Google+ adds itself to social media equation
December 2011 byAfter Google Wave ‘bye-bye’ and Google Buzz ‘lightweight’, Google’s attempt to enter the brutal social media world with Google+ could prove third-time lucky for the world’s dominant search engine.
Part of my remit at HR Media is to develop our social media services, both internally and externally. So with the launch of Google+ for brands and businesses a few months ago, I’ve been monitoring how the platform has been developing.
Still to be convinced of how it would break the social media
triopoly of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, I decided that it would best to
check out what the experts had to say.
I attended the first ever Google+ seminar/conference in the UK, hosted by Communicate Magazine. The speakers, like the breakfast, were seriously good, and I headed back to HR Media HQ feeling a lot more knowledgeable...not about the logistics of the platform necessarily, but more the philosophy behind it.
Anyone who’s watched Charlie Brooker’s faux-Orwell-comedy-noir trilogy Black Mirror, particularly the second episode, would have come away from the conference feeling a little dizzied at how accurate a picture he paints of the future of the internet, if the ‘expert’ views were anything to go by. Let me explain...
The main point I took away from the conference is that this new platform is building on the changing way we all use the internet in terms of search.
Search engines are fast becoming ‘recommendation engines’, whereby one day you will search for a pizza restaurant in Sheffield and Google will promote restaurants that have had positive peer comments/reviews, or ‘likes’, or your friends ‘checking in’, rather than websites heavily-laden with SEO manipulation.
This sounds a bit frightening, but most of us do it already. We all check Trip Advisor before booking a cheap internet holiday, check an eBay seller’s star rating before making a bid or even check the review section of an App before purchasing. But it won’t be long before Google knows even more about who we are, where we are...and what we think.
There are positives and negatives to this. It will be great that any searches or advertising in the future will only be aimed at who I am – everything will be targeted and relevant and I won’t have to click on every website on Google’s first page to find what I’m actually looking for. But at the same time, I like being able to ignore things that aren’t relevant to me. I have enough in my life to concentrate on without targeted information being in my face at every turn. I’m painting a verbose version of what was discussed, but it’s not difficult to reach this kind of Big Brother narrative.
Because of Google’s absolute dominance of the search space, I can only see Google making a success of a social media platform sooner or later....especially as businesses and brands will eventually cotton on to the fact that it will become more essential to search engine ranking than Twitter or Facebook. ‘Missing a trick’ could be a huge understatement if Google+ takes off.
For now, web folk are still watching with intrigue as to how the platform develops and how its finished identity might finally manifest itself. Even the experts admit that they are still unsure of the how Google+ will mature – but the early signs are that it will certainly outlast its rank predecessors.
These are my initial thoughts and I’m still trying to digest and articulate a fair few more. I’ll continue this in the New Year...but I’m going to stick my neck out and say that Google+ will be a big hit in 2012.
To be continued...
