I’m a bit reticent to jump into this, as I’m not sure you all care that much, but I’ve got a decent reason for writing about Buzz (yesterday’s piece) again today.  

First, I’ve seen a piece (Calacanis) proclaiming Buzz the second (third? fifth?) coming of social. Facebook will “lost half its value” due to Buzz’s arrival, Jason opines. I think this is silly. Then again, I seem to think a lot of things are silly. Pretty soon, I’ll be chasing kids off my front lawn, the way I’m going. And I’ve not used Buzz, nor will I, as I’m not a Gmail user nor do I plan on becoming one. So don’t listen to me if you are a Gmail addict who wants to recreate your entire social experience in that medium. Go nuts. I’m all for more options.

Anyway. The larger issue to me has to do with Google’s approach to customers. The Google mantra has always been “we design for our customers.” Here’s the official declaration on Google’s corporate philosophy page (the first two points are also in the image above):

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow. Since the beginning, we’ve focused on providing the best user experience possible. Whether we’re designing a new Internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage, we take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line.

For the most part, Google has hewn closely to this strategy. But it has a major blind spot when it comes to Facebook and Twitter – Facebook in particular. I can understand ignoring Twitter – one could argue it’s not ubiquitous and therefore can be left off the feature set of new products. But ignoring Facebook when it comes to social search and status update is akin to ignoring oxygen when it’s time to light a fire: it’s silly (there’s that word again).

Furthermore, it’s not designing for your customer. Just about every one of Google’s customers has invested significant time and energy into their Facebook social graph. Launching social search (my take here) and Buzz with the pretension that Facebook doesn’t matter can not be explained away (at least, Google isn’t trying). What Google customer wouldn’t want at least the option to have their Google searches filtered through their Facebook social graph? And what Google customer wouldn’t want to at least have the option to import their Facebook connections and data feeds into and out of Google Buzz (not to mention publish into Twitter)?

Google made a clear decision to exclude Facebook from both social search and Buzz, and to my mind, that decision was made due to competitive issues – the company’s “own internal goal or bottom line.”

Now, tons of companies make similar decisions every day of every week. Fine.

But if you’re going to claim to be a different kind of company, one that is unique in philosophy and management approach, you can’t continually chip away at your core philosophy and not expect to be called on it by the very consumers that built your brand in the first place.

Oh, and by the way, it might be time to take a look at the second point in that Corporate Philosophy: “It’s best to do one thing really, really well. We do search.”

…and Nexus One, and Android, and Docs, and Doubleclick, and YouTube, and broadband and wifi networks, and blogs, and music, and books, and shopping/checkout, and Buzz, and Gmail, and…..anyway.

I think Google is an extraordinary company. But as I predicted way back in January, it’s time for it to mean something besides search, and for the company to own up to acting, well, like a company that protects its own interests, even ahead of, at certain times, the interests of its customers. It’s not like any of us are paying for Gmail, after all….

Onwards to the linkage:

IPG Goes with Microsoft’s Atlas for Ad Management (ClickZ) The politics between Microsoft and Google continue to play out in the agency holding company battlefield.

Making the Most of Earned Media (eMarketer) Content is key to platform-based marketing programs.

Needed: A New Science For Valuing Content (AdAge) And content companies need to figure that out.

MySpace CEO Van Natta Was Fired by News Corp. Digital Head Miller in Late Afternoon Meeting (D) I like Owen. I like Jon. I don’t like news like this. Bummer all around.

TV Ads Less Effective, Budgets Shifting Online (MarketingProfs). Well, sometimes it’s nice to just sit back and watch it happen.

Live From Yahoo SearchSpeak 2010 (TC) Yahoo’s not given up on search, despite the Microsoft deal. The company is still innovating.

Love Stinks: 5 Parodies of Google’s Romantic Super Bowl Ad [VIDEO] (Mashable) You know, this is why I love them interwebs.

So Google went and did it – it integrated a whole mess of social and local features into Gmail, wrapping the whole thing into a product burrito it calls Buzz (Yahoo has got to be fuming, if it has any more fumes left, that is).  

The first-day response is somewhat positive – mainly due to the huge installed base that Gmail brings to the party.

However, I am not so certain this is going to work. And my reasons remain the same:

1. Buzz does not let you publish out from Gmail to Twitter or Facebook. So for this to compete, you have to build yet another network of followers/friends – and do it through Google services. Not many of us use Google services for social purposes. That’s a mismatch.

