Tag Archives: google+

Social Media is Marketers’ El Dorado: Hype or Reality?

I am sure you noticed that also: it seems that with this economy (check the recently published World Economic Report 2011 by Financial Times), while worldwide financial markets suggest to pursue a modern “gold rush”, it looks like companies are rather pursuing some kind of “social rush”. Never like in these months businesses are talking about social media, using them, investing in them, hiring people to manage them and launching new ones. And funny enough, social media are the most frequent news on the traditional press.

The debate is still open: some say social media are a tremendous business and an incredibly effective channel for marketing and invest more and more on them (revenues are expected to double for Facebook and go from $45M to $400M for Twitter) , hire people, web agencies, buy platforms and reinvent their business.

Some others consider social media just a waste of time, a hype on its way to a decline and proudly tell they are not on social networks and they don’t need to be there. Maybe they did not notice their audience is there. I wonder why struggle with sending marketing messages all over places where your clients may just walk by, instead of those where they spend their time.

I am currently running a Social Media survey (please take it here, it’s just 10 questions) and my results say it clearly: more than half the interviewed companies are planning to increase their marketing dollars on social media for 2012. Final results to be published soon on this blog.

So I am sure many still wonder: will social media last?

Breath and relief: according to a recently published study by InSites Consulting, with a population of over 7Billion and 2Billions today already connected to social networks, only half of them (about 1B) are already on social networks. So there is definitely room for an improvement!

Social media adoption is uneven across the globe: In Europe, people join on average 1,9 social networks. In USA it’s 2,1; Brazil 3,1 and India 3,9. Uneven is also the social media awareness: while Social Insites estimates that Facebook awareness is about 100% of total connected population, and about 75% used it (with over half connecting every day), Twitter is used by only 16% of those who are aware of it.

With Facebook being at around 750M and remembering about that other analysis I posted back in July about the social media adoption curve, drawing from the Rogers’ model on technology adoption, this is an additional confirmation of my thoughts: we are almost half the way on the social media technology adoption curve. And with 2B connected out of the 7B, the more time goes, the situation should not change that quickly.

So, to answer our question: are social media the new El Dorado? The short answer seems Yes.

Yes, because according to this study, people join more than 1 social network, with Asia driving the truck to up to 4 social networks per person (I wonder how much this may be influenced by languages). See this image to learn more:

Please don’t jump yet for your happyness: “No” could still be a possible answer. The study also reports – sorry Google+, bad news- that about 60% declare they don’t want any additional social network, and about 93% are either not planning to leave the SNs they are in, or not entering new ones.

Surely, results leave some room for all those startups launching new social networks in these months. And creative ideas or social networks around shared passions (shopping, travel, sports, food, business, etc) are still likely to attract members- you don’t need to abandon your favorite social network and join a new one. You can stay on both.

Nevertheless, with these numbers in mind, and the current penetration of existing social networks, the message is crystal clear: big existing social networks will get bigger; small social networks will get smaller. After all, it seems this rule applies to the entire economy in this global financial cycle.

You may had an idea of how big Facebook is willing to become if you remember Mark Zuckerberg’s speech at the f8 conference, where Facebook presented the latest news and future developments about the most crowded social networks. When talking about the apps and developers of Facebook apps, he said Facebook has been working with “over a thousand companies to develop new things on Facebook”.

To all those who are still quite sceptical about Social Media and Social Media marketing (according to the preliminary results from my survey, lack of support from execs is one of the top reasons for not having a social media strategy), I suggest they have a look at this image and see that not only their clients are on social media, their clients are also waiting for them and asking for something! Also those whose social media strategy equals to having banners placed on social networks or a facebook page with zero interaction should consider a proper social media strategy. Need help?

