I love, love the principles behind Google plus – I think many people had the ‘that is sooo true’ moment when reading through their thinking on how Facebook and Twitter don’t allow us to filter oour social activity in the same way we catagorise the different people in our lives (I’ve lost the bookmark to this deck – if you have it please share!)
But I have really struggled to adopt it because I can’t answer the question of what role it plays in my life.
What does Plus really add?
Is it the place to share personal information (I already do this on Facebook), to build your professional image (this is LinkedIn), to engage in discussion with people in my industry (for me this is the role of Twitter). For me, as for many people, I’m pretty time poor, have spent hours curating my lists of people I want to follow and am yet to see the benefits of building an entirely new contact system.
GigaOm asks a key question in a recent post: is Gooogle plus a solution in search of a problem? and points to the Chitika stat reports suggesting that traffic to the site is down significantly. The Chitika graph shows a big increase in traffic to Google plus but then a large drop off; suggesting that a lot of people were drawn in but then not engaged with the platform. A key problem with this hypothesis is the fact that the graph below isn’t labelled on the Y axis, making it difficult to make a call on the scale of the change being shown.
But Google Plus looked like a big success when it launched – What happened?
Well yes there was a large amount of activity when Google plus kicked off. But the fact is, if you run a walled scheme in which only key social media users and early adopters are asked to used a platform then I would expect activity levels to be higher than on a platform that is open to all. If you take a look at the infographic shared by Rob Gonda then it really suggests that the population of Google plus is not representative of the general population – check out how the number of tech people and consultants on Google Plus during the trial. What would they want to get out of using Google Plus; in my opinion this is a professional rathern than a personal usage, that is likely to be based on a need to keep ahead of market trends.
So what’s next for Google Plus?
There is truly great insight and technology behind Google plus but if the platform is to succeed then I feel marketing should be focused on giving Plus a purpose in people’s lives. It also needs to be easier to adopt – supporting contact imports for the lazy who want to recreate their connections on plus will help people adopt, as will clearer and richer introductory text. At the moment Google is asking people to embrace ‘circling’ people, but for the unsure they need to dig quite deep into a text based FAQ section to understand it.
If Google Plus is a social channel then experience of learning about it needs to become more social and more engaging. It will be interesting to see if it survives.
