By now, most of you have received your invitation to Google+. If you are like me you’ve taken the bait and today you have a Google+ page, which bears an uncanny resemblance to your Facebook page. The big difference is fewer friends. So what do you do? You send out your invitations for people to join you. And some of them take the bait. That’s when you ask yourself a fundamental question: why?
Why do I need another social networking platform in my life? Why do I need to invite my Facebook buddies to visit me on a whole other site? Let’s face it: Facebook already has more than three quarters of a billion users. This Google+ thing is not going to send them under, right? So why do this?
Sure, Google+ is easy to use. It has a wall to post on just like Facebook (and the men’s room at the bus station). It has a feature called Google Stream that lets you tap into others’ posts (like Facebook’s News feature). You can also add posts from perfect strangers (like those Facebook friends who you aren’t sure who they are anymore).
Then comes the curve ball, a feature called Circles. This ingenious feature helps you file people by relationship. This, I like. How many times has some distant cousin asked to be included among your LinkedIn network? You can’t tell them “no” so you just don’t respond. But even this is not a giant advance from Facebook’s Friends list that now let’s you segregate “Close Friends” from those other 500 acquaintances that Facebook has awkwardly dubbed “Friends.”
Google+ also has a feature called “Hangout,” a multi-participation video chat room. You invite a group of friends, family or mere acquaintances to “hangout.” A big advantage of Google+ is how it seamlessly allows you to interface with other Google franchises (like Gmail and Picasa photo sharing).
So the question is, why Google+? Branding agencies from Dallas to Davenport will have to determine if this is worthy of their clients’ time. Brand managers will have to determine if they want to get their brand in on the ground floor. Marketing Directors will have to vet out whether this is worth a position paper. And then, of course, CEOs will have to ask their kids what they think. After all, they were the ones who told him that Myspace is, like, soooo thirty seconds ago.
