Google and Facebook get personal in battle for social networking rewards

It is one month since the launch of Google+, a belated attempt at a social networking tool that invites users to follow friends’ activities in their news feed and share favourite content by marking it “+1″. If this sounds familiar, it shows the extent to which Google is playing catchup with Facebook, which is brewing a public offering next year that could value the firm at $100bn and, critically, has positioned itself as the gateway to the web for many of its 750 million users.

Much of this pressure is down to the abrasive ambition of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Even Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has conceded that Google has been late to the social networking space, with identity and personalisation now critical to the social experience for consumers, and the lucrative commercial opportunities that advertisers expect. But with Google’s proven commercial success nudging its market value towards $200bn, and data vaults that hold the browsing histories of most of the online population, is Google really on a downward trajectory, and is the era of search really ending?

Ben Gomes has worked on every aspect of Google’s core search product and is leading exploration into the social navigation of search. Despite Google’s forays into everything from video communities to mobile operating systems, he insists that at its heart Google is still a search company. It was search, he said, that fuelled the explosion of web content and, unsurprisingly, Gomes doesn’t see social data as a replacement for search but as a layer that accesses the information in a different way.

“We saw a symbiotic evolution of the web and search because people could find what they wanted more easily,” said Gomes, who joined Google in 1999. “We see social as a layer in search that provides you with more relevant information in certain situations, so if you were looking at product reviews, those of your friends would be marked in the results. But the most important thing in search is still the search term, and how your computer understands that.”

Though Google+ is an intelligent attempt at a social networking tool, it seems a typical Google product in that it is brilliantly, heavily engineered but lacks the human focus required for a social network – the fuel that has propelled Facebook to 750 million users.

With data from so many consumers informing so many Google products, why isn’t there more personalisation? “In most cases ‘personalisation’ just means giving you what you wanted in the first place,” said Gomes. “If two friends search ‘malt’ but one likes beer and one whisky, they will see different results. And if that kind of personalisation didn’t work, you’d just think search was broken.”

The issue of personalised search results based on our browsing history has become contentious. With news, for example, how can users be presented with an objective view of a story from multiple sources if Google serves up sites or perspectives that the user is known to like? “Diversity of results is something deeply baked into the algorithm tools we use, so that we hopefully give a broad perspective,” said Gomes. “But if you are interested in a topic you’d tend to do a very specific query anyway, and our first goal is to give you the information you want.”

Facebook rigidly maintains that social context is historically and socially relevant. “Anthropologically, we have been informed and influenced throughout time by the people around us, and that’s equally true on Facebook as it is offline,” said Facebook’s advertising chief, David Fischer. “Now we look at the networks people communicate in …

“There are important opportunities for marketers in getting their messages out through those friends and family connections. The social graph contains not just people, but brands, universities [and] institutions that people chose to connect to.”

This network of social, professional and commercial relationships may have always existed, but it is their accessibility as expressed online that is unprecedented. One of Facebook’s biggest successes – and a strategy Google has strictly enforced on Google+ – has been encouraging real names on to the site, making its network and data far more valuable. This is creating a living record, said Fischer, and building it in a meaningful way. “There’s no decision that a person takes in their lives that is not a better decision when it is informed by the people around them that they trust.”

Several hundred research scientists at Google are studying how web users access, interact with and share information. How will Google refine its mission of organising the world’s information? “We often see the future already exists in the present in some form, so the things just getting interesting now will be very important,” said Gomes.

He describes a relationship where users expect Google to synthesise answers from different sources to provide an expert response and expects the most noticeable changes to be made to the mobile homepage, which can take advantage of multiple sensors such as location to provide “richer interaction models”. That might include speech recognition – already vastly improved from even two years ago – and localised artificial intelligence that improves suggestions as it learns about the user.

Gomes claimed that instant access to information through Google has made conversations smarter, citing the time he went to see Kafka’s Metamorphosis and read up about the production. “My experience of the play was richer and I took away more because the combination of me plus the internet made me seem like someone who, in the past, would have been regarded as an expert. I became the kind of person I would previously have looked up to.”

Yet though Google and Facebook are both keen to burnish their scientific credentials, ultimately the real battle is over cold, hard cash. Google made 97% of its revenues, or $32.3bn, in the past 12 months from advertising. eMarketer, meanwhile estimates that Facebook’s largely ad-generated revenues will grow from $0.74bn in 2009 to $5.74bn in 2012 – yet the site has hardly begun rolling out truly personalised, targeted advertising. If there is any of Google’s lunch to be eaten, it is here.

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Military spouses get hip clip tips from ‘Extreme Couponing’ show

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YOKOTA AIR BASE, Japan — Armed with two binders bulging with neatly clipped coupons every time she enters the commissary, Air Force wife Aprille Caesar shops for groceries like she’s on a mission.

