April 13, 2006

Google Calendar Not Worthwhile for Marketing

I saw a number of articles and blog posts this morning celebrating the new Google Calendar that just launched. (Click here for Google's guide to its calendar).

Given this praise, I figured it would be worthwhile to spend some time experimenting with this calendar application to see if it would be a good way to promote dance performances. After spending too much time tinkering with this calendar, my answer is that it's not ready for prime time and it's not a worthwhile marketing tool.

I'm very bothered with some bloggers and online publications. It could be that a number of the posts and articles about Google Calendar were written by people who had different ideas in mind about what type of functionality they thought was important in a calendar and ended-up exploring different features than I did. Or it could be that some people just rehash the claimed feature-set and have no idea how it works and haven't experimented with it.

I don't know what the answer is to the above but I do know that I'm not taking anything for granted anymore. (At the end of this post I include links to write-ups about Google Calendar so you can judge for yourself.)

Here are the mostly marketing-related features that I thought would be worthwhile but do not work that well or don't exist or are too difficult:

First, I was intrigued by a calendar feature that allowed you to add a button to your website so that users could click on it and save all of the event information for, say, an upcoming performance to their own calendar. Well, creating this button is much too cumbersome and is not worth the effort. Here is the help page that describes this process.

Second, once you add your events to your Google Calendar, you can't even generate a public URL that you can promote and email to your audience so that they can see a listing of all of your upcoming performances. Without a public web address to access your calendar, it's not much of a marketing tool. Although you can publish an RSS feed that only reaches the segment of online users that actually subscribe to feeds.

Third, I was really intrigued by the integration of Google's Gmail with its calendar application. Supposedly, if you receive an email about an upcoming event within Gmail, you can click on a button and the non-structured event data will be added to the appropriate date within your calendar. My problem is I couldn't find the calendar button in Gmail and neither could some other users who posted messages to the help board for Google Calendar. But from some of the blog posts I've read, it appears that this Gmail integration capability does work for some users. I can't explain this??

Fourth, with the "Quick Add" feature you should be able to enter free-form text about an event and Google Calendar will structure this data for you and create an event item. For example, if you type:

"Breakfast with John at Starbucks on April 30, 2006 at 11:00 AM at 100 Main Street, Washington, DC NW 20016"

the calendar app will organize this text into an event. It does a decent job, but it does not appear to recognize the actual address, which it appends to the event's title.

Google Calendar does include email and text messaging invitations and RSVPs as well as group calendar management and sharing capabilities among its feature set. But I wouldn't recommend spending much time with this application until it improves and simplifies its marketing features.

Blogs and Articles about Google Calendar

- "Google Launches Web Calendar" - Washington Post

- "Google Calendar is Live" - TechCrunch

- "Google Unveils Web-based calendar app" - News.com

- "Google Calendar Now Online" - Internetnews.com

- "Google Calendar Impresses" - Mashable

- "Google Calendar Makes an Impressive Debut" - SearchEngineWatch

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