C Level Social Media Action from Ted Rubin
I have been talking more to the people who are doing the work of social media so the readers of Marketing Pilgrim can step back from the news and the theory to get some feet on the street perspective. More and more those feet on the street are C level executives who are embracing social media to brand themselves and their companies. Kent Huffman of Bearcom Wireless has put together a list of these socially active CMOs on Twitter.
One of these folks, Ted Rubin (@tedrubin), exemplifies the energy and effort that is required to make a place for oneself in the social web for business. I interviewed Ted by e-mail recently to learn about the who, what, where, why and how of his social media efforts as the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) of the Eyes Lips Face (e.l.f.) Cosmetics line. I challenge you to find a more active C-level marketer out there.
1. Tell us a bit about yourself. What is your marketing experience and what is your mission as CMO for e.l.f. Cosmetics?
Prior to joining e.l.f., I served as Senior Managing Director of Marketing and Business development for Eastern Union Commercial and RealProspex.com, the fastest growing and most innovative commercial real-estate-listing site in the country. I was also President and CEO of The Black Book and responsible for its turnaround and eventual sale to a private equity group, and have held senior level positions at 1-800-Flowers and Yoyodyne, a Yahoo! company, in addition to running my own internet marketing and business development consultancy which serviced a vast array of online and traditional companies.
As Chief Marketing Officer for e.l.f. Cosmetics, my responsibilities include communicating with and building e.l.f.’s client base, leveraging brand equity through strategic marketing programs, and creating/managing a major thrust into social media initiatives and partnerships. I also focus on strengthening both core products and line extensions, including the extremely successful Studio line and Minerals collection, both launched under my tenure and growing rapidly.
EyesLipsFace.com considers itself not only an e-tailer, but a pioneer of social commerce… a beauty and trendsetting destination site with approximately ten to twelve million page views a month, several hundred thousand monthly visitors and over two million members. I believe the key to continued success is identifying with the customer. Listening is finally getting the respect it deserves through Social Media… listen and adjust your message to make it relevant to your consumer. Brand loyalty declines due to lack of relevance… a direct result of not listening.
Number one is always try to understand who your customer is and stay true to your brand. At e.l.f. we position the brand with a unique approach toward beauty, accessibility, interactivity and consumer engagement.
2. Tell us how long you have been engaged in digital marketing (social media , search etc) and what venues you are currently using.
I have been involved in digital marketing since 1997 when I joined Seth Godin at his online direct marketing company Yoyodyne, which was acquired by Yahoo! a year later. I scaled and continued development of Yoyodyne’s most successful and only profitable product, “Get Rich ClickSM”. My team blew away sales projections from $20,000 in February 1998 to sales in excess of $6 million in the back half of that year – beating projections by more than 200 percent.
Currently at e.l.f. we are very totally immersed in affiliate, search, email, word-of-mouth, and social media marketing… as well as intertwining all of that with a robust earned media presence. In addition we maintain a seven day a week blogging presence and have built a very strong relationship with the Mommy and Beauty Blogging community.
3. Why have you chosen these avenues and are there others that you are considering?
I have chosen these venues because they lend themselves to performance marketing and allow us to either only pay for acceptable results or extend our footprint without the need for a traditional media budget.
We have an extremely high brand visibility and combined with our phenomenal “Affordable Luxury” model we are a great fit with many publishers (and work with most including Hearst, Conde Nast, Hachette Filipacchi, Time, etc.) and websites/bloggers for special features… especially in today’s economic environment.
We are featured regularly in blogs, magazines, newspapers and TV news reports on a daily basis. e.l.f. does not have a traditional marketing budget. The majority of our marketing is through PR, cross promotion, partnership, content sharing, and/or rev share with other websites. We work very aggressively enhancing the e.l.f. client base through hands-on marketing initiatives and are focusing on leveraging and continuing to grow brand equity through strategic marketing programs, partnerships and an aggressive Social Media strategy.
4. You stated in a tweet recently, “This recession, unlike past few, w/hav long term impact on consumr shopng habits. Ignor new valu paradigm at ur own risk. Could you explain what you mean by this?
This recession, unlike other recent downturns, has reached deeper into the wallets and more importantly psyche of most consumers. In addition the effects on the purchasing power of the average consumer will be longer lasting and most have seen the light for the first time in many years about the importance of building a savings base. Due to this, “Value” is now king… “Value” being a combination of price “and” quality. Simply put… consumers want more for less and will insist upon this for a long time to come.
