Google, Facebook, and Twitter are battling. Google is clearly the aggressor right now, unsatisfied with it’s role as “aggregator of the worlds information…. but only when the world permits it”.

Google has been pushing around web publishers and web users for the past year or so, and is now making moves to show it’s willingness to destroy the search results in order to get the social media access it wants. Presumably to make those search results better… but I’m losing faith in that. More than ever, it’s becoming clear Google is only after the money and power.

The people have spoken — they don’t like Google Plus very much. Certainly not as much as Facebook or Twitter. In fact, the people haven’t liked much of what Google has developed so far at all. Oh sure properties like YouTube and Maps are loved, but Google didn’t create those. Google Search is the only Google-developed product the masses really like and use.

And now Google is taking that away. Google just took away the meaningful, diversified SERPs that made it famous, and replaced them with junk culled from Google’s social media and other properties. I’ve already heard two people say “I hate the new Google. I can’t find anything I want”.

This is a very dangerous game for Google to play. Not sure what’s going on in that Google complex. Is it desperate?

Google did this with local last year… and that is still a mess. Google Place Pages replaced yellow pages and various other listing and directory sources. My own personal experience with Google local today? When I use Google Maps linked to Google Places and local reviews, it is wrong more than it is right. Much more. Businesses that moved a year ago, still shown at the old address. Restaurants that changed name many years ago still ranking for the old name. Lots and lots of “the wrong things” returned.

Just yesterday I finished playing tennis in Seattle, and hit maps for “tennis store” because I blame my raquet for everything. Google was useless for local commerce. I tried “tennis raquets” — also useless. What a waste of time relying on Google local! I was ready to spend up to $150 for a tennis raquet *if* I could hold it in my hand and ask about grip size and get it stringed while I waited.

My disappointment with Google for local is based in my expectations… that’s the scary part. Those searches use to work! Google used to return useful answers for searches like that!

An old Korean saying translates to “when whales fight, the shrimp’s back is broken”. That’s what we have here… Google’s gotten super greedy, innovators like Twitter and even Facebook are resisting the Borg, and Google’s getting mad and taking it’s ball home.

Grow up, Google. There’s a long road ahead and you have plenty going for you. Make search work. We’ll love you for it.

Aaron posted a great review of transparency in SEO over at SEO Book. You should read it. He goes into detail on how the marketplace seems to attach value to claims of transparency and “open” ness, even though those credits are largely misplaced. He reviews how Google abuses that to its advantage in numerous ways. I consider the Internet to be the “Land of Opportunity” since we all have so many ways we could apply our web efforts.

Transparency and Openness in SEO and Beyond

In reading the review I found myself nodding in agreement on point after point. It also reminded me of SEOMOZ, which Aaron didn’t mention by name, but which is probably the most vocal self-proclaimer in the SEO space when it comes to claims of being “open” and “transparent”. I consider them big abusers of that… “open” tools that are actually marketed via the freemium strategy, use of “dot org” domain for a clearly commercial enterprise, default “opt out” web crawler that leverages the good will of publishers to feed the commercial tools (and requires reciprocal brand promotion in order to “opt out” after the fact). I think seomoz would have been a great candidate for a case study on exploitation of “open” and “transparency”, if Aaron had needed another one.

Aarons article also prompted me to comment here about another form of “transparency” that relates to web marketing — validity of marketing claims and the inferred claims buried in testimonials.

Time and again these days we see slick tool vendors launch into the social media space with great websites and promising feature sets, accompanied by claims of value, uniqueness, efficacy, and general awesomeness. These claims are backed by testimonials from major voices. VERY OFTEN those testimonials from “major voices” appear to me to be very carefully worded. They don’t actually make any factual statements. They read like horoscopes.. snippets that sound GREAT the first time you read them, but upon analysis you can see they could apply to anyone (not just you). Here’s an example:

I have yet to see a platform on the market that can do all the things that Chirpaloo does. It is powerful!

Now it might seem I just questioned the integrity of “Patrick Mueller, Managing Director, Smly.com”. I don’t mean to… it’s just and example of a testimonial that COULD come from someone who actually uses or used the tool, or… from someone who looked at the claims and said “wow… [if it does all that] it’s way cool”.

It may also seem I am questioning the integrity of Chirpaloo, the oddly named twitter tool that published that on its home page, as its most prominent testimonial. Nope.. at least not intentionally. But I am pointing out an apparent problem with their marketing.

