Google+ for Business: Exploring the Digital PR opportunities

Google+ now offers a social networking service for brands prompting  thousands of businesses to set up profiles. However, to optimise brand exposure, businesses need to understand what differentiates Google+ from its competitors and tap into its full potential.

Although it looks quite similar to Facebook, there are some features which really set Google+ apart. One of the greatest advantages of the new social networking service is its integration with Google Search. Google Search provides brands with exposure to a search base allowing access to reportedly 50% of global websites. Furthermore Google+ enables brands to streamline social media content easily across multiple platforms including Android, Google Chrome and YouTube. This could offer exciting opportunities to businesses to improve audience engagement and explore innovative ways to create and distribute marketing content.

To make its service more appealing to brands, Google+ launched its Direct Connect feature, which makes it simple for users to find and follow brands on Google+ by just typing a “+” sign in front of the name of the brand on Google Search. Another step towards strengthening the integration with Google’s search engine is the brand verification procedure at the initial registration stage. As Google+ permits the registration of multiple users with one brand name, it allows organisations to appear at the top of the search results by verifying their brand identity and linking their profiles to the company website.

As Google+ is looking to further integrate with the rest of Google’s products, the appearance of the website and its features are going to change. At the CrushIQ conference this week, Google’s spokespeople announced that they were planning to integrate Google+ with AdWords and enable multiple administrators to handle the brand pages on the website.

A further integration with products like Google Shopping and Places could open exciting opportunities for brands and advertisers to deliver micro targeted campaigns based on users’ interests, location and shopping habits. This has huge potential for brands. Furthermore they will be able to tap into Google+ features such as Circles and Hangouts to segment their Google+ followers and create targeted campaigns for engagement.

However, as social networking websites emerge almost on daily basis, a question is beckoning of how many social media profiles users can tolerate? With 40 million users worldwide Google+ is still far behind Facebook and Twitter in terms of popularity among brands and consumers.

To expand its reach, Google+ have to differentiate itself from its competitors and get the most of its integration with Google’s products to create an innovative, intelligent and pervasive social media product.

The Importance of Evolution in Social Media

Last week the news agenda was dominated by the announcements from Facebook’s F8 conference – changes for the social network were coming. True to the rumours, Facebook played along with the script and showcased a number of big changes to the site (here), all designed to give more functionality to the user.

These changes are aesthetic – more options with pictures and video, or functional like the integration of Spotify – the background to these changes is a little more crucial to the longevity of Facebook. The tech world doesn’t stand still and if you’re a brand or service that rests on your laurels then you’ll be left on the tech scrapheap a la MySpace (remember that?).

These changes are much more important to Facebook than just making it look pretty. It needed to deliver additional functionality in a space where content and engagement is critical. The launch of Google+ earlier this year shows that users are willing to try something different. While Google+ is an unknown quantity for the moment, as consumers and brands try to work out how to use its tools for the best benefit, the huge numbers of users flocking to the site (over 43 million users at the last count) must have been a worry to Facebook. Now that it’s a free to join, rather than invite-only, must concern Mr Zuckerberg furthermore.

Facebook’s answer is to evolve. It needs to provide users with what they currently want right now – a highly usable and function social media platform, but also deliver the features they will utilise and use increasing more in the future (integration of music, new apps etc). Twitter is also set to play a big part in the way the social media landscape will settle, but for the moment is watching on as the other two big guns slog it out. It’s going to be an interesting battle, where the ultimate winner is going to be the consumer as the platforms fight it out for their digital loyalty.

As the old get younger, the young do indeed get older

Part of our market trackers training series looks at different audiences and the ways that the latest social media trends are reflecting their changing profiles.  Every generation thinks that kids grow up younger but the stats do indeed, in the case, back this idea up.

Ofcom’s recent report offers some useful insights.  74% of homes now have internet access. This suggests that beyond those who do not have the means to afford it, pretty much every home with a young family has access to the web.  This offers a whole world of new opportunities: 67% of 5-7s rising to 82% of 8-11s now use the internet at home.  That’s pretty much everyone interested, so it is universal access (or close to it).  Half of these parents think their children know more about the internet than they do.  So who is leading who here?

One direct indicator of getting older younger is tweens eagerness to get onto more teenage sites.  Around a third (34%) of children aged 8-12 who use the internet at home have a social networking profile on sites, like Facebook, which requires users to register as 13 or over.  That number is up 36% in a single year and no doubt will continue to rise whilst these sites continue to be popular with teenagers. One third of 8-11s (37%) rising to two thirds of 12-15s (66%) watch YouTube regularly.  And there is a whole education to be had just on YouTube.

Another insight is offered by research commissioned by Marketing Week.  It looks at brand awareness amongst kids.  Perhaps unsurprisingly more than 90% 6-10 year olds recognise popular kids FMCG brands like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Tropicana and Ribena, alongside other classics like Nike, Adidas and Disney.  Yet as kids grow from six to ten years old, grown up brands like BlackBerry and Apple become more important and child friendly brands fade in value and importance.  This is pretty young.  Before this I would have said perhaps between 8 and 12, not 6 to 10.  It is also fascinating to note that favourite ads for older kids in the age group include GoCompare, Cillit Bang and Webuyanycar – so products aimed at adults but all with catchy jingles.

