What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [46]
Interactivity has its limitations. Some people are simply wrong. Others are asses. Some need their meds. But don’t let them ruin the party. Too often, I hear traditionalists in every industry suggest we throw out the internet baby with the bathwater: When they see one nasty comment, one hoax, one rumor, one lie, they try to use that to discredit the entirety of a service or of the internet as a whole. That’s just as silly as wanting to ban phones, cars, or kitchen knives because something bad could be done with them. Of course, people misuse the internet. They misuse everything else, why should the internet be different? Where there is a challenge, though, find the opportunity. LiveWorld, for example, has made a business out of monitoring and maintaining communities.
Too many companies have been built not on trusting people but on making rules and prohibitions, telling customers what they cannot do, and penalizing them for doing wrong. Google has built its empire on trusting us. Trust Google on this.
Listen
At Google, we are God and our data is the Bible. It’s through the data generated by our activity that Google listens to what we want, prefer, and need. Google vice president Marissa Mayer has said that Google is constantly trying to anticipate and interpret our desires so it can predict what we are going to do—our intent. It does that by watching our every move. When her team wonders whether a page should be this color or that, they don’t make the decision themselves, nor do they hold a focus group. They put both colors on the web in an A/B test that measures which yields better usage. “We’ll be able to scientifically and mathematically prove which one users seem to be responding to better,” Mayer told students at Stanford, demonstrating an engineer’s faith in numbers.
If a Google employee is meeting with Larry and Sergey to talk about users’ needs, Mayer advised, she’d better come with more than her own conclusions. She’d better come with the data. “Their immediate question is, ‘How many people did you test?’” This reliance on data as the proxy for the will of the people is so ingrained in Google’s culture that it even supersedes organizational politics. “We rely so much on the data and we do so much measurement that you don’t have to worry that your idea will get picked because you’re the favorite,” Mayer said. “Data is apolitical.”
Google has faith in data because it has faith in us. When you take to heart the moral of James Surowiecki’s 2004 book, The Wisdom of Crowds, you must realize that your crowd—your users, customers, voters, students, audience, neighbors—is wise. The next questions should be: How do you capture and act on that wisdom? How do you listen? How do you enable them to share their wisdom with each other and with you? How do you help them make you smarter (and why should they bother)? Do you have the systems in place to hear? Do you have the culture in place to act on what you hear?
The first answer is to listen before you speak. Many times, companies have told me they’re going to blog to start conversations. Hold on, I tell them. Read before you write. Use search tools to find the conversations already going on about you and then join them. Look at every bit of data you have about how your constituents behave to learn more about their desires—and figure out what new data you can collect. Find ways to ask your public directly or through testing. If you’re lucky, like Google, you will have the means to test the actions of thousands or millions of users in a day. About.com has 700 sites with useful information on very nichey topics and millions of users searching for answers in millions of articles. When I worked with them, I sat in metrics meetings while executives stared at no end of usage statistics projected on the screen, tracking the behavior of any and every link on all pages. They rigorously