It looks like the conspiracy theorists may have actually gotten one wrong.  I know, I know; it’s shocking, but hear me out.

It looks as if Google’s foray into the world of wireless communications may begin with the Google Android, but they apparently don’t end with the purchase of AT&T, as many had begun to suspect.  This may mean that Google isn’t trying to take over the world, one company at a time.
However, although the Wall Street Journal reports that Google has no interest in purchasing AT&T, it may have its sights far higher than that.  Specifically, WSJ relays that Google is looking to become a player in the cellphone space on its lonesome, without purchasing a preexisting company in the market.

This presents many interesting points of discussion.

Let us consider that Google doesn’t generally enter into an arena without serious forethought and great ambition.  The Google Android itself is a monumentally groundbreaking software platform.  Assuming that it catches on and that Google is best equipped to make the most of it, there is no reason not to give Google’s bid for cellphone credibility serious credence.  Couple this with the fact that the characteristic shared most between the current major cellphone carriers are closed interfaces and customer apathy/dissatisfaction and I would be surprised if the emergence of Google as a player didn’t spark a revolution in the way we think of our cellphones.

If you’re anything like me, you use your phone primarily for making calls.  We all text, we all take pictures and many of us get email through our cellphones, however, the every added feature means more money and–as Biggie so famously put it–mo’ problems.  Cellphone applications are far from perfect are we are always limited by both the abilities of the phone device itself and our carrier’s willingness to serve.  Google’s model would, hypothetically, fly in the face of these limitations.

So, the conspiracy theorists have it wrong: Google isn’t looking to buy AT&T.  However, not only do questions linger regarding Google’s motives but a larger question looms overhead.  Namely, would Google’s success in yet another media space be good or bad for the consumer?

It looks as though we’ll have to wait and see.  Don’t worry though.  Knowing Google, we won’t have to wait long.

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Being someone who is on the phone, live chat, or email with clients throughout the day, one of the biggest misconceptions of people, and simultaneously the most important thing a webpage trying to advertise needs, is about what good content is.

Most of the time, this is how things break down – people think they have a great website, and while they have a visually appealing one, it is not “content rich.”

To get the most out of sponsored link advertising in Google and Yahoo, it is best to have a good amount of content on their webpage, which can you lead you to having good keyword quality score, or in other words, your keywords have good relevancy to your webpage and what you are trying to do. Things like “about us” pages, pages describing your service – both what and why it works – along with blogging and other extension pages are all how you make your site content heavy.

Now this all may seem simple, even if it may be more work than someone wants to put in to create a good site, it is something that a lot of people (webpages) lack and lack understanding in. I get dozens of phone calls from people each and every day that end up being an explanation to clients and potential clients that despite how visually appealing a site may be, without the proper content, and presentation of information, you may have serious problems getting a decent “quality score” with Google and Yahoo. Since this quality score concept, as noted in the beginning, is so determinant of how Google and Yahoo will rank the relativity of your keywords to your webpage, there is sometimes little an advertiser can do if the site they are trying to work with is a page with one or two pictures and pretty graphics on it.

It is integral to web developers and webpage owners to gain and understanding in this, so that they may assimilate it and then synthesize it into a successful webpage and subsequent successful advertising efforts.

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For the past few years, Facebook has developed and hosted an NCAA Tournament Pool. The competition was very simple, start your own pool or join an existing one, and compare your picks to those of your friends. Winner gets bragging rights.

Last year, Facebook spiced it up a little. With co-sponsor Geico, the competition offered a hefty prize to the winners.
1st place - $25,000
2nd place - $5,000
3rd place - $1,000

How did it end? A tie.

PicksPal has capitalized on this Facebook tradition by developing it’s own NBA Challenge application. While the user count is just shy of 12,000 total users, the potential of this application is tremendous. When a friend in your network adds the application, a notice is displayed in the daily feed (also the first page users see when they login). This along with word of mouth advertising and invitations to “join my pool” are bound to convert more and more users to the app.

Now where does the potential of Facebook apps come in?

