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I received a comment on Facebook regarding You Are Not Google’s Customer that I thought was quite insightful, and so I thought I would share it here:

I agree to your point about the customer. But the other side is missing too much for my taste: Google is only attractive to advertisers if it pleases a lot of people – and if they are outraged about their privacy, it will have an effect in their desired direction. Most of the time this will not be the conscious rationale, because people are not self-knowledgeable to this degree. And that is certainly most important: If you get worked up on something, find out what it is really. It is most often not what you first think it is.

My reply:

I did think about Google’s actions pissing off their advertiser’s targets, but opted to not mention it because I was mostly speaking to the people who (to the best of my knowledge) were experiencing rage “second-hand”.

My opinion about target audience attractiveness is that I don’t believe that Google Buzz will turn enough people off to Google for it to make a difference. In fact, it will tend to weed out people who weren’t very good targets for the kinds of advertisers that Google wants to attract.

I would put forward that Google made this calculation prior to releasing Buzz. The reason I believe this is because Google did not immediately retract Buzz when news of trauma victims came out, which was pretty much immediately after it was released.

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2 Comments »

Comment by heiko.cochius

2010-02-20 13:24:04

I was the facebook responder. I am here, finally! I agree completely with your response. You are certainly more knowledgeable than me in this respect, and with your addition I feel that all bases are covered. Thank you for your very insightful response.

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Comment by James Pyrich

2010-03-02 00:28:17

Thanks for your comment! Sorry it took so long to get approved; maybe one day I will figure out what's wrong with the email on this blog. :)

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