Marketing Technology for Growth

Though I hate to admit it, I may have been a little harsh on Google these past months. Like many, I’ve rushed to judgment, dismissing the tech giant's year-old Google+ social network as a flash-in-the-pan, a pet project gone bad. Given Google’s general trajectory over the years, you'd think I would give the gang in Mountain View more credit. Mea culpa, Larry, Sergey, Eric, mea culpa. By way of apology, here's a brief but heartfelt exposition outlining why I think Google+ may end up being the social media site du jour when the (pixel) dust settles.

As you probably know, yesterday Google+ announced it will begin rolling out Hangouts On Air to the general public. Plenty of articles have already been written detailing exactly how the new service works (Hubspot wrote a great summary here), so I’ll spare the Internet another one. Instead, this blog will focus on a critical new functionality Hangouts On Air offers businesses and marketers: the ability to promote and host webinars that are open to the Google+ audience, and can be indirectly accessed by the billions who use Google’s search engine.

Between Google’s 2011 Panda update and January’s introduction of Search + Your World, people can’t stop talking about the tech giant’s dramatic shift in favor of fresh and original online content for its search engine.  While content marketers heralded the move as a new dawn in online consciousness, SEO experts cried foul. Yet one basic question seems to have been lost in the online shuffle (or scuffle, as it were): why exactly does Google love fresh and original content, anyway?

To set up a Google+ brand page or not to set up a Google+ brand page? That is the question.

In recent days, the Internet talking heads have been ganging up on Google+ over some new data published by research firm comScore. Their research found that visitors using personal computers spent an average of about three minutes a month on Google+ between September and January, versus six to seven hours on Facebook each month over the same period. Pundits were quick to draw dire conclusions: "Nobody wants another social network right now," said Brian Solis, an analyst at social-media advisory firm Altimeter Group. For those who already use Facebook, "Google hasn't communicated what the value of Google+ is”¹