Chirpaloo.. a tool that claims to be awesome, but doesn’t publish a price. A tool that offers a demo video but doesn’t let you watch it. They require a sign up form (for contact information) in order to “schedule a demo”. These are not trust-instilling facts about the Chirpaloo web site. So, lacking trust factors, I must look more closely at what is offered.. the testimonials, and the specificity of the marketing claims.

Here’s another of the home page testimonials:

“We began using Chirpaloo at its earliest stages and found it an invaluable tool for our attendee marketing efforts for Pivot Conference. With the next iteration of the platform, we believe Chirpaloo will become even more valuable for us in 2012 and beyond.” Mike Edelhart, CEO, PivotCon

See? It reads like he used it during beta or alpha (not likely to have paid for it), for a specific event, and hasn’t used it since. His “testimonial” is little more than assurance that they do have something under development, and that he believes they will (eventually) have something at least more useful than it was when he checked it out.

Is that really a great testimonial? On SECOND read, does it instill confidence? One of the four best testimonials they could locate? (they selected 4 for their home page).

Pivot Conference is a branding/social media conference, so naturally the very existence of a twitter tool is relevant to them out of the gate. I’ll stop analyzing Chirpaloo here, because I’m not gaining any confidence as I look deeper (which is why I started looking… I didn’t see satisfactory trust signals). There is no shortage of incomplete, erroneous, badly-designed websites on the Internet.

And that’s the tie in to transparency and openness. If your product is amazing, let the amazingness do your marketing. If people are using it effectively, your marketing work should involve opening up access to that knowledge, not creating new content to help express that fact that you’re amazing, or get people to schedule a relatively expensive (time and attention wise) phone conference. That’s the beauty of the Facebook “like”… Facebook doesn’t promote your brand, your satisfied customers do. Facebook is enabling for that communication to reach everyone else.

Transparency in SEO World

SEO is a strange field where transparency will hurt your ability to earn a living. In SEO, there are real issues that create real challenges to openness and transparency. Aaron notes that, when he highlights how SEO firms promoting themselves as “open” and “transparent” can’t possibly be sincere, because openness and transparency in SEO destroys SEO value. But that’s not the case for twitter tools, and most “normal” Internet industries. Most industries do not have the worlds most powerful Internet company (Google) highlighting them as the biggest danger to their business profitability (something Google did in its pre-IPO paperwork - it warned investors that SEO could kill Google).

So it seems to me, openness and transparency are important. If your product is expensive, don’t hide that fact. If you hide the price and it turns out to be expensive, I have to assume you yourself have very little confidence that the market will recognize the value. THAT awareness should drive your marketing, not cause you to hide your pricing. If your success depends on people overlooking or not noticing that your service is not a very good value, you very likely have a big problem.

If your product has a lot of bugs, help everyone see the benefits of using the parts that work well. That’s all we’re looking for any way… we don’t actually want to buy your promises. We want to buy what works. If you sell us promises, we will be disappointed and it will be your [your brand’s] fault. If you sell us something that is awesome for task “A” and we discover it is indeed awesome for task “A”, but is terrible at task “B”, we can honestly evaluate it on its merits. We won’t feel cheated if we make the purchase knowing we’re buying an awesome Task “A” tool that also tries to do Task “B”.

Open. Transparent.

Exploitation of Transparent and Open Claims

On the other hand, there is one very legitimate business case when it’s SMART to hide the price, promote the promises over the facts, and present great SOUNDING testimonials from BIGVOICES instead of trust inspiring testimonials from actual experienced customers. Exploitation. Raise money, sell a product that might not be ready yet, or sell a promising product into a high-demand marketplace where there is a lot of need, not yet a lot of awareness, etc. Use “open” and “transparent” to exploit the market buyers.

Not the same as Aaron’s notes on Google, but in between my own observations about SEOmoz and perhaps the most slimy segments of the affiliate marketing world, where blatant lies and often completely fake testimonials are purposefully used to generate fake buzz and raise money from high-pressure sales.

Testimonials look like transparency, but should be real not crafted. Good ones should instill trust. Otherwise it looks like fake transparency, which is a red flag for trust. Marketing claims should be specific and demonstrable, so they empower the consumer to make a deal (buy your offering). If you can’t do that, sell what you have, not what the market wants. To do otherwise is doomed to disappoint customers, which is brand failure at best, and fraud at worst.

