other night from Annie Hall, though you might not have heard of that either), in the grand scheme of things, it is not the content itself, or any single provider of content, that is most responsible for the way people interact with media, or the changes media can bring about, but rather the medium itself.
On that note, the results of the research are clear. Despite our overwhelming love of select media brands to keep us informed and engaged, the medium is still the #1 message. And the message is, at least as far as I’m concerned, I should have bought Google at $95.
IM, Chat, Email and Social Networks Gone Wild
December 8th, 2009 by Rory Partalis
Categories: Digital Innovations | Tags: all-in-one, api, buddy media, chat, comments, communication, content, dashboard, digsby, email, facebook, fan pages, friendfeed, google, google wave, IM, images, inbox, instant messaging, media landscape, mobile, open, ping.fm, pixelpipe, platforms, profiles, social media, Social Networks, status updates, trillian, twitter, video, websites | 2 Comments »
The Social Media Landscape has become so complex that something needs to be developed to help us manage all of our profiles.
There is a quiet battle brewing under the shiny-new-thing syndrome we all are guilty of from time to time. This battle grew out of the complexity and exploding number of websites the average internet user has profiles on today. Modern advertisers and marketers are especially plagued by the inability to keep up with all the comments, inboxes, and instant messaging clients we use to communicate with our family, friends, coworkers and clients.
This provides an opening for smart companies to build an all-in-one online communication dashboard. And this opening gets bigger and bigger as companies like Twitter, Facebook and Google keep rolling out more and more open platforms and APIs. This allows other websites, widgets and mobile apps to have greater access to content and information from those platforms.
Friendfeed was obviously the original social network aggregator, and Facebook mimicked their methods and then bought them outright. Now Google has ambitions with Google Wave, but there are still gaps for an all-in-one online communication dashboard that both pulls and pushes content from all other communication platforms.
I’ve seen a few emerging spaces where companies are trying to partially realize this dream. The first battlefield is combining IM, Email and Social Network communications and content into one chat client. The two rivals I’ve found in this space are Trillian and Digsby. Each are strong contenders and pull from many of the same sources. I am currently testing Trillian on my work laptop and Digsby on my home laptop. I prefer Digsby’s IM client and chat window layout, but like the look of Trillian’s pop-ups better. In my opinion either works fine for my needs, both are strong contenders in the all-in-one space, but neither are quite there yet.
The second area where I see a battle brewing is the content uploading battlefield. This is where you can login to one place and post text, images, videos and other content to all of your social network profiles. Both Ping.fm and PixelPipe have a lot to offer in this space and also push to many of the same sources. Both also have mobile apps, which is awesome for posting content on the go.
I’ve also seen a third battlefield begin to emerge after having a conference call with a company called Buddy Media. They provide a dashboard that manages the layout of Facebook Fan Pages and Twitter Profiles. Very cool stuff, but still in its infancy.
Have you seen any other similar tools like this that would make all of our online lives easier? If so, please mention them in the comments section below.
2 Comments »