Pause Before You Plunge Into Plus: Google + For Your Company/Brand

You probably have heard the news –
Google+ is now open for business(es). And I’m sure for many the announcement comes with an almost instinctive blind mandate from management to claim your place in the new space NOW. But this isn’t like the land rush when Facebook opened vanity URLs and, if we’ve learned anything from our collective previous jumps into social waters (including that one), it’s probably best if you take pause before you plunge into Plus.

One obvious reason is that it’s new and there’s some exploring/learning that needs to be done to develop best practices for implementation from a technical perspective.

But technical aspects aside, perhaps the biggest issue to address before diving in to Google+ is -- how does this new channel fit in to your already established and ongoing integrated strategic marketing plans as well as your tactical implementation resources? You need to ask or re-ask yourselves the core questions that formed the basis of entering the social landscape in the first place:

o What are my goals for this channel?

o What does success look like? How will it be measured?

o Will this require more real dollar budget allocation for advertising or promotion that we have learned is an important component of many Facebook campaigns?

o Who is going to be responsible for managing this
new social channel/platform? Do they have the time to add this to their
plate? How will they be trained?

o How will this channel be handled differently and/or integrated with other digital channels? With other offline channels?

In other words, as with DBE’s Phased Process for Social Media, the key to success with Google+ will be doing the thinking and planning first. Then you can act with confidence and with the expectation of reporting success.

Google’s Query Deserves Freshness

Google recently announced a search algorithm update that should promote fresher and more relevant search results. Although Google makes over 500 changes to its algorithm annually, the majority of updates do not affect a large percentage of search results. The new update, which seeks to build on the Caffeine web indexing system, will affect approximately 35% of all search queries.

According to Google’s engineer Amit Singhal, the following topics deserve fresh results:

• Recent events or hot topics. For recent events or hot topics that begin trending on the web, you want to find the latest information immediately. Now when you search for current events like [occupy oakland protest], or for the latest news about the [nba lockout], you’ll see more high-quality pages that might only be minutes old.

• Regularly recurring events. Some events take place on a regularly recurring basis, such as annual conferences like [ICALP] or an event like the [presidential election]. Without specifying with your keywords, it’s implied that you expect to see the most recent event, and not one from 50 years ago. There are also things that recur more frequently, so now when you’re searching for the latest [NFL scores], [dancing with the stars] results or [exxon earnings], you’ll see the latest information.

• Frequent updates. There are also searches for information that changes often, but isn’t really a hot topic or a recurring event. For example, if you’re researching the [best slr cameras], or you’re in the market for a new car and want [subaru impreza reviews], you probably want the most up to date information.

Our Take

While Google has indicated they understand that different search queries will require varying degrees of “freshness” based on a searcher’s intent, we are wondering how well Google will be able to match intent with result.

Google is anticipating 35 percent of searches are around this kind of up-to-the-minute data, which leaves a majority of searches still prioritizing on the “relevancy” of the data over its “recency.”