Google's Social Meltdown

Today’s post is courtesy of my associate Mike Keesling… who is MarCom Broadband’s search engine optimization expert, and a creative guru out of TV production and advertising. We don’t always agree on issues related to marketing, but I will admit that he’s right more than not.

Said Keesling, “It was only a matter of time before Google came to their senses and re-evaluated using social media as one of their weighted algorithms. To me the whole proposition of giving any weight to social media was what we call in the trade, an ass idea. It's the same thing as comparing reality TV to something worth watching (and if you're one of the morons who sees nothing wrong with wasting hours on irrelevant people doing ludicrous things then please stop reading, right now! This article is not for you.) Let's face it, reality TV is impossible to achieve once you let people know there's a camera on them.”

I don’t agree, for instance with Mike’s next comment basically because I am seeing the content we build and place in article submission sites and blogs, linking back to our client websites, work. “Social Media has always been a lowest common denominator content form, lots of volume, all noise...in other words a bunch of crap.”

He continues, “Why on earth (no, not Google earth which is cool) Google ever entertained the idea that a site's SEO should be influenced by social media content is beyond me...it reeked too much of the blind leading the seeing eye dog. To me, the purpose of a search engine is to help you find the information you seek, the answers to questions you ask; and how and why Google figured that MySpace Content, amateur videos and the like could be of help in my searches is perplexing to me. To their credit, this misguided experiment only lasted about three months before Google silently gave up the concept.”

And he wraps it up with this summary… “Apparently, Google fell victim to the Web 2.0 hype. Newer does not mean better, and much of Web 2.0 is the same-old, same-old with a new name or acronym to describe an existing practice or concept. I find no fault with Google; in fact I commend them for being one of those rare corporations in the top spot that is not willing to rest on their laurels, and is always trying to raise the bar. When you do that, invariably you will have some ill-advised choices, I just think Google could have spotted this one as a lemon before they ever 'went to press' with it. As it came down in the real world, it served solely to justify more idiots putting up more crap.”