I’ve just moved over to the agency side, and the first question a client has asked me in the new job is one I don’t yet have a confident answer to. Should we be doing something about Google+?
For anyone who has been on holiday, Google+ opened its doors three weeks ago. It’s still invite-only, a “field trial” in Google’s words, and it has landed with more genuine interest than anything Google has done in social before. Circles for sorting your contacts, Hangouts for group video, Sparks for topics you follow. The video calling in particular is properly good, which is not a sentence I expected to write about a Google product.
Here is the thing I keep coming back to when a client asks whether they should pile in. There is nothing here for a business to actually do yet. Google+ is built around personal profiles. There is no company presence, no brand page, no equivalent of a Facebook Page you can set up and start posting from. If you’re a business, the platform currently has no front door for you to walk through. Some brands have created profiles anyway and Google has been deleting them, which tells you where things stand.
So my advice to the client was to hold. Get a personal profile, have a look around, understand it as a marketer should understand anything new. But don’t build a strategy on a platform that hasn’t decided what it wants businesses to be.
The scepticism isn’t only about timing. Google’s track record in social is not encouraging. Wave was launched with enormous fanfare and shut down within a year. Buzz arrived, upset everyone over privacy, and has been limping ever since. It would be easy to file Google+ under “here we go again” and get on with your day.
But I don’t think that’s quite right either, and this is where I part company with the cynics. The difference is the +1 button. Google has spent this year putting +1 into search results and onto websites, and Google+ is the network that sits underneath it. If personal recommendations start feeding into how things rank, then Google+ stops being just another social network competing with Facebook and becomes something bolted directly onto the search results we all fight over. That is a very different proposition, and it is the reason I can’t dismiss it.
For now I’ve told the client to keep an eye on it and set up a personal account to learn it, but to build nothing on it yet. Ask me again in a few months, when Google has worked out what a business is even allowed to be on there; at the moment it doesn’t seem sure itself.
