Americans (broadly) love baseball. Someone’s got to. Last year over 15 million people watched the MLB World Series live.
That same year, 32 million people livestreamed the League of Legends World Championships Season 3 on Twitch.tv
Predominantly a games streaming service (though with popular videos quite frequently fronted, excuse the pun, by girls in tops 2 sizes too small), Twitch has a huge following in the youth market. It has become the go-to platform to share gaming content online, making clips and gameplay easily sharable to friends and, increasingly, to give professional players a platform to share with their millions of fans.
And with PS4 integration from launch via the Share button, the service is seeing an increase in console players livestreaming their games. On Xbox One it’s a slightly more convoluted process – you have to search for and download the app – but once you’re set up the barriers to sharing your gaming prowess similarly fall away.
So why is Google interested? It’s no coincidence that Twitch has made money with unskippable pre-rolls at the launch of a stream and at user-defined times after that, following the hugely successful YouTube model that accounts for up to $5bn of Google’s total $55bn revenue. Add to that the estimated 12-13 million consoles sold to date across both platforms.
Google+ launched brand pages yesterday to some fanfare and it seems that once more people are hailing it as the next big thing, the Facebook killer. Even people who were but yesterday decrying the death of the social networking site, scoffing at the 50 million users as inactive and essentially calling Google plus dead in the water, another failed Google project. Funny how fickle the social media expert crowd is when shiny new features are involved.
Brands can now create brand pages for their brands. Great. Whilst marketers are now having crisis meetings with clients who demanding to know whether they should create a Google plus page and how it fits into their social media strategy (surely they’re not just creating accounts for the sake of it?), most people are probably thinking, awesome, more companies in my stream.
So what should your brand be doing on Google plus?
If you are struggling to answer that question then perhaps the answer us nothing. And that’s a perfectly acceptable answer.
If you still want to something, like a child with a shiny new toy, then stop and think. Answer some questions:
Do you have a Facebook and Twitter page?
Do they have a large fan base?
Is my audience on Google+? Will they be?
Do you have enough budget for another channel?
If you start maintaining a Google plus page, what resources will you have to take away from Facebook, Twitter etc? Time, money, content? How will that affect the users on those channels?
What can you do on Google plus that you can’t do elsewhere?
What are you going to use Google plus for long term?
Gimmicks make for quick growth, but once the novelty wears off, if there isn’t a sustainable approach to content you’ll be left with a dead page, and no one likes that.
That’s not to say no one should be creating brand pages on Google, the different feature set should allow some innovative new marketing opportunities for the early adopting brands. Hangouts for example allow for countless opportunities for brand with celebrity endorsements. Pop up gigs for fans, crowd sourced interview etc. And there is certainly some value in the idea that people can over think the strategy, spending weeks and months making a decision. If you can do something awesome and are confident you can follow it up with continued awesome, then a certain line of thinking says do it. Fortune does favour the bold. But make sure it really is awesome. And recognise that you’re not just doing a one off launch stunt. You’re creating a page. A page you’ll have to maintain for the foreseeable future. A Google plus page isn’t just for launch day.
The last question you need to ask is Do you really want a Google plus page for your brand?
Let me know what you think, show off your Google+ brand pages in the comments. And follow me on Google+ here
Google’s latest effort to enter the world of social, Google+ launched today. Possibly the most interesting thing about the launch is the number of people who have passed comment without even trying the service. ”Google doesn’t get social – this will fail” they cry. (Invites certainly are scarce, I haven’t yet had a chance to have a play, hence why I shan’t be going into specific features.) (more…)
Google unveiled their recommendation service, +1, yesterday. It’s a simple enough system, you can essentially recommend search results in Google with the click of a button:
This service has the potential to be very useful, no doubt. But to how many people? You can only get recommendations from your network who also have (and use) a Google account. It’s only going to be useful to the 10% of the population who have both a Google account and friends with a Google account. How many of your friends have a Google account that they are signed into when using Google? 90% of my friends don’t have an account. And of the 10% of my friends that do, only a fraction I want recommendations from.
And that’s the second point. The numbers of potential contacts that I can get recommendations from is low, but, they’re all pretty similar. They all have early adopter tendencies; they tend to be up on the latest trends etc. And most