5. Moving forward how do you intend to embrace this new paradigm for e.l.f? What will your marketing efforts look like in 5 years as a result of this shift?
The beauty of our business at e.l.f. is that we were pioneers, trailblazers and trendsetters in this regard. We were doing this when everyone else was raising their prices… even those brands that offered nothing more than fancy packaging for the higher prices.
EyesLipsFace.com is not just an etailer, but a pioneer of social commerce… we have become a beauty and trendsetting destination site with a few hundred thousand monthly visitors and in excess of 2MM members. Check out “the buzz” section on our website… . The majority of e.l.f.’s products are sold for only $1. Our single item price points for our three lines are $1 (our standard line), $3 (Studio line), and $5 (Mineral line).
In today’s rapidly evolving marketing world I am not sure what we will be doing next year, so five years out is not something I am even pondering. My hope is to continue to build upon what we have done to date with regard to engaging and interacting with our members/customers/prospective customers to build a relationship with our brand that will be loyal and enduring.
6. If you were to give someone who is new to the marketing game a bit of free advice what would it be?
Research the social media/marketing medium and become knowledgeable. There’s nothing better than first hand experience. Later, there are many things you will be able to delegate, but this is the one thing that you need to do. I spent months researching and understanding social media before I made many moves in the space for e.l.f.
Build a following for your personal brand. If you are able to build a sizeable audience for your personal brand then you are closer to developing a social marketing strategy for your company.
Set management’s expectations properly so everyone understands what you are trying to accomplish and how to measure those results.
Build a strategy with measurable goals, such as number of followers, growth rate and interactions, but don’t avoid areas that may not be measured accurately as these are potentially very valuable to the company’s bottom line down the road.
Get your hands dirty… interact with your audience and provide that personal touch that a brand so desperately requires.
7. How important do you think video and interactive content will be in the near future?
I think video, and the ability to put a face to the name of user-generated content, will play a huge role in the growth of social media marketing. When the next phase is complete, and the average consumer can manage the ability to embed a link that can click through to a product from a YouTube or other ubiquitous video platform, the next generation advocate/affiliate will arise and become incredibly valuable to a retailer/brand.
In January 2009 we launched a sister site ASKelf.com that hosts all user-generated content posted about e.l.f. around the web, primarily focusing on video, and will soon be integrating it into our site in a significantly upgraded format as the The e.l.f. Beauty Network.
We just re-launched our site this month with a new design and will be adding the The e.l.f. Beauty Network as soon as the design is ready to fit in and some important upgrades are made.
Thanks to Ted for his time. As noted at the start, he may be the “hardest working man in C-level social media”. If you have any questions ask away. I suspect Ted will be willing to “interact” here at Marketing Pilgrim.
Chrome Extensions Include Ad Blockers
Google must know something that we don’t. Why else would they be SO open in their new move toward transparency as to allow for extensions on Chrome that, gulp, block the very lifeblood of their money printing operation? Well, considering the market share that Chrome currently has (around 40 million users) and the mindset of someone likely to use (or even know about) this extension the thought of this kind of ‘allowance’ is probably bigger than the reality.
In a manifesto-like e-mail message sent last month to all Google employees, Jonathan Rosenberg, a senior vice president for product management, told them to commit to greater transparency and open industry standards. Rather than hoard knowledge to exploit it, he wrote in “The Meaning of Open,” share it and watch Google and the entire Internet prosper.
The resulting openness is allowing for ad blockers as extensions but this decision did not happen without a Mountain View trip to the revenue mountaintop for advice.
Speaking at a conference on Dec. 11 in Mountain View, Calif., Linus Upson, engineering director at Google, said there were many discussions before allowing ad-blocking programs “because Google makes all of its money from advertising.”
But he explained that the prevailing thinking was that “it’s unlikely ad blockers are going to get to the level where they imperil the advertising market, because if advertising is so annoying that a large segment of the population wants to block it, then advertising should get less annoying.”
“So I think the market will sort this out,” he said. “At least that is the bet we made when we opened the extension gallery and didn’t have any policy against ad-blockers.”
That was a long quote but it’s the last sentence that was uttered by a company that is both loved and scorned at the same time. This is uttered by a company that some would think anti-trust is in their future in the same way it was for Microsoft and IBM. Letting the market sort it out is the only way to go in the long run. Sure there will be hiccups but the alternative (some form of regulation that reads real well but in practical use is just plain stupid) is not going to work. I think that there is enough evidence from 2009 for that one.
