I spent about two years speaking for Google at conferences about local search and marketing. In that time, I became increasingly confident that certain marketers had an enormous advantage by keeping up with macro-trends among the large platform-building companies, like Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, et cetera—let’s call them the Silicon Valley Companies, or SVCs, from now on. I don’t want to deify these companies, but I also don’t want to pretend that their offerings for both marketers and consumers are anything short of very powerful in the digital economy.

On average, the folks I’ve met who keep up with tech as a business sector, and not just micro-moves and small launches from particular SVC products, have more accurately understood and predicted the decisions of the SVCs. I call this activity of keeping up with where these companies are heading, and in turn making smart long-term predictions for your agency and clients, reading the industry. I believe that reading the industry is one of the most valuable skills that a digital marketer can build.

People will tell you that everything’s relationships/politics/etc., and while that probably isn’t entirely false, I don’t think that it’s a helpful frame. As you’ll read here, I think that a combination of reading widely, prioritizing shrewdly, and asking SVC employees reasonable questions can help digital strategists and marketers run more efficient shops.

This is my first attempt at creating a resource that I plan to update as I learn more, refine my thoughts, and receive questions from folks around the web. If you think anything about any of this, good or bad (as long as it’s not, you know, horribly cruel), let me know at willys@willdigital.io.

1. “Secrets” are cheap and silly.

If I had a nickel for every time a conference attendee asked me for a “secret” from inside Google, I’d have a lot more money than Google paid me. Some of these requests were jokes, but a lot weren’t.

Joel Headley, a fellow ex-Googler who spoke for Google many times, jokingly reminded me of the dynamic on Twitter early this year:

In my time giving talks on local search and Google My Business, by far the most salient “secret” was upcoming product launches—what exactly they were, and when they were scheduled to launch. We didn’t give out this kind of information because it would have sold out the folks who are hard at work building the features. If I had gotten on a stage at a large event like MozCon Local or Local U and said, “we’re building this amazing Feature X, and it’ll be launched to 100% of users by May 1,” every engineer, product specialist, lawyer, product manager, designer, support agent, and salesperson would be on the hook to either launch on May 1, warts and all, or look sloppy. It’s hard to appreciate until you work at a place like Google how much goes into even ostensibly small launches—there are oodles of steps, and even minimum viable products have to be excellent on many dimensions. So many bumps appear on the road. That’s why, with the exception of big media events, these launches remain fairly quiet until they happen.

The good news is that pursuing “secrets” from highly developed Fortune 100 companies is exhausting and thankless, and there are more rewarding ways to truly read the industry. Understanding what SVCs are building toward, and positioning your marketing practice around that ever-evolving conceptual frame, will pay off. You’ll also have more substantive questions to ask those staffers when you see them at events.

2. Structures trump tidbits.

One thing that’s unequivocally true about Google, and it’s abundantly clear as I work with more and more businesses, is how strongly it values data. Keep that in mind. This is a company where virtually every non-trivial decision is made using every data point that the involved Googlers can find. It feels like Sundar Pichai, the firm’s CEO, hasn’t not mentioned machine learning in public statements in a couple of years. Data drives Google. Don’t underestimate this. It’s not larger-than-life personalities, it’s not “brand,” it’s not some wild conspiracy. It’s clean, well analyzed data.

Keeping up with the day-to-day launches of a product like Google My Business is tactically important, but I encourage digital marketers not to get bogged down in every detail of every launch. Understand what’s new and how that inflects your marketing landscape, then find your own data to figure out what’s next. Tracking how a client’s marketing KPIs change after the launch of a major user-engagement feature, for example, provides the foundation for quantifying the relative value of that feature to the client, and in turn making better decisions about how much time and money to invest in content for that feature. Even incremental improvements in these sorts of agency analytics make SVC tools more useful, clients more successful, and agencies more valuable. The whole system benefits.

The other structure to pay close attention to is personnel. Knowing when a large software company replaces or hires a senior executive, for instance, is crucial. Knowing the officers for the companies whose offerings you use most often, and knowing a bit about their backgrounds and views on important issues in tech and society, is a largely untapped advantage for understanding how product roadmaps are created and adjusted. The recent Facebook executive reorganization is a good example: I have no idea why it got so much press coverage, but it will certainly affect the way that Facebook prioritizes and creates products.

The same goes for the team-level personnel on SVC products that you use. When I worked on Google My Business, for example, very few members of the SEO/marketing community were interested in who ran particular parts of the product. While it’s probably not worth your time to create a comprehensive org chart, roughly knowing who’s responsible for what on the products you rely on will give you a network of folks who might love to chat about their work with you. Again, the point here isn’t unearthing “secrets:” it’s learning how folks think, how they approach the work, and how SVCs staffers and marketers can learn from each other. This structural approach is exponentially more valuable than the salacious practice of conspiracy-theorizing.

3. Trends matter a lot.

At its most difficult and least defined, reading the industry means filtering news from SVCs through the lens of both the broader software industry and the international business environment. Probably two-thirds of the work can be done here. Bloomberg Businessweek, Stratechery, the Wall Street Journal, The Information… you can pick your favorites, but the publications that focus less on launches and developer conference coverage and more on how these companies work as companies are by far the best way to start accurately reading their decision-making. The last several months of tech development just can’t be explained without a very heavy emphasis on GDPR, for example. As I mentioned in the last section, it’s also worth reading about the C-suite for every SVC that your business uses frequently—unlike the folks actually building products, that kind of senior-executive person will show up in international publications.

In the local search space, it would be virtually impossible to create an explanatory model of the industry without recognizing in fairly specific detail the extent to which Google and Facebook are acutely aware of what the other is doing. Acquisitions are helpful, too: when an SVC buys another company, always look at why, for roughly how much, and what the acquired company’s employees will work on when they get to their new (much larger) 9-5 home.

4. Conversation matters most.

People who speak for Google at events can barely get to the venue’s bathroom or grab a coffee—they’re barraged by constant questions and conversations and troubleshooting. After a couple of hours, even Herculean speakers are going to shut down a bit, especially if they hear about the same question or concern over and over. Here’s my best advice for trying to learn from SVC speakers: bring your reading of the industry to bear, and in 30 seconds run the speaker through a theory you’re building. Then simply ask:

“Does that sound reasonable?”

Working for an SVC means that every word can be twisted and misconstrued. But SVC speakers also want well-intentioned members of the community to understand their team’s goals, and will in most cases be able to say things like “yeah, that’s an area we’re really trying to improve,” or “it’s not something we’ve been able to focus on lately.” (Of course, they might give you more specific information, depending upon what you’re curious about.)

Though these kinds of answers are often shrugged off by agency marketers as corporate double-speak, I promise you that they’re useful. That speaker is probably giving you as much as she can without overpromising (which would help no one), putting unnecessary pressure on her team, or disclosing confidential information. Weigh this kind of signal however you want, but don’t ignore it, and don’t assume that it’s a smokescreen. You’re talking to someone who wants to help folks understand their product and succeed online. Everyone benefits, no one’s in trouble, and both sides have learned something about the other.

To be very clear, I’m not talking about currying favor and nuzzling your way into some super-secret access. Please don’t annoy these folks when they’re trying to pee or follow them to a dinner they’re clearly trying to have with an old friend while they’re in town. They’re just people, I promise. Simply ask them questions that they might be able to answer, and that show that you’ve done the homework to understand where they’re coming from.

This is also the fun part, where the granular tactics of creating and using tech products become a colorful ecosystem of people learning from each other. Here’s to great conversations, healthy businesses, and flourishing communities.

conferences industry