Ever since Facebook opened up its platform to developers, numerous companies including iLike, LinkedIn & RockYou! have jumped aboard and created custom applications for users.

While many developers are creating entertaining and useful applications, there is still a void in that there is little reason for users to actively engage with their applications. It seems that an area of this that developers and the companies are forgetting about is that college students, and Facebook users in general, simply love free stuff. By running applications/contests and offering prizes (maybe even daily prizes), the possibilities for widespread brand name exposure to the facebook demographic become endless. Make the prize cash and integrate it into your current website or marketing goals and you’ve just gained a new avenue to acquiring users and possible sales.

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With much fanfare, Facebook last week introduced a pretty darn revolutionary new advertising platform, which allows advertisers to tap into the much-coveted and rapidly expanding Facebook audience. In a nutshell, the new Facebook Ads system allows advertisers several methods to tap into the Facebook audience:

1. Advertisers can now have company pages on Facebook. Coca-Cola can now have a Facebook presence, and I can be friends with Coca-Cola. Unless this is done in truly exciting viral ways, this is quite unexciting, though I suppose is designed more as an obvious complement to the other ad options (to keep interactions with advertisers within Facebook and not linking to eternal web sites).
2. Demographic targeting. This is an extension of the Flyers Pro program Facebook has been quietly testing for a few months. Basically, from the audience of 20 or so million Facebook users 18 years old and up, you can — fantastically easily — target specific groups of people (with segmentation available by gender, age, education level, political leaning, relationship status, and hobbies or interests). For example, in just a few clicks I can place an ad that is shown to the 93,000 men on Facebook with a college education over 24 years old who specifically like music. This is by far the easiest and most straight-forward demographic targeting system I have ever seen.
3. Social Ads. This is the one raising all sorts of privacy concerns, with some pundits claiming that these sorts of ads are flat-out illegal in some states. I won’t weight in on the legal aspect, but I imagine that Facebook will overcome this challenge, if only by updating their Terms and Conditions to some degree. Basically, what these ads do is connect the interactions and purchases that users have with businesses with their social network (the Facebook ‘mini-feed’ to the uninitiated). For example, if I go sign add a new movie to my Netflix Queue using the upcoming Netflix Facebook App, my friends will see an update that “Michael Mothner just added Superbad to his queue” along with a link to Netflix for my friends to sign up for the service as well. Basically the concept is that a friend’s recommendation is the most powerful form of advertising, and this would attach marketing potential to the core of Facebook. A very powerful concept!

We have been running tests with Facebook Flyers for the last month or so, very excited about the demographic targeting ability. What have we found so far? Bottom line: people don’t click the ads. This is a fundamental paradigm in what users seek when at certain places online. When I am at Google, I am seeking something out; information, products, services. So the highly targeted ads that Google serves up fulfill that need. When I am on Facebook, my goal is fundamentally different; I am seeking networking and communication with friends or colleagues. Since I am not in the mindset to seek and buy, even highly targeted ads by demographic are going to be a tough sell for me.

It is my belief that the success of the Facebook advertising platform is highly contingent on whether or not users start accepting the combination of social interaction and commercial interaction. We are not there yet. But as users start integrating these until-now disparate “goals” online, this platform represents a powerful and well-executed new advertising paradigm.

In introducing Facebook Ads, Mark Zuckerberg declared that “the next hundred years will be different for advertising, and it starts today.” Modest he is not, but Facebook has executed too well in too may areas for me to not be very, very intrigued.

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Tonight concluded what we at Wpromote hope will be only the first of many visits to the Googleplex in the spirit of sharing ideas. That’s right, Michael Mothner “the captain of the good ship Wpromote” and I just got back from the Google Client Forum. This annual get-together is essentially a glorified airing of grievances for agencies and mega-clients to Google.

It’s true that we spend a good amount of time on this blog singing Google’s praises, and deservedly so, make no mistake about it. Google is heads and shoulders above their “competitors”, i.e. Yahoo and MSN. Needless to say, Google’s insatiable desire to improve their phenomenal product is the very characteristic that allows them to out pace their competition. Google’s search for perfection isn’t just a company tag line; they really mean it. Priority #1 on the agenda for Google at the Forum was to find out what they aren’t doing well, what they’re doing that annoys us and what they’re doing that just doesn’t make sense.