Similar extensions are currently available on Firefox, which has a much larger market share but has not exactly stopped Google in its tracks so that may be the evidence needed.
Oh and if you want to gain access to these blockers here’s their stories and a link or two for you.
As it happens, two 28-year-olds, Michael Gundlach, an independent programmer from outside Athens, Ga., and Tom Joseph, an M.D.-Ph.D. student at Mount Sinai Medical School, separately went through the exact same experience. In telephone interviews, each told of excitedly looking to see if he could install a Chrome extension of his favorite Firefox add-on, Adblock Plus, which prevents ads from appearing on Web sites, whether bright flashing animation or the text ads that Google serves up after a search.
They did not find one. So, naturally, each spent a day or so creating a rough version of such an extension, with much more work to come. AdThwart from Mr. Joseph is now No. 2 in popularity among the more than 1,200 Chrome extensions; AdBlock from Mr. Gundlach is No. 8. Together, they already have more than 120,000 users.
Happy ad blocking!
We Are Spending More Time Online According to Harris
Shocked aren’t ya? It really is two days before Christmas because there is just not much happening. The folks at Harris Interactive are still working though and reporting that we are spending more time online than ever before. This will surprise no one but the report digs into some of the specifics of age groups which is always of interest. Honestly though, no surprises there either. TechCrunch tells a little about the study and what possible effects on the results could be:
Harris concludes that the average hours spent online have increased from 7 hours from 1999 to 2002, to between 8 and 9 hours in 2003 to 2006, and surged after that.
There was a sudden spike in time spent online in 2007 when the average hours spent on the Web increased to 11 hours. Last year, Internet users were online for 14 hours a week, double what it was from 1999 to 2002, although Harris says this could have something to do with the outbreak of the financial crisis and the lead-up to the presidential election in October 2008.
The study is about personal time on line and is not inclusive of e-mail time. Based on that, we are talking about just short of 2 hours per day online on average. Here is the data that may be of service to you.
There are no real surprises here. I think the shock of the proliferation of the online life is wearing off. There are likely to be other spikes moving forward like the increase of use of the mobile web that will be the new measure of growth online. I suspect that if Harris did some polling around that there would be great interest in the trending. Maybe that will help us identify when the real “Year of Mobile” was or is to be.
If You Can’t Buy’em, Join’em
It wasn’t too long ago actually that Eric Schmidt was referring to Twitter in terms that were less than flattering by saying the micro-blogging service was a ‘poor man’s e-mail.” As with anything in the Internet industry space just give it 6 months or so and there will be some sort of about face or make up or whatever.
So where are Google and Twitter nowadays? Well, let’s see. There was the “Google is Going to Buy Twitter” phase. Then there was the Google deal for Twitter’s feed reality. Now, all is well between the two ‘frienemies’ as Eric Schmidt appears to have opened his very own Twitter account at ‘eschmidt0’. Oh happy day.
TechCrunch shared this info from the weekend.
Current Googlers such as Hunter Walk (YouTube) and former Googlers such as Chris Sacca welcomed Schmidt to the service tonight, pointing to his account, eschmidt0. Yes, you’d think he could have gotten a better name (for example, ericschmidt is currently suspended, and presumably available). But maybe he’s continuing Google’s love affair with 1s and 0s.
So what was Schmidt’s first tweet? Like any good Twitter user, he took some time for self-promotion:
CNN GPS with Fareed Zakaria on Nov 29th, starts around minute 17; Fareed is a very good interviewer http://bit.ly/6GwGjn
His second tweet? Another self-promotional one:
WSJ op-ed on newpapers and online news; thanks to the WSJ for publishing! http://bit.ly/895j8L
As MG Siegler of TechCrunch points out Schmidt has caught on early and strong that self promotion is where it’s at on Twitter. As of this writing he had around 3,000 followers and his follow list looked like a who’s who of people whom had also mastered the medium including Barack Obama (aka., his handlers) and as diverse as The NY Times, Jimmy Buffet, AHHHH-nold Schwarzenegger, Heidi Montag, Ivanka Trump, Bob Saget, The Onion etc., etc.
It looks like Mr. Schmidt may convinced some of his friends to get involved as some of the poeple he follows exhibit either a very low level of activity or have made their tweets private.
So welcome aboard, Mr. Schmidt. After all, it may be good business to keep track of what’s going on in the ‘real time’ world. You never know when Google might want to take it over.
