If you’re looking for ways to drive greater engagement and satisfaction with your brand (A.K.A. Loyalty), you need to search no further than… search. Google, Bing and newbies like Blekko are integrating social networking to add relevance, reliability and engagement with search results. The ultimate vision here? To attach an individual’s most trusted resource – their friends and influencers – to the personalized results they deliver in order to make their search engines more effective and the search experience more engaging for users.

What is Google+?  What does this mean to advertisers?  What does this mean to the competition – Facebook, Twitter, Skype?  We will attempt to provide our customers with insights to all of these questions – realizing that this is still very new and much is yet to be learned.
 
What is it?  Google+ is a new social networking site being offered by Google.  It is, in concept, very much like Facebook in that it allows users to post information (videos, comments, photos) and share that information with a network of friends, family, associates – essentially any list of contacts.  The system also provides “Skype-like” video chat, and Yahoo Messenger like text chat features to allow a user to share via various media.   The list of contacts  for a user starts with the Gmail account list – which is an obvious synergy point for Google.

How is it different from Facebook?  The system has a couple of differences from the leading social networking site – Facebook – that are important.

• First, Google is marketing that it allows a user to direct with whom information is shared in a very simple way. Facebook has similar capabilities, but they are harder to control and in most cases a users’ entire contact list gets pinged on a post.  With Google+, the user will be able to direct which of its groups, or circles, get the post.
• Second, the system does not require one to accept a connection in order to get postings from another party. So one can receive updates without having to share their own.
• Third, access to this system will be even more ubiquitous than Facebook. Chrome browsers will have easy access. Android operating systems for mobile phones will have this embedded through a system called Huddle. And there will be easy ways to post YouTube videos to Google+.
• Google is intending to make it very easy for people to share information from videos through Youtube, contacts through Gmail, mobile usage through Android, and web data through Chrome. This will be the major technical advantage of the system.

Will The Google+ Project Work?  It’s too early to tell.  The marketing of The Google+ Project will come down to two issues – how easy will Google make it for people to build their networks on Google+ (answer: very easy) and whether the privacy issues they are bringing up will be salient (answer: less likely).  If Google really sees the key metric being the “mindshare gap,” then keep an eye on this statistic.  For Google to even the “mindshare gap” based on Comscore’s May data they would have to increase users time on Google for the average monthly user by 80-85 minutes.   
 
For advertisers, if Google can provide the same types of advertising opportunities currently seen on Facebook, Linked In, and other social platforms, this will be a huge opportunity for advertisers.  Ads served through Doubleclick to target the social platform, integrated with search functionality on YouTube and the main search engine for PPC – that is a powerful combination.  Google Analytics can be used to track user behavior all the way through to conversion either on the social platform, or on the search engine, with seamless reporting and analytics.  
 
Facebook’s Response? Nothing yet.  The big issue continues to be when/whether Facebook decides to build a search engine – or leverage Bing as the search engine within the platform.  Remember, Microsoft is an investor in Facebook.  If/when that happens, then as they say in football:   “It’s on!”
 
In the meantime, Facebook continues to grow, and the advertising response quality is good.

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