How Credible Is Klout?
Posted on 29 April 2012 | No responses
How credible is Klout? Is it really true that people are being refused jobs in Silicon Valley because they have Klout scores below 50? It’s also been rumoured that airlines have been offering free upgrades to people with high Klout scores and likewise, that some restaurants have given priority to customers if they have a high Klout score.
If you find it hard to believe then you should take a look at this article by Seth Stevenson on wired.com. Stevenson recounts stories of interviews being cut short when lower Klout scores for interviewees were pulled up by interviewers and how these job applicants had greater success when subsequently boosting their Klout scores. He also raises these stories about the unseen power of Klout:
At the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas last summer, clerks surreptitiously looked up guests’ Klout scores as they checked in. Some high scorers received instant room upgrades, sometimes without even being told why. According to Greg Cannon, the Palms’ former director of ecommerce, the initiative stirred up tremendous online buzz. He says that before its Klout experiment, the Palms had only the 17th-largest social-networking following among Las Vegas-based hotel-casinos. Afterward, it jumped up to third on Facebook and has one of the highest Klout scores among its peers.
Klout is starting to infiltrate more and more of our everyday transactions. In February, the enterprise-software giant Salesforce.com introduced a service that lets companies monitor the Klout scores of customers who tweet compliments and complaints; those with the highest scores will presumably get swifter, friendlier attention from customer service reps. In March, luxury shopping site Gilt Groupe began offering discounts proportional to a customer’s Klout score. Read the full story here
If it is going to carry this sort of influence, it’s got to be time to assess how credible is Klout. An interesting article on this subject recently appeared in The New Yorker courtesy of Nicholas Thompson. He argues Klout is evil but can be saved. Here are a sample of his views:
Klout grades users on a scale of one to a hundred based on some proprietary algorithm that counts how often your comments are retweeted, liked, or shared. If you want your score to go up, tweet more and get influential people to retweet you. Don’t ever go on vacation. If you’re on a social network, Klout gets your score, whether you’ve ever logged into the service or not. Think of a mercenary socialite, holding a calculator and trying to figure out who to invite to a party based on import. Then put whatever number she arrives at on every guest’s lapel. That’s Klout. Rick Ross has a score of eighty-five; Rick Santorum has a score of eighty-two; Rick Perry has a score of sixty-six. Rick Astley has a score of forty-seven.
The idea is very clever, and very timely. There are all kinds of ad-hoc ways to figure out how influential people are on social networks. You can count their Twitter followers. You can figure out the ratio of followers to the number of people they follow. Or you can divide their followers by their number of Tweets. Klout takes those indicators, adds a few more, and then just gives you a number. Klout doesn’t equal real-world clout, but, as the ratio of Ricks demonstrates, the numbers are pretty good.
But clever ideas are not necessarily good ones, and Klout is designed in a way that makes it likely to fuel both unhealthy obsession and unhappy competition. When you log into Klout, it makes it easy to see, in order of score, exactly how all your friends rank. The number is more personal than those used by other social networks, and Klout displays it prominently.
The structure of social networks subtly changes the way we act. And Klout seems to encourage nothing good. To make your score go up, you have to tweet out of obligation, and you have to try to influence the other influencers. Read more
There’s certainly a place for a reliable gauge of a person’s influence in their areas of expertise, but is Klout the appropriate tool? How reliable are it’s mysterious algorithms? It certainly baffles me that I appear as an influencer in certain countries far away from me which I’ve neither visited nor expressed an opinion about. Do real influencers tear their hair out trying to play the Klout system? I suspect that most don’t give a damn but the danger is that by default a distorted gauge of how genuine an individual’s influence is being produced where groups of users with nothing better to do can pump out floods of tweets on automation to share between each other to boost their ratings on Klout. That surely cannot be the way to gauge genuine influence.
In his well argued article Nicholas Thompson believes Klout can still fulfil the role it seeks, provided it changes in some key areas including allowing privacy options. Is that your view or is there a need for a more credible alternative to Klout to emerge? Any comments would be warmly welcomed.
Google Business Page – Have You Moved There Yet?