Verizon and iPhone in 2010?
It’s a slow news day so we’ll just enter into the realm of ‘what ifs’ and ‘maybe, kinda, sortas’ for a minute and imagine a world without barriers. Sounds nice doesn’t it? Imagine a place where you would be able to have the best possible smart phone device for you personally regardless of who your carrier is or is not partnered with. Imagine there’s no dropped calls …. it’s easy of you try. I think I may be channeling John Lennon ……
Anyway, what I am imagining based on a report from All Things D is the ability to possibly have an iPhone even though I am a Verizon customer for the foreseeable future. That’s an interesting prospect for sure but one I will have to do a ‘wait and see’ on.
Apple has a lot to gain by ending iPhone carrier exclusivity in the U.S. and signing up Verizon as a second carrier partner.
….such a deal could more than double U.S. iPhone sales in the near term. That said, it does have some noteworthy downsides, top among them, the end of the estimated $450-per-iPhone carrier subsidy AT&T (T) has been paying.
That’s the word from Broadpoint AmTech analyst Brian Marshall, who believes Apple (AAPL) will bring the iPhone to Verizon (VZ) in the second half of 2010 and forfeit AT&T’s “sweetheart” carrier subsidy as a result.
With the number of iPhone apps growing at the current rate of ‘really fast’ and the B to B marketing crowd seeing the value of building apps for branding purposes this is a great bit of speculation that I hope comes to fruition. While I have thought that going “droid’ may allow for me to have the best of both worlds I have to admit that having two devices now (BB Storm or phone, e-mail etc and iPod Touch for music, apps etc.) is a pain. I am not so convinced now that having a droid device and the iPhone is a good thing because carrying two separate devices is just not a good thing.
As this plays out marketers are going to have to make some hard choices as to which platforms they tie their marketing budgets to. While many look at the number of devices that Apple will sell if they were out from under the AT&T deal as weighed against the smaller subsidy the real money is in the apps. If twice as many people have an iPhone then the app sales go through the roof and Apple has a license to print money.
Well, one thing this whole aura of uncertainly has created is one less droid device sale. I’m holding out to see if this Verizon and iPhone thing happens. Until then I’ll just suffer. Actually, I can’t seem to make up my mind on this one. Maybe I’m channeling Brett Favre ……
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Google Wins Over the City of Angels
Google went a long way toward answering the naysayers of their Google Apps offering. How you ask? By winning a contract to provide e-mail and other Internet services to the City of Los Angeles. Nice get.
While winning a contract is just the first step in proving that Google is a serious threat to the stronghold of Microsoft’s software business, it’s a pretty big step. This kind of deal will be felt up and down the left coast (that’s what we East Coast folks refer to the West Coast as). Starting in the great Northwest there will be some serious Steve Ballmer hand-wringing and maybe another Bobby Knight-like chair throwing moment or two. In NoCal (the Google Plex in Mountain View in particular) there may be some Tiger Woods-like fist pumps of victory. While in SoCal it’s likely that no one outside the people who made the decision will know or care because it’s not directly about them. Different strokes for different folks, right?
Yahoo Finance tells us that while this is a victory for sure there are the typical concerns that still need to be overcome and there’s nothing like a financial penalty to overcome those issues.
The Council voted unanimously for the $7.2 million deal with contractor Computer Sciences Corp. to replace many city computer systems with the so-called Google Apps services.
An amendment added shortly before the vote makes the contract contingent on Computer Science agreeing to pay a preset penalty if a security breach occurs. The contractor’s project manager David Barber said he believed such an agreement would be reached.
The city’s police officers’ union and privacy advocates had raised security concerns over the Google contract because it places data online rather than on individual computers under the city’s direct control.
I bet dollars to donuts (there was a police officer reference after all) that Microsoft is assigning the task to someone to watch this thing like a hawk and to know just when and to what degree a security breach occurs if at all.
This particular battle could be looked back on as a game changing moment as there is an ‘out with the old and in with the new’ theme. The big loser? Novell.
The move will also end the city’s 7-year contract to use Novell Inc.’s GroupWise e-mail and record-keeping software, which city workers have complained is slow and crash-prone.
Novell senior vice president said during the Council hearing that many city departments were not using the most recent version of GroupWise and reiterated an offer to provide additional services for free.
That kind of ‘excuse based selling’ is not recommended and does not fly in today’s business world does it? My question is why weren’t they upgraded by Novell so they could at least have a shot at keeping the business? Silly me for asking such an obvious question, right?
