Google Shifting From Content To People
Google has made some small announcements recently that I could be an indication of a significant long term shift in how they execute their strategy. Google’s stated mission “to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful” has been humming along for the last decade or so by organizing and rating content, hence the Page Rank. In other words the page was their basic unit of currency.
Google recently announced that it will begin ranking and tracking individual content creators and has now launched a tool for online reputation management for individuals.
Google has been famous for its missteps in the social space and I wonder if that wasn’t because as an institution it valued content more than people. These small changes could signal a cultural change at Google which could be significant especially for many of the measurement companies in the social media space.
It will be very interesting to see if Google will enable people to monitize their equity or value in a similar fashion that it has enabled people to monitize their content.
Traackr has recently posted about the big moves by SalesForce and Google in this space which also provides a little extra colour in this emerging space, namely the acquisition of Radian6 by SalesForce and PostRank by google.
