What Would Google Do, Jeff Jarvis: Top 5 Findings

“What Would Google Do?” by former-media-executive and blog-mogul Jeff Jarvis – catchy title, and it keeps the promise. It’s not a book about Google’s company history, not even on web- / media- / tech-topics, but a scholar’s interpretation of what kind of corporate mindset and behaviour is necessary to first benefit, then survive in the age of empowered customers, free information and dramatically changing laws of economy.

I definitely recommend you to get the book, though I heavily disagree with some views Jarvis expresses regarding business models: just because nowadays Google and others don’t make money from the business model they started with, doesn’t mean that a precisely thought-through business model isn’t necessary from the very beginning in a network economy – it just might happen to change as more connections are made and different values are created.

This is a work-in-progress-list of the IMO top 5 ideas Jarvis sketches in What Would Google Do? are (sorted by priority) – I’ll edit / change while finishing my reading (halfway through):

• Middlemen are doomed. If your business model is to be a bottleneck of information in an inefficient marketplace (as nicely explained on the example of realtors), then your days are numbered. Internally, we’ve started discussions on how journalistic work can add value as the information itself is omnipresent and content is created by amateur users faster than by any army of editors / writers. I think we need a totally different understanding of editorial work compared to what we, as a magazine publisher, are used to.

• We have shifted from an economy based on scarcity to one based on abundance. Jarvis cites the (old – 2005!) thesis of economist Umair Haque predicting “the age of the blockbuster is past”. Entertainment media heavily rely on blockbusters, from World of Warcraft to The Dark Knight. So if Jarvis / Haque / Anderson are right (and I second that), we need to find a way to “enable, organize and monetize the abundance”. I.e.: one-size-fits-all-products will fit a decreasing number of people.

• Listen & Collaborate. “We know our audience’s taste, because we have so-and-so many years of experience” – that’s so yesterday. First, there’s not THE audience. Second, our user’s tastes depend on so many criteria that prediction is bound to fail. The process of creating and publishing content on the web has to evolve to constantly incorporate extensive testing / analyzing of user behavior and sharing ideas with “the audience”. Quote: “Join in conversations with customers. Ask people what you should do. Admit mistakes (!). … Your ceompetitive advantage is not htat your designs are secret but that you have a strong relationship with your community of customers. … It’s still your job to come up with good ideas, to invent, inspire, surprise – and to execute well.” Actually, the users are not OUR community, and they’re already doing what they want. Our privilege is to help them by sparking discussions with our content and of course by providing the tools.

• Think distributed. Not control (… of products, distribution...) earns a profit but creating connections. Our content shouldn’t be closed in into the walled gardens that many editorial websites still are. Jarvis writes: “That’s how companies and institutions should view themselves: on the outside [of the people’s me-spheres], asking to come in.” So we contribute to networks, and make content accessible and reusable, even editable. When we compose an editorial site, we decide to focus on certain contents / topics. Why shouldn’t interested users take the pieces and reassemble it in a different way? Why shouldn’t we give them access to our tools / technology and syndicate content? The idea is not new in the media business, and basically what Glam’s talking about. But from my point of view,Glam doesn’t execute the “create connections”-part very well – they’re much better at creating a story for advertisers and investors.

• Google diluted our brands – true for brands that stand for providing information / content. But trying to fight or even inverse this state would be denying reality – and, frankly, dumb. As Google-keyword stats show, many (in our case print) brands are still very lively – so we need to find out what exactly users are looking for and work hard to best possibly serve their needs. And we should embrace Google and add values (services, views, connections) that make us stick out from the other results.