Meanwhile back at the Plex all is good with the world.
“In our view, this can be a watershed agreement,” said Dave Girouard, president of the Google division that provides business services. “There’s a lot of cities and counties around the state and around the nation who were watching this.”
Translation? If you are a Google rep and you are talking to any of the big government agencies you better set an appointment now to make it happen in a local government near you.
So Google continues to expand far beyond the world of search. I’m not surprised are you?
Sweet! Tweet Delete Complete
Have you ever put together that questionable 140 character outburst or ‘observation’ and then experienced ‘tweeter’s remorse’ when you sent the poorly designed nugget of wisdom? It’s like that e-mail you didn’t want to hit send on (those really suck though because in most cases you have no recourse other than to start putting together an apology / explanation immediately). At least with Twitter you have always had the opportunity to ‘delete the tweet’ but Twitter had an annoying little habit of keeping that nasty little bugger in their search index. That was at least until recently. TechCrunch reported
Now, when you delete a tweet, it will instantaneously be removed from Twitter’s search index as well. We’ve tested it out this morning, and it is in fact the case. Even better, those tweets are also removed from the search API. We’ve tested several third party apps, and none contain the tweets that I deleted.
This is good news for users from a privacy perspective, as deleted tweets showing up in searches have been troublesome in the past. In one extreme example, a series of tweets that were sent the night two people died in a sweat lodge, but then were deleted, resurfaced on Twitter search.
So for all of folks out there with a quick ‘Twitter finger’ or your return / send mechanism has a ‘hair Twitter’ (you know, like a hair trigger, get it?) there is hope.
Apparently, this improvement just happened to coincide with the big announcements that bing and Google would be getting Twitter’s feeds for indexing in their engines. The timing is good though since having those bad tweets removed from Twitter is nice but not having them show up in every SERP from now until the second coming is even better.
Now don’t get too excited because all those tweets that you have deleted are likely to reside somewhere just waiting to surface in some odd way to embarrass you. So don’t ‘Drink and tweet’ or ‘Tweet responsibly’ and this won’t be an issue.
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Google at Its Minimalist Best?
Google is well known for many things to many people. Of course, search comes to mind. Then there’s e-mail and apps and on and on and on. Finally, there is the concern of world domination but that’s at least a year or two away so we can all breathe easier.
One design element that Google has been both famous and notorious for is its minimalist look, particularly on its home page. The simple search box and Google logo are as much a part of the Google brand and image than anything it actually does. Maybe that’s why it’s the most recognizable brand on the planet.
TechCrunch brings to our attention Google’s attempt to be even more minimalist if that’s possible.
We all know that Google is a big fan of minimalism, especially when it comes to its famous homepage, where it tries to keep its ‘word count‘ down to 28 words (actually, it looks like it might be up to around 30). Tonight, Google is apparently experimenting with taking that concept to a whole new level: the site is bucket testing a new effect that hides everything on the Google homepage aside from the search box and Google’s logo, only revealing the rest of the navigation elements with a nifty fade effect when you move your mouse.
Not surprisingly the homepage looks like you might imagine without anything but the essentials.
While this is far from earth shattering it is interesting in that Google even entertains the idea of taking things to the absolute bare minimum. I rarely, if ever, go to the homepage myself since toolbar access to the engine makes more sense to me but there are likely to be a lot of people who use the page to access the engine. I am amazed at how often I watch people actually type full URL’s in the search box to get to a site rather than in the browser itself.
So is there a need for Google to be any more minimal in its design than it already is? Does anyone really even care? The only time I even take notice of the Google logo anymore is if there is a special rendition to commemorate some event that Google deems important. Is this because Google is burned into my psyche or is it that I don’t really care about the logo, just the functionality? I’m so indifferent I’ll let you tell me which it is.
How NOT to do Email Marketing: Scare Tactics
Toyota and their advertising agency, Saatchi & Saatchi must have thought they were onto something huge when they launched a series of emails last year. And then this week, AdAge reports, they were slapped with a lawsuit by one of their subscribers/victims. The plaintiff in this case was enrolled in the email marketing campaign when a friend decided to play a prank on her—the genesis of the Toyota/Saatchi campaign.