Our clients will be happy to know that Michael Mothner and I have kept a record of the complaints that we have received and we made sure to air these concerns to some of the most influential figures at one of the most influential companies in the world. From the woes of expanded broad match to the frustration created by the “all other queries” notice in a search query report; from the inability to collect conversion data by the hour to the problems that continue to plague the content network; from ills of dormant keywords to the lack of communication with interruptions of service…

We covered it all!

I hope that there are two things that our clients can take away from this blog/our trip to Google:

1) We’ve been listening to you,
2) Google just got finished listening to us… and they really listened!

At the end of the day, Wpromote was honored and privileged to be one of only four agencies in the world invited to take part in this Forum. In addition to this, we are all truly indebted to Google for creating an advertising medium through which we can help our clients achieve success. Most importantly, however, we are thankful that Google holds this conference and makes it their mission to ensure that next year the grievances aired will have nothing to do with the ones from 2007 because, ideally, they will have already been addressed, fixed and left behind at that point.

It wasn’t easy to dole out criticism to a company that we ultimately appreciate despite any of their flaws. However, when one looks at the situation from Google’s point of view, it is easy to understand how venerable a company they really are. Google will be fine without our/your feedback; they’ve accomplished so much already and this is undeniable. Therefore, it is even more admirable that they would not only welcome critiques and suggestions but also invent a forum in order to make sure that such advice made it directly to the people who have the power to make systematic changes for the better. Overall, the Google Client Forum was a wonderful experience. Personally, I look forward to working hard for my clients so that we will continue to be thought of as a search marketing authority. Only through this action will we be able to continue to represent our clients and the great ideas that they pose to us on a daily basis.

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So, it seems that all the hubbub over the Gphone was really less about a phone and more about a rethinking of the concept of the mobile phone.

Today, Google formally announced the release of Google Android, an interface that will be completely open source in almost every way imaginable. Cellphones have always been hindered to a degree by their closed interfaces (see the iPhone’s war against the hackers), which was a calculated move by the designers and carriers to ensure that top dollar had to be paid for exclusive, cutting edge designs. Even where technology of cellphones far outpaced what we are used to in the states–in countries such as Japan and Korea, for example–the ability to improve the device you’ve been using to call your friends, take pictures, browse the web and listen to music remained elusive.

The Google Android concept appears to be a step in the completely opposite direction. In a world where openness, compatibility, usability and connectivity are the keys to a products success, the Google Android concept makes a lot of sense. If there is such a high demand to hack the iPhone, after all, isn’t it inevitable that it will eventually happen? If it will eventually happen, doesn’t it make sense to be among the first people on board? Google’s answer is, “Absolutely yes!”

And, in all honesty, what better company to rethink making money in the cellphone industry than the company that showed how powerful and profitable search engines could be as a marketing medium? In an open source world, the money isn’t in the product, the plan or the presentation; it’s in the advertising. All other elements should be honed and perfected by the people, and as the web becomes more and more easy to use while on-the-go, the volume of potential consumers to advertise to should inherently become larger and larger.

A college buddy of mine once pointed out the genius of Pizza Hut to me:

Just when you thought there were no more places to put cheese, Pizza Hut comes up with Stuffed Crust Pizza. For centuries, people loved the cheese, but couldn’t think beyond “extra cheese” when it came to adding more. That’s why the guys behind the Stuffed Crust Pizza were so brilliant.

Something about the way that Google looked at the cellphone and decided to completely rethink it reminded me of my pizza-loving friend in college. How could Google, which had already seemingly perfected search, possibly improve it? By finding a new place for it. But not only did they know where to put it, they’re trying to pioneer the medium by which to do it.

Now, I’m not saying that the Google Android will necessarily revolutionize the way we use our phones or the mobile Internet, however, much like the Stuffed Crust Pizza–whether you love it or hate it–you’ve got to respect the guys who thought to themselves, “You know what? There’s got to be another place that we can put some more cheese!”

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