by Wikus Engelbrecht - GraphicMail Marketing Team
29. giugno 2011 02:11
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, social share was still a little planet, chugging along its own little orbit on the outskirts of the known universe...
Then Facebook came along and changed all that.
Irked by a history of failed forays into social marketing territory, this week the Google empire struck back with the debut of its “+1” feature, the search giant’s challenger to the Facebook “Like” button. The new service, called Google Plus, is their big stab at fending off the search uprising of hot social sites and the company says it may use +1 data as a metric for improving search results in the future.
Google designed the service to tie together all of its online properties in an attempt to increase its online presence and to lay the foundation for a fully-fledged social search network. First announced on the Google AdSense blog, Product Manager Nick Radicevic said that they’ll be starting off with domains like google.co.uk, google.fr, google.de and google.jp, then soon after that; take over the rest of the world.
Social networking has been made a top priority at the world's biggest internet search engine, as the more people spend time on Facebook and Twitter, the more their status as a top information gateway is at risk.
Google is betting on what it says is a better approach to the privacy issue that has burned social networks as well as search engines in the past, setting this service apart. However people today habitually use multiple internet tools, and it’s likely that they might decide to opt for both social and search offerings to benefit from the distinct advantages of either sphere.
But this isn’t a war that is only going to be won or lost on the search space itself; this conflict could well largely come to explode within the mobile integration galaxy.
In the future, mankind’s pet tech will probably involve the latest starship model, and we will socially validate ourselves according to the size of our hyper-drive. But for the time being we’ll just have to make due with cellphones and tablets instead. While they might not be able to get you all the way from point A to the Orion nebula, mobile devices are marketplace-prominent and the integration of social and search media on these platforms, often a process of exclusivity, is a constant struggle.
The dark side of integration is that business-driven consumers constantly need to seesaw between devices, depending on which specifically offers them the best advantages – which is only necessary because social and search competitors aren’t happy sharing the same virtual planet.
The real question though, is how the online marketing software community will respond to +1.
GraphicMail uses the force of social logins as well as the social sharing of content. Our newsletter features equip our clients with social widgets and social share and like buttons in email to enable the use of social data as a contextual tool for conceptualizing new marketing efforts. With that said, Google Plus - though a threat to the social sovereignty - is still fresh out of space-dock and will need to impose itself on the social cosmos somewhat more before email newsletter and mobile marketers in general will start threading +1 into their services.
That is, of course, unless Google finds a way to blow up Facebook…
Is social media a fad? Or the biggest shift since the industrial revolution? These new and updated social media & mobile statistics from Refresh are hard to ignore.
