Social media is no longer just about Twitter and Facebook. Granted, at the time of their release, both of these entities rewrote the rules when it came to sharing our lives online. Facebook made it easy to become a voyeur of the lives of soon-to-be moms who you dated at university; Twitter gave you 140 characters into which you could cram your controversial opinion; and location-based services like FourSquare and Gowalla rewarded you for your loyalty. At the height of Facebook’s dominance in the week of 13 March 2010, more people visited Facebook than Google. It seemed strange that, with all the amazing yet disparate products under its wing, Google was floundering in the social media pyre.
The meteoric launch of Google+ (20-million users in less than 3 weeks) can be seen as the proverbial phoenix rising from the ashes of such failures as Buzz and Wave – the word ‘Circles’ immediately comes to mind here. Users are invited to collaborate with whomever they want to include and those who are excluded are oblivious to it, that’s quite a nifty way to manage the message socially. This form of ‘targeted sharing’ is in keeping with their core money-spinner, Adwords, too. More on that later though.
What we can confirm via Joseph Smarr is that Google+’s backend is built mostly using BigTable and Colossus/GFS and that they use a lot of other common Google technologies such as MapReduce which many other Google applications do. What this means, in the bigger scheme of things, is that Google+ isn’t a Facebook killer – it’s a social media game changer, and here’s where some imaginative integration speculation can spice things up:
- Google+ and Docs = collaborative publishing on the fly. As more groups of people begin to collaborate on cloud-based documents it’s going to be important to publish information to certain groups (read Circles) as well.
Eventually, different departments within a business could start publishing information within their Circles and could increase their productivity through this efficient means of data dissemination.
- Google+ and Youtube = exponential video sharing. The chances of a video going viral increase exponentially when you’ve got influencers sharing with their Circles. With over 20-million potential influencers Google+ is now a very nice home-away-from-home for Youtube. Hangouts also mean increased brand engagement: imagine talking to the Isaiah Mustafah (The Old Spice guy) in real time.
Waiting around on Twitter for your brand to reply to you is going to be so old-school when you’ve got real time brand immersion.
- Google+ and Latitude = Foursquare killer. It’s easy to see how having a location-based application like Latitude could fit into a conglomerated social media environment. You can check in, your friends know where you are and, once Google+ allows in brands and businesses, it’s going to be easier than ever for them to do loyalty targeting.
As an aside: If we cast our minds back to November 2010 when rumours of Google acquiring group buying company Groupon were rife we can see the potential in having a group buying application linked to a location based service – this could be a compelling marketing tool for small and medium businesses.
- Google+ and Translate = a true social media Babel fish. Ever get sick of having foreign friends who are probably posting the most interesting things, but you can’t understand Swahili? By integrating Google Translate into Google+, we may no longer have to wonder what our foreign friends are saying or commenting about us – it’s automagically translated.
- Google+ and Sites = Facebook Fan page killer. There’s only so much you can do to your Facebook page in order for it to stand out from the rest. Not so, if Google+ integrates Sites. The potential for celebrities, businesses and eccentric geeks to differentiate their pages from each other is going to be huge, coupled with the fact that this allows different forms of transactions to occur, from leading generation to crowd sourcing, your ‘site’ on Google+ could cover it all.
And, the real kicker:
- Google+ and Adwords = a viable, trackable and ROI effective monetisation model for social media. Gone are the days of trying to justify the value of a ‘Like’ on Facebook or a retweet by an influencer on Twitter, with Adwords contextual targeting advertisers will be able to target Google+ the same way they do with Gmail. Added to this is the kind of demographic data (age, sex, interests, +1′s) that Facebook has previously only been privy to — which makes targeting your ads in a social media environment so much more effective. As an addition, if it’s reporting you’re after: consider that linking Adwords to Analytics is done fairly easily as it is.
In the bigger scheme of things, Google+ is Google’s Chocolate Factory when it comes to being the one-stop shop for all of their amazing (yet currently disparate) peripheral applications. Given a bit more time, these wild speculations could be the death knell for some of the more favoured social media entities.
COMMENTARY: I applaud MemeBurn's Graeme Lipschitz for his keen insight into the future of Google+ as a social platform for sharing information and content by integrating all of its product offerings What Mr. Lipschitz was referring to is Google's strategy of creating a Social Media Hub. In April 28, 2011, Bill Slawski from SEO By The Sea reported that Google had filed a patent for a "Social Hub". Here's what Mr. Slawski says about Google's Social Hub.