Credit Card Re-Billing Interview Test

One of my interview tests when dealing with affiliate marketers or people who were at some point active in strategic alliances and online marketing, involves credit card re-billing. I find a way around to discussing the amazing effectiveness of credit card re-billing, including float and slippage. Re-billing is the system of “sign up now and we’ll bill you monthly, until you cancel”. Float is the free money you make from their money, which is in your account before they use any of your services (or cost you any expenses). Slippage is the free money that you get when they paid, but didn’t consume.

The obvious part of the discussion should be, well, obvious to all participating. Free money is the most profitable revenue. I get some value from watching how a potential partner represents the credit card subscription/re-billing opportunity and their experiences with it. Not every one of them is a thief.

The not-so-obvious parts will hopefully come up in the conversation (if the candidate is at least trustworthy). That’s the connection between costs, charges, optimization of float and slippage, and management of customer accounts. It’s real work to run any business, and real work to run a very profitable business.

The nuanced parts are rarely brought up by potential candidates, but when they are, I have a candidate. Why is the re-bill so successful? Because of trust, risk, and power. The sign up is based on potential (which involves trust, as I showed earlier). Trust is also closely tied to risk. Power, which is tied to risk, belongs to me (the consumer). Take away my power, and I have risk, so I re-evaluate my trust in you.

I own my power and I own responsibility for risk. I own the responsibility for the transaction (the deal). The ONLY thing you own is the potential and the deliverable that you promised, and which I decided was the basis for the bargain. Leave me to mine, and take care of yours — then we can do business.

Re-billing? If you are trustworthy and enable me to retain my powers as a consumer, I may invest in you based on your potential to deliver, even if I know I am giving you “free money” month after month via the re-billing mechanism. It’s a deal I make, not a deal your sales guy closed, or a trick your re-bill scam pulled on me.
Open and transparent can only apply to your part — the promise and the deliverable. When you are using it for my parts (the risk, the trust, the close), you are very likely exploiting the consumer, and nothing more benevolent than that.

Today I visited the local bank to get some Canadian currency in advance of my next trip over the border. It’s much better to have Canadian currency while in Canada: it’s easier and cheaper than credit cards.

I am sick and tired of the “system” nickel and dime-ing me to death every time I’m up north.  Every hockey game, lacrosse game, etc. takes me over the border, and I find myself taking out cash from an ATM for coffee, snacks, admission fees, raffle tickets. I end up paying a Canadian bank ATM fee, an American bank ATM fee, and a currency conversion fee, every time.

Our Canadian neighbors don’t like American Express. Small businesses don’t take it at all, and only American-based or multi-national corporate stores take it. Starbucks will take it, but can’t do so at the regular register (a manager type has to swipe it behind the counter somewhere). Ditto for VISA. For some reason, the lower British Columbia mainland doesn’t take VISA. They like MasterCard. Stop for Tim Horton’s coffee or donuts? You’ll need cash or a Mastercard. No VISA, no Amex, and no American dollars.

Of course I don’t have a Mastercard. Every one of my cards is a VISA.I’m not at all sure why.

My local bank branch is “the one closest to the border” in Washington state. At a branch in Seattle, I was unable to buy any Canadian currency at all. I was told all about how this local branch up here actually stocks Canadian currency as a service to customers, and I was urged to stop by and buy some, before heading north. The guy was excited telling me about it, like it was a banking feature or something cool. Imagine… in a state that borders Canada, in the city that is closest to the border, our nation’s second largest bank (or something like that) actually has Canadian currency available for it’s cusrtomers to buy.

So I stopped by, and they were out.

I honestly wonder: we border Canada, and these nations passed a “North America Free Trade” agreement,  so why is it so hard to change money? We are FLOODED with Canadians every weekend. They fill our parking lots, and buy out our Wal Marts and Costco buying clubs. For some reason they have no trouble coming down here and spending. It’s obviously a good deal for them. So why all the hassles doing business the other way?

Any this story is really about robotic workers, not my gripes about border policies.  I went back to the bank branch today, because they were supposed to have some Canadian currency “in stock”. I asked to change $400 into Canadian colored money. Mind you I’ve been a bank customer for like 15 years, and have a tad bit more than like a trillion times that much money in the bank’s accounts, at any given time. It’s not like they don’t know me.

“I’ll have to create a profile for you, and then we can make a trade on the exchange”, he told me.

What? A profile? Trade? Exchange? Puhleeeeeze…. I’m a bank customer at the teller window, asking for currency, after having been told they did indeed have some.

“Not sure what that means”, I said,”I’ve been a pretty good customer of this branch for a long time, so you should have a pretty solid profile of me. How about you use my account as a profile and we move forward? Oh, and what will all this trading stuff cost me?”

