Doug Edwards, who was Google’s director of consumer marketing and brand management from 1999 until recently, has been blogging about his former employer for what appears to be the last week or so.
The blog, Xooglers (get it? ex-Googlers?), invites other former Google employees to “reminisce and comment on the latest developments in search.” Most of his initial posts recount interviewing for, getting, and starting the job, including this notable excerpt:
So, now I was Google’s online brand manager. What exactly did that mean? I didn’t have a clue, and evidently no one else did either. It was as if some corporate biological alarm clock had gone off: “You know, we’re at that point where we need to have somebody to do all that stuff that’s not engineering. Let’s get us some of them marketing folks. And since the world is divided between online and offline, we’ll get one of each.”
So far, I haven’t found any comments that come from other former Google employees, but the blog’s only been around about a week and may not yet be on xoogler radar screens. Nevertheless, the number of comments is growing and the blog seems to be gaining popularity quickly. Edwards’ candor and writing style don’t hurt.
Ex-employee websites are nothing new, of course. Employees of Enron who had lost their jobs started several sites that served as resources, gathering places, and support. But this is the first time I’ve seen a blog dedicated to discussion of a former employer. While Google hasn’t done anything comparable to Enron’s abuses-and thus would not be likely to inspire the kind of vitriol the ex-Enron sites did-it is a venue where dirty laundry can be aired and a company embarrassed. As the audio clip Adam Curry often plays warns, “There are no secrets, only information you don’t yet have.”
Hat tip to Google Blogoscoped.
Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.
As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.