"Google is becoming more social on a number of levels, but really doesn’t have a central hub where those social interactions can all be seen at once. That may change in the future, and a new patent application from Google shows an example interface that such a system might use. I couldn’t help but be reminded of Twitter seeing this screenshot from the patent filing:
Another look shows icons that indicate a wider range of status updates and snippets and notifications that might be available:
Google already has worked social features into many of their offerings. Some of the pieces of Google’s somewhat distributed social network include:
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- Google latitude – Allows you to find your friends on a map and share your location with the friends you choose
- Google Buzz – Sharing real time status updates, messages, and multimedia
- Google Reader RSS Newsfeed Reader that allows you to share items with others
- Google Places – The sharing of recommendations and reviews for places that Google tested under the name “Google Hotpot” has been merged into Google Places
- Blogger – Enables you to start and maintain a blog quickly and easily, comment on other blogs, and “track” favorite blogs
- Orkut – A social networking and discussion site
- Gmail – Email program
- Picasa Web Albums – photo sharing site
- Google My Maps – Enables you to create your own personalized maps and share them and collaborate upon them with others
- Google Talk chat via text, voice, and video
- YouTube Upload videos, comment, favorite, like, befriend, create playlists and interact with others
- Google My Library – Build a library, annotate it, and share it with friends
- Google Docs – An online office productivity suite that allows people to share and collaborate on word processing documents, presentations, and spreadsheets
- Google Friend Connect – Enables people to add social widgets and features to their websites
- Google Knol – wikis that can be published by individuals or as collaborative efforts
- Google Panoramio – Photo sharing involving posting images of specific places where pictures can be incorporated into Google Earth
- Google Profiles – A page to share more information about yourself with others
- Google Sidewiki – Enables people to annotate and comment on any page on the Web and share those annotations with others who can rate and respond to them
- Google Sites – Enables you to create public or private web sites that can be collaborative efforts
- Google +1 Button – Allows you to “like” a result that you see in Google Search Results pages, and let others who are connected to you to see your vote. These buttons may become available for placement on web sites in the future.
The Google patent filing describes a hub and corresponding user interface for social interaction, and possibly may include an availability indicator that would show whether other parties are available for interaction. The patent filing is:
Social Messaging User Interface
Invented by Christopher D. Nesladek, Jeffrey W. Hamilton, Jeffrey A. Sharkey. Prasenjit Phukan
Assigned to Google
US Patent Application 20110099486
Published April 28, 2011
Filed: October 28, 2010
Abstract
Hubs for social interaction via electronic devices are described.
In one aspect, a data processing device includes a display screen displaying a social interaction hub, the social interaction hub including a collection of records. Each record includes a counterparty identifier identifying a counterparty of a past social interaction event, a mode indicium identifying a mode by which the past social interaction event with the counterparty occurred, and a collection of mode indicia each identifying a mode by which a future, outgoing social interaction event with the counterparty can occur.
The counterparty identifier, the mode indicium, and the collection of mode indicia are associated with one another in the records of the social interaction hub.
There’s been a lot of talk from Google in the past few months about becoming more social, though as can be seen from my list above, Google does have a lot of social elements already available.
Chances are that we may see some kind of social hub come from the search engine in the future that may help centralize many of their social features.
It’s possible that it may take on an appearance like the one shown in this patent filing, but we won’t know for certain until Google’s ready to bring their social pieces together in one place as one Google social network.
The patent filing’s description and screenshots don’t seem to integrate as many of Google’s present social features together as I might like to see, based upon what Google already offers, including things like personalized My Maps.
What do you think might end up in a Google social hub?"
The Social Media Hub is so important to Google's future, that new Google CEO Larry Page reported told Google staffers that 25 percent of their bonuses would be tied directly to the success of a social strategy.
Google's Social Hub is the equivalent of Steve Job's Digital Hub Strategy, something I am very familiar with and wrote about in a blog article dated March 28, 2011.
The Digital Hub Strategy was Steve's grand vision of the future that capitalized on an emerging Digital Lifestyle that included text, images, video and sound. According to Steve, the MacIntosh was to become a Digital Hub, providing a seamless and more efficient system for storing, duplicating, viewing and sharing this digital content between external digital devices like digital cameras, MP3 music players, DVD players, personal organizers and digicams. The Digital Hub Strategy worked to perfection, reshaping Apple from a strictly computer business to a consumer electronics products maker built around digital devices and digital content. The Digital Hub Strategy gave birth to the iPod, iPhone, iTunes, iPad and Apple TV, and the rest is history.
In a blog post dated June 23, 2011, Google's Chairman Eric Schmidt gave some hints of a Social Media Hub describing Google's social media strategy as follows:
"Our social strategy is to take our current products, get users to give us social information and make our current products better."
Mr. Schmidt's comments came just about a week prior the announcement of Google+, but I didn't take Mr. Schmidt's very seriously because Google has bumbled several attempts to enter the social media space, and I didn't think they had the social network culture. However, I did say that I thought Eric might be "purposely keeping things vague and close to the vest while they develop a social media platform." How prophetic my comment has become.
Whereas the MacIntosh was the Digital Hub for all digital devices and content, Google+ will be the Social Media Hub for integrating Google's product offerings from Gmail to YouTube, and anything else that comes along.
While Facebook is continually spending capital to develop and add new features and third party apps to its social media platform, Google did things in reverse, Google has has found a way to integrate all their disconnected product offerings into a single platform so they are more visible and easily accessible. The integration does not require extensive investment, and can be integrated fairly easily. Google+ serves that strategy beautifully.
Courtesy of an article dated July 29, 2011 appearing in MemeBurn
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