I was invited to contribute a few throughts for an article by ZDNet Asia on what businesses can expect from the upcoming Google+ corporate profiles. The article by Ellyne Phneah is available here, and my full response is below. Let me know what you think.
Personally, I think it’s still way too soon to compare Google+ to Facebook. While Google+ has had a solid start so far and has received mostly positive comments all-round from early adopters, it’s still unclear what the final product will look like and whether it will offer users a compelling reason to migrate from their current social networks. For example, Google just included the option to "ignore" and "block" posts or people into their notification settings, and you will see them make more of such fundamental changes as they continue to refine the product in the weeks and months to come.
Similarly for businesses, the options for brands to set up presence on the Google+ platform will only be rolled out at the end of the year; although they are already working with a few brands like Ford to experiment with test accounts.
Facebook on the other hand, has had the advantage of time to build out a solid offering for brands to engage in one-to-one and one-to-many interactions with fans. This offering includes many of the now staple features available to community managers such as social ads, local and hyper-local geo-targeting, customized landing pages, Facebook applications, games, events, Facebook connect and analytics. That’s not to say that these features will not be available on Google+ eventually.
But while we’re speculating, there are already hints of areas in which Google+ might be able to better Facebook.
Firstly, is targeted conversations. Google+ Circles allows you to organize your contacts into buckets according to your real-life social connections. This enables you to filter conversations and share them with only the people you want, as well as manage content posted by people you follow. For businesses this could potentially be a feature that allows brand to have multiple types of conversation through the same platform, e.g. share content for consumers and enterprise customer through the same brand profile just by organizing them into separate circles.
Besides sharing them to circles, Google+ also allows you to have private conversations with another person. This could be a useful feature for branded conversations that need to be taken offline, e.g. customer service queries or conversations that require sharing of private information. Facebook currently only allows page administrators to send private messages to fans, and not from the brand profile.
Secondly, is search. Google currently has a 65% of global search share and it will be interesting to see how they will use this to build out Google+ as well as integrate Google+ data into search results. And while how they will do this is still unknown at this point, it will eventually happen. The key here though is not necessarily just in enabling a search feature within Google+ or pouring Google+ data into search results, but more about weaving Google+ as a social layer across the entire web ecosystem. If Google is successful in developing Google+ as the backbone of its social ecosystem, the opportunities for real-time search and with that, targeted content serving even outside of the social network will be immense.
Thirdly, is analytics. Google’s measurement tools, Google Analytics and DoubleClick, provide users with detailed and actionable data. While Facebook has constantly been upgrading its page analytics feature, Insights, it still lacks meaningful data and doesn’t integrate across multiple channels and campaigns. There are third party companies that offer more intelligent and elaborated reports for Facebook page managers, but the built-in tool is terribly lacking. Integrating Google Analytics and DoubleClick with Google+ will surely prove to be valuable to marketers.
That said, the ultimate statistic that will convince brands to invest time and resource in Google+ is reach especially to relevant and local audiences. According to ComScore, Google+ now has 25 million users since it launched in June. Still, a far cry away from Facebook’s 750 million. Early adopter brands may consider creating a presence on the platform (once the brand profiles are available) as a skunkworks project. And if you do, remember that while it’s an experiment, it’s still a public space for discourse. So the same rules for communications and brand engagement applies. For those that are not quite ready to take the plunge, it will still be important to include Google+ as one of the platforms to monitor and listen to conversations about your brand.
Yesterday, Ganesh Kumar Bangah, CEO of MOL (which acquired Friendster and recently signed a partnership with Facebook to become a payment provider for Facebook Credits), paid a visit to the OffGamers Facebook community page and:
(1) made an unwelcomed remark that its gaming service was better than the competitor's
(2) indicated that people who didn't agree that MOL's product was better, were... un-intelligent. To him, it should be plain to all, since his brand is BIGGER
(3) after the page admin kindly offered to carry MOL's game credit products, said "no thank you, you are of no value to us"
But what baffled me the most were Ganesh's final words: "I understand that you may be upset that we are gate crashing, but this is social media".
"...but this is social media"??? What does that mean?