He told me it won’t cost me anything. Cool. That is SO RARE.

So while I dreamed of the fresh Vancouver sushi I’d be buying (with cash) later, I didn’t listen to him as he explained some details about profiles and  stuff, as if it was important and official. Eventually I heard him ask me to swipe my card, which I did. He mumbled some more as he did some stuff.. explained some more about trading exchanges, buying currency, etc. It seemed very important to him, and important that he tell me, and I understand it all. Whatever Dude… just change my money.

As I almost ran out of patience waiting, when he stopped suddenly, looking at his terminal. It was like he was ACCESS DENIED or something. I imagined an FBI warning must have popped onto his terminal, with my face on it. He seemed so serious. “How. Much. Canadian. Money. Would. You. Like.”, he asked sternly.

Now I had already placed $400 in front of him, and had initially asked him to change that into Canadian magic rainbow paper (using less colorful bank terminology, of course). “I’d like to change this”, I re-iterated, pointing to the money.

Then he robotically pushed my 4 crisp $100 bills back towards me, and started to explain to me that the system requires him to state how much Canadian money the customer would like, in whole dollars only. The system doesn’t allow him to buy less than a dollar (no coins). The system doesn’t allow him to enter $400 American dollars. The customer must state how much Canadian currency they would like, to the nearest whole CANADIAN dollar, so that he can buy it for them, on the currency exchange. His “them”, in this case, appeared to be me.

Hmm…. this is odd. At that point I wanted to go all Jed Clampett on his ass, but I stayed civil.

“Okay”, I started. “I have an idea. How about you figure out how much Canadian money I can buy with $400 AMERICAN dollars, using that fancy computer you have there, and that advanced currency trading system you just created a profile for, and then we’ll buy THAT much, using this $400 of American money right here?”. I slid the $400 back towards him, nice and gentle-like, being careful not to make any false moves. I knew the cameras were watching.

At first I thought “hey, he liked that idea” because he quickly came back with a suggestion that I can buy $400 Canadian for something like $398.37 (something.. I forget).I was about to say “bravo.. you did it!” when it dawned on me that this braniac, out of frustration, had probably just typed in $400 into the Canadian box to “see what would happen” and he lucked out. Based on today’s exchange rates, I could buy that for less than the $400 I had tendered.

So much for clever or even basically competent. Forget about the fact that I could have bought like $401 or $402 or something, had he bothered to do a wee bit of currency conversion math. It’s not like he’s expected to be able to do math or anything. He’s just a banker, after all.

A robot worker at a bank. No brains required. Push everything back at the customer, with no thought to what it might mean for the customer.

All that crap about creating a profile did nothing but show me he was not competent, and that the bank didn’t care about me. The talk about exchanges and buying and trading… whatever dude. It means NOTHING to the customer. Whatever happens in the split seconds behind your terminal is inconsequential. Whatever comes out.. that’s what I would get. The only thing the customer needs is customer service, which should be HIM creating whatever profiles HE needs,  and HIM buying whatever HE needs to buy, with my money, so I can get my $400 changed into Canadian foil.

His attitude was a bonus. If it were up tome, the guy would be fired today. And tomorrow, some other less cognitively challenged “banker” would run the customer event this way:

Imaginary Banker: “Good afternoon. How can I help today?”

Me: “Good afternoon. I need some Canadian coin. Funny colored money. Four hundred smackers worth. Can you do it?”

Imaginary Banker: “I can buy you some, it’ll just take a sec. Swipe your card for me if you don’t mind”

Me: “Soytenly” (swipe)

Pause..clickclickclick…whirr… banking stuff happening. I feel important,  like Jed Clampett. I have money, the bank’s working for me, I’m gonna get some colored foil-filled Canadian paper, and sushi!

Imaginary Banker: “Looks like I can get you $400 Canadian for $398.37, or I could spend a few more minutes trying to get you even closer to your $400 spend, if you like.”

Me: “No worries, thanks.. that’d be great.  Plenty close enough for me.”

Imaginary Banker: “Done. Here you are… (count count count). Anything else I can do you for today?”

Now THAT is banking…doing the currency thing so the customer can move forward with his plans. But today, in our world of messed up, broken banking systems, disconnected bank executives, loser bank robots and completely failed econo-politics,  we have robotic workers in stupid bank branches, NOT getting the job done for customers and NOT EVEN AWARE that the job could be done well.

Rant over. The sushi was not only good and fresh, but cheap and easy, and I was treated like a local.