Posted on 20 March 2012 | No responses
Does your business have a Google Business Page? If you’re a business which has invested time and money by the bucket load investing in a Facebook business page or operate a business which promotes other businesses on Facebook there’s a chance you might be a bit underwhelmed by the recent changes to Facebook business pages such as the imposition of the Facebook timeline on all pages and the ending of the option of choosing a “Welcome Page”, complete with SSL certification plus offers encouraging new visitors to like the page and join an e-mail list for that business, as it’s landing page.
There’s no mileage in complaining about these changes. Facebook obviously owns Facebook so if you want to be active there you have to sign up and comply with their terms and conditions and dance to whichever tune they wish to play and make the best of it. There is massive mileage however in looking for alternatives and one of the best of them must be a Google Business Page.
You might not be too interested in my views on this but you probably ought to be extremely interested in those of Guy Kawasaki. At the last count he had approaching 85,000 subscribers on Facebook as well as over 63,000 likes on his “Fan” page there, 1.52 million account holders have added him on Google Plus and over 721,000 follow him on Twitter, so when it comes to the major players in Social Media he’s right there at the top. He was recently interviewed in the leading online Social Media publication Social Media Examiner by it’s founder Michael Stelzner about his new book about Google+ What the Plus! Google+ for the Rest of Us
You have likely heard the buzz about Google+ for some time.
Perhaps you’re wondering why so many marketing professionals are focusing heavily on the new social network.
In this article, I sit down with Guy Kawasaki, the original Macintosh evangelist. You’ll discover why 99% of his efforts are now focused on Google+.
Guy reveals his Google+ strategy and talks about his new book, What the Plus! Google+ for the Rest of Us. And it’s very different than his other books. It reveals extensive details about how to benefit from Google+.
Mike: Guy, why should businesses consider Google+? What are the major advantages?
Guy: Businesses should jump on Google+ because it’s the Wild West, so you can stake your claim, as opposed to breaking through the noise on Twitter and Facebook.
Also, Google owns the river called search traffic. It can point this river any way that it wants.
When Google introduced the concept of “social search,” it turned SEO upside down. Now when people search on Google, they see the actions of their friends on Google+. That’s huge.
It means 1) you want people to circle you so that when they search, they see your posts and 2) you should post about what you want your followers to know you for.
If I were running a business, I would be thinking, “Why wait until I have to buy real estate in Manhattan? I should get in now and grab all of the followers I can before Google+ hits the mainstream.”
Mike: You have been a huge proponent of Twitter for some time, and later Facebook. Where does Google+ fit in for you with the other social networks and why?
Guy: I fell in love with Google+ because of the ability to edit posts, the more elegant user interface and the quality of comments.
Today, 99% of my social media effort is on Google+.
This is just an outline of Guy’s views and predictions of the future for Google+. Whether 99 per cent is an exact figure or not, it can’t help but be noticed that although it is the newest of the Social Media networks, Google+ is where the highest number of his followers are. You can bet that he would have weighed up everything before opting to focus the majority of his efforts on Google+. He certainly won’t be doing it just for fun or for the hell of it. If you’re intrigued, read the rest of the article in Social Media Examiner itself.
For even more guidance on how to make the best use of Google+, plus whether you should operate a personal account on Google Plus and/or operate a Google Business Page download the Kindle version of the book itself, What the Plus! Google+ for the Rest of Us
If you’ve got any questions about using a Google Business Page or an opinion to express, we’d love to see it in the Comments box below.
6 Skills Every Entrepreneur Must Possess
Posted on 29 February 2012 | No responses
Being an entrepreneur is no joke. It takes hard work and diligence to get a successful business off the ground and running smoothly. In order to do this, you need to be knowledgeable and skilled. But skilled at what, exactly? You have to be a master at your trade, of course. And here are six more skills every entrepreneur must possess in order to become successful.
Time Management
When you’re trying to put your ideas into action and run a business, it can seem like there are never enough hours in the day. That’s why it’s essential to make the best use of the time you do have. Good time management skills will help you get more things done in less time, which means more time left over for other pursuits and spending more time with that family you forgot you had.