Lessons learned:

  • Social Media are today what IT has been in the past: not just a tool, but a nessessary component of every business strategy
  • Your clients are on social media. Why are you wasting your marketing budget somewhere else?
  • Your clients are on social media and are willing to talk to you.
  • Social media are the easiest and highest potenial for word of moouth: have your sales on social media and have them listen to your clients needs.
  • Different geographies have different social media penetration and potential. That potential also applies to your business.
  • Never underestimate the importance of the word “social” in social media / social networks.

Related posts and resources:

Social media around the world 2011

View more presentations from steven van belleghem

Facebook’s new users decline after the launch of Google+, while the two companies fight a new “War of the Roses”

It seems Google+ and Facebook have started some sort of “cold war”, with Google preventing a former employee (now with Facebook) to add more people to his circles, and Facebook blocking Google+ ads on its social network, while media and social media experts start showing their preference by publishing either too positive or too negative articles about G+.  Some independent forums also are not liking some form of censorship in G+.

Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas in "The War of the Roses" (1989)

While the new “War of the Roses” goes on, I was wondering how Google plus is affecting – or may be affecting- current and forthcoming marketing efforts.

While some sources say that a good number of companies are in line waiting to build their company pages on Google+, I was thinking of those whose marketing dollars have been invested in Facebook already:

- Is there any risk companies should evaluate when deciding about their social media marketing dollars?

- Are there countries where Facebook-based marketing campaigns could be at risk?

- are there countries whose Facebook campaigns are “safer” and not impacted by a migration of fans to G+?

In order to answer these questions, I started comparing some figures about Facebook users growth by Country, and compared the last two weeks of June (before G+ was launched) with the first two weeks of July (when G+ was launched).

Analysis by SocialNetConomy, 2011

Interesting enough, in the past two weeks, while Google got 10 million new registered users since its launch, Facebook’s new users grew less than the previous 2 weeks. As shown in the picture above (SocialNetConomy, 2011), out of the 213 Countries where Facebook is present, new users registrations declined by some 3.4 million during the past two weeks.

Which Countries got the biggest decline?

The figure below represents the top 20 countries in Facebook (those with the majority of users, regardless of the Internet penetration in that Country). Top 20 countries decline, in terms of new Facebook registrations as a total, is slightly over 2 million.

Analysis by SocialNetConomy, 2011

Some countries slowed down more than others – and there is some confirmation in the recently launchedunofficial Google+ statistics website.

Analysis by SocialNetConomy, 2011

Data show a vast majority of countries experienced a slowdown – between 0.2 % and 1.3% of their overall Facebook users base for the top 20 countries. The table shows the difference between the number of new users registered in the June 15-June 30 (2011) timeframe, minus the number of new Facebook users registered in the the past two weeks (July 1- 15, 2011, after G+ launched).

The table shows the top 10 “declining countries” (additional data are available on request).

Suggestions to marketers investing on Facebook:

We are still at the beginning of G+ vs Facebook, but surely something more to consider on the marketers’ plate is how to keep people engaged on the platform they invested on. This could also be a good reason for Facebook to get closer to those brands whose pages may be keeping their fans on Facebook and that may keep Facebook growing. It could be a win-win if thhey manage to get closer to each other and become more “social”.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+: who is using social media and what to expect from social media marketing in the future

There’s no day you open a news website or a printed newspaper and you do not find any article about social media or social networks. And increasingly, there are no talks with friends where you don’t mention the word “Facebook”, whether it’s about an event, a birthday or a photo album or some other gossip about your friends.

So, while the big giants of the web (unless you spent the past couple of weeks in a cave you should know I am talking about Facebook and Google) place their army on the two main buttons of your mouse, I started investigating how big is the social media effect on the business side of our life and what we should expect in the future.

Surely, when scrolling down the virtual wall of my Facebook friendsfeed, I can tell there is a huge Facebook penetration  in the business world (at least considering how active my friends are on commenting pictures and updating their status during their working hours). After all, if one every 6 minutes is spent on Facebook (according to ComScore’s research), some of those minutes must come from your office time. I heard someone bought an iPhone to stay on Facebook during office hours, after their company blocked access to it.

