Google Austin: A first-person, customer update
Google. They are the digital version of General Electric, but for the 21st century. Both are classic, American-headquartered, global conglomerates, with diverse portfolios. But, whereas GE’s goods and services have ranged from light bulbs to jet engines to TV networks, Google’s portfolio ranges from mobile operating systems to lunar challenges to small business services (oh, and they sell ads, too).
But, it is through this last offering – small business services, under the brand of Google Places – that I most recently came into contact with Google Austin. You see, Google publicly chose Austin about six months ago as the second location to introduce its Google Places offering.
This was after Google had introduced a downtown Austin location to great fanfare in January 2008 and then closed the office a year later in January of 2009, in response to the economic downturn, according to public reports.
The whispers, however, were that Google never really left Austin entirely, especially given the Austin roots of engineers from Postini, the email security company that Google acquired in 2007. Regardless of the actual path between 2009 and officially returning to Austin earlier this year, there is no disputing the company’s presence – the logo on the side of the building in North Austin is a dead giveaway!
More importantly and according to my recent contact with Google’s Austin team, the company has a renewed commitment to the region. This commitment was highlighted by the significant investment of time, people, and money to produce two days of workshops in downtown Austin.
The workshops were promoted under the tagline “Texas: Get Your Business Online,” supported with a dedicated website: TexasGetOnline.com. The site is still active as of this writing.
The workshops, materials, and presenting partners were all very clearly targeted towards small businesses, which is a the sweet spot for Google Places customers.
Now, in addition to being a co-founder and executive with a venture-backed mobile company, Appconomy, I’m also an investor and advisor to several small businesses and non-profit organizations. And, I’m about as much of a Google customer as the average person can be: I click on Google ads, I advertise with Google, I use Google tools and applications, I use a Google Android-powered tablet, I’m a registered user of Google’s latest social software darling, Google+ (or G+, for short), etc., etc.
So, I was quite curious to attend at least part of the Google-led program and hear the message to local merchants – especially, the mobile message. Here’s what I observed.
1.Building a feet-on-the-street, “Retail” presence is challenging but Google is trying hard
As I walked into the big event center on the grounds of a well-known Austin club, La Zona Rosa, I was checked-in by a young lady named Emily. [NOTE: See photo]
Emily quickly found my registration and asked me a couple of questions, most likely I presume to qualify me and/or rank me in the Google CRM system. (I was registered on behalf of a small non-profit organization that I co-founded, rather than my venture-backed firm.)
The phrasing of the questions themselves that Emily asked me threw me off a little. Paraphrasing from memory, the first was “does your small business interact with customers through a virtual or physical location?” I was thrown off because I was trying to figure out if they wanted to know if I had a traditional brick-and-mortar “storefront” where people called “customer” come and go, versus offices where our people work (we don’t have the former, but we do have the latter).
The next question was “do you travel to interact with your customers?” This one also threw me off, because I think of travel as getting on an airplane or at least hiking a couple of hours up to Dallas or over to Houston by car. But what she really wanted to know was if we went from place-to-place to see or meet customers, i.e. commute around town, for which the answer is yes.
This was my first hint that understanding the lingo of a small business customer, standing right in front of you, might be a little challenging for a company that normally earns billions through a virtual staff of thousands. Anyhow, Emily and I got through the questions, after which she armed me with a bag of goodies (filled with nice printed Google handouts, mainly) and pointed me to the refreshments table and workshop rooms.
Another clue that working with a small business customer might be somewhat unfamiliar territory was that, even with a conference center seemingly filled with people from Google and its partners, no one walked up to me as I wandered around and asked, “May I help you?” or, “Is there something I can help you find?” Instead, little clumps of Google t-shirted people were standing visiting with each other and variously buried in their phones texting, checking messages, or playing QRANK – who knows?
However, when I sidled up to a group and asked for help, everyone immediately dropped what they were doing and were unfailingly helpful, listening well and in a couple of cases, giving me their business cards to follow-up with them – nice touch!
2.Google is very focused on helping local businesses get results
I got to the workshop just as a Googler named Fred, who referred to himself as a Google Adwords evangelist, began energetically launching into the first hour of a two-hour workshop on SEO and Adwords. Although people continued arriving and some left at various points during Fred’s talk, I’d say the audience size was about 120 people, give or take. [NOTE: See photo of Fred]
The first thing Fred wanted the audience to know was Google’s contribution to the Texas economy (i.e. economic impact). It’s $3.6 billion in Texas ($64 billion annually, nationwide). Then came a first plug of the mobile story: the power of Android. Fred cited the data indicating that there are more than 500,000 Android-powered phones activated every day.
That figure was important to know, because of the next slide Fred covered: a diagramming of the typical Google search results page. While we are all universally familiar with it, in Google lingo there are four main sections:
1. The keyword entry (or query) – where you type in what you are trying to find
2. The organic results – the left-side two-thirds of the display
3. Ads (Google adwords) – which are at the top and right-side one-third of the display
4. Local results – up to 10 businesses that fit on a local map, if the query is determined to be local
Every step of the way, Fred focused on explaining how Google had built its systems, its reporting, and its revenue model on the basis of doing what it can to help business people get results.
It was a convincing presentation, backed by partners at the event like Intuit, whose staff – at no cost – was helping attendees build websites, registering their domain names, and hosting their sites for a year. As they did so, the Intuit web-building mentors took the mobile form factor into account, as they helped participants design their websites, which leads me to my final observation.
3.Mobility is the future and Android is the rocket to get Google there faster than others
Going back to Fred’s draining of the contents of the Google search page, he cited a couple of key stats for local results. First, that 1 in 5 overall Google queries have a local intent, and second (the “kicker”) being that 1 IN 3 QUERIES ON A PHONE have a local intent.
That phenomenal gap – 20% of searches overall, versus 33% of mobile searches – is really the key driver behind the story of Google Places and Google’s other small business outreach efforts.
Because, the bottom line is: the great industry computing mega-trend of our time right now is all about the transition from stationery to mobile computing. And mobile search is all about optimizing local results…followed soon by enabling mobile payments with Android-powered apps at those merchants that are listed and that advertise.
Austin is Google’s second location to introduce Places, the first being Portland, with two other pilot locations in Santa Diego and Madison. If you want to keep abreast of their local-Austin activities, you can follow Google Place’s Austin community manager, Whitney Francis, via her Twitter handle @GoogleATX or you can favorite the Google Places blog.