Organization
Some people are naturally more organized than others. If you tend to live in chaos, it’s a good idea to learn some organizational skills and techniques that will help improve your workspace and beyond. When you suffer from poor organization, you become inefficient. Being able to find what you need is so important, as is maintaining all the little details that come with being an entrepreneur. And there are a lot of little details.
Networking
You aren’t in this alone. There are lots of people out there that can help you thrive as an entrepreneur. The trick is that you have to find them, and you do this by networking. If you can learn to effectively network with others, you will be able to form invaluable connections with important people like potential investors, mentors, and customers alike. You can never underestimate the power of good networking skills.
Closing the Sale
Being able to close the sale is a skill that many people have trouble with, but as an entrepreneur you have to learn. It’s not just about being able to make a good sales pitch. You have to be able to expand upon that pitch and turn it into an actual, accomplished sale. There are lots of techniques that will help you close a sale, and mastering what works for you is so important to the overall health of your business.
Leadership
In many cases, entrepreneurs are born leaders. To be an entrepreneur, you have to take risks. When you’re a good leader, you can convince others to take them with you. Also, your business is only as good as your employees. When you’re an effective leader to them, you have a team that will go above and beyond to help your company grow because they not only believe in it, they believe in you.
Communication
If you aren’t good at communicating, you’ll find often find yourself frustrated when your message doesn’t come across as you intended. Mixed messages can be extremely damaging to your business, as well as your relationships. Basic communication skills will help you get exactly what you want, and help you effectively promote and run your business.
Ben Sharp is a successful small business owner. To make more time for building his customer base, he uses the web’s best grammar checker to save time editing his professional writing. He gets fresh ideas for running his business by being involved in small business owner networks.
Pinterest Invitation
Posted on 21 February 2012 | No responses
Have You Received Your Pinterest Invitation?
Have you received your Pinterest invitation and, if so, are you going to accept it? If you are in any doubt as to whether to accept your Pinterest invitation then here are a few figures you may wish to chew over.
Pinterest registered more than 7 million unique visitors in December 2011 alone, up from 1.6 million in September 2011. According to a recent report from Cambridge, Mass.-based content-sharing site Shareaholic, Pinterest is driving more traffic to company websites and blogs than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined. Additionally, TechCrunch reports that Pinterest now has 11.7 million active monthly users, thus crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history. It also reports that Pinterest users now spend so much time sharing their favorite images that now only Facebook and Tumblr have more social media time on site than Pinterest. If these figures aren’t compelling enough, The Wall Street Journal reports that in January 2012, the number of visitors on Pinterest had reached almost a third of those visiting Twitter and also that Pinterest’s rate of website traffic referral was close to that of Twitter.
The seasoned online ratings assessor Alexa is declaring that Pinterest has a global traffic ranking of 57 and in the USA alone ranks it at 19. This puts it ahead of well established major websites including CNN, MediaFire, AOL, ESPN and WordPress, to name a few.
The well known social media commentator Jason Falls reports in Entrepreneur that Pinterest already is driving buyers to some websites. In the last six months, the retail deal site ideeli.com has seen a 446 percent increase in web traffic from Pinterest and sales resulting from those visits have increased five-fold.
These figures and reports illustrate the dramatic rise of a fledgling site which The Wall Street Journal declares isn’t even sure how it is going to make money, quoting board member Jeremy Levine’s statement that “Pinterest’s monetization strategy isn’t in the oven and it’s not even off the baking table. We have one hundred ideas but no execution as of yet.”
Another issue with using Pinterest is that of copyright when uploading images. The Boston Business Journal, for example, stopped using Pinterest one day after setting up its account there after realizing that it could be sued for images it uploaded to the site.
Attempting to explain the growth of Pinterest and the reasons why a Pinterest invitation is usually eagerly snapped
up, Anthony Wing Kosner in an article in Forbes Magazine explains:
1) It’s a Fun Experience: There are lots of ways to consume content curated by other people, but Pinterest is a much more enjoyable—and lean back— experience than, for instance, Facebook or even Flickr. Many users describe paging through grids of sympathetically grouped pictures addicting. The fact that there is still room for new entries in the field suggests that despite their huge popularity, social networking sites have not created great content experiences.
2) It’s Easy: Pinterest’s bookmarklet makes quick work of responding to things you see online, which turns passive viewing into active curation.* It’s simultaneously a way to share and a way to remember what you’ve seen and liked.