The emails were sent from “Sebastian Bowler.” In his emails, he told subscribers that he knew them personally, the suit alleges:
Mr. Bowler’s digital missives to Ms. Duick indicated he knew her, knew her address and was coming with his pit bull, Trigger, to stay with her to avoid the cops. In his second e-mail to her, Mr. Bowler listed his MySpace page, which is still up (although it says he last logged in June 2008). His video and pictures on MySpace “depict Mr. Bowler as a fanatical English soccer fan who enjoyed drinking alcohol to excess,” the suit says. His MySpace page also shows a photo with an arrow pointing to “me” and the caption “my mate took this photo which shows me right before the riot.”
One of the nine e-mails to Ms. Duick, the suit alleges, was a bill for $78.92 from a motel for Mr. Bowler’s one-night stay there, plus damage to a TV set and picture frame. He had listed her as a reference and told the motel to send her the bill, the complaint says. . . .
The final e-mail had a link to a video that showed Mr. Bowler driving into a drive-in movie where the film “Imbecile” was playing. The out-of-focus film shows an old man laughing continuously, revealing to Ms. Duick that “she had been punked” and all the e-mails were part of an ad campaign for the Matrix, the suit claims.
Specifically, the plaintiff is suing because she was convinced “a disturbed and aggressive” stranger was coming to her house. She was “terrified” and “slept with a machete next to her bed and she slept with mace. She could barely sleep or eat normally.”
While becoming physically ill with fear is a strong reaction, and while the case will most likely be settled out of court, the victims’ reactions seem like something Saatchi and Toyota might have at least passingly considered as they planned this campaign. What did they think they would accomplish by trying to convince people that someone involved in riots and riotous living (and some of the other “maniacs” look even scarier) had their address and expected to evade arrest at her house?
Yeah, maybe the friend got a good laugh (if s/he even got to see what was happening—I’m hoping s/he was far enough away that s/he had no idea the kind of stress she caused the plaintiff). But the recipients of the pranks obviously didn’t all agree. Even if the emails didn’t terrify most of their recipients, I can’t imagine how pretending to stick us with a bill for a wrecked hotel room would somehow associate the Toyota Matrix with a positive message in our minds.
Yeah, pranks are fun (when you’re the one pulling them, and when you get to see the reaction, not terrorize your friends for a week). And they can even sometimes be an effective marketing tool. But somehow, this doesn’t seem like the association Toyota needs to move cars.
What do you think? Should Saatchi and Toyota have thought twice about this? Or is this a good way to increase buzz and awareness around their product?
Let My Data Go!
Have you ever experienced a time where you had some important data stored in a SaaS (software as a service) application like e-mail or CRM and you wanted your data out of the application? Sounds simple enough, right? After all it is your data? Often times this turns into a process / project that makes little sense to the end user who is indignant that they can’t easily get their own data. The provider, however, has every reason to either make the process difficult or just stall because it gives them time to make a ‘save’.
So who should rescue the day when it comes to the freedom of all data in the known universe? Why Google of course! Doing their best Rage Against the Machine impression they have launched a site promoting the Data Liberation Front. Considering all of the talk these days about taking back power and control blah, blah, blah it’s interesting that they present this in a manner that looks rebellious in a Che Guevara kinda way. I suppose it gets people’s attention but …..
The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products. We do this because we believe that any data that you create in (or import into) a product is your own. We help and consult other engineering teams within Google on how to “liberate” their products. This is our mission statement:
Users own the data they store in any of Google’s products.
Our team’s goal is to give users greater control by making it
easier for them to move data in and out.
Google is becoming very adept at addressing their shortcomings in a way that is both self-effacing (they admit they are not perfect in this mission yet) and preemptive. They have become masters of seeing where there may be some ‘evil’ and making a big deal about eradicating it. Very interesting indeed and, honestly, pretty darn smart on their part.
To take that to the next level they address the very same information in a much less cool and revolutionary but more practical blog. In fact, the blog looks to be the place moving forward to get all the latest on Google’s progress to not lock-in their users.
We expect to use this blog to give tips and tricks on getting data in and out of Google products, as well as kudos and reviews for services supporting rich import/export features. We think that we can provide simple solutions for liberating/managing your data stored in the cloud, and let you voice your complaints about services that aren’t properly liberated.
So rather than looking like Fi-Fo-Fi-Fum giant trying to corner the data information and dissemination market through book copyright deals and search engine dominance Google comes out with the look of data revolutionaries. Don’t worry everyone, Google’s got your best interest at heart and is fighting for your rights. Ultimately you may never need to worry about data liberation at all. Probably because they’ll have it all anyway. Looks like all that time hanging out in Washington, DC may be rubbing off on them.
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