Chris Crosby

The blogoshere and news headlines are a blaze lately with articles on “Politics 2.0” and candidates harnessing the Internet and social networks to gain wider exposure and raise money.

But what if you’re not a candidate or PAC and you want to influence a campaign? Or make your voice heard to other voters about an issue or a politician that you love or hate?

Traditionally this was a difficult task. You used to have print flyers and knock on doors or pass them out on street corners. In today’s world, you just start a blog. Think blogs don’t matter? Do a Google search on “Pete Roskam”, the Congressman for IL-06.

The fifth result down is Dump Roskam, a blog “Dedicated to tracking Roskam in DC. This blog will show his policies and votes that are way too conservative for Illinois.” A little more poking around Google gets you to The Roskam Record, a blog “Committed to monitoring Rookie Congressman Roskam’s words and actions.”

In a world where, if you don’t appear on the first couple pages of a Google search you don’t exist, this type of publicity can be very damaging for a candidate’s image.

As a congressman, Roskam is up for reelection in 2008. Now, as much as I wish that traditional big media and 30 second sound bites on TV won’t be an influence in 2008, they will. However, as the Internet takes on a more influential component of campaigning its going to be tough for candidates to protect their online identity. (Just ask Hillary Clinton after the famous YouTube video that kicked off the 2008 political season).

Surely it won’t be long before a web savvy campaign manager creates a smear campaign by helping supporters to optimize their blogs and web sites for search engines and Google page rank. However, in the meantime, here’s to the Internet helping individuals get their voices and opinions heard!!

I’ve been contemplating lately some hypothetical mergers and acquisitions that could make the summer months a little more interesting for us all and for Wall Street. I think the market is ripe for innovation and with the right combinations of companies and products things could get really exciting. I’ve come up with several that I’ll be talking about, but here’s one that I think would change a lot of landscapes.

What if Google were to acquire Vonage or (any other VOIP Carrier for that matter) and add phone service to their line-up? They already have Google Talk which is their IM client and provides for Google Talk to Google Talk Voice calls. But what if they could make your phone ring?

The first question you’re asking is why would they ever want to be a phone provider? Well to be “Google-esk”, the service would have to be free to the user and Google would need to generate its revenue via targeted advertising. So now start thinking Ad Words goes 10 second “voice ads” delivered directly to your telephone.

Before you get visions of your phone ringing round the clock with annoying voice messages, let’s walk through how this would work.

Inside your iGoogle profile you sign-up for a Google VOIP line (Google isn’t necessary original or clever when naming their products so it would most likely be called Google VOIP or Google Phone).

At this point, Google already knows your search patterns, what RSS feeds you subscribe to in Google Reader, email context from Gmail, perhaps if you use Blogger they even know what you’re blogging about. They also know your geographic and most likely demographic information. With all that data, it would be pretty straight forward to put together some VERY targeted advertising.

Now, how about the delivery strategy? ”Robo-calls” would be far too intrusive and too reminiscent of those annoying political get out to vote campaigns with recorded messages from celebrities. But what if before every free phone call you made you heard a 10 second sound bite?

The scenario looks like this:

My recent web searches are for a new digital camera, maybe its specific models, makes, etc. The next time I pick-up the phone to call mom I hear a 10 second commercial from Target telling me they have the Canon Rebel on sale this weekend at my local Target store located at 2112 W Peterson Ave, and if I would prefer to hear more information press 1 to have an agent contact me shortly.

So I press 1 and after I finish my free phone call home to mom one of the following actions takes place based on the preferences I have set in my iGoogle account:

1. My phone rings or a chat session auto fires-up through Google Talk and there is an agent ready to answer any questions for me or place my order (this hypothetical service would need to be provided by a third party call center)
2. I receive an email with a direct link to the camera on Target’s web site.

As an advertiser on Ad Words you pay between $.10 and $50 per click. My sense is that the Voice Ads would be in shorter supply than their search based counterparts (there are a lot less phone calls made in a day than web searches performed) and the demand for such targeted advertising would certainly surpass the upper limits of say traditional radio media buys. Supply and demand tells me that the per ad revenue would be pretty high.

Let’s say conservatively though that the average ad generated for Google is $1, that would make the revenue model look like this:

Current Vonage pricing plans are: $14.99 a month for 500 minutes, or $24.99 a month unlimited. They also have Small Business plans that we’ll discuss in a moment. Google can still keep these subscription based options for people like me that would rather pay $25 a month than listen to ads (but I make A LOT of calls a month so that’s A LOT of ads I’d have to sit through). 

In the free version of Google VOIP if a user makes 15 calls per month then the revenue generated by Ads is already incrementally higher than that generated by subscriptions. Same holds true for the unlimited folks, every call beyond number 25 is a significant top line increase. Just think if the per ad revenue hovered around the $5 mark and the average user made only 10 phone calls a month. The per user revenue would be double what Vonage charges today for unlimited calling…

My last point to this is that Google could take Vonage’s Small Business offering and bake it right into Google Apps. As a small business, if I could use Google Apps for my business’ email hosting (which we already do today) and as an add-on have the option to provide a soft-pbx and combined VOIP plan for all my employees I would do back flips; especially if it was integrated into Gmail and I could do one-click dialing from my contact directory (would we easy if you’re using their soft phone, and would require a bit of CTI integration if you’re using a traditional hard phone). In this environment I’d opt for the subscription based version rather than Ad supported, but the options here really are limitless.  

Next-up for Google after this? Cellular phone service…