3) It’s About Discovery, Not Search: As pointed out earlier on TechCrunch, we go to Google or Amazon, keywords in hand, when we know what we are looking for. But how we discover things we want in the first place is still wide open. Pinterest promises to be a one-stop-shop for anything we might want to discover (at least visually).
Additionally, Anthony Wing Kosner goes on to say:
The Content is the Navigation: Again, unlike Facebook, Pinterest has a lot less visible plumbing making it all work. Without the chrome, the ads and the news ticker you’re left just navigating a lot of beautiful pictures.
It’s About Interests, Not Friends: Instead of the emphasis on who you know that has been the backbone of social networks, Pinterest is all about what you like. Shared interests are only one aspect of friendship—we don’t necessarily pick our friends because of their curation skills. Ironically, the pinboards help you get to stuff that interests you quicker by sidestepping your actual friends.
It Creates Persistent Content: Unlike Facebook and Twitter that create fleeting timeline streams of content, Pinterest’s pinboards stay put. This is great for sharing and collaborating on image collections with other people, but particularly valuable to creatives or brands with something to sell.
Time will tell whether Pinterest will be the next mega social media success story and whether it’s success will endure, but for the moment the urge to grab a Pinterest invitation amongst social media users seems to be proving irresistible.
Let’s hear whether you’ve taken up your Pinterest invitation yet or intend to when you receive one or whether you intend not to because you’re dismissing Pinterest as an irrelevant sideshow and a bubble that is waiting to burst. We would love to hear what you have to say in the Comments box below.
Adapt Change or Die – In Memory of Kodak
Posted on 20 January 2012 | No responses
I have no wish to intrude on either private grief or very public grief in the case of Kodak but I’m indebted to my good friend Harlan Kilstein for his thoughts on their demise and thought they’d be worth sharing as the fate of Kodak has a big lesson for all of us. Harlan purchased his first Kodak camera – a Brownie – at the time of the New York World’s fair in 1964. He remembers visiting the Kodak exhibit as a little kid and being blown away by what he saw.
Here is what he had to say in a recent message to me:
Kodak was HUMONGOUS. Could it get any bigger or better?
They made cameras, film, paper, chemicals, and much more.
They took photography to new levels.
They endowed schools of the arts.
Working for Kodak was a dream for many. Because once you were in with Kodak, you were set for life.
In case you didn’t know it, Kodak declared bankruptcy this week.
The unthinkable happened.
And it happened because the world went digital and Kodak refused to believe it was happening.
Kodak went on with its regularly scheduled business of manufacturing film, cameras for film, paper and chemicals and ignored the digital revolution.
They kept thinking:
This is just a fad.
People want to take their pictures into the drug store and wait a week for them to be ready.
People don’t want to be able to edit their own photos, share them with their friends, or be able to view their pictures instantly.
Guess what Kodak….
You were wrong.
Too late, as the death knell started to toll Kodak woke up and said:
“Wait! We get it. People want digital cameras! And digital printers! And they want to take video too!”
But it was too late.
The giant filed Chapter 11 Bankruptcy and the future will tell whether or not there is a role for Kodak in the future.
But it’s a powerful lesson for all of us.
Adapt Change or Die.
As humans, we tend to like things as they are.
We don’t invite change.
One of my favorite quotes is “the only one who likes change is a wet baby.”
But if you want to survive…
If you want to thrive….
You have to WELCOME CHANGE.
Don’t be like Kodak and think people are going to embrace the past.
Most people don’t want to live life in a museum.
Be flexible.
Be innovative.
offer value.
Be the best you can be.
How very true. As another friend of mine once said: “You either move with the times or you quickly find yourself being against everything.” A lot of us like things to stay the way they are but you’ll soon find out (without advocating change just for the sake of it) that you can’t afford that mentality if you want to succeed as an entrepreneur, especially in today’s fast-moving online world.
Don’t forget to share your own thoughts on this subject in the Comments box below:
How Video Marketing Can Help Your Business (An Interview With Gabriel Valo)
Posted on 11 January 2012 | No responses
Have you considered accelerating the reach of your business by using video marketing?
