Bad buzz can be good for you (and for Google)

It’s been more than a month since Google released its brand new service: Google Buzz.  For those who forgot or aren’t paying particular attention to those kinds of events, Google Buzz is a mix of Facebook and Twitter, enabling people with Gmail account to share latest news, information, etc… about them or the world in general, to their followers (people who are also on Gmail in their contact list).

Sounds familiar ? Yes, it should. After all, it’s another ‘me-too’ in the crowded space of social sharing sites and tools, which almost everyone uses, at least through Facebook. The intriguing element is that the initial release on February 9 generated a lot of bad buzz on the Internet. Google had off course the desire to get all Gmail users on board as quickly as they could. In the process, they automatically turned off lots of privacy settings. Some of them had the unintended effect to share your address book to many people, or even almost share your email address to the outside world.  Not good, since the email is still considered as ‘protected territory’ when it comes to privacy.

A few days after the bad buzz, Google quickly launched a second version, with improved on-boarding process for privacy adjustments. A few days ?  Yes, that was fast.

The usual debate around this was on the typical ‘tension’ between privacy defenders and the Web companies, for whom the more  a service is ‘open and shared’, the better it is for the service, since users will see more content popping up and come back more often. Google pushed this to max, going too far in its first release. It is certainly part of the explanation.

The theory of this post now, is that this bad buzz was all intentional. Google did it on purpose, perfectly knowing about the bad buzz this would generate. Off course, it’s a theory, but let’s explore it for some time. As a note, this is why I did not write about it earlier – didn’t want to be part of that…the other reason is that I was simply slow to get back writing.

First, Google was really, really slow on that opportunity. Social sharing was, as far as I remember, invented not by Facebook but StumbleUpon (apart from few earlier failed attempts), which was built with the idea of letting people share and discover new web sites by sharing and voting for them in the community. It was founded in 2001. In 2010, or a whole 9 years later, which is about 20 years in Internet time, Google Buzz follows Facebook, Twitter, and all other social sharing sites which themselves followed StumbleUpon, in some shape or form.

Further, when Yahoo! Buzz was launched in Feb 2008 (yes, two years ago), it did not create that much noise. You could hear some ‘Ah, one more’ or ‘Eventually’ but it was it.   Well, it’s already not easy to be a ‘me-too’, then if you launch something about ‘Buzz’, it might be smarter to create some by yourself, right ?  Or people will laugh about you. It’s clear that the features by themselves won’t generate much chat, apart within the geek arena. So, you are the Google marketing guy in charge of the launch and you scratch your head: get buzz or get sacked. But buzz is not something you buy, it’s something you hope for. How to improve the odds ? Well, let’s put some stuff that people will really talk about, some dynamite into it.

In addition, isn’t 4 days really short for changing something so big and used by millions (ie many of the gmail accounts)  ? No, this improvement wasn’t ‘ready and put aside’  in case, was it ? Well, maybe, maybe not.

That’s two hints. Now you may argue that creating bad buzz is stupid, because it will negatively affect your reputation. Yes and no. Off course, killing someone is a bit the extreme, silly version of buzz-creating actions and would be unwise, even if you’re desperate marketer.  But some actions, or the overall story, can show you under a nice image, after all.

The famous case is in point is of French politician Ségolène Royal, which revamped her site ‘Désir d’avenir’ under a terrible design – the web site was just awfully ugly.  It created so much buzz on the  Web  that the site went actually down for a few days.  Lots of parodies got created around in a matter of days. Now, the rumour went on at some point that, as she is a prominent politician surrounded with some of the best known figures in the French Web, it couldn’t possibly have been a tragic mistake. This was just too much, ‘trop gros’. For those who know the Ségolène character from the press, the idea that she authorized this to create the buzz on her was tempting.  It did not hurt her, she just looked amused and changed it – and after all, it was just about an ugly background image someone in her team had chosen.  But the site was cross-linked from everywhere (Search Engine optimization for free) and it is still known by many.  She even made a listing of the parodies on her site. (Thanks to Chris for sharing this story)

And for Google Buzz ? The whole story is: “We did not tune well the privacy settings. We heard your feedback and four days after the launch, we’re rolling out big improvements, wiping out all concerns”. Looking at it, the story is not that bad. As our research showed, there is no or few better image improvement actions than showing that you listen to your customers.

So, well done to Google – but remember this is only a theory.

Bad buzz can be good. Ok, let’s put it that way: bad buzz is better than no buzz. Next time you want to get heard but your creativity is running out and the product is not going to sell by itself, think about it.  What would you have done if you were the Google employee in charge of this?