But, seriously: how big is Facebook penetration in today’s business? We all know big brands and large companies have a massive social media presence. But how many companies are really adopting social media as part of their strategy?

I found an interesting study on adoption of social links and plugins by the world’s 10000 largest websites. It provides a clear proof point we are just half way through the way that brings business close to their customers.

Less than 50% of the top 10000 websites have links to either of the two major social networks (Facebook and Twitter) on their front pages.

This gives us an interesting view of where we actually stand, what Social Media really is, and gives us room to understand what we should expect in the forthcoming months.

I believe we should take some little assumptions before moving ahead and get to the point:

  • Social media are about a new technology-based channel, and this is exactly how we should consider it.Social Media are not about a new marketing strategy.
  • While IT has become part of every company strategy, since it affects all units of a company, it seems social media (yet being substantially a “technology”), has not become part of the company strategy, though it’s about the company brand, and not just the number of fans on a facebook page. At least, this is true for about half the companies, it seems.
  • We need to consider Social Media’s users lifecycle like other technologies (please note the graph below has been authored in the 60’s by Everett Rogers) and we should keep in mind this is about SOCIAL, not only about media:

Rogers' bell curve

According to Rogers, who analyzed the technology adoption for farm practices, the adopters categories can be summarized as:

-          innovators – had larger farms, were more educated, more prosperous and more risk-oriented

-          early adopters – younger, more educated, tended to be community leaders

-          early majority – more conservative but open to new ideas, active in community and influence to neighbours

-          late majority – older, less educated, fairly conservative and less socially active

-          laggards – very conservative, had small farms and capital, oldest and least educated

We should of course consider those “less educated” companies in terms of being less educated in social networks.

We just miss another piece of information to understand what the possible future scenario can be: how old are today’s social media users? I found a nice infographic and took the numbers I needed from this analysis:

Keeping in mind what we just saw about the Rogers’ bell curve, the fact that LinkedIn users are usually older than Facebook and Twitter users, is another factor to keep in mind, and here is why:

-          traditionally, when talking about marketing, B2C marketing has been the one of the “early adopters”. Data confirm this theory for social media adoption by business brands: B2C companies are those topping the ist of most followed pages on Facebook and handles on twitter.

-         Interactions in the B2B business are those who likely happen in the senior executive level of companies: they are those taking decisions, they are those likely more “aged”, and they are those who we may likely consider being in the “late majority” and “laggards” portion of the “Rogers’ bell curve”, and they seem also those who have a higher presence on LinkedIn (the business network), which, in fact, has older users than the two most used social networks Twitter and Facebook.

Future scenarios for business: What shall we expect in the future of social media?

-          Social media marketing is all about building and increasing brand reputation while dealing directly with clients. To listen to them mainly, and to tell them also. This means increasingly, companies will centralize their brand strategies and integrate it with the company (marketing) strategy- which means social media strategy will call marketers and IT departments to talk more and more, like IT talks with company execs today.

-          B2B marketing will increasingly adopt the social media channel, and will likely develop a bigger presence on major social networks, including LinkedIn. This also means those companies operating in the B2B business will have to learn how to develop a “brand” strategy. The good news is B2B already knows how important is to “listen”.

-          LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter users will have a more similar average age.

-          Google+ and its pages for business will have a relevant impact on the social media marketing games and they have the huge potential of attracting those markets whose presence is not yet that high in social media.

Facebook fan pages vs (forthcoming) Google+ pages for business: lessons learned and tips

While waiting for Google+ business pages (and not only) to be officially open (after they let some brands get in, then blocked them, then re-opened again), I thought it was good to have a look at what happened with Facebook’s most famous fan pages.Especially since we all know this “social networks battle” is not just about social networks.

Also, after Facebook announced that some brands will have a dedicated offering to their fans, based on fans’ Klout scores, I thought it was good to have a look at klout scores too. I actually found something very interesting.

