Don't worry, it is only Google and they are not very good

This appears to be the view of Rightmove.

Martin Smith spotted a letter from rightmove to all their staff on the FT.

Didn’t someone famous say don’t worry it isn’t loaded then had his head blown off?

Anyway, rightmove may have a small point about having a strong big brand,  but big brands go down just as much as they go up.  Indeed, some of the worlds largest companies went down recently, big brands!   Lehman Brothers, Enron, general motors, ABN, Texaco  and of course Woolworths … the list goes on and on.

Rightmove is not in this league and the more interesting questions for me are twofold.  First, how many agents actually contacted rightmove and what were they asking?  Secondly,  why do companies still adopt this attitude of ‘lets fight’ when they should be saying ‘let’s work with’.  Would you really believe a rightmove customer service agent if they said to you in response of your question about google, ‘ahh, don’t worry google are rubbish and our brand is much better’?  I don’t think you would believe this.  What I would want to hear would be along the lines of yes we are always keen to see what Google are up to and we are endeavouring to work with them in this space.  Now that would give one confidence.  This all smacks of misplaced arrogance.

The letter as follows in full as taken from the FT,. with thier comments (cat references included – they are good):

Dear all,

It has become apparent that many of you are facing some questions from unusually inquisitive agents who are interested to hear about how we see the future for online property advertising. It could well be that they just asking after us because they care, though I suspect the reality is that this sudden interest in our business and the wider market has been prompted by the will-they-won’t-they story surrounding Google.

The reality – we think! – is that at some point Google will launch a real-estate feature in the UK. We can’t be sure about when they will launch but we can hazard a guess that what they will launch will be along the same lines as their real estate features in Australia and the US, launched in July. So, what do we know about the brave new world of online property advertising in Australia and the US?

[Not very much it would seem:]

What Google have actually launched in both the US and Australia isn’t actually very easy for users to find!

What Google have launched is only accessible via their maps function and not part of their main search results directly through google.com (or Google Australia). In other words, at the moment, users have to know it’s there and go looking for it. See if you can find it. You’ll see what I mean.

[And then things get really catty:]

Not everything Google turns its hand to turns to gold

Google are huge, Google are successful, but Google also get things wrong sometimes. At any one time Google has more than 100 products and features available but not all of these go on to become best-in-show or topple existing market-leaders. Whilst products like Google Mail and Google Maps are obvious successes, Google failed to get the better of You Tube with Google Video and Knol, Google’s user-generated online encyclopaedia, has failed to have any impact on Wikipedia. And anyone used the Google’s answer to Facebook? No, thought not.

There are plenty of other examples too. Much of it depends on how seriously they take it and where they see their priorities. Google’s answer to Internet Explorer, Chrome, is being heavily advertised at the moment, but they rarely run such high profile above-the-line advertising on that scale for products. The fact that Chrome is head-to-head with a well-established Microsoft product (Internet Explorer) probably explains the Chrome campaign.

[Meow:]

Can Google match the service we deliver to users through the site and our account handling teams?

Not only does Google have to match existing websites in the market (and not just ours) in order to seriously challenge, but they will also have to match existing offers from a customer service perspective too. That means matching our teams of AMs, TAMs and CST who work incredibly hard to make sure that our member agents are expertly looked after and get full value from everything we offer. And Google are not famed for the ‘human-touch’ when it comes to dealing with customers: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8451473.stm. They’ll need to keep up too. Everyone knows how much work went into the second half of last year alone to deliver the agent scorecard, two new products (local homepage and featured agent) and a new agent-focused marketing campaign and TV ad

Brand and market leaders are pretty hard to budge! Others have been eying-up our #1 spot for some time without making a significant dent in our lead. And, anyway, we’ve all worked very, very hard to get the position that we are now in – you don’t get c.90% of the agents and more than 50% of all pages viewed without a bit of graft.

And some of the numbers from recent research are pretty compelling too: We serve more pages of property than all the other property websites measured by Hitwise added together (there’s about 1400 of them!) Awareness of Rightmove amongst the public stands a 64% without prompts and 91% when prompted (to put that in context, McDonald’s have a score of 98% for prompted awareness and Burger King a score of 95%) Of those that have ever heard of Rightmove, more than 7 in 10 say that it is the property website they “turn to first” 32% of people who bought a home in the last 12 months first saw that home on Rightmove.