7 lessons from a Google marketer

I recently received a review copy of Douglas Edwards’ new book, I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59.  It’s a quite fascinating, humble account of one marketer’s adventure joining the company in the early days in 1999 and growing along with the company till 2005, when it had upwards of 20,000 employees.  Edwards was responsible for consumer marketing and brand management at a company where many of the truisms of his profession were turned on its head.

For example, Edwards tells the story of arguing adamantly and repeatedly against Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s desire to play with the Google logo with turkey for Thanksgiving, hearts at Valentine’s Day and aliens making off with the letters for fun.  Appalled, Edwards told Brin that would be bad branding.  “It wasn’t just my opinion, but the consensus of marketers worldwide,” he noted.  But Edwards lost the argument - and as it turned out, the users loved the Google “doodles.”  Edwards says:

“It was so blindingly obvious (to me) that I was right, yet I was so clearly wrong.  Google did that to you—made you challenge all your assumptions and experience-based beliefs until you began to wonder if up was really up, or if it might not actually be a different kind of down.”

So what are Google’s rules?  Edwards helped write them up and they are worth sharing, because they are good advice for all of us.  The complete list is here, but my favorites are:

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow. (Substitute your audience for the word “user” and this holds very true for all of us.)
2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well.
3. Fast is better than slow.  (The credo refers to products that work fast, but the book also talks a lot about the head engineer’s policy of getting a product to 80% completion and pushing it out to users for testing and feedback rather than waiting for perfection.  He would say “good enough is good enough.”)

Edwards also shares co-founder Larry Page’s rules of order.  The above rules are good marketing advice.  These four are great rules to work by:

1. Don’t delegate: Do everything you can yourself to make things go faster.
2. Don’t get in the way if you’re not adding value.  Let the people actually doing the work talk to each other while you go do something else.  Don’t be a bureaucrat.
3. Ideas are more important than age - junior people deserve respect and cooperation.
4. The worst thing you can do is to stop someone from doing something by saying “No. Period.” If you say no, you have to help them find a better way to get it done.

I love the last rule.  As Edwards notes, he was good at saying no when he joined Google.  There, he learned to say yes, solve problems and find better ways.  Not a bad way to work - or to live.

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