2. Related, but worth repeating: Buzz does not let you do pretty much anything at all with Facebook. Buzz tries to find your friends and connections through algorithms that watch what you do on Google services, then lets you add more, but through the lens of Gmail. There are two things wrong with this: Algorithms, and email. Facebook didn’t depend on either to create its initial value. Instead, it let humans pick other humans, which honestly, is what social is all about at its core.

(The images are from streaming coverage of the Buzz event from Cnet.)

The reality is, Facebook has won the social graph war. Google taking on Facebook for the social graph is akin to Facebook taking on google in web search. IE, silly. Google should incorporate Facebook Connect into Gmail/Buzz asap, and then build on top of it with its powerful services and algorithms. THAT would be a win.

In fact, one very well informed source of mine inside the non-Google socialsphere (IE, one of the major competitors) tells me he thinks Buzz will in fact play out, over the coming months, as *good* for his and other similar companies.

Well, time will tell. Meanwhile, there’s plenty of stuff worthy of your attention this Weds. morning (and I’ll include some tasty stuff about Buzz as well):

Introducing Google Buzz (Official Google Blog)

Google Buzz: What It Means for Twitter and Facebook (Mashable)

With Buzz, Google Plunges Into Social Networking (NYT) Plunges in? Well, for the fourth or fifth try…

Google Buzz? MSFT, Yahoo Say ‘Been There, Done That’ (SEL) Yep. And they failed.

Google Buzz re-invents Gmail (Tim O’Reilly) Tim is a big fan. This is meaningful to me, as he’s my partner on Web 2.

Twitter: Now more than 1 billion tweets per month (Royal Pingdom) Twitter continues to grow in usage.

FM Audience Takes Off – Now #4 in Conversational Media (FM) We’re behind just three others – Facebook, Myspace and Blogger. Look, I get to promote FM on my site to a certain extent. And I am very proud of the company’s growth and financial performance. OK, enough said.

Social Media Top Online Priority in 2010 (Marketing Profs) Yep. This is one of the reasons FM is so well positioned.

A Touch of Romance (Adverblog) I may well do this for my valentine – create your own romance novel cover.

The Man Who Looked Into Facebook’s Soul (RWW) I am a very big fan of academic research based on large social data sets.

Management Secrets Of Grateful Dead (The Atlantic) Are you kidding me? Finally, they get their due.

Oh MY GOD Bonnaroo lineup is announced. Anyone who has followed me for some time knows that I sorta kinda totally love this festival.

Tuesday, we hope, things will get back to normal after Super Bowl fever had subsided. Google is set to turn Gmail into a status updatin’ machine, which positions it to compete directly with Twitter. I’ll be posting this Signal an hour or so before the details emerge. I have an FM Board meeting this morning, (don’t fear, it’s all good…). So click this link for news of Google’s Gmail moves.  

Meanwhile, the past 24 hours has brought, as usual, all manner of linkworthy schtuff:

Loopt and Mobile Spinach Team Up for Location-Based Deals (Mashable) I’m watching this space. Hence the next item….

Beyond The Badge: Big Media Brands Strike Foursquare Deals (AdAge) It’s early yet in this space. I expect a significant acquisition by one or two of the majors. Foursquare, for those of you playing at home, was started by folks who sold Dodgeball to Google, watched it go nowhere, left and started over. Of course, if they or others sell, it will retard (yes, I said it) development of a truly native marketing medium. Which would be sad. But not atypical. (Also, see this Bits post, and my post on “checking in” last week.)

Even After Super Bowl, Google Plays the Reluctant Advertiser (ClickZ) Look. I know I promised to write more about this earlier, but I kind of lost my zest for the topic. Google laid its cards on the table. Now lets see if it decides to keep playing the game. I doubt it.

Social Today Feels Like Search A Decade Ago: Lots Of Noise And Lots Of Spam (TC) Indeed, a good point. But not entirely apples to apples. The larger observation is entirely correct: There is a large, very large, opportunity in uniting all these competing platforms. However, it means folks have to play a bit more nicely. The way it’s playing out right now, I don’t see it being solved in the near term. NB: I don’t think the regular joe six degrees pack has the same spam problems as Mike. That could change…

‘Conversationalists’ Climb Social Technographics Ladder (MarketingProfs/Forrester) (image at top left) Jeez, conversationalists? Whodathunk.

