| Marketing through Google Base |
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Written by Shaun Johnston October 30, 2006 Marketing through GoogleBaseHow can you get more attention for something than you're already getting from the search engines? I wrote recently about how individual tourist lodgings are appearing further and further down in results of searches by town names, forced down by a growing list of directories. So I face this question in my own marketing of guest lodgings online.Obviously, Web2 suggests ways. But how about GoogleBase? It feels like a yawning pit, I throw information in and it vanishes. But it's intriguing, because it's the exact opposite of a directory, with fixed categories. You can make up custom categories -- attributes -- for your items, to fit them better. Problem is, probably no one will ever type in your custom attributes, so you're better off sticking to the ones Google provides. But they're very limited for what I want to promote: towns and lodgings in getaway regions, maybe by county. Their To and From attributes appear to be along the lines of only city / state. You can put region / state, but if that's not how the attribute is supposed to be used, people won't enter it that way. So in effect your back to fixed categories again. But, as I said, I find the idea intriguing. Google suggests you make up a spreadsheet of all your items and bulk upload them. You give each item an ID. Then you can keep changing your spreadsheet and re-uploading. Now you're building your own database in Google that you control and that you can keep current. The missing side is how you get people to query your database. Google says it will pop up your data when people put in appropriate queries. Fine. But the way people are searching now isn't throwing up my items. Is there some way to draw attention to that database? This opens up some intriguing possibilities. Suppose I create a custom attribute for all my items, which I call c:nycgetaways:text:. Then I advertise this in my marketplace, maybe through cryptic classified ads. "Find your 'nycgetaways' in Google." Now I'm creating a new term people will think to search by. And when they do, they get mainly my items. "nycgetaways stockbridge,MA" -- up come links to my clients, and just my clients, in Stockbridge. Once I create that stream of attention it will then occur to other people to put their items in GoogleBase and mark them with my attribute, so as to tap into the stream of attention I've created. By doing so, of course, they broaden that stream. Maybe I even encourage other people to use my attribute. In this way, markets can create their own streams of attention within Google. Once they do, Google is likely to add these attributes to their official list of attributes. Once that happens, these attributes become part of common knowledge, and everyone knows to search by that term, everywhere online. Collaborative creation of attributes within Google allows us to re-carve up the stream of online attention along new joints, joints of our choice. A business's spreadsheet of database of GoogleBase items that it keeps updating and uploading will become one of its key intellectual assets. Google becomes a vast marketplace that we shape the way we want, along the lines of human attention as it changes. See possibilities for marketing here? Shaun Johnston <Moderator Comment> Interesting, Shaun. I've been mulling this over as well recently. It seems ideal for marketing typically offline content for one, such as paper books, protected ebooks, and research papers. One idea for publishers: provide reviews of your books, ebooks, research papers, etc. Make these reviews high-quality and contextual summaries - not just 101 reviews - then upload them to Google Base. Use highly relevant, rich attributes. Next, tie in AdWords to the content to drive interested searchers to your Base docs and then (hopefully) to your purchasing pages. AdWords is partially integrated w/ Base. This is just one example off the top of my head. Should be interesting to see how this develops - the service is still in Beta. Maybe something for your marketing, Shaun, would be local-specific guides / reviews / maps for tourists that are promoted through the lodgings. These could be offered in inexpensive printbound editions or as PDFs on their sites, then marketed through Base in summary form. Or consider offering some cool freebies, too. Or, partner with existing resource authors and build out a series of reviews / free versions for Base promotions. Adam Comments (1)
Jeff
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| I just saw Google base show up in my Google tools and they tout it as a business tool for listing your business and that it will... (may) show in in live google searches... I'd be interested in knowing a good way to leverage this as a tool back to my website.. As always more clients to my website can't be a bad thing.. |
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