Google’s Answer to Pinterest?

It’s me talking about Google again

I know I sound like a one trick pony when I write anything containing the name Google, but in my defense, they are a pretty amazing company. They are spread across so many things that it’s hard not to come into contact with them – constantly. So, to keep all of those that love to ‘chase the new’ happy, this post will touch on another service that is all the rage – Pinterest. Anyone that knows me knows I am not a fan of Pinterest due to the potential intellectual property issues that come with it. What do you expect? If you build a pin board and snip a piece of this article out and put it in there without properly attributing me, you have effectively done nothing less than stolen from me. If my words were an MP3 or a photograph it would be more obvious.

When you think about it though, what’s the biggest benefit of Pinterest? Isn’t it a place where you can go and see a nice visual display of useful information? I think so.  People have been caught up in the beauty of it all but I think the real usefulness is the utility. Something that seems great for all of your best chicken recipes can also be a great place to find all of my picks for your best mobile phones.  So I will concede that there is a utility to Pinterest along with some serious SEO value – if their systems can keep the links straight AND they can keep domains from blocking them. Yeah, that’s a problem.

What do you love?

So in the interest of clean easy utility, let’s take a look at Google’s version, ‘What do you love?’ It’s a simple question. Coincidently enough, the home page looks A LOT like Google.com. It’s amazingly clean and simple. There are NO intellectual property liabilities here since everything that’s served up are Google services that have simply been populated with your interest and returned results based on that. Now, the downside to this is clearly that it’s AGATH (All Google All The Time) but consider this. How would you normally find something? You’d GOOGLE it!

Google is not a person

Yeah, yeah, I know. You can’t replace human beings for finding cool and useful things. Google is just an algorithm that returns results based on what you ask it. NO! Search is changing and that stupid algorithm (at least in it’s current state) is going to be less important very soon. As people +1 things, they will get more weight based on what YOUR friends think is cool and useful. Social search will change the way we find things and consume content.  And I’m sure WDYL will be making use of that; they’d be crazy not to.

And as for humans finding things and populating them in Pinterest; there’s a flaw with that as well – how do they know what you like? One man’s treasure is another man’s trash. I rarely agree with the masses and I think on any given subject most anyone can. If my friends were exclusively pinning things for my consumption then that would be better but that will limit my world. With social search, all that opens up and you can have two and three degrees of separation with their respective weights.

What does this mean to your business?

This is all in its infancy so there is never going to be a better time to do this than now – before everyone else gets in on it. For what it’s worth, I did a search on my name today on both services and didn’t get any results on Pinterest but did get plenty on WDYL. Given, much of it wasn’t me for whatever reason but at least I got something I could use and refine from there. WDYL will get better and better. My prediction is that some will use it instead of Google.com. How can you take advantage of this? Well, for starters you can +1 every page on the web involving positive content about your business and yourself. Mentioned in the local paper? +1 it. Did an interview for another blog and the video is on YouTube? +1 it.  And don’t stop there. Encourage your customers and clients to +1 your website and anything they find about you. Maybe offer some sort of incentive if they +1 it and tag you in the comment when they do. When they do this, they are giving you access to their sphere of influence. They are also going to help to populate that search for your business up on WDYL.  Pretty powerful stuff.

-PH