Social Media Marketing Best Practices (eMarketer) A plug for their paid report, but hey, the post is worth reading even if you don’t want to pay.

Super Bowl Ads: Hulu’s Winners and Losers [STATS] (Mashable/Hulu) Google did pretty well. So was it worth $6 million? Even Google can’t tell you that.

Google leaps language barrier with translator phone (Times of London) Fun. Early. But fun.

Was it really as simple as that? Google CEO Eric Schmidt took to the blogwaves after the Super Bowl yesterday to explain Google’s surprising decision to purchase an ad thusly:

We didn’t set out to do a Super Bowl ad, or even a TV ad for search. Our goal was simply to create a series of short online videos about our products and our users, and how they interact. But we liked this video so much, and it’s had such a positive reaction on YouTube, that we decided to share it with a wider audience.

If there’s one thing Google’s consistent about, it’s the company’s approach to PR: it always sounds reasonable and intellectually defensible, but it’s never really the whole story. Google didn’t set out to run a Super Bowl ad, that’s for sure. But somewhere in the last five or so years, it became the kind of company that would. And that’s the point. I mean….is Eric serious when he implies somehow he needs television to find a “wider audience.” I mean, seriously?!

I’ll have more thoughts on Google the Super Bowl ad runnin’ company after the Monday hoo-ha of meetings ends. Er….stay tuned.

Meanwhile, some other news worth grokkin’ as you sip your Monday morning beverage:

Enhanced Cooperation with Facebook on Search (Bing blog) – Or, put another way, Facebook and Microsoft Cancel Display Ad Relationship (ClickZ).

Moms on Facebook Are Savvy to Marketers [STATS] (Mashable) Well what do you know, Moms and marketers are a match, and what do you know, Facebook Emerges as News-Content Provider (Marketing Profs). Facebook is ubiquitous, folks. The question now, is what they do with that fact….perhaps a Super Bowl ad? Meanwhile, there are now books on the company (NY Review).

How To Get Our Democracy Back (Larry Lessig, the Nation) A rather outrageous proposal from one of technology’s best policy minds.

Plentiful Content, So Cheap (NYT) Carr marvels at Demand’s model.

FBI wants records kept of Web sites visited (Cnet). Watch this story. I will be (and have been for years).

Physicist Discovers How to Teleport Energy (Technology Review) Just cool.

Friday is all about the biggest event in television marketing – the Super Bowl. This year (as I’ve noted here before) I’m struck by how many campaigns are integrated with longer term social marketing platforms. That’s putting the investment to good use – promoting what I call a media annuity that will pay back all year long. However, much of the press and some of the marketing still gets it backwards – they see the Super Bowl as something that social media “builds buzz for.” Nope. It’s the other way round, folks. Your brand, which after all is what you’re buying the ad for, right? – your brand lives all year long on the platform you create. That platform is social, mobile, real time. The Super Bowl ad should drive that platform, not BE it.

Super Bowl Advertisers Are MIA on Facebook (ClickZ)

Google to Super Bowl Markters – Give Us Your Ads- and Your Dollars (Forbes)

How Social Media Is Changing the Super Bowl (Mashable)

And in other Friday linkage:

Google Maps To Add “Google Store Views” (SEL)

Googler Quitting To Run AOL Media “Will Be Missed” (AOL, GOOG) (SAI)

Cisco Crushes The Street, We’re In The ‘Second Phase Of Economic Recovery’ (CSCO) (BI)

New Facebook Redesign (HuffPo)

Astronaut Tweets Beautiful Earth Images From Space (Mashable)

Apple prohibits App Store devs from using location-based ads (MacNN) Hmmmm.

Today is all about checking in. Not so much driven by anything in today’s news, but every week or so I’ll just go off based on what’s on my mind – driven by the news, to be sure, but also by the bricolage of a lot of inputs over time.   

And over the past few weeks, I’ve been developing a thesis around the concept of “checking in.” Now for those of you not playing along at home, “checking in” is the terminology for “declaring where I am and what I’m doing through mobile devices and social media platforms.”