I hope he isn't of the opinion that social media is the wild wild west, and no rules apply. That is a huge myth. The misconception that you can do and say what you want on social media without consequences is a major mistake. Social media is made up of people and communities, and the same rules of engaging with people offline apply online. What is rude offline, is rude online. What is considered shameless promoting offline, is still shameless promoting online. But unlike offline, where communication is one-to-one or one-to-a-few, what you do online is laid bare for all to see. Hence, adhering to the rules and etiquettes become even more important.
In my opinion, the most important rule is respect the community. It isn't hard. e.g.:
- Don't be rude
- Don't say what you wouldn't want to see on your own page
- Don't spam
- Don't be a troll
- Respect the on-going conversation
- Understand the intent of the community before you participate
- Add value, don't just push your own agenda
Wait, don't we know all these things already?
-- UPDATE --
"Thanks for your email. We have no plans to provide comments on the matter. Regards."
If you're unfamiliar with this slideshow series, view the rest here.
Facts that stuck:
- 500 BILLION minutes spent on Facebook per month.
- 25 BILLION web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc. shared on Facebook each month
- 2 BILLION YouTube videos viewed per day
- 4 BILLION images hosted on Flickr - 13 times more than the U.S. Library of Congress
- ONE-THIRD of women aged 18-34 check Facebook when they first wake up - even before going to the bathroom (!!)
- 1 in 6 marriages last year occurred between people who met through social media. That's twice more than the number of people who met at bats, clubs, and other social events combined (!!)
- 27 MILLION average “tweets” per day on Twitter
- 16,000 followers for BP's official Twitter account; @bpglobalpr, the satirical BP Twitter account, has 180,000 followers
Each week, I'm sharing interesting or important articles and content that I've read/seen. Hope you find these useful. Do drop me a comment below if you have other articles to share.
These are some of the best articles /news stories I found over the week that I thought you shouldn't miss:
Feel free to share stories which you think I've left out and have a great weekend
The Obama administration's push toward open government, including the use of web-based and social media is truly inspiring. The latest initiative from Capital Hill is a memorandum, titled: Social Media, Web-Based Interactive Technologies, and the Paperwork Reduction Act, that regulates federal government use of web tools like Twitter, blogs and wikis. The documents can be found here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/openThe memorandum facilitates the use of web tools for the purposes of engagement and interaction with the public, by informing federal agencies what they can do with these tools without triggering bureaucratic review. These include using wikis to engage with the public, hosting webinars, as well as the use of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. *The PRA is mentioned a lot in the memo. It stands for The Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980, which limits the ability of federal agencies to collect information from the public. According to the PRA, agencies must get permission to requests information of the public.This memo clarifies what social media activities falls under the PRA and which are excluded.
John Piper has this to say about why and how he tweets:
I see two kinds of response to social Internet media like blogging, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and others.
One says: These media tend to shorten attention spans, weaken discursive reasoning, lure people away from Scripture and prayer, disembody relationships, feed the fires of narcissism, cater to the craving for attention, fill the world with drivel, shrink the soul’s capacity for greatness, and make us second-handers who comment on life when we ought to be living it. So boycott them and write books (not blogs) about the problem.
The other response says: Yes, there is truth in all of that, but instead of boycotting, try to fill these media with as much provocative, reasonable, Bible-saturated, prayerful, relational, Christ-exalting, truth-driven, serious, creative pointers to true greatness as you can.
Now what about Twitter? I find Twitter to be a kind of taunt: “Okay, truth-lover, see what you can do with 140 characters! You say your mission is to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things! Well, this is one of those ‘all things.’ Can you magnify Christ with this thimble-full of letters?”
To which I respond: "The sovereign Lord of the earth and sky, puts camels through a needle’s eye; and if his wisdom see it mete, He will put worlds inside a tweet."
Read full article here: http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/TasteAndSee/ByDate/2009/3951_Why_and_How_I_Am_Tweeting/
Also, Rick Warren on why he joined Twitter: http://www.christiantoday.com/article/rick.warren.joins.twitter/23850.htm
... it was just 3.9 million users at the end of 2009.
What are your early thoughts about Google Buzz?
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