Even the most camera-shy person can have a beautiful and powerful sales and marketing video for their business, without busting their budget. Not only can you have beautiful and powerful sales and marketing videos for your business, you should have them or else you are wasting the quickest and most effective way to promote your business. Don’t take my word for it, take that of Gabriel Valo, one of the World’s most passionate advocates of video marketing. Gabriel is based in Singapore and has built a big name for himself when it comes to video marketing, particularly but not exclusively, in Australia. You can listen to my interview with Gabriel in full by clicking the icon below:
Alternatively you may wish to listen to the interview in three edited sections for much quicker downloads (please allow just over 30 seconds for each download):
My Video Marketing Interview With Gabriel Valo – Part 1
My Video Marketing Interview With Gabriel Valo – Part 2
My Video Marketing Interview With Gabriel Valo – Part 3
So what’s your take on video marketing? Have you considered giving it a try. Maybe you already use video marketing. Do share your experiences, either positive or negative, by responding in the Comments box below. In the meantime, Gabriel is offering a FREE consultation offer for the first 100 respondents to contact him after listening to the audio.
If you want to take advantage of Gabriel’s great FREE consultation offer for the first 100 respondents you can contact him now via his business address: Gabriel@goneviralmarketing.com.au. He’ll be delighted to hear from you!
Any other business owners seeking an interview with me are very welcome to contact me via one of my social media platforms accessible from this page.
The New Look Twitter
Posted on 13 December 2011 | No responses
Those of you who are active Twitter users will by now be aware that there is a new look to Twitter. The new look Twitter has an appearance that looks closer to Facebook than the old style Twitter’s text only format. Even before users sign in, they are presently with a glossy image which paves the way for a new more “picture-heavy” appearance to the site itself. Further tabs have also been added to the menu for users.
The new look Twitter has new navigation tabs on the top left of the page. These include a discovery tab, letting users tap into search results based on their personal interests, a home tab, and a connect tab. To the top right, after the Search option, is a new Tweet button and a more simplified way of embedding users’ photos and videos. Just like Facebook’s new timeline, everything is served up in columns.
Clicking the “Me” tab will reveal a much more expansive profile page where your followers can tweet directly to you and view your lists, favourites, followers and photos, almost in the style of a Facebook personal profile page.
In fact many critics are accusing Twitter of “having done a Facebook”. One such critic, but not the only one is Pluggedin.co.uk, a technology news, advice and reviews site operated in association with Comet, Stuff, T3, Tech Radar and What Hi-Fi? Sound and Vision, where an article posted on 9th December argues:
Twitter has gone and done a Facebook on us by updating and dramatically changing the look and feel of the website.
So far there has not been the barrage of whining and moaning that comes with every tiny change Facebook makes to its interface.
This is probably because the new-look Twitter is an improvement on the old design, and the new features add to the experience. As Twitter aims to attract more people and businesses to the site, they have gone for simplicity and aesthetics.
Twitter currently has around 100 million active users. Not bad, but when you see that Facebook is closing in on the billion-user mark, it is no wonder that Twitter wants more followers.
So gone are the cluttered pages and dark design, replaced by a sleek, simple design that is much more light and airy.
Old-hands may be a little put off by the rearranging of the homepage, but the navigation is basically the same. And where it might have taken a couple of sessions to get used to how Twitter works, noobs will now be able to pick it up much quicker.
And the homepage now has a much larger space for viewing Tweets, presumably to make the most of embedded pictures and videos.
This feature is also on the Me page (formerly your profile page), and lets you view content in a much more straightforward way.
Another interesting new feature is the Discover tab. This is basically the ‘Activity’ function version 2.0, and will show you a stream of Tweets and content that Twitter thinks match your interests. Rest of Article
It’s argued that these changes will make Twitter more accessible and that it will become a real challenger to Facebook, but that is a very big call with Facebook’s near 1 billion users dwarfing Twitter’s approximately 100 million active users. The main attraction of Twitter, namely the speed at which anything can be posted is unaffected, but like anywhere else, substantial change brings with it the risk of alienating existing users. Not every account has been uploaded to the new style Twitter, and some accounts seem to fluctuate between the old style and the new look Twitter, but the changes are due to roll out to all accounts in the coming weeks.
