We've all spent countless hours reading the bi-polar predictions about Google+, Google's new social network, and it's either eventual global domination or complete doom. Since this far outweighs the time anyone's actually USED Google+, it's my turn to weigh in.
Google+ will be great for brands and businesses — and pretty darned great for consumers as well. With over 10 million signups already (already more than Foursquare!) and over 1 billion items shared and received daily, there’s no doubt in my mind that, whether brands are ready or not, Google+ will be an absolute social giant. And brands are eagerly proving that by beating down the door for early access to Google+’s “Entity Profiles” feature for businesses, which Google preemptively announced and then abruptly closed off when demand overwhelmed the system.
Why do I think Google+ will connect with brands when earlier social networks clashed? In a nutshell:
By facilitating the social clustering we all naturally do in our lives, rather than fighting it, Google+, even in its early form, lays the groundwork for a massively intelligent social supercomputer of friend recommendations.
Google+ fixes the privacy gaffes, overly complex settings, and confusing bits of Facebook and Twitter, offering people a chance to actually CHOOSE who sees the links and photos they share and Like, eg, “+1”. This social segmentation is something we all do in real life, instinctually, unlike the shotgun-sharing we’re forced to do online. While research has shown that when we tweet or post on Facebook, we always have an “intended audience” for the post; a sub-group of friends or fans who will really respond to what we’re posting.
Google+’s advantage here lies in the fact that, historically, segmenting our personal social networks has always been at odds with Facebook & Twitter’s corporate mandates to build big baskets of eyeballs, and so these networks have been slow to facilitate anything that fragments the social graph and makes sharing reach smaller audiences. Product designers for the dominant social networks like Tumblr/Twitter/Facebook have cited user apathy and unsophistication as rationale for omitting friend segmentation, but users famously can’t articulate demand for features they’ve never been allowed to try, so that’s a straw man argument. And now Google, in a surprisingly design-focused move for the famously engineer-driven giant, has invested deeply in the social research necessary to build a scalable community where sharing can be both segmented and safe; each being key to attracting brands and retaining users.
As the biggest digital media company (er, I mean technology company!), Google is better positioned than anyone to use the social signal of Who You Follow and What You Like (WYFWYL,”) to give digital brand marketers the holy grail they’ve been asking for: the chance to reach a highly targeted, in-market audience at scale, in moments when they are primed to discover new things, rather then focused on viewing photos of their ex’s on Facebook.
In true Google fashion, Google+ “fixes the glitches” of Twitter and Facebook to eliminate embarrassing over-shares and awkward “suggested” ad mismatches seen daily on other social networks. By cleaning up the social recommendation space and building a tool that’s safe for users, Google has wisely laid the tracks to rapidly channel brand ad spend into the pleasantly segmented Google+ network of networks.
(*580 words @ an average 250 WPM reading rate)