I started my analysis by finding the top 10 brands in a specific sector (I focused my attention on food and beverage) and started with gathering information about their Facebook fans, their twitter followers and their Klout score, since it seems these are the most used reference “numbers”. Interesting enough, while some Facebook fan pages gather over 10M fans, the relevance of their twitter followers and their Klout score seems totally not correlated.

After investigating on how they moved their social media steps, I found every brand has its own strategy and, while some of them have a complete integration between mobile apps, twitter and Facebook page (like, for example Starbucks does), some others stay definitely more simple.

But for a couple of them, the story on how their Facebook presence was created is really awesome: the Coca-Cola Facebook page was, in fact, created by 2 Coca-Cola fans from Los Angeles, who just went viral and got to page having over 3M fans in 2009. At that time, in 2009, they were contacted by Coca-Cola, who asked them to keep taking care of their page. And today, Coca-Cola ranks first in the top 10 brands on Facebook. Surely Coca-Cola had a very intelligent use of RFID – and not in their supply chain!- and a good partnership with Facebook. In fact, their Coca-Cola village 2010 experiment helped them gathering more fans. And Coca-Cola was the first to experiment RFID-enabled Likes for their page.

Definitely a great example of using the page for actually listening to the fans and spotting the best technology to get more visibility. They are also very active on their twitter, though their activity seems pretty much interacting directly with their followers. Good to have them feeling close to the brand.

Another fan page-  amongst the top 10 – created by a fan is the Nutella Facebook page. And interesting enough, the Nutella page is one of the most simple pages too! (I love the world map on the Facebook Info page, done with bread and Nutella, by the way).

So if your brand finds that you have a good number of fans on an unofficial page, think twice before asking Facebook to close that page (which is in your rights), especially if fans are well engaged and if the creators of that page give your brand a good reputation. Also, you may actually be saving some good $$.

Another interesting thing I found about the top ten pages, as anticipated at the beginning of this post, is that not all have a twitter presence (having worked mainly in Italy and only for a few months in the US, I am not really surprised the 2 products, both owned by an Italian brand, don’t also use twitter): I am referring to Ferrero Rocher and Nutella.

That’s not all. I found something even more interesting from this analysis. I am sure you all would think those pages with the majority of online interactions, integration of apps and twitter and with the most effective marketing on social media would translate – if not in an immediate revenue- at least in more visits on your corporate website, where maybe your talks can be more direct and more focusing on increasing your revenues. Wrong! Those pages with less interactions and links are those actually getting more traffic on their website  – at least according to compete – which tells you how your competitors are performing online. Data show website traffic trends for Ferrero (owner of both Nutella and Ferrero Rocher) and Coca-Cola for the past 12 months or so.

Ferrero’s website traffic increase seems more evident than Coca-Cola’s

What shall then brands do on Google+ to have winning strategies?

Surely, keep building brand reputation, increasing your clients and fans experience, letting them really interacting with the brand. Maybe suggesting contests and making your business page your hub for all your country-based marketing initiatives- If you are doing this on G+, you may likely be able to use google maps to point your audience to dedicated events (taking inspiration from the food trucks of famous New York restaurants), or use Circles to create dedicated messaging on upcoming events, promotions, and roadshows, or even use hangouts and let your fans use their own creativity to keep the ball rolling.

Facebook fan pages vs Google+ business pages:

Another good point to keep in mind is the different words used by the two companies to call their “branded” pages. Facebook, which is somehow more of a “vox populi” creation, and as Zuckerberg has pointed out, it’s all about leaving people a chance to create that 95% they want to add to what they give them, as reported in this article.Business pages on Facebook are called fan pages, and this sounds so nice and customer centric.

Google+ calls these pages “pages for business”.

Whatever you will do on G+, don’t forget to listen to what they have to tell you first. They may give you the right input to start your campaign.

