A story this weekend makes me wonder whether Botch your Buzz (ByB) is a new way of feeding the social media frenzy. Botch of course is a blunder, an embarrassing mistake. However we humans more often talk about others’ weaknesses rather than their strengths. Perhaps ByB could join other fundamental organizational processes that rely on basic human nature such as BbB (Bullshit Baffles Brains).
The genesis of this story is an item from Michael Arrington giving an Update On Google iPhone Voice Recognition App: Look For It On Monday. As he recounts:
Google’s voice recognition search application for the iPhone, originally set for launch on Friday, will likely go live sometime Monday, we’ve heard from a source with knowledge of the situation.
Google was under the impression that the application would be live on the App Store on Friday (obviously, since they pushed all significant press attention to it). Sometime Friday they found out Apple wouldn’t be pushing it, despite the fact that Google submitted it for review earlier in the week and got a thumbs up for Friday.
Who knows why Apple delayed the application, or why they tend to treat every application developer equally poorly. But in this case Apple really screwed up in our opinion. .. Google could have launched for the Android first and pushed sales of phones on their platform. They didn’t, and Apple should have embraced them for that. Next time I expect Google won’t be so trusting. And I don’t blame them.
That is probably what really happened. Nevertheless it may well be that more people talk about this online than if all had gone smoothly on Friday. If all had gone smoothly, then all we could talk about is the technology. This way that technology talk is now leveraged with the scandal of an organizational blunder. It perhaps is a good example of what I like to call Crikey! Surprise Marketing.
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Well, this is the strategy of Google, whether we accept it or just leave it alone…
That’s a great point of view. You have to admit that such conclusions can be drawn for a lot of things. I really don’t think that is the case this time. If things were to go smoothly on Friday, most of the talk would be about the service itself because the number of techies is far smaller than the number of bloggers who would cover the subject. Anyway.. you never know =)