Inbound Marketing

Last week Google surprised us all with the launch of BUZZ. I went out to dinner with a friend and when I returned, there it was, embedded in my Gmail. One has to give some props to Google for keeping it under wraps during development. Before Apple launched its iPad the rumor mill was working overtime and Apple was denying it daily. With BUZZ, even those who make it their business to know things before they happen were taken by surprise. Give us all a new toy to play with, give us no instructions on how to play with it, and the imaginations run wild. It’s been a crazy week. People are trying to figure out who to connect with, what to share, how to handle information over-load and content being duplicated in many different streams.

The other side of the coin is Google got caught by surprise too. Unlike everything else they have launched, they didn’t do the normal beta testing but just did internal testing. The backlash was immediate. Google says that they wanted to give users a robust experience right out of the box, and therefore had Buzz connect with all those you email frequently. Anyone could access the list of who you follow and who follows you. This caused a huge red flag to go up as many worried about privacy issues.

The BBC reported on the concerns of Evgeny Morozov, a Belarus-born researcher and blogger who looks at the political implications of the internet. ”If I were working for the Iranian or the Chinese government, I would immediately dispatch my internet geek squads to check on Google Buzz accounts for political activists and see if they have any connections that were previously unknown to the government,” he wrote

My first concern was that this was a opt-out service instead of an opt-in one. Of course we know why Google did this. It was great that they could say “24 hours later and we have XX million users.” I’ve never seen a opt-out system work out well for anyone. And it isn’t Google’s normal practice, usually they put things in the Labs and then let you chose to activate them or not. With BUZZ, there was a tiny little link at the bottom of your Gmail page letting you disconnect from it. This was pretty hard to find.

All that being said, Google is a company that has built its reputation on listening to its users. So it has set up a war room to look at what people are saying and deal with the issues. The privacy issues were dealt with within a day. You now have the option to share, or not share, your followers (If in BUZZ, click on the link to your followers and at the bottom of the pop-up you will find a check box to share or not share your followers). You have the option to share, or not share your other applications such as Google Reader (Up near your picture you will see a link for “connected sites” and here you can chose what to share.) I predict you will see many changes in BUZZ over the next few weeks as Google listens and responds to what the users are saying.

The biggest question that remains, what to do with this Google BUZZ. Is it a Twitter or Facebook killer as some suggest? Is it something in addition to all the other social media we are using? Is it another place to post our content, or is it about developing relationships and having meaningful conversations? As of now, no one can answer that questions, and that’s about as exciting as it gets. If you are an early adapter, you will just love being involved in something that is developing fast and changing daily. If you aren’t, then holding back and waiting till it sorts itself out is a good idea because you just might get dizzy watching the changes that happen moment by moment.

BUZZ is definitely something else, so you can be sure I’ll be talking more about it in future posts.

If you need more help:

Thanks to Tom Snell for sharing this resource with us – http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2010/02/13/complete-guide-google-buzz/

And you can also find information at- http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2010/02/google-buzz-tips.html