10 Reasons Why Google’s Social Network May Fail (Again)

I have been playing with Google Plus for about a week and read many comments and discussions about it. I also posted some comments myself. I believe there are a few reasons why Google+ may fail, and I am really concerned about privacy:

1-      Google Plus’ beta testing is lasting for too long. Invites do not really work and you also have to consider the frustration of those who get an email from the system – after their friends shared something- and still cannot get in. It’s been open since a week already for beta. It’s Google.. isn’t a week too long?

2-      It does look like too much like Facebook, yet not behaving like that (it’s more like a mix between Facebook and Twitter), and it’s far more complicated than Facebook.

3-     No iPhone app available yet. The choice of launching such a global service before an iPhone app was ready has not been a good choice. You cannot ignore 40M users (this is the number of daily users of the Facebook for iPhone app, according to Facebook’s data). We are in the mobile era. A good thing would have been maybe to open G+ in preview to Android users only.

4-      There are serious privacy concerns about how content is shared – very similar to twitter- and how it (may) appear on search engines. Google+ says in its privacy policy ” be aware that when you share something through Google+, anyone who received it may share it with others”. Wow. Really?

5-      Google’s apps are not integrated with G+, while they are almost all integrated into the black navigation bar – too bad you get G+ notifications, but you don’t get those from Gmail or other apps. So what’s the point of having them all? Just for their use maybe?

6-      It took over 5 years for Facebook to become what it is today. We go there because all our friends are there. We are used to it. Like it or not, I think it’s absolutely useful and cool. It cannot take just a few weeks or months for G+ to beat it.

7-      Facebook is what it is because users wanted it. G+ is pushing its own Facebook because they want it.

8-      G+ didn’t tell us why we should move to G+. We know why of course, but I mean they did not provide us with a good reason for it.

9-      It looks like it’s been created for users that are younger than those who spend the majority of time on Facebook (over 35). Younger generations do not spend a lot of money on websites and not a lot of time on brands pages, interacting with them, unless they are related to music and fun. And there’s no music app on Google.

10-  And, more important: It will not take long to realize how seriously we should worry about our privacy. Consider how bad is having Google gathering too much information about us: they already know our search habits and what we are looking for (they are the most used search engine), they know our browsing habits (don’t forget they have Google Analytics for a large majority of WW websites!) and they know our company’s website analytics and our banners performance (who clicks on our banners), and they host our office documents, they host our Gmail emails (those we use to register to all newsletters and websites, hence they know what happens to open rate and click through), and so on. They just missed a piece: how we get there, who are we influenced by and who we can influence. Now, with Circles, they will know this. How much will this mean in terms of advertising and marketing dollars? In the meantime, Facebook is protecting our privacy against Google’s attacks.

 

 

Facebook to announce something “awesome” next week – is it really about Skype?

As you will recall, at the beginning of last week, while Google was creating the buzz around its forthcoming Google+, Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook was going to announce something awesome next week.

Mashable, one of the most followed news portals around new tech and social media, yesterday announced the “awesome” news was about the integration of the Skype Video chat with Facebook. While surely this would definitely be a good improvement for Facebook, I don’t see it being that “awesome”. So I decided to investigate a bit further.

This is why I believe it may not be just that:

Facebook and Microsoft started a long-lasting relationship back in August 2006, when they signed an exclusive agreement which made Microsoft the exclusive advertising platform for Facebook. This deal was worth 900M$  and it was for 3 years. In 2007 Facebook and Microsoft Corp. announced that the two companies were expanding their advertising partnership till 2011 and that Microsoft was taking a $240 million equity stake in Facebook’s next round of financing at a $15 billion valuation.

In 2008 Facebook implemented Microsoft’s Live search in its pages and in 2009 the two companies announced a further integration with Bing. While Facebook was integrating search with social network, Google launched its first OS: Chrome (2008). In 2009 Facebook purchased FriendFeed, somehow similar to twitter, but not as “followed” as the original.

Big things happened in 2010.

Bing search service started to mine anonimized data from consumer usage of Facebook’s (recently introduced) Like buttons, and Microsoft signed a partnership with Bing, and then added Facebook into Outlook. [Question to self: will Google use anonimized data for our searches while we are logged in on G+?]

