What is Counter-Googling?
To google a person is to look up the person’s name and information on the Internet via search engines like Google. Most of us have done it at one time or another, and we also use search engines to research businesses we might want to use or companies that could hire us. It’s pretty standard to Google persons or entities to get some extra information about them. It isn’t a stretch to imagine that businesses might want information about each of us too. Welcome to the world of counter-googling. With so many of us contributing regularly to the Internet via things like blogs and personal web pages or social media sites like Facebook, we’ve put a ton of personal information into cyberspace that is fairly easily accessed by other people. In the early 2000s, businesses started taking advantage of this by counter-googling or looking things about customers and potential customers. Information gleaned might be used to provide more personalized service or to tailor different types of sales offers
Pay attention, marketers: remember Roger & Peppers, evangelizing 1:1 customer relationships back in 1997? Well, just when you finally have your company’s customer databases and filtering tools all worked out, and you actually identified that Lego-loving dentist in Taipei and emailed him a personalized offer for a family holiday in Denmark, Google changes the name of the game with a vengeance. The art of ‘Googling’ (checking people’s backgrounds on the internet via search engine Google) — which started out as a useful tool for weeding out psychopaths from the online dating game and performing a quick double-check on an applicant’s claim about his or her astonishing career — will soon be an integral part of corporate 1:1 marketing strategies. With consumers disclosing their most intimate secrets online (voluntarily!), Google has essentially created a ‘domestic database’, i.e. a world-wide database loaded with your customers’ details and profiles, with a depth of information your compan
