by Miriam Ellis
It's not a Harlequin romance novel nor even a better class of historical fiction. Google really is running away from the castle with their new Places contact form!
When I read the announcement yesterday that Google had added a new 'Fix A Problem' section to their Places Help Center, and that the section actually drills down to a contact form, an image burst across the screen of my mind of Google galloping away from a crumbling castle toward a brighter new era. In making this latest decision regarding their highly visible local product, Google has grown less anachronistic overnight, at least in my eyes.
The Discomfort of An Anachronism
I'm a fan of well-written historical fiction, but when it is translated onto the television or silver screen, one thing that never fails to drive me crazy is when the producers fail to get the flowers right. You'll have George Washington making a bold speech about independence next to a bouquet of roses that were first cultivated in 1973. Whoa, George, where did you get those posies?
Similarly, I recently watched a refined Victorian lady deliver a bouquet of wildflowers she'd supposedly picked in the woods to her kindly old mother. The only problem was, the flowers not only weren't wildflowers, but they were modern cultivated garden flowers of the type one can pick up on the nursery racks of a today's drug stores. The only way this woman could have gotten this nosegay was to have trampled through her neighbors' yards stealing their flowers - 100 years in the future!
Okay, so not everyone is going to take this kind of nitpicking issue with blossoms, but most of us know how to recognize an anachronism and feel weird when we see something or someone represented as being out of time with the times they inhabit.
The crumbling old castle is Google's historic stance on customer service. Granted, half a millennium ago, it was acceptable to dub yourself 'the magnificent' and have a host of serfs toiling at the miserable bottom of your feudal pyramid while you lived off their backs and never bothered to look a single one of them in the eye. But we're supposed to have grown beyond that now.
Practically since Google's first essay into the world of Local, business owners and SEOs have been begging for customer service. I have written countless articles over the past five or so years attempting to point out the injustice of profiting by representing real business data without permission from business owners while simultaneously refusing to speaking with them and, to date, that has been Google's modus operandi in Local.
Google's announcement of associating an actual contact form which will ostensibly reach a real person at Google is their first effort to shed the mantle of anachronism that has clung so uneasily to their broad shoulders. Google is finally realizing that you cannot process real world business data solely through the machine of the algorithm. Too many people are getting hurt and too many people are voicing their anger.
It is early days yet to write about the success of this first attempt at customer service. How effective will it be, how many business owners will know the form to fix a problem exists, how quickly will a response from Google be received and how quickly will said problem be resolved? No one I've spoken with in Local knows these answers yet, but every single person I've talked with so far is standing up and cheering for Google's latest move.
We don't have a phone number yet, nor a dedicated rep being assigned to help business owners manage their highly visible Google Places accounts, but we are centuries closer to dignified treatment of local business data and local business owners with the release of this new contact form.
Close your eyes and I believe you can see Google running away from the feudal castle - or at least tippy toe-ing out of it for the very first time into the bright sunlight of the social real world in which they play so large a part. It almost looks like this long and tortured story I've been writing chapters of for so many years may have a happy ending.
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Source: http://www.searchengineguide.com/miriam-ellis/google-local-gallops-away-from-feudalism.php
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