- A blogger's recount of Google's lengthy response to an FTC discussion draft on recommendations to support the protection of newspaper journalism. The response raises many interesting points and has some valid arguments, but its tone strikes me as slightly autistic. It seems like didactic browbeating from a know-it-all party who stands to lose or benefit from the FTC's decisionmaking process might not be the best way to win friends and influence people in Washington. In fact, I'm increasingly getting the impression that Google has a collective case of Asperger's Syndrome: They are very smart and generally well-intentioned, but the approach they take to convincing others that they are right shows a distinct lack of empathy and charisma. This no doubt influences - and is influenced by - the company's zealously data-driven culture, which reportedly values logic and proof above everything else. But what the company seems not to be able to understand is that not everyone else in the world thinks this way (despite the fact that Google would like them to).
- For a small company with not that many users (only 2 million worldwide), Foursquare has made an outsized ripple in the digital media pond. Now comes this report that they are negotiating with all the major search players on a distribution arrangement. I'll be curious to see how Google et al. would use realtime check-in data to improve the relevancy of their local results. To wit: Just because a lot of Foursquare users check in to a coffee shop, does that mean that the coffee shop is better than the one across the street?
- This has seemed like a no-brainer for a long time. Historically, for the local search value chain, calls = leads. If a Yellow Pages company could prove to an advertiser that a potential customer called them because of an ad they found in the phone book, they could claim a portion of the value of that lead. The problem had been that call tracking/monitoring was technically difficult. Now in a pay-for-performance world, leads from phone calls are still valuable, but many advertisers expect to be able to see some data about how valuable they actually are, and pay accordingly. Finally Skype has stepped in to help bridge this gap between local consumers and local advertisers, facilitating the call between them, and the exchange of money between advertiser and publisher. The trick will be how and where it's implemented.
- My former employer, no longer in the wholesale telecoms business thanks to Australia's National Broadband Network, needs more than ever to be in the customer acquisition and retention business. When competitors are all trying to sell a commodity (e.g. highspeed internet), how else do you differentiate yourself other than lowering prices? Marketing 101: turn your commodotized product into a value-added service. In this case, if you can create compelling over-the-top content, you might be able to hold on to customers and/or change them a premium. Pity Telstra hasn't been very good at this in the past.
- Related: Telstra middle-management jobs to go
- The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement, a high-profile collaboration between the media and ad industries, has announced plans to launch a new initiative to measure audiences in a world where Nielsen box numbers are increasingly less meaningful as people consumer more content online on mobile, both time- and place-shifted.
- I don't know why this strikes me as funny, but it reminds me the old story about the workman's favorite hammer: he'd had it for years, and he only had to replace the head twice and the handle three times. Of course, it was no longer the same hammer. But what about Yahoo Japan? Is it still Yahoo even if its search engine is Google instead of (Bing-powered) Yahoo? Interestingly, this move means that Google will now have nearly 100% marketshare on search in Japan. Also,I wonder whether could bode ill for some of Yahoo's other JVs in other geographies (e.g. Yahoo7 in Australia).
