SMT: Of course Google+ is big on our radar and they've just released Pages, so I'm interested to hear what you see as the marketing potential of G+ in the context of the rest of the social media universe.
BC: Let's start with the stats. There are 40 million users on G+ with the +1 visibility to reach beyond that, so the numbers are there, absolutely. I think in order to have a viable social platform branch the investing in a certain space, you need either a highly targeted group of influential people around an affinity or a passion or you need large scale mass numbers of people in order to have it make sense to invest in. So I think the foundation has been laid, which is great.
We're advising clients that it's early days. Some brands have been let in, sort of, to do a few things. Like Ford and, I think, in tech circles where some of the vendors have jumped in as well. But there are some challenges.
One of the challenges that we're finding is that the accounts, from the brand perspective, are associated still with one individual, so you have a single point of contact with the brand or agency in order to administer the page.
It feels a little like the initial rollout of Facebook in that the branded pages and G+ pages feel more like a forum group at this point. The tools aren't really that great for larger companies. For small business, sure.
SMT: Our organization with its 10 domain properties has been talking internally about this limitation to one admin account per page....
BC: Who the hell is supposed to own it?
SMT: ...and how we might coordinate a main SMT page among all of our domain editors. Who uses the account during what time period? We're not your typical widget-selling business, but we're wondering if G+ is done yet and how they might respond to this criticism of the platform's limitations.
BC: That's exactly the point and I talked with someone from Fast Company yesterday as well, and when Google announced their what I call "volley" on the day of Facebook's F8 conference he thought, "Great. This starting to heat up," and "Great, more is coming." So I honestly expected to have this whole admin rights thing more figured out, but for larger organizations, not having shared admin rights this will be hard to scale or execute.
The last thing any brand wants to do is open up yet another fire hose of conversation that they can't deal with and can't share collectively across their organization to target response. So being there could create more nightmares for you than not being there at all. I think Google fell short of expectations.
BC: You know, many of the enhancements that Facebook announced along with the timeline are visually impressive - some amazing things for the consumer. For example, the shift in the timeline and the way messages are displayed, or liked actually make it a little bit harder for brands to ensure that the likes and messages are as visible as they are in the current page environment. So it puts more onus on the brands and their content strategies on the platform, so the new features offer a bit more challenge to getting the visibility and the eyeballs that you want on your messages.
But I do think that the upside is that the content that gets aggregated on the consumer's timeline and page will actually allow brands to do more targeted advertising. Facebook is most powerful where consumers share so much of their passion and interest, and in that Facebook is able to translate that into targeting for very cost-effective advertising.
I think that some of the timeline changes will allow for potentially better targeting for consumers because their passions will be more visibly expressed and affiliations will be easier to recognize.
SMT: What's interesting to me is that these platforms affect how companies present themselves, and affect their cultures. Companies that adapt to social media, that put expertise on their staffs to communicate with agencies like yours, can make better use of these platforms. But many companies seem to think, "We've gotta do this," without fully understanding the cultural implications of such online customer involvement.
BC: We do a lot of work with clients and we say, "You need to get social in your DNA more than just applying it to a channel. We don't know what the next platform is going to be. Twitter could disappear or Facebook could collapse. Instagram could be where everybody lives. It's all about getting social practice in your DNA and being ready to adjust, and here's a perfect example: this G+ thing with the single admininstrator rights.
Some brands are fully invested in social and get the value of what they can derive out of social conversations be they market research or answering customer service questions or selling stuff, whatever. They're looking at the platform and asking themselves how they can make it fit into one of the use cases like "What I get out of Facebook," and "What I get out of Twitter."
The bigger brands like Ford and Starbucks - which have been investing in social media - always seem to get there first, so they see G+ as just another platform where they need to translate how they're going to get value out of it. Meanwhile the laggards are thinking, "Yeah, we oughta be over there, and yeah we've got the Facebook page and we'll throw a coupon on there every so often." Or, "Yeah, we're on Twitter. We've got that covered." They've got a "check-the-box" strategy
This harkens back to the days when everyone built a Web site because the thought was that everyone needed a Web site. For a lot of brands the light bulb didn't come on until they realized that they could sell things through the Web and the shopping cart appeared. Does anyone question the value of a Web site now? No. It's the front door to your business.
The more progressive brands get less flustered with "Oh God, here comes a new platform," since they're always ready to experiment.