Google+ has come out and most people feel it is Google last, best hope for breaking into the social networking space. No small part of that is the integration with Google Labs, allowing users to more easily share content relevant to a social context.
“The problem is, however, where Google+ fits into people’s everyday lives. Maybe Google+ has been intentionally silent on that for a good reason,” writes Shiv Singh. “Facebook has become part of our digital habit – I sit down for a cup of coffee in the morning and I go on Facebook to scan my news feed. I find some really compelling content while surfing the web and I tweet about it to the world. It’s not clear if Google wants Google+ to be an add-on to my digital habits or a replacement. A lot of people – the 20 million people who are playing around on Google+ are asking themselves that question. The funny thing is that Google+ has the best of Facebook and the best of Twitter – you have the ability to broadcast and select closed groups who should receive that broadcast. So is it meant to be a bridge between the two but do we really need that Targeting for brands in a real-time fashion this way is extremely powerful.”
“Right now, adding friends and adding friends to circles is a laborious, personal task for users to do manually. What Google could do is suggest friends and circles to add, with brands and products also offered in a similar fashion.”
“From a brand perspective, two things matter most — knowing where, when and how we can engage meaningfully with our consumers and in turn being mindful of how they’d like us to engage with them. As marketers, we absolutely want to find ways to engage with our consumers on Google+ that are organic to the Google+ philosophy and in ways that consumers are using the platform. But to be effective we need very strong analytics. We have to be smart in how we engage — we can’t be everywhere or do everything, so we need analytics that help us make decisions on how and where to best reach our consumers at moments in time when we matter. Google has said that when they do launch brand pages they will have strong analytics. Google understands brands because they have worked closely with us on search and they know what analytics we need, so I am happy to wait for that,” said Singh. “Keeping in mind the importance of people’s privacy, we’d also want to know psychographic information about who we’re engaging. This is not an anonymous platform, so we always have to respect that. If Pepsi could reach out on Google+ and engage a Pepsi fan and then also be able to engage with their friend circle or their work circle that would be a win. In the end we want to participate in a way that makes sense for the platform, consumers and the brand.”
“As a real time sharing engine, Google+ is second to none by integrating more seamlessly with YouTube, Google Photos and Google Music than anything else. It’s sharing mechanism are better than Twitter and very different from the Facebook newsfeed.”
“That’s an advantage. If someone gave me one wish in the world, I’d probably use it to understand how Facebook’s edge-rank system actually worked. Like the Google-search algorithm, it’s a black box and I’m not exactly sure how many users (and which users) may see a specific post from one of my brands. From a marketing standpoint, that’s a bit of a problem,” wrote Singh. “However, in the case of Google+ everything published appears in the stream in chronological fashion. I have a much better sense of what a user will see. Now, this can certainly get overwhelming but there’s absolute clarity in terms of what will make it into a user’s feed. You could argue that the Google model is simplistic and not scalable but what’s certain is that it forces you to take those circles seriously. And for Google that’s a good thing, and for marketers it makes Google+ more valuable.”
“It’s going to be fascinating watching the evolution of Google+. To get 20 million people to play with it in a manner of weeks is no joke. The social network is definitely off to a good start but there’s obviously a lot more to do to create true stickiness of the Facebook variety. One thing is for sure, if Google were to integrate the Google+ stream and comments into its search-engine algorithm, that alone may provide enough incentive for a lot more people to take it even more seriously. Only time will tell whether Google decides to go in that direction or not,” Singh concluded.
Source: AdAge.com
