Why Google Beats Everyone at Public Relations posted by Craig Oda at Tuesday, November 04, 2008

The future of PR is being created today, on sunny sidewalks and corporate cafes in Mountain View. The Google campus is germinating the future of information access and the future of public relations. There is no PR super-genius at Google inventing a new type of PR. The innovations in public information management comes from the Google campus itself, the world's ultimate PR water cooler.

Type the word "browser" into Google or MSN search. Chrome pops up in the top three results, ahead of Apple Safari, Internet Explorer, and Flock. Google News results for "browser," show Chrome in the top two rankings due to a Beta 3 announcement -- well ahead of Firefox. Since when is a Beta 3 considered news? Is this 1994 and I'm reading about Netscape? On a YouTube search for "web browser" Chrome is the top search result and the Android (Google phone) browser is the second result. How is this level of visibility possible for a beta, feature-incomplete version of a browser that doesn't work with Mac OS X or Linux?

Google PR hits on all media channels in parallel - blogs, video, forums and traditional media outreach. Having worked with Google on PR for their main developer conference, my impression is that they don't have a large PR army of staff or consultants. They are efficient. Google doesn't need to pay for an army of marketing professionals because their internal staff and the online community help them get the message out.

To understand the distributed nature of Google's PR efforts, look at the Google Chrome launch.

Messaging
Google locked down three message points and pushed them out through all channels. The browser brings web applications closer to desktop applications by improving speed, stability, and security.

Bloggers Create Three Media Hype Waves

On Labor Day at 10pm, Sundar Pichai, the VP of product management and Linus Upson, engineering director, launched Google Chrome on Blogger on the Official Google Blog. This was ahead of the official Google press conference and press release. By Tuesday, the next working day for press, the web was already buzzing with Google Chrome news. There were already thousands of blog posts, a Wikipedia entry with hundred edits, and active chatter on Twitter before most professional reporters could get the official information. This resulted in a triple wave of coverage, first by the online community based on the blog and rumors, second by the mainstream press, then third by the online community again once they gained access to the official information and product.  By the end of the day there were 50,000 blog posts and 6,000 news stories on Google Chrome.  Today, 2 months later, there are 450,000 blog posts.

The first media wave was heighten

ed by Google's clever use of Scott McCloud, a well-known professional comic artist, to produce a Comic Book on Google Chrome. The comic book was physically mailed to reporters and bloggers, arriving in Europe one day ahead of the launch. Although Google claims that this was in error, the result was that starting in Europe, bloggers scanned the comic book and distributed it online ahead of the official launch.

YouTube Triple Play

Google released three types of YouTube videos at the launch of Chrome: 1) Technical HowTo videos that were an average of 20 seconds long; 2) technical vision human story , a 4:50 minute video featuring their development team (currently at 650,000 views); 3) the Google Chrome press conference.

Multitude of Media Channels

• Google Chrome Media Center - an online press site with links to the official press release, B-roll (broadcast) and YouTube videos, logos, and screenshots.
• Google Chrome Help Documentation - official help documentation from Google with links to video embedded in the documentation.
• Chrome Help Forum - online community-based help.
• Chromium - open source site for the project behind Google Chrome.
• Online community development with Blog and Google Groups discussion areas for open source developers.

Google organizes key message points and uses free online services to amplify their messages. Everyone can freely use Google Groups, Blogger, YouTube, and search analysis tools like Google Analytics, and Google Webmaster Tools. The secrets of visibility hide in the open. Now, it's up to the rest of us to open our eyes.