So if you are an existing Twitter user, will the changes put you off using Twitter, encourage you, or make no difference? If you don’t use Twitter will these changes encourage you to become a user. Do let us know by making use of the comments box.
Gary Vaynerchuk’s Take On Social Media (Keynote @ RE/MAX Annual Convention 2011)
Posted on 7 December 2011 | No responses
Gary Vaynerchuk‘s take on social media: “Everybody gets on Facebook & Twitter and starts pushing. You are trying to close too fast and need to relax.”
If you don’t know Gary Vaynerchuk, he has over 908,000 followers on Twitter, 72,500 Facebook Fans and 106,000 Google Plus account holders have included him in their Google+ Circles. (Just click the above image of Gary to view & listen)
This keynote is well worth the hour it will take to watch it. You can always leave it on in the background while you’re working if you must, but make sure you let his messages sink in, especially his take on traditional marketing like Yellow Pages. It’s also very entertaining! When it comes to social media, Gary Vaynerchuk knows what he is talking about!
As always, I’d be pleased to receive and respond to comments.
E-Mail Organization – Organising Your E-Mails
Posted on 13 November 2011 | No responses
Have you mastered the essential skill of organising your e-mails?
If you are like me, I suspect that every day you get hammered by 100′s of emails from other Internet Marketers. You probably dismiss most of those emails as junk, but do you realise that some of them will be really helpful? Perhaps you do but you feel overwhelmed by how can you make effective use of them? Indeed, regardless of their value, how can you stay organized and know exactly how or what action to take?
It doesn’t matter if the person is someone you like or not, you can learn just as much from bad marketing as you can from good marketing. You can often see what’s wrong as soon as you open their e-mails, eg the one’s who can’t even be bothered to address you by name or the one’s which always try to sell a different affiliate product.
If for some reason you can’t stand getting someone’s emails and it ruins your day, then unsubscribe from them and move on!
What I’d recommend however, is that you take an hour or so to go through the past week of emails. Create folders for the Internet Marketers that interest you (good and bad) and start indexing all of their emails everyday inside their folder.
It’s important to note that you want to keep track of the bad marketers too – not just the ones you like.
“Patrick, how do I know who is a bad marketer?”
If you’re brand spanking new to Internet Marketing you might not know, but that’s OK. Whoever annoys you the most in their emails is usually doing something wrong and is not a good marketer. Therefore they probably can’t help you at this time, but that doesn’t mean they won’t in the future which is why it’s still worth saving their emails.
So why do we do this?
The secret is not to watch what they are marketing to you, but HOW they market to you.
That one sentence is one to remember. It could be one that changes everything.
Studying the way other Internet Marketers market to you will open up another world to you. That transparency will set you free and save you years off your learning curve.
In order for you to grow your business more rapidly, you need to be studying Internet Marketing as an art. This means studying what the other top Internet Marketers are doing. Why re-invent the wheel? All you need to know about making money is already right there, being marketed to you!
There is so much information to consume that is readily available. Most of that information you will find through your
emails. I mean let’s be honest here.. I can almost bet you most of the stuff you have learned has been through another marketer recommending you to check out a piece of information via an email?
Sure you can Google your life away but doesn’t that suck? Isn’t it time consuming….so most of you will rely on the call to action that is made inside your inbox. The information you’ve subscribed to.
This is why you must be organized with your email inbox by indexing the good from the bad.
This might seem pretty elementary but most people don’t even do this, so they stay stuck in the mud, spinning their wheels.
Do likewise with webinars. Some do get taken down quickly, but others are not. Assemble them by their author or subject and you will soon have a library of valuable training material to refer to and act upon, often almost as good as the course that the webinar host is seeking to market to you for a hefty fee! If you simply leave them in your inbox, they will quickly get lost and be forgotten and wasted.
If you’re still sceptical, you’ll also find that by trying this exercise, it will get you more focused and organized, allowing you to take the precise action that can make a difference.
I therefore urge you to get in the mindset of studying marketing campaigns. Precise action will allow you to consume more information, index good from bad and then grow from each. The end result will then be that you’ll make more money, and faster!