As usual, I’m a late bloomer in this new trend. I joined Foursquare, one of several check-in-based services, about a month ago. I’ve started checking in at work, the gym, various restaurants and local businesses. The service has a strong game element, with social capital earned for checking in, or doing more than one thing in a day, or unlocking action-based “badges,” or repeat check ins over time (Foursquare makes you “Mayor” of a location if you check in there the most. Competition amongst Foursquare nerds is pretty intense for those Mayorships.)

Other services that employ checking in include GoWalla, Yelp, and MyTown. Twitter is adding location services as we speak, which is just another way of saying it’ll support checking in shortly (although most check in services drive announcement tweets already).

And while it may not be clear as to why, I fully expect Google and Facebook to follow suit by enabling some kind of check-in behavior shortly.

Here’s why. To my mind, checking-in is simply another use case on the evolutionary path of search. As I said in the book, each search query is a declaration of intent – you are telling that search engine what you want, and hoping the engine will return a result that satisfies that declared intention.

Checking-in is a powerful new field in the database of intentions. It is a social declaration that “I am here” and, in a more nuanced way, “I am open to appropriate responses/conversations based on the fact that I am here.” Whereas search intent is clearly a request for a specific response, check-in intent is less specific – and hence more open.

I expect this to evolve quickly. I can imagine a time, and it ain’t far off, when we set our mobile devices to automatically check-in at our favorite places, and expect that that check-in will reward us with localized and personalized offers, discounts, and social capital of some sort or another. Furthermore, I expect we will soon expect that if we set our device to “discovery” mode, local businesses (and random strangers too) will be able to ping us with enticements and announcements of all kinds.

Instrumentation of this new social/local/mobile reality will be initially clumsy and fraught, but not for long. The use case is simply too compelling. It’s already happening in various ways – the Chipotle burrito app, the Polo store. Imagine what happens when McDonald’s adopts it? Game changer.

—–

In other news:

Is Amazon Building a Superkindle? (NYT) Yes, it bought a multitouch technology company, and yes, it’s going to get fun out there in ApplevsAndroidvsAdobevsAmazonLand.

Snickers Uses Social Media, SEM to Support ‘Lead Spot’ in Super Bowl Ads (ClickZ) More proof that social marketing is platform independent/supportive.

He Calls Google A Vampire, But Mark Cuban’s Mahalo Is Doing The Sucking (SEL) Oh SNAP.

Unclear ROI Impedes Mobile Marketing (MarketingProfs) You want proof of ROI? It’s coming. BTW, it’s also already here in terms of higher CTRs, if that’s your thing….(as anyone at AdMob or Microsoft Mobile Ads will tell you).

The IAgency: How the IPad Will Change the Advertising Business (AdAge) Or: Why We Should Emulate the Dying Publishing Industry. Yes please…do.   

Mobile Internet Market to Eclipse Desktop Internet (Brian Solis) Anyone who saw Mary Meeker at Web 2 last year already knew this but it’s worth repeating…

Foursquare Plots Its Business Model (BI) Tick, tick, tick….BOOOOOM.

SlideShare Launches Channels for Businesses and Brands (Mashable)

Traveling to a marketing conference in Scottsdale today, so here’s the roundup from last night’s best headlines:

Facebook Marketing Goes to the Super Bowl (InsideFacebook) Over and over again, we are reminded that this is the year the Superbowl ad becomes an adjunct to an ongoing social media platform. Good.

More Than Half Of Mobile Pageviews Are To Social Networking Sites (BI) This in no way is a surprise but it’s worth reiterating: social drives mobile drives social drives mobile drives location drives mobile drives content consumption drives brands.

3 New Ways to Measure the Social Web (Mashable) These are certainly *not* new (we’ve been measuring these and more for years at FM), but any evolving consensus on measurement is worth pointing out, and reinforcing.

Time Spent on Social Media Surges (MarketingProfs) You want metrics proving the social web is huge? Here’s more.

Top Marketing Innovation Killers (iMedia) Well, don’t kill innovation. Just don’t make silly mistakes. And make sure your partner can deliver. That’s certainly my focus.

Google before you Tweet is the new think before you speak. (TheNextWeb) Funny.

A quick set of headlines today, more coming later, after a morning PTA meeting….

Google Is Wrecking DoubleClick, Says Unhappy Client (GOOG) (Business Insider) I’m a DBCLK client and this does not ring true for me, though of course there are always issues with any major business relationship.

