Word of Mouth Markets
Posted by goodmind on January 8th, 2008
It’s been awhile since Google was the subject of a feel good, quirky-employee-culture-puff piece, and frankly, we were getting worried. As it turns out, the search engine has quietly been running an internal gambling enterprise all this time. The New York Times first broke the story in an article excerpted below;
“Prediction markets have been used for years to predict things like elections. At Google, they are used, of course, for business. In the last two and a half years, 1,463 employees have made wagers with play money (Goobles, as in rubles) on questions like: will Google open a Russia office? will Apple release an Intel-based Mac? how many users will Gmail have at the end of the quarter?”
While we like the odds of Google basing business decisions on the wisdom of its own crowd, we also know Google is way too savvy to take the obvious approach in obtaining insight from gambling in the workplace.
Google’s internal prediction market was in fact a rather shrewd research project, a noble attempt to accurately capture the flow of information through the organization. Hedging a bet on Google:Russia was actually a data point in identifying the common factors (aside from demographic details such as job type, or level) that influence opinion.
Findings indicated that “microgeography” is the biggest opinion influencer, meaning information is shared most efficiently, and most effectively, via cross cubicle communication. By Western standards, this might be a low tech way to communicate, but it is not necessarily in tension with the prevailing Internet ethos of the company. Though Google employees prefer their tête-à-têtes to be face-to-face, the content of these interactions reflects the ease of access to new information.
As people consume more information online, the concomitant word of mouth output becomes “smarter” in a sense. Information may still circulate on a local level, but the geographical point of origin has never been more expansive.
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