It’s Not Easy Being Big.
As any big corporation knows, some will automatically question their motives. Wal-Mart is perhaps the prime example of this. Even though a corporation may be attempting to apply the highest standards of ethics, inevitably mistakes may occur. Individual managers within a large corporation may look to further their own careers by taking decisions which might not be aligned with corporate policies. Even though a corporation may proclaim a slogan of, “Do No Evil“, that slogan may not be applied by every individual working for the corporation. The situation is even worse in a public corporation, where the bottom line results in any quarter must satisfy the investing public.
For whatever reason, Google seems to be running into a number of problem situations of this type. Andy Beard points to one of these in his post, “Google Reputation Management Disaster With Open Social“. As he mentions, there have been a number of reputation management and trademark problems. Google is now looking at a new “Open Social” platform for social media web developers. The big problem is that Google don’t own the trademark, or even a lot of the concept behind it, and they certainly don’t own their own SERPs (search engine results pages). Although he is expressing his own opinion, there is some element of truth in the following:
Google’s Idea of “Open”
Google’s whole idea of “open” is to have the data available to them to index.
- They don’t really care about privacy
- They don’t care about copyright
- They just want access to all your information
Sometime in the future, Google will have control of how your personal profile is represented online, and in many ways how it is portrayed.
If big corporations wish to avoid that ugly epithet, they must work hard to ensure individuals feel their rights are being fully acknowledged and respected. Given that so much personal data is now available on the Internet, a company like Google needs to work even harder than most to maintain a good reputation in the community.
Related:
Wal-Mart – The Big Ugly (UPDATED)
For Wal-Mart, PR = Public Revelations
Thanks to Andy Beard for Sphinning this.
And, of course, the perception of what is “evil” is hugely variable depending on how you’re effected by it. The recent example of sites having their PR decreased due to link selling activities is a good demonstration: to the sites who have lost revenue, this was clearly evil activity.
However, to Google, the change means that their index is more “pure,” according to their definition of what it should be.
It’s all just a matter of perspective.
There’s no question that they need to work hard to maintain a good public reputation — but the best they might be able to hope for, at this point, is a solid “neutral.”
You’re right, Joe, big companies have to be extraordinary to escape from the typical assumption that they’re entirely out for themselves. If Google was working hard to be a solid “neutral”, that would be fine.