Forget Common Sense: Social Media Communicators Must Have Empathy (Shannon Paul) I feel this one.

The Bestest 2009 Industry vet Marc Ruxin always nails it in his annual round up of the best films and music.

Google’s tablet UI concept pictures (Neowin) Oh Lord, it’s a tablet war.

CBS Sells Out Super Bowl Commercials (LA Times) Well that’s not surprising – it’s rare these days to find a place where you can launch a real platform program.

Happy Monday, folks. Today is all about poker. Over the weekend, the buzz was hearsay about Steve Jobs’ distaste for Google and its ‘don’t be evil’ mantra, as well as for Adobe and its Flash technology (this is all second hand reporting from Wired and other sources, repeating what Jobs reputedly said at a Friday town hall for Apple employees. The story became instantly reported “news” all over the blogosphere.)

Whether or not the sources got their quotes right, what’s really interesting is the Texas Hold’em playing out across the computing, media, and Internet industries. Apple, Google, Adobe, and others (including Microsoft) are playing their hands as each market card is revealed. New standards are tested (HTML5), old standards are questioned (Flash), new devices are introduced (Droid, iPad), and old alliances are shattered (Google, Apple – it was less than a year ago that Schmidt was on Jobs’ board, recall?).

I love it. Our industry has never been more fascinating.   

Meanwhile, other interesting headlines:

IPad Can’t Play Flash Video, but It May Not Matter (NYT) See above and my prior Signals from last week…

Google news Jeff Jarvis talks with Eric Schmidt at Davos and reports his findings, including that Google is toying with making AdSense splits “transparent.”

Who is the MVP of the Marketing Bowl: Social Media or Super Bowl Ads? (Forrester) A research note that details how social marketing is finding its footing in large platform plays – IE, don’t spend that money on a SuperBowl ad if you’re not going to amplify it through social media, or, honestly, vice versa: the SuperBowl ad should be a platform for the social media program, not the other way around.

Tesla Files For $100 Million IPO (BI) IPOs filings are starting to appear left and right, but this one caught my attention because it’s Elon Musk (of various Web startup fame) and it’s electric cars/motors.

The Birth of the Virtual Assistant Siri’s CEO quotes a guy name Battelle to show how his new product fulfills the future of search. Clearly the guy’s been drinking over the weekend.

Microsoft to Test Ad Exchange Business (AllThingsD)

The news today was still iPad driven, for the most part, with the question of whether Flash will be supported at its core. So far, the answer is no, and Adobe semi-officially chastised Apple in this post: Apple’s iPad — a broken link?. However, a site called 9to5Mac studied the iPad introduction video, and found that Flash must be working on the device, because it’s used on the nyt.com, which was featured in the demo: The iPad has Adobe’s Flash on Apple’s video. This of course is important to marketers, as Flash is pretty much an industry standard for rich advertising. Is Apple really planning a total end around, as IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg warns in this post?

I’m not so sure. I’d wager Apple and Adobe are deep in negotiations right now, and I’d also wager part of it has to do with Flash’s execution in the Mac and associated operating systems. Why? Well, it’s not a secret that Flash is resource intensive and reportedly buggy on the Mac (at least, that’s what developers are saying). Perhaps Jobs is using the iPad as leverage to get Adobe to focus on his platform. Or, perhaps he really is spurning the company’s technology. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, a Google exec (Hal Varian) damns the iPad with faint praise, reminding us all that Google and Apple are circling each other in the mobile device market like boxers calculating their first flurry of punches. And O’Reilly Radar has what I think is the best take on the iPad I’ve read so far: The iPad is the iPrius: Your Computer Consumerized.

Other interesting links today:

“Mommy, Where Does Content Come From?” 11 Easy Ways to Create Great Stuff (Open Forum) Content is critical to marketing in social media, without a doubt.

Social Media Marketing: How Pepsi Got It Right (Mashable) I love case studies. You’ll be seeing a lot more of them at the CM Summit in NY this June.

U.S. Advertising to Rise 3.5% in 2010, Barclays Says (Bloomberg) After a year like 2009, who doesn’t like a headline like that? Online, of course, will grow far faster.

Facebook Develops Conversion Tracking Tool: What’s A Fan Worth? (MediaPost)

Consumers Demand Engagement (eMarketer)