On the social web, “Brand perception changes at the speed of a mouse click,” as Eileen Brown, CEO of Amastra, puts it. Like it or not, mice are clicking and perceptions evolving as the leviathans of search and social joust for position.
Google+, still in its infancy, has already weathered its first crisis with a business-created page: a now-removed fake Google Plus page for Bank of America replete with mocking photos of former BofA CEO Kenneth Lewis, and incendiary messages such as: “Starting tomorrow, all Occupy Wall Street protestors with Bank of America accounts around the country will have their assets seized as part of BofA’s new Counter-Financial-Terrorism policy.” (The bank's official page is here.)
To avoid such future brandjacking, Google has partnered with six social media management firms — Buddy Media, Context Optional, Hearsay Social, Hootsuite, Involver, and Vitrue — to use their products to help brands better manage the Google+ platform. Its official Google+ page now features a check mark logo to show it's been verified by Google.
"I'm not surprised they're taking this step. We recommended as much to them during the pilot phase when Ford was allowed to have an account before other brands," commented Scott Monty, Ford Motor Company's global digital communications manager, in an email to ClickZ.
"Ultimately, a brand or business needs to be where its customers are," Buddy Media noted in a blog post. "Google+ has experienced tremendous growth since opening its doors to the general public. In just a few short months over 40 million people have created Google+ profiles and use the service to connect with each other and share content."
Whether they're venturing solo or with third party help onto Google+, some brand marketers appear undeterred and, dare we say, enthusiastic about Google's new social sandbox. Witness the MINI auto brand, which just launched its +MINI page with a press release stating "Google+ is remarkably well-suited for the MINI fan base, which is engaging and responsive when challenged in an online setting."
Google+'s main rival, Facebook, remains dominant with brand presence and click-through rates.
“The click through rate for links posted to the news feed by Facebook Pages with over 100,000 fans is 0.14%, or 1 click per 715 impressions according to a new study shared with us by analytics provider EdgeRank Checker," writes TechCrunch. "Pages receive 0.00093 clicks per fan, or roughly 1 click per 1000 fans. These figures should give marketers an idea of how many Facebook fans they’ll need to accumulate to drive significant traffic to external websites, a core way of deriving return on investment from the social network."
Most major brands have 100,000 or more fans on FB, such as Pepsi, a leader in social media marketing with 6 million plus "likes" on Facebook, and 18,865 followers on Google+.
“If they spend the time and money, brands like Porsche, Netflix, and Old Navy can drive around 2,000 qualified clicks a day for free. Facebook Pages can’t completely replace the need for paid advertising, but they can become an important component of a savvy online marketing strategy,” continues TC.
Microsoft, meanwhile, is testing Socl.com, its version of Google+, as a combination of search, discovery and social. Its “Video Party” feature is similar to Google Hangouts, while the biggest difference is the absence of “listing” features.
“Socl doesn’t give users the ability to drop friends into groups based on work, personal life, locations, etc. the same way the Google Circle’s or Facebook’s Smart Lists do," VentureBeat observes. "That means all search status updates are shared with whoever you’re connected with on other social networks. The site also lacks the ability to tag individual users (e.g. +Tom Cheredar or @tched).”
Social media monitoring and analytics firms are stepping up to the expanded domain they must survey. Twitter’s DataSift business intelligence and analysis platform is now open for business, one of two companies with rights to re-syndicate Twitter’s firehose of more than 250 million Tweets a day (the other one is Gnip), reports TechCrunch.
“What makes DataSift special (besides the premier access to Twitter data) is that it can then filter this social media data for demographic information, online influence and sentiment, either positive or negative.” DataSift plans to add stream data from Facebook and Google+ in the next two months.
The prevailing question for brand marketers remains, why expand to Google+ if your brand presence is clearly established on Facebook and Twitter? Does G+ dilute, or turbocharge, brands' existing social marketing efforts?
Three key reasons to make your brand available on Google+, according to Cickz:
• Smaller User Base – cut through the noise and clutter in more direct and personal relationship with their audiences.
• Unique Functionality – hosted "Hangouts," and live audio/video chats such as The Black Eyed Peas backstage pre-concert. Hangouts could become the new home for live customer support.
• Future Integration With Other Google Offerings – integration with Google Places and Maps, Web and Image Search, and YouTube. Already launched, Google +1s into Image Search.
To assist brands' Google+ strategies, Buddy Media is offering webinars about its ConversationBuddy product to address marketers' questions, such as how to:
• Publish content to the right Circles at the right time
• Moderate stream conversations to manage connections
• Segment consumers to target conversations
• Track important metrics to measure success.
Is your brand on Google+? Let us know if you're finding it more (or less) effective as a conversational marketing platform in the comments below.
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