Who Cares About The "Words"?

Douglas Edwards, in his book documenting the early days of Google, calls himself the "words guy," meaning that he gives Google a voice, whereas the rest of the company is essentially made up of programmers who lack the marketing and journalistic background that he has. But something has puzzled me about this, and other word guys: of the people using Google, or whatever other websites - who is actually reading these words. I use Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Google, and host of other websites, but I don't think I've ever actually read the statements made by the website themselves. When I researched Twitter for my Community on the Internet project, that was the first time I'd ever looked at the "about" page on Twitter - and that's after using it for over five years. The same goes for the other websites, and especially Google: Google has never been a destination for me. In a lot of ways, it's like an airport: I don't necessarily like it, I want to get through there as quickly as possible, and I just want it to be easy and painless. Thus, it makes Google's message - and in turn, their word guy - not really important to me. I would think that other users would have a similar opinion about those "about" pages, and it makes the words that Edwards writes a lot less important than he claims them to be.

On the other hand, they're important to the company. I am intentionally rough on pages like that, but they are important to the employees who are wondering what, exactly, they're working towards. I hate to side with Douglas (because I've been pretty against the book and his writing up until this point) but a company with as much power and as much momentum (at least in the early days) that Google has needs to be asking those questions and looking at the big picture. Ideas of "Don't Be Evil" (which I'll discuss in another blog post) are incredibly important, and even if your consumers aren't necessarily reading your mission statement, you need to have it for yourself, and to keep the company on the right track in a financial, innovational, and moral sense.