Google Wants To Know How It Has Changed Your Life. Now Has It?

Honestly, I can’t imagine my life without Google. I use Gmail for all my personal emails and I use that account for Google Talk where I have more contacts than in ICQ even though I’ve been using ICQ for 8 years and GTalk - for less than 3 years now. After many failed attempts to find a perfect desktop RSS reader, I have decided to stick to Google Reader - it is far from perfect in my opinion but I am probably too lazy to continue my search for a better alternative.

I use Google Docs pretty frequently whenever I need to collaborate on a document and I also use Google Calendar when I want to share a calendar of a particular event with colleagues or friends. True, my life will lose tons of great things if Google is gone somewhere and I don’t even want to imagine how much time it will take me to restore all the login credentials to many websites I am registered for with my Google account.

And of course I am not the only person like this as there are many others who use Google services for just about everything in their lives and would be seriously damaged if they were left out of their Google accounts for some more or less lengthy time.

Sure, you can argue that Google is becoming way too powerful to ignore it and probably powerful enough not to be at least a little scared of the company that has so much information on every internet user with a Google account. You can tell I’m paranoid but I believe that supporters of various conspiracy theories are not exactly wrong when they try to persuade the world it can be potentially dangerous when one single corporation owns so much information on so many people around the world.

But the question today is: how life-changing Google is. Now Google is powerful, it offers numerous excellent services and it knows just everything about your online life. But has it changed your life?

This is exactly what Google wants to know and invites everyone to tell: this morning the team has published a blog post describing one touching story of a man reconnecting with his father after 17 years by using Google Search to find him. And everyone is invited to contribute their own stories of how various Google services changed our lives and they have even provided two tools to do that: you can either write your story and submit it using a special ‘Share Success’ form or alternatively you can post a video about the story of yours.

So everyone who has a life-changing story to share with Google is invited to participate already. But you should keep in mind that if you submit your personal story, they will reserve the right to use it for marketing purposes (there’s a clear indication of that). So you should either refrain from contributing if you’d rather not see your name quoted in Google ads or PR materials or you should make up the most amazing story if you want to make headlines of newspapers (after all, if Google wants issues a press release with the most impressive stories, it will be certain to draw tons of attention).

What I don’t understand here, is why Google of all companies will need to exercise this type of narcissism. I believe everyone knows Google offers top-quality services that millions of people around the world enjoy. What’s more, I do believe there are some true original stories about how Google changed someone’s life (even though after thinking hard about it myself, I don’t think Google has changed my own life much at all - other than making me use many of their services). But does Google need yet another reason to make sure they are loved and wanted by their users - enough to claim the company has actually changed our lives?

Sorry guys, your services are great and I’m sure you helped someone meet their true love or choose their future profession but for a pragmatic marketing person like me this effort just sounds like a little too much. I’d really not want to see in a couple of months billboards along the roads with unnaturally happy faces of Google fans and quotes from their Google stories. This will probably look very much like the usual “I’m a Mac” versus “I’m a PC” battle with the only difference being that Google will hardly have an opponent in that battle. Is not it too sweet to want to taste it at all?