But more importantly, Google integrates Plus into its web-dominating search engine. With Google+ Direct Connect, searchers can insert a “+” before their query and jump directly to a business’s Google+ page. Type “+YouTube” into a Google search box, for instance, and Google will take you straight…”
“But why would you? The Direct Connect feature would really help if G+ was already a Big Mainstream Thing that everyone already naturally used, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to call it a feature that’ll GET it to that stage. Maybe I’m just being dense and missing something obvious but how exactly is this + prefix behaviour meant to spread?
I suppose you could point to hashtags as an example of a counterintuitive behaviour that people got used to, but that was a social thing - they spread because users saw other users using them and copied it. That can’t really happen with search activity”.
#furthermore, twitter’s functionality (hashtags, @ replies) grew because the community started to use them themselves.
#moreover, why would you ever search for a brand’s Google+ page (or indeed their facebook page)? This is becoming a common problem: incentivisation of brand interaction. Because people are seeing interaction as the KPI: if someone interacts with our brand then we have won.
Citation Needed Marketing 101
Back in the days before social media, brand interaction was purchase and consideration. It was either buying it, or considering buying it. One did not interact for interacting’s sake. Unless you were incentivised to ‘buy this hat and win a holiday’ or ‘fill in this form, and win the chance to win a holiday’. That way, you’re drawing in an otherwise uninterested consumer.
But how do you incite a person to add a plus button, to a search term, solely to get to a brand’s billboard on a particular social network?
How’s that going to ever happen?
Win A Hat
Incentivised interaction. ‘Follow us on Google+ and….win the chance to win a chance holiday’.
Which is fine. But it’s hardly a step forward. It’s the worst sort of technology, the kind that use a technology to do something for no added reason. Like playing Snake on an iPad. Or using a phone as a door-stop.
But at least with facebook, yknow, a lot of people are there right? So at least there’s a lot of people to target, and it could feasibly make some sense to spend 10k on a brand page, and maybe a bit more /month to send messages out to people.
But yet again, this was community-driven! People started setting up their own ‘I love Starbuck’s’ pages, 2 years before brands were able to step in and take over. You probably set up a fan page back in ‘08 (why not check out ‘Rhod Sharp Is A Legend’ http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=wall&gid=2477325945 ).
Good Idea Coming Up
If people start searching for ‘+starbucks’, and then people start hyperlinking ‘+starbucks’ to the Google Plus page for Starbuck’s, then Google’s already wonderful algorithm will do the deciding for you. It’ll start magically ranking! This is the basis of PageRank, of online search! It’ll enter the search vernacular, it’ll become second nature. The +button will become…AS BIG AS CAPS LOCK IN 4 YEARS.
It won’t if you just tell people to do it. Unless you incentivise it, and then it’s just shit.
To summarise: incentivising a useless interaction is pointless. Allow the community (if you have one) to tell you what they want. Let the community hone the marketing tools, not the other way round.
