Posts Tagged 'Google Plus'

Yesterday, I could almost hear the collective swoon across the country when people tuned in to David Beckham’s live interview on Google+ Hangouts. Beckham joins the line-up of celebrities  from Will.I.Am to the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu who have used Google+ Hangouts to connect with their fans in. These high-profile gatherings work wonders in drawing attention to the ‘coolness’ of some of its features, drumming up media attention and  pushing the social network ever closer to reaching mainstream status. Such endorsement goes some way to explaining how in a short space of time Google+ has amassed 90 million registered users (it took Facebook about 4 years to reach the same number).

Hangouts are a differentiator. Google+ hasn’t yet managed to shake off its comparisons to Facebook and Twitter and the similarities won’t go unnoticed. In many respects Google+ has done a great job of pulling out the best features of Facebook and Twitter and making them a little shiner. Such as the addition of ‘circles’ allowing you to group your network into different categories from friends to work colleague and family, then filtering the information you choose to share with them via your status. Even the humble hashtag has been given the Google treatment – start typing your hashtag into the status bar and Google will autocomplete.

Hangouts are different. Aside from the glitz of those high-profile endorsements, Hangouts are a genuinely useful and practical B2B tool. Here are just a few of the ways your company can start using Hangouts:

Online reputation management: A crisis can break out at any point and escalate at lightning speed across social media channels. Response is time-critical but how do your usual crisis management procedures stack up in periods such as the Christmas break – many offices are closed, employees on holiday and with family – how do you get all the key decision makers together? Hangouts allow live group chat with webcam support providing a productive new way for collaborating and making time-critical decisions. What’s more these sessions can be recorded and shared.

Integration with Google docs: In just a few clicks you can share your documents and authorize others in the hangout to edit them. The video element transforms what would have previously been a simple test-based chat to a rich live discussion.

Live demos and training: Google+ Hangouts with Extras allows you to share your screen with other people – perfect for live demo’s, training, presentations and tech support.

Sketch up: Designers, UX teams, content planners rejoice! It’s possible to sketch up ideas, illustrations, wireframes and pretty much anything you want in a real-time collaborative meeting.

Track participants: Post event follow-up is a breeze, Google+ gives you a list of everyone who attended a Hangout. Handily, it also provides a list of all those who didn’t, so you can invite them again. Push notifications can also be sent to your participant’s steams to keep the conversation ticking over post hangout.

Time to start hanging out?

There is still discussion in bars, offices and around the web on the topic of whether G+ will ever be as big or bigger than Facebook?

Lots of opinions abound often reflecting the author’s view on the relative merits of the two platforms. Well in my view it doesn’t matter whether G+ gets there or not. User volumes are little more than bragging rights and more important to Social Media Strategists selling their wares than to the platforms.

What’s really important here is the “logged in internet”, the more a platform can get you “logged in” the better for them. Historically when you wandered around the internet, you weren’t logged in to anything (only your ISP and they didn’t pass that on). So you were in effect fairly anonymous, you had an IP address (that could change) and some cookies (which you could delete).

There are pros and cons to this depending on which side of the fence you sit. As a visitor you were anonymous and every page request is treated as a new request with no history, as a web site lack of identity makes life harder and means you have to address identity on a site by site basis which can’t be readily shared.

With the advent of Facebook and it’s always logged on model you are no longer anonymous, and therefore when you interact with “associated” sites, you are known, in more detail than you may care to contemplate. That’s why Facebook are so keen on getting 3rd party sites to support the Facebook Login.

Google on the other hand has been taking a data centric, data mining approach, trying to build up an identity for you from its records, which are sadly incomplete. The game now is to find as many ways as they can to have you logged in, so Youtube needs a Gmail account, Gmail needs a Gmail account, Google docs needs a Gmail account, and Android phone needs a Gmail account, you get the picture. And by being logged in (and with the new black bar always signposting the things you can do) Google starts to know much as much more about you and can smooth many transactions, building a more complete profile along the way, all the better to push targeted ads at you…

So Google’s game is not to make G+ bigger than Facebook, it is to make Gmail logins ubiquitous and to know more about you.

Does anyone still think that this is about building a better search experience?