Google Celebrates 10 Years!

There is an article on CBS's website that discusses how Google is celebrating its ten year anniversary of operation. Google created a guided tour, on its anniversary site, detailing its ten years in business. The site also launched Project 10 to the 100th to try to "improve the world." There is also a timeline which focuses on historical moments in the company’s existence. All of these website features are the end result of research. Google's team must have researched possible ways to promote and celebrate the anniversary, prior to planning or creating these tactics.

Project 10 to the 100th allows Google users to submit ideas of where $10 million would best be spent. The advisory board will pick up to five ideas, donating up to $50 million. The company's website says, "If you have an idea that you believe would help somebody, we want to hear about it. We're looking for ideas that help as many people as possible, in any way."

These methods of celebrating the company's anniversary must have been thoroughly thought-out before any planning or implementation could occur. Research such as focus groups and surveys were probably utilized to gather opinions from top management, employees, investors, and customers. This research was then probably utilized to plan, and later carry out the results. Google decided to utilize historical timelines, a guided tour, and created an interactive and humanitarian project. Now, the company is probably in the process of doing final research and evaluating the effectiveness of these methods.

Will Concealed Story Damage Image?

Google acknowledged Wednesday that two employees have been terminated after being caught in separate incidents allegedly spying on users' e-mails and chats. In July David Barksdale, an engineer for Google's Site Reliability team in Washingtong state, was fired for "violating company privacy policy." However, this story was covered up since July when the events actually occurred. Also, no legal action was taken against Barksdale and many experts are concerned by this. Google might need to utilize public relations research methods to conduct reputation management after this incident.

Yet "the company insists that it maintains careful control over employee access to user data, and said it’s amping up its log-monitoring to guard against similar violations in the future." It seems that Google was doing a good public relations job by admitting the truth, saying what they are going to change, making restrictions, and ensuring stakeholders that the "problem" will be fixed. The problem is, that this incident was covered up for two months, no legal action was taken, and experts have voiced their opinions on the matter.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, acknowledged that legal action wasn't compulsory, but should have been taken. Rotenberg said this incident “impacts the interests of individuals outside the company, I don’t think it’s sufficient for Google to handle it as an internal matter." Others have a more pessimistic view, insisting that more internal privacy breaches will occur, and possibly even increase. This can be a big problem for the Google Corporation in the next few weeks or even months. They are probably in the process of doing quantitative research, like surveys, and gathering data from qualitative research, probably by doing focus groups. With these research tools Google can learn the opinions of its various publics - shareholders, users, investors, clients, advertisers, etc - to assess the damage this has done and how to resolve the situation in satisfying manner.

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"Great Just isn't Good Enough"

Microsoft Corporation and Yahoo have begun integrating their search engines, Yahoo's search engine has been incorporated in Microsoft's Bing, leaving Google to reap the benefits. An analytical firm, Experian Hitwise, found that the first week of the Microsoft-Yahoo deal, 24% of all searches were done through Bing. But, in August Google's search capacity market share increased to 71.6%. Experian Hitwise accounts this growth for Yahoo users moving to Google, instead of Bing. Previously in 2007, Microsoft's CEO hoped the company would hold 35% of the market share between 2010 and 2012. Since then, Google's  market share increased from 54-65% while Microsoft's Bing only rose a few points. American Banking and Market News said that Bing "still hasn't gained any significant traction against Google's search market share."

Google has been a launched search engine for 12 years. It is a well recognized global brand. The name Google has become such a commonly recognizable brand, that I would consider if a brandnomer. A brandnomer is a brand that becomes the generic term for a product. For example Kleenex for tissues, Band-Aid for adhesive bandages, and iPod for mp3 players. Now, we say "Google it" in place of "look it up online."

So, what is the reason for Google's growing success, high control percentage of the search engine marketplace, and its vast expansion into most technological markets? One reason I think the corporation is so successful is because one of its ten philosophies is "Great just isn't good enough." The corporate website adds to this point by saying,  "We see being great at something as a starting point, not an endpoint. We set ourselves goals we know we can't reach yet, because we know that by stretching to meet them we can get further than we expected....Ultimately, our constant dissatisfaction with the way things are becomes the driving force behind everything we do."

Throughout the semester I will be blogging about Google's success and future expansion in regards to public relations.

http://www.americanbankingnews.com/2010/09/08/did-microsoft%E2%80%99s-and-yahoo%E2%80%99s-search-deal-increase-google%E2%80%99s-market-share-msft-goog-yhoo/