Currently in Munich SMX Munich is taking place. Johanna Langer is there for us and is reporting the talks. In this post she describes Frederick Vallaeys’ view on the culture in the Silicon Valley, Google and more.
The 3 Habits of Highly Effective Online Marketers – Frederick Vallaeys at SMX Munich
Frederick (“Fred”) Vallaeys was one of the first 500 employees at Google where he helped grow the AdWords search marketing system and served as Google’s AdWords Evangelist, teaching advertisers about which Google products are best to support their marketing goals. He was a key player on several of the teams that made AdWords into the leading platform for search marketing, including the team that started the AdWords Editor, the one that acquired Urchin (now Google Analytics) and one that started conversion tracking. He has contributed his technical expertise to several AdWords books including bestsellers like “AdWords for Dummies,” “Advanced Google AdWords”, and “Quality Score in High Definition”. Today after 10 years at google he is the founder and Chief Marketing Technologist of Top Tier Marketing, an online marketing agency specializing in AdWords strategy and management. He is also the Cofounder of Optmyzr, an AdWords tool company that makes a Historical Quality Score Tracker, One-Click AdWords Optimizations and other tools to make account management more efficient.
We are lucky to be in this industry because even as it is a competitive industry its still so big and so much business to there for everyone.
The culture in Silicon Valley
Frederick starts talking about the culture in the Silicon Valley.
The most important thing to be successful in the valley is you must start in a garage. Just like Sergey and Larry. Of course this is more or less a joke but a lot of the culture in google comes from these humble beginnings. Like the interesting rule that no employee can be further away from a snack station than 50m.
[Tweet “To be successful in the valley is you must start in a garage”]
Work and personal life mixed more and more. One intern even lived under his desk at one point. You have to have a great culture for that and devotion for the company.
When google went public Larry Page made sure that the culture did not change because they are not a conventional company and that is the culture they want to have. Android was bought by google and worked really well because the cultures matched and the people got along really well.
Empowerment
Another thing this culture promotes is empowerment to make own decisions and to innovate everyday because otherwise somebody else will beat you just like the dinosaurs. Once strong but now extinct.
When the tsunami disaster happened in Japan it was friday afternoon and a group of google employes did not wait for the execs to give them approval to change the google homepage to help japan on monday but did it without approval on friday evening and the execs loved it. Thats what empowered to make decisions is about.
What you can learn from Google
The Google mission statement is “Organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful”. It´s now about indexing the whole world around you and bringing it to every one everywhere. Even through maps and self-driving cars so users have more time to click more ads.
3 things marketers can learn from google:
- Data drives all decisions
- Build people – Threat your people right
- Push past constrains
Data drives all decisions
Google is setting the rules of the internet but in reality google uses data and aggregation the “wisdom of the crowd” to change it for the better. They do 6000 experiments a year with 600 experiments launched. So there are 20 experiments every day and every version we see is different.
Usefull Data can be everywhere. 411 the google phone help was used for voice recognition. Big Data means something different to everybody but if you have a lot of data then you have to make smart decisions with this data thats data applied to marketing.
If we do right for the user, Google will catch on and reward this.
[Tweet “If we do right for the user, Google will catch on and reward this.”]
Build people – Threat your people right
Hiring is at the heart of all we do! HR will know when the employee quit before he does. Google hires people, who can do the job today and can grow and finding people fit into the culture
Google even tired to use data on the employees and find out if the grades would correlate to how well some one does at google but it turns out there is no correlation.
Google pushes their employes to be more creative and try something new. For that there is the 20% free time from which gmail, news and even adsense originated.
To structure the 20% time there is the 70 20 10 rule which makes you put 70% of your 20% time into core activities – 20% into related like learning and sharing activities and 10% into far out stuff like new technologies.
[Tweet “Google pushes their employes to be more creative and try something new”]
Learn from your failures
… Google wave was developed by the same team as Google maps but it failed. New Google products have 18-24 month window for commercial and market success
Google manages its employes through OKR: Objective Key Results
Always for the next 3 months from top to bottom so everybody knows what to do so you need less management.
Push past constraints
Youtube could never been such a success if Google was not so good at building servers and storage cost dropping over the years now with 100 hours of video uploaded every minute to Youtube.
Open is better than closed, android has 1.5million activations a day and the users stay not because the are locked in but because they like the product.
You will have to do the best job to keep the users and that what Google does every day in every product.
This is a post written by Johanna Langer, an SEO Account Director & Conversion Optimization Specialist with the agency blueSummit in Munich. She also worked for the Scout24 group as SEO specialist and has many years of experience in online marketing. Johanna also has a real passion for horse riding.