All of this has important implications for us as marketers and makes for great onechocolate market trackers.

Google+ vs. Facebook: The battle of the two contenders

The launch of Google+ was the biggest social media story recently grabbing the headlines for good and bad reasons. Just a few weeks after its launch, the website is boosting 20 million users and rapidly gaining market share in the social networking space. However, last month Google+ asked businesses not to create Google+ profiles and caused a furore with the scandal around cancelling accounts using nicknames.

In the meantime Facebook has focused a lot of efforts into improving its relationship with businesses and does not seem likely to relinquish its supremacy as the number one site in the social media world.  Last week it quietly launched Facebook for Business, a new service which offers help and advice for businesses looking to boost brand awareness and engage in a two-way conversation with the Facebook community. With more that 750 million subscribers, Facebook remains a valuable marketing and PR tool, and a great way of engagement with difficult to reach audiences.

In addition to creating a Facebook page or using Facebook Ads and Sponsored Stories, business users can choose among plenty of free business applications to boost their marketing efforts. Applications such as RatePoint and Hudle for example enable businesses to create professional communities on Facebook by sharing reviews and testimonials or creating secure workspaces for colleagues and business partners. Furthermore businesses might soon be able to use conference video calling after Facebook recently introduced video calling to boost its service portfolio.

However, as Google+ is gaining momentum, Facebook is likely to face severe competition for the attention of business customers. Last week Google+ announced that it was planning to bring business profiles and analytic tools to its social networking platform later this year. The service will allow businesses to link their profiles to products like AdWords, enabling businesses to tap into Google’s substantial online advertising platform. Furthermore Google will be able to benefit from its strong enterprise customer base to drive business customers to its new social networking offering.

As Google and Facebook continue to diversify their services, there will be much more to witness in the coming months. The business offerings of the two internet giants will create great PR and marketing opportunities for companies looking to engage with online communities and make their brands visible in the social media space. However, we are yet to see how the battle between the two contenders for the social networking crown will unfold. I would only say that it is too early to make any predictions as the social media world is full of surprises and you never know what will be the next ‘hype of the day’.

Game on, Facebook.

Enter the newest (albeit considerably tardy) player into the arena of social networks – Google+.   My first reaction was one of unbridled excitement at the fact that Google had finally decided to wake up and fight it out. The war has been long and ugly, with no one likely to forget the “furtive and creepy” smear tactics employed by Facebook against Google anytime soon.

Even if Facebook has already achieved a considerable head start (750 million users, counting last), it’s important to remember that it replaced several other networks like MySpace, Orkut and Hi5. Cyberspace is constantly evolving and it’s too early to tell whether Google’s efforts signal the demise of Facebook. However, it does indeed ensure that the nature of communication does not stay static, instead morphing continuously.

After joining and exploring, here are some major features that stood out at the moment to me :

The introduction of ‘Circles’ : Simply enough, you can sort your contacts on the network into different groups and most importantly, actively constrain the information you publish/post to selected circles – essentially giving the user complete control over who sees what, something that Facebook has had considerable trouble with. You can still eavesdrop on conversations (if the people involved let you), though, not to worry. Importantly, your colleagues no longer need to know that you’re skipping drinks with them to go bandstand busking.

It’s already managed to create quite the ‘buzz’ in the media (couldn’t resist reminding you of the disaster that was Google Buzz) and a noteworthy trend is that journalists are writing about it by directly sourcing posts on it by prominent public profiles, such as those of Christian Oeslin , the ‘Ads Guy’ for Google+. He has said that

“Google believes how individuals communicate with one another is “different from how they communicate with brands, and we want to create an optimal experience for both”

- important information for those waiting to see the marketing potential it can offer. It’s changing how journalists are using social networks too, as Mashable reports.

However, as of now, positioning itself as people- focused, privacy conscious and friendly, Google+ has removed most business and company profiles from the network, only keeping a few for the ongoing testing phase.

Another interesting point- the fact that nearly everyone with Internet access has a Google account makes the threat more tangible. Why? Think about it.  Most of us use Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs, Google maps, Picasa, Google latitude, Google Reader etc. Some of us even have iGoogle as our homepage. When these separate entities get integrated into Google+, the need to use a separate networking site like Facebook becomes redundant. It’s the same analogy as with a smartphone – the integration provided on one single device makes it more convenient for users – who needs a separate camera, a laptop, a copy of the A-Z anymore if they own a smartphone?

Of course, the robust counter argument to this is that we don’t want a Googleopoly and herald an Orwellian future. Do we? Or will we succumb to it? And quite a lot of us have only just managed to figure out the features on Facebook. Can we really handle yet another networking site? Some wars are long and some are short. We’ll just have to wait and see how this one ends.