Facebook vs Google Plus: Writing Off Google+ Could Be A Big Mistake
Posted on 6 November 2011 | 10 responses
Many commentators have enjoyed describing the arrival of Google Plus as a Facebook vs Google Plus battle. Reports in recent weeks suggest that Google Plus numbers are stagnating and that users are now drifting back to Facebook. This has led some commentators to pronounce that Facebook has won the battle, but is this actually the case? An alternative view that’s starting to gain ground argues that writing off Google+ could be a big mistake and that Google’s strategy with Google Plus has been misread. Far from competing with Facebook over user numbers, Google may in fact be pursuing a completely different approach but one designed to ensure their ultimate hegemony. For Google numbers of users could be less important than attracting the lion’s share of online advertising and overall user activity, and that Google holds the aces needed to achieve this. One of the more informative posts taking this view was posted on VentureBeat.com by Jolie O’Dell.
Over the past couple of weeks, the Internet’s frothy enthusiasm over Google+ has dried into proclamations of its imminent death.
Social media experts and bloggers who were one month ago hailing the fledgling service as the second coming of Christ are now calling it a graveyard and a ghost town.
But from where Google executive Bradley Horowitz sits, in an office on the Google campus in Mountain View, the vista isn’t nearly so dire.
“I don’t blame the pundits,” he says, “they’re not privy to our long-term strategies.”
The comment may seem snide or passive-aggressive; it’s also true to some extent. To understand Google’s plans for Plus, Horowitz says, you need to listen less and watch more.
“Six months from now, it will become increasingly apparent what we’re doing with Google+,” he says with a measure of opacity. “It will be revealed less in what we say and more in the product launches we reveal week by week.”
Over the past couple of weeks, we have, in fact, been seeing Google+’s social features creep into other Google web products, including Reader and Blogger.
We were clued into the real scope of Google’s plans by Louis Gray, a relatively new employee of the company who is a product marketing manager for Google+. A few weeks ago, Gray gave us a glimpse at the long view: Plus isn’t a social network; it’s Google’s new way of getting you to use all its web products.
Now, Horowitz confirms that conception. As I explain to him the vision that Gray explained earlier to me, he says, “directionally, the world you’re describing is the world we aspire to. And it will be much better than the current state for our users.”
What is Google+?
Too many pundits and tech bloggers have made the mistake of thinking of Google+ as a Facebook competitor, but it’s absolutely not — at least not as far as Google is concerned.Of course, Google is still in the business of competing with Facebook for ad dollars. That boils down to compiling the best, most actionable data about consumers to sell to advertisers.
And if Plus catches on, Google stands a much better chance of accomplishing that goal, not by orchestrating a Great Migration of users from one social network to another, but by subtly linking all your Google-powered online activity and profiles so advertisers can see a more complete picture of you than Facebook could ever offer.
But that’s just the follow-the-money part of the story of how Google is banking on staying in the black. As far as what you, the average end user, are expected to do to use Google+, there’s a lot less effort involved than you might think.
After all, Google is a company renowned for the massive collective brainpower of its workforce, and no one in that workforce really expected a billion people, give or take, to switch their online lives and relationships to a new destination.
Rather, Google+ is simply a new way of accessing Google’s web search. And Gmail. And Google Maps.
In other words, Google+ is (or soon will be) part of all of those products, rather than a standalone social network of its own.
“We think of Google+ as a mode of usage of Google,” says Horowitz, “a way of lighting up your Google experience as opposed to a new product. It’s something that takes time to appreciate, even internally. It’s easy to think of Google+ as something other than just Google, and I think it’ll take more launches before the world catches up with this understanding.”
Until the world does catch up, however, Google has to find its own metrics for success. Users are complaining they don’t see enough activity in their circles, that too few people are coming to Plus to hang out and interact.
Then again, if you buy into the idea that Plus isn’t, pardon the pun, a hangout or destination per se, you can accept the idea that Google+ could still be a success without massive amounts of public sharing and user activity. Original article
Could it be then that whilst Facebook may have won a battle, Google Plus will go on to win the war? Whichever view you hold, the longer we as users have a choice the better that must be. Do let us have your point of view.
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