So last week I was deluged with phone calls for the college admissions and records and financial aid offices. For a long while I thought the phone system went haywire and the voice mail system was misdirecting my calls. I pleasantly redirected peoples’ calls, silently reminding myself that it wasn’t their fault and as I am fond of saying, marketing is everyone’s job. I may be king of my castle, but I am a member of a larger organization whose interests I serve.

I soon discovered though that people were actually directly dialing my number and were not being redirected by a voice mail system. I also discovered that people only have a really vague idea about where they get pieces of information. Eventually I deduced that people were being misdirected by search engines –specifically Google. I did a search for the college on Google and to my horror found that my office number was listed as the main switchboard number. This was only true for Google. Yahoo and Bing didn’t have erroneous information.

I am not sure how it happened, but my theory is that someone tagged the theatre on Google Maps and put our phone number. My building is one of the few on campus tagged on Google maps and somehow it may have become the default phone number. Once it became the top search result, everyone started calling.

Fortunately, Google has a link that allows you to submit corrections. In fact, if you have an account, you can fix it right away. So I submitted a couple corrections from different IP addresses and submitted one from my Google account. It took about 48 hours, but the listing disappeared…..

…And was replaced by a listing for the ATM machine in the library, the location of which was also tagged. Since the telephone number listed is that of the bank, I am willing to bet that the bank has been getting calls from people who haven’t been paying attention.

But the story doesn’t quite end there. Today I received a call from someone at Google Maps verifying where it was exactly that the erroneous listing was directing people. Google may be massive, but they apparently aren’t too unwieldy to fix and then follow up on problems in a timely manner. You often don’t get that sort of response from utilities and companies whose service you actually pay for.

Probably the big lesson here is that even when you are depending on other people’s labor to contribute and correct content, the endeavor can never entirely be without cost. It would be inconceivable for Google and Wikipedia to collect and present in a meaningful way the amount of information they do if they depended solely on paid staff, but they still need to create a structure and invest resources to monitor the veracity and suitability of the material they provide. In fact, I just read today that Google doesn’t outsource the review of content flagged as inappropriate and provides counseling to the staff that processes it.

I don’t mean to turn this into a plug for Google. The whole experience just reveals the importance of monitoring and addressing mistakes and that it is possible to do so no matter what your size should you make the conscious decision.