This is the move Google HAD to make, even if it makes them look like total douches…
In a world of infinite choice your friends experiences and recommendations become vital.
I was only discussing with a mentor yesterday, when I grew up in the 70s in a small country town we only had two TV channels, two radio stations and one newspaper. If it wasn’t for the magazines of the local newsagency I would’ve been screwed.
Now I look at the choices my nine-year-old Hannah has, hundreds of television channels, the entire Internet, Wikipedia, club Penguin, FaceTime and on and on.
As soon as she becomes a teenager the world of social networks will open up to her as well.
She can download books in an instant, buy a song whenever she wants, download a new game to iPad in seconds and choose exactly when she want’s to watch when.
In a delicious irony, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former’ish CEO and now chairman boasted Google collected more data in two days than information existed on the entire planet before 2003!
Google has an immense, unenviable and ultimately (as we are now seeing) impossible task. Google wants to help you find stuff on the Internet, it’s done its job pretty well over the last decade or so.
It’s losing the battle.
Who knew when Facebook opened up to non-college students in 2007 that 50% of all Americans would use it last month. The uptake and growth of Facebook has been like nothing we have ever seen. I’m not sure anybody, except perhaps the inner sanctum at Facebook, realised the simple like button would alter the search and discovery landscape forever.
This simple fact is why Google HAS to make this move with it’s +1 button
The Like Button Competition
As a marketer, the first issue I saw with all of this is we have to add another button on all of our articles.
Great…
In marketing we know a simple truth, it’s hard enough to get someone to do one thing! When you give the user multiple choices the likelihood of them pressing anything dramatically decreases. If I’m forced to add a Google +1 button, it adds yet another choice. And we know, with choice we will make it even less likely someone who reads an article will click anything.
The Facebook like button has been a tremendous success. Why? It’s because it’s a win–win–win situation for everyone involved.
For the consumer, pressing a Facebook like tells your friends you’re interested in the article. Your social graph (your network of friends) will get to see and act on an article. It’s a brilliantly simple implementation to the user means it’s very easy to press. The article goes into your newsfeed and your friends – based on your recommendation – are far more likely to go and have a look at the article themselves.
As a publisher I love the “Like” button. The moment we started adding a Facebook like button to our blogs we saw an increase in traffic. Fast forward to today, nothing comes close to the amount of traffic Facebook drives to our properties.
That’s a win for us! So the consumers win, the publishers win, and of course Facebook wins.
By clicking the like button you’re also providing Facebook an extraordinarily accurate profile of your likes (and in this case I mean the stuff you’re interested in!). This is extremely valuable information, and allows Facebook to provide services like demographic pay per click advertising. Your “likes” add to the base of this demographic information. This is a massive business for Facebook.
BING can also use your information to display more relevant search results, more importantly, it allows BING to show sites your social network have liked in your search results.
Please don’t underestimate how powerful this is.
Remember how I opened this article, in a world of infinite choice we almost have to regress to how things worked when we all lived in villages. Recommendations of people you actually know, trust, respect and admire carry far more weight than anything any computer algorithm can ever hope to generate.
Facebook knows this.
Microsoft knows this.
And Google realises it to.
What about Twitter?
We still have a Retweeting button on most of our properties. I encourage you to have a look at any website you come across that has both a Facebook Like and a Retweeting widget. Nine times out of 10 the Facebook Like button has an order of magnitude more likes than the retweets.
Twitter has a problem.
It has become a broadcast medium, not a community.
I know this bit is going to be controversial. I’ll deal with the Twitter problem another day. Just go with me for the moment.
My view is Twitter will become a broadcast medium for artists, corporations and people with tribes. I believe Twitter will still survive and thrive because in return for being broadcasted too as a consumer you have a guaranteed method for communicating back…
The @reply.
I’m pretty sure Joe and Jane Smith are not using Twitter to alert their social network, (or group of friends as we used to call in the old days!) about things they found interesting.
That’s what the like buttons for.
Facebook won the game while the digerati wasn’t looking.
Twitter’s future is its ability to get messages out to a lot of people and for those people to understand they have a right to feedback.
The sad thing is Twitters greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. The @ symbol unleashed a spam storm and i’m not sure Twitter will ever be able to effectively deal with it. One persons SPAM is another person’s convenient snack food.
Don’t get me wrong, Twitter has a great future, I’m just not sure it’s the future its founders had in mind.
Why Google Why?
Why would Joe and Jane Smith press on the Google +1 button? There are a lot of reasons to push the Facebook like button, a couple of good reasons to push the Twitter button, but what’s in it if they mash a +1 button?
Is it to tell friends?
Nope.
Have you ever been to a Google personal profile page? Neither have I.