In the meantime, some other partnerships didn’t go through: Apple and Facebook didn’t find any agreement for Ping, Apple’s music-social-network on iTunes, and Microsoft and Twitter didn’t partner on Bing (Twitter recently announced an agreement with Yahoo Japan). Apple made it to Twitter though, and the next iOS will have Twitter already integrated. And still during these times, Google had again social network troubles, with Buzz (its first attempt was Orkut, only successful in Brazil).

2011, so far, seems an year of surprises, or at least the year of the truth:

-          Facebook hires: starting with Orkut’s business development person, and going to Microsoft’s global ad sales head Carolyn Everson – which was about to turn into a possible legal action, till the most recent hacker who jailbroke the iPhone and PS3 seem actually going to mark another milestone in the Facebook story. Facebook also buys some software companies, such as Sofa.

-          Microsoft buys Skype for 8.5B$. Definitely a big thing for Facebook, after the integration with Live Messenger, definitely Skype would have been the next one. So not really awesome I would say- at least not such a surprise, we all knew it was coming. It would be awesome if we could share videos in real time – a true real live feed and video, from our mobile – which is the most used way to upload pictures on Facebook- made possible through the integration of Skype and Facebook. This would also make sense if we keep in mind the Seattle-based team who developed this “awesome” thing is definitely focused on mobile-related technologies and applications.

(Click to enlarge- this has been adapted from http://www.flickr.com/photos/michperu/3702942040/ )

-    In the meantime, Google launches updated profiles in February and then more recently Google +, integrating and enhancing its previous unsuccessful social attempts and its successful apps, and tapping into common users for gathering feedback, while creating great expectations by limiting the access to a few users only.  [I’m one of the lucky ones- see my preliminary thoughts here]

So now, what shall we expect as forthcoming awesome announcements? Surely the Skype one is a big thing, but let’s try and think about what we could really call awesome (and surprising):

-          Not sure you noticed, but LinkedIn is looking more and more like Facebook. I just noticed in the past couple of days how comments on LinkedIn and Facebook look so incredibly similar in terms of shape, colors and available links (Like-Comment-Share). And not sure you noticed, while Facebook was testing quietly its own LinkedIn app (BranchOut) since a while using LinkedIn API with no issues, as soon as Monster announced its own Facebook app (BeKnown) quite loudly, LinkedIn closed its API quickly – to both apps. What if the “awesome” announcement was an integration of Facebook and LinkedIn? After all, they are the two big ones in the social space.

-    Another big thing could be a “Triangle”, with Facebook, Microsoft and Apple all together.

I would definitely call awesome an announcement about Facebook being implemented into the next iPhone5. After all, each of them has a good reason for competing with Google this hard battle -and a triangle, on a funny note, would be the perfect opponent to Circles ;-)

  • Google’s Chrome OS didn’t make Microsoft its best friend
  • Google’s Android apps are Apple’s apps biggest enemy
  • Google’s “Plus” social network now seems a much serious obstacle to Facebook’s growth

While waiting for the announcement to become official and for the next big things coming to our browsers and our phones, it’s good to consider that all that happened during these past 4 years of strategic partnership between Facebook and Microsoft, and all that Google and Apple made during these past 4 years,  are depicting an interesting scenario for a number of markets, not only the social networks one:

-    the advertising market – think about how Facebook has changed it and how Google+ can add our personal habits to all already know information about our searches, all company websites traffic and all other G-apps that we use every day- and don’t forget about related implications on all those sectors who are increasingly “socializing” their marketing strategies. A lot has been said about Facebook and privacy: shall we worry about Google and privacy? Google may know too much about us: our circles, how we influence them, what we look for, how we purchase, where we click, how our websites are performing and what are our Internet habits, other than our life habits, what are the files we share for work and for fun, what we like to play and what we want to read. Think about applying advertising to Sparks and to Circles we influence. G+ may be 1984.

