Google Expands 'Going Google' Ad Campaign Worldwide

Google (GOOG) continues to hit milestones with Google Apps – 2 million businesses and 20 million users in over 100 countries and 40 languages (up from 1.75 million businesses in June). And they aren’t slowing down the advertising, either.

The Going Google campaign, first launched in August (and spoofed within a day) with billboards that changed messages daily, is expanding.

The target? Microsoft Office/Exchange/Sharepoint. The message? Give your employees shared documents, calendars, email, etc. without the hassles of managing email servers or rolling out software updates. Customers are pointed to google.com/gogoogle.

Sunday Google is announcing the expansion of the Going Google campaign into the U.K., France, Canada, Japan, Australia and Singapore (”train stations such as Paddington, La Défense and Shinagawa, and at airports in Singapore, Toronto, Dallas and beyond”). They’re also announcing new enterprise customers onica Minolta, Rentokil Initial and TOTO. Other recent customer wins include Recent wins include Motorola’s handset division (20K users), Konica Minolta (7K users), Rentokil Initial (business services company, 35K users), and MeadWestVaco (VA based global packaging company, 17K users).

They’ve also created a montage video of the campaign:

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[NW Tech:]

Mr. Arrington,

You are the dumbest rock today. Below is a comment from GOOGLE on the REAL numbers surrounding GoogleApps. The fact is you have bought into the LIES and DISTORTION that Dave Giroud (Head of Google Enterprise) has been perpetuating for two years.

BOSTON - Google Inc's efforts to persuade businesses to buy its email services suffered a setback this week after a highly publicized outage shut down accounts of millions of corporate customers for almost two hours.

The outage -- one of several in the past year -- underscored fears that Google's email, still lagging Yahoo Inc's in market share -- is not stable or reliable enough for corporate users.

The Internet giant apologized for the problem, pledged its best to prevent a recurrence of the problem, explained what went wrong and added three days to year-long subscriptions to its corporate Google Apps email service, which costs $50 per-user-per-year.

"The giveback in credit in any email situation is always bitter money. Everybody would always rather have uptime than a giveback," said analyst Matt Cain of market research firm Gartner Inc.

That may not be enough to compensate for the bad publicity and ill will created by the incident, which was widely covered in the press. It could hamper efforts to persuade businesses to abandon technology from Microsoft Corp and International Business Machines Corp that handle hundreds of millions of email accounts.

"This is bad news for Google. Email is a critical tool and outages are unacceptable," said Nucleus Research analyst Rebecca Wettemann.

Google hopes to eventually derive a steady revenue stream from corporate users, as growth in its leading online advertising business begins to show signs of slowing.

Known for Internet search ads that generate billions of dollars in annual revenue, it has spent more than 2-1/2 years marketing Google Apps, which includes email as well as calendars, a word processor and other Web-based software.

LIMITED SUCCESS

The effort has so far met with limited success.

Google spokesman Andrew Kovacs said the number of paid subscriptions numbers "in the hundreds of thousands." The vast majority of Gmail's 15 million business users use a free version of the service.

Gartner's Cain said Google has only started to gain traction in recent months as it has added key features that businesses demanded. They included support for Research in Motion's BlackBerry devices and letting users delegate use of their email and calendar to another person.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks had been that Google used "beta" to describe the service until July. Cain said that raised concerns that the product was not ready for prime time.

Analysts said that Google has been slow to persuade businesses to pay for the service because it is not easy to convince customers they are getting a premium service.

"Once somebody has gotten into the habit of getting something for free, they expect more for free," said Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry.

"Google is having a tough time changing people's habits."
Tuesday's outage reinforced those perceptions because paying customers suffered the same as free users. Google Apps promises that it will provide them more reliable service, giving special protection to their data.

"In this case we weren't able to do that, and they were impacted," Kovacs said.

Oct 19 09:22 AM

[Mad Hedge F...:]

wey When people ask me what is the one stock they should put in their kid’s college fund and forget about, I always give them the same company: Google (GOOG). The toll taker for the Internet that controls 80% of the global market for search just announced record Q3 profits of $1.6 billion on a revenue rise from $4 billion to $4.4 billion. In this economic environment these numbers are nothing less than astounding, making GOOG one of the few firms that has actual top line growth. Google earnings, in fact, have turned into a valuable leading economic indicator by telling us that the strong ad growth came in the retail, travel and the automotive sectors. The performance is further proof that a tectonic shift away from old line media like newspapers, radio, and TV to online is accelerating, offering advertisers far and away the highest return on investment. Search is fast becoming the operating system for advertising. While critics focus on the myriad ways the company recklessly burns money on peripheral businesses like Google TV, YouTube, forays into print media, and their private space program, I see gigantic growth opportunities from here. Mobile search grew 30% QOQ as the growing legion of sophisticated portable devices are increasingly used for search. Also, click rates cratered in the great recession, the price of “investment advisor” for example plunging from $4 to pennies. A recovery could bring an equally ferocious rebound in rates that fall straight to GOOG’s bottom line. Most analysts are now targeting the high 600s for the stock price, which I believe will prove conservative. If you are ever worried about America’s future, then just look at these two kids who built a $400 billion company out of their dorm room at Stanford in virtually no time with no capital.

Oct 19 11:29 AM