The objective: Save as much as possible.

Caesar has honed a military-like discipline for using coupons since tuning in to the reality TV show “Extreme Couponing,” which debuted this spring on the TLC network. It features shoppers maximizing savings by using several coupons for items already on sale, then buying in bulk and walking away with hundreds of products for pennies on the dollar.

“If I don’t have a coupon for something now, I usually don’t buy it unless it’s something I really need,” said Caesar, 32, who over the past few months has cut her biweekly grocery bill by 30 percent, to about $100. She usually pays full price only for meat, vegetables and dairy products, for which coupons are typically scarce.

The stay-at-home mother of two had clipped coupons regularly in the past but began “taking it seriously” after seeing the show. That meant buying a coupon binder (a necessity to most avid “couponers”) and creating a system based on her family’s needs. She now pre-shops for upcoming sales to maximize coupon savings and sacrifices brand loyalty to make it work.

She claimed her greatest victory yet in July when she took home $337 worth of groceries from the Yokota commissary for about $25.

“I did it,” Caesar exclaimed as she walked out of the store beaming. “It’s not like the crazy savings you see on ‘Extreme Couponing,’ but I’m proud of myself.”

Her husband, an Air Force technical sergeant, was proud, too. He briefly stopped in during that checkout to congratulate his wife on her accomplishment.

Although the Defense Commissary Agency hasn’t seen a spike in coupon redemption since the show began airing in March, according to DECA spokeswoman Nancy O’Nell, blogs and social networking sites devoted to military spouses have been buzzing with traffic related to “Extreme Couponing.”

Shoppers like Caesar praise the show for spurring their newfound sense of savings during tough economic times, but others have criticized it for encouraging unnecessary and obnoxious practices — such as buying out a store’s entire stock of a particular item — and giving “couponers” a reputation for hoarding.

On a new Facebook group set up for military wives titled “Not so Extreme Couponing,” one woman bemoaned the bad attitude she received from a commissary cashier.

“The cashier tried to tell me that I couldn’t have that many coupons and then asked me ‘I mean, do you even need all of this stuff?’ Seriously!?” she wrote.

“That is what the show Extreme Couponing has done,” replied one commenter.

Caesar said the backlash is understandable, considering similar experiences she’s had with cashiers in the past few months.

“But they all know me now,” she chuckled. “I’m the coupon lady.”

Caesar said she is diligent, not fanatic. She does it to put extra money in the pocket of her one-income family.

However, she noted, there is such as thing as “coupon etiquette.”

“Most people who coupon know you shouldn’t clear shelves. That’s the biggest thing I make sure not to do,” said Caesar, who instead will pre-order items she anticipates buying in bulk.

U.S. retailers and supermarket chains have recently been adopting new coupon policies and other rules in response to the TLC show and the subsequent onslaught of shoppers it apparently has inspired.

DECA, the Army and Air Force Exchange Service and the Navy Exchange Service have policies that already prohibit many of the practices featured on “Extreme Couponing.”

DECA, for example, does not allow customers to use more than one coupon per item but still ranks among the top 10 coupon-redeeming retailers in the U.S. alongside Walmart and Target, according to NCH Marketing Services Inc.

However, DECA permits shoppers to profit when a coupon is worth more than the item is listed for in the store. So, if you have a $5 off coupon for antacid and the antacid costs only $3.50, you get the item for free plus the $1.50 difference.

“That’s the goal right there,” Caesar said. “Why would you pay for something when you can get paid instead?”

And those stationed abroad, like Caesar, get the added bonus of being able to use coupons up to six months after they expire. The policy was created to help make up for the limited amount of U.S. coupons overseas. Many bases distribute stockpiles of expired coupons sent from stateside volunteers and coupon enthusiasts and most commissaries have a “coupon corner.”

But while DECA, AAFES and NEX have not followed suit with civilian retailers’ backlash to the show, officials said they continue to monitor trends and reserve the right to adjust their policies in the future.

Stay tuned.

reedc@pstripes.osd.mil

COUPON TIPS

Aprille Caesar, a wife and mother of two, has reduced her grocery bills by 30 percent since she began cutting coupons a few months ago. Here are a few of her best tips:

• Stay organized with a coupon binder.
• Break your family from brand loyalty.
• Redeem coupons on sale items to maximize on overages.
• Stock up on oft-used items to reduce shopping trips.
• Don’t clear the shelves. Pre-order items you want to buy in bulk ahead of time.
• Read the fine print on the coupon and know your store’s coupon policy.
• Stand your ground with a cashier when you know your coupon should be accepted.
• Connect with other couponers and retailers online for tips on how to save and where and when to find the latest deals.

 

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