Google could in theory shove these in your face. If they do, they tread a very dangerous line.
Not many people remember when Google was first launched. In those days, Altavista and the like ruled the roost. Yahoo! was a major search engine.
They all tried to shove other stuff in their users faces.
Google made its name because of its comprehensive indexing but most importantly, because Google got out of the way and delivered the search results.
Over the years Google has put more and more things in and around the search results but on the whole they’ve been very good about keeping things relevant. If they did anything else it would be suicide.
I wonder if the +1 button may be the thing that pushes them over the edge?
So if Joe and Jane Smith are not going to push the +1 button to tell their friends, what’s the reason they are going to press?
AHA! I know, more relevant search results for you!
Ummm, Google, how’s the star rating and favourite thing working out for you?
You already have the ability to customise your search results and favourite things you like to see. Nerds do this, Blackhat SEO types do this this, Lot’s of workers on Mechanical Turk do this, the digerati do it to their own sites…
Joe and Jane Smith do not.
There’s simply no incentive for the Smith family to press the +1 button. There’s simply no payoff! This is crazy unless you consider the next point.
I know why Joe and Jane will do this! They want to help Google search and stay relevant so Google can continue to spree better targeted ads their way!.
Yuh.
Does Google seriously consider your average net citizen is going to like stuff on a page just so it can save Google from irrelevancy? They’re fighting a couple of million years ofchuman behaviour if they think this is going to fly!
You need to understand, Google must do this.
They have no choice. The day Facebook blocked Google out of its like information Google knew the writing was on the wall.
If there’s nothing in this for Joe and Jane Smith, maybe there’s something in it for me, the humble publisher.
Ummm, no.
Adding the Google +1 button on my content is going to add confusion. More choices equals less people clicking. We conducted a study over a dozen blogs in the last quarter of 2010. We got rid of the multitude of social network clicky buttons and just left Facebook and Twitter. Across the board, usage and resultant traffic increased.
If we have had to add another button (and you’ll see why I say “had to” in a moment) this will result in less clicks and less traffic.
Google right now doesn’t bring me much in the way of search engine traffic. My site is not dependent on it. Most sites making money are.
What if Google makes this a part of the ranking formula? Then all of a sudden it’s on like donkey kong.
I’ve read a number of articles over the last few hours which indicated they would not do this…yet. The only official comment I’ve seen from Google seems to indicate they won’t do this at the moment by are “very interested to do so in the future”.
If this is the case and it remains independent +1 is dead on arrival – there’s no point.
Let me be clear, they HAVE to do this.
They have no choice. They have to do evil to stay relevant. (Don’t get me started on the Android Bait and Switch happening as we speak – again, they had no choice)
Let’s not cry for Google just yet. This is a media company still well and truly growing. Google is very much king of the hill.
They are many things, stupid, is not one of them. There is a limit to how much algorithms, machines and massive data centres can map, index and deliver you the Internet.
Two things happened that Google (or anyone for that matter) did not see coming. I don’t think anybody could have predicted the “lack” of usage of the Internet.
Wired was lambasted for declaring the Internet dead. I agreed with Wired! Of course, the Internet is thriving, it’s just the “traditional”, old-style, surfing around from webpage to webpage Internet is rapidly disappearing.
How long is it going to be before people spend more time on the Internet through a mobile device they do through traditional PC?
For my wife, my hairdresserand lets not forget, Joe and Jane Smith this is already a reality.
Already, more people use Facebook than the “traditional web”.
When was the last time you spent an idyllic half an hour surfing the web?
Exactly.
Google is about hiring the brightest Ph.D. engineers and systems people on the planet. It makes sense right?
By hiring every postgraduate they could get their hands on, they caused them selves a very big blindspot…
You could not even get an interview if you dropped out of college.
Like, say, Mark Zuckerburg…
Steve Jobs…
Joe and Jane Smith…
It took the longest time to convince my academic friends (I’m looking at you Guru Bob) to convince them Facebook wasn’t a waste of time.
There was a tectonic shift going on in the way we roll online.
The academics didn’t realise – while all those people were playing Farmville, they were also finding a new home free of spam, free of viruses, and the only messages they saw were by people they “friended”.
Facebook was created by college dropouts and hackers. The majority of the world are not postgrads…
It’s ironic, now we have access to effectively infinite information our choices and decision-making comeback to something as old as human civilisation…
Asking your friends if they like something.
This is Google’s big problem and unless they push the big red “Do Evil” button and make +1 a key ranking factor they’re in massive trouble.
Ed
PS They’ll never, ever announce +1 will effect rankings, it’ll just happen and we’ll see an epic SEO arbitrage occur.