Google+ did not just unleash a viable alternative to Facebook it also let loose a bandwagon with sufficient space for the world and its wife to leap upon. And that's exactly what has been happening. From blogs to newspapers to newspaper blogs to columnists and commentators the buzz is: 'Google vs Facebook - who's going to win?'
When companies are ran by emotion rather than logic, it's true, we often get the kind of behaviour exhibited by former Yahoo! CEO, Jerry Yang, whose role was pivotal in Yahoo! shares dropping from $33 to $14 in just six months, in 2008. Google has never been high on emotion and its current CEO is a maths whizz kid whose fond of crunching numbers and using mathematics to run cool, long-term campaigns. Because of that Google+ is really neither a direct Facebook competitor nor a Twitter killer. What it is, however, is leveraging arm helping Google do business with both social network giants.
To understand this better let's examine another Google success is a slightly different area: email. When Gmail was launched in 2004 it was a late comer to a scene split between Hotmail and YahooMail. Like Google+ it offered something extra to entice users to try it (in this case massive, free=, storage) and like Google+ it was released in Beta stage and by invitation only. Gmail today numbers 250 million unique users and it is growing month-on-month at a time when both its rivals have stagnated and might even be shrinking.
Gmail, a free service, was supported by Google Ads (a core Google product) and has been instrumental in the trial and soft-launch of Google products which range from Google Buzz to Google Docs.
Why is all this important for Google+? Well, because the strategy here is much the same and has an added dimension we need to understand. Until Google+ came along Google was struggling to catch up on the social media network stakes. Twitter had stolen a march on real time feeds and Facebook had managed to concentrate 10% of the world's population on its membership base. Google's search results, to succeed in terms of relevancy require a certain amount of information to be derived from activity within both Twitter and Facebook. The latter is largely closed to Google and the former has recently refused to renew a real-time search agreement with the search giant.
Potentially, both these actions pose a direct threat to Google's stranglehold on search for two reasons. First, by closing their sizeable part of the web to Google, Twitter and Facebook, could quite easily start to carve out their own slice of the online advertising pie, directly threatening the core income of Google. Second, by refusing to open up their social graphs to Google indexing both Twitter and Facebook could adversely affect the quality of Google's search results, threatening to decrease relevance, make some results redundant or simply wrong and adversely affecting the end-user experience. In other words, left to run its course the path Google would have taken then would have been one of supplicant to two of the web's most successful social media network sites.
Google+ changes all of this. By providing web users with the tools necessary to socialise the web they provide a viable alternative to both Twitter and Facebook. Google+ has a stream that's updated constantly (like Twitter), has no character limit, provides the connectivity of Facebook's Wall but also enables a much better integration of the Stream in comments and the ability to mute certain capabilities (like re-sharing) if necessary, to create greater engagement and reduce social 'noise'.
Yes, at face value this could be a contender which given time might overcome Facebook and could kill Twitter. Facebook however has 750 million users and Twitter users generate a billion tweets per week. Taking them on might be possible but like any war it's going to be messy, expensive and with an uncertain outcome. This is not how business is done these days and certainly this is not how business is done by Google.
In a revealing interview to The Register former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, showed Google's plans when he admitted that Google would love to achieve "deep integration with both Twitter and Facebook". In other words, now that both social networks feel threatened by Google's Google+ it is time to get them to the table and strike a mutually beneficent deal before they become irrelevant and lose their bargaining power.
If Google's plan pays off and Facebook and Twitter agree to negotiate and reach an agreement regarding Google search and indexing by Google the social media marketing metrics which social media marketers have been using will acquire even more value. Twitter and Facebook will both benefit directly by playing a central role in the way Google weighs sites, online brands and a product's web presence, and Google will benefit by direct access to the concentrated user-base of the two social networks. Should they refuse to play ball Google's Google+ has sufficient leveraging power to enable the search giant to integrate all its products and provide a platform which will eventually force them to capitulate.
Either way it is clear that social media network marketing will play an ever increasing role in the way information is disseminated, indexed and shared in the world. As a result, any company or individual webmaster who fails to have a social media marketing campaign in place risks increasing their online marketing costs to make up the gap or (worse) becoming marginalised as competitors who 'get it' rush in to fill the gap.
Information, which always demands to be free, is going to change the way online publicity and advertising work, for good.
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