-          the mobile phones market – once upon a time there was RIM’s Blackberry, whose aim was to increase workers’ productivity, and today the mobile war is moving to Apple’s OS and Android, with Microsoft gaining shares, with less focus on productivity and more on internet traffic (on social networks… somehow killing productivity). Don’t forget about mobile carriers and their increased revenues coming from data. Here the battle is more interesting between Google and Apple.

-    the OS market, with Google launching its Chrome OS in 2008 and openly declaring war to Microsoft (and Apple)

-    the app development and gaming market – just think about Facebook’s revenues with Zynga and about the recent announcement that Google+ will soon launch games on its platform, not to mention Microsoft’s Live meeting gaming platform. Did you know people on Facebook install 20 million applications every day?

-    the social networks market – just think about MySpace. Or just about Facebook’s revenues. Then add Google and Apple’s Ping. And don’t forget about LinkedIn and Twitter.

-    the cloud: Google did not invent it, but definitely contributed to make it become one of the biggest thing under the spotlight. Apple recently spoke about the iCloud. Microsoft’s Office 365 is there too.

Whatever it will be, we will surely be impacted. Not sure about you, but I am happy I am here witnessing these happenings.

These are my thoughts. What’s your take?

Google+ vs Facebook: Is It Just About Social Network?

Taking advantage of the LinkedOut situation this morning (LinkedIn returned a 500 error), I managed to spend some time on Google+.

The move about having users being able to get on G+ only by invitation it’s surely been a nice marketing move. And the fact that LinkedIn was not working today, has been a fortunate coincidence. Let’s see now if G+ will work. I am curious to see if there has been any drop in Facebook traffic in these days, after G+ launched, or if there will be more drop in the US GDP once G+ will get bigger.

I still think one of the most interesting differentiating factors of G+ is “Circle+”. Interesting enough, it took less time to have an app (which also grants visibility to its source code) making Facebook have this same funcionality than it took to Google to open its doors to users.

Here are my initial thoughts about G+, summarized by section:

click to enlarge

G+ and Privacy: isn’t Google going to know too much about us?

[more about this can be found in this more recent post here]

We heard already about some concerns about privacy settings on Google. And I am sure we all remember about all the issues facebook went through during its 7 years, with regard to privacy.

As a start, here are the available Privacy settings on G+ as of today, 7/1/2011 (I am sure they will change them=:

Someone sees this Google move as a way to compete with Twitter, rather than with Facebook. Personally, I don’t see Google+ as a way to take either of the two (Twitter and Facebook) out of the Social Networks game.I see Google becoming more and more the owner of our data, our identity, and becoming the most powerful marketing weapon.

Surely, many of those who claim to be sick of Facebook – mainly because of the fact they don’t like their life to be so visible to their friends- will be happy they will have another option. But I am not sure those who tell they are sick of having others knowing so much about them will be happy to share even more.

Companies who turned their marketing dollars into Facebook will like this G+ even more than those who were hoping for a decline of Facebook.

Talking about marketing, I haven’t seen any ads (so far). I am sure the drop in banner clicks, as also reported in a recently published article, wasn’t a big surprise to Google, who knows basically everything about almost every website, if we consider the traffic that goes through its search engine, its emails, its analytics and its adwords, to mention a few. Surely we should not forget about other apps like docs and chats. Do they keep a copy of all our data?

Consider this: Google knows all banners performance for a huge number of companies, knows their website traffic, from and to inside pages and other websites. But what Google was missing, and why Google – IMHO- was keen to enter the social media market, is “who” was performing these actions, what are the habits of “clickers”, what is what today is called “digital body language”.

The social side of the equation was Google’s missing link for the ads battle. This is how Facebook started making the big bucks (I am referring to the deal with Microsoft). So now the game is not about Social Media – or at least not only. And I would expect some news to come up from Microsoft and its ads network.

What’s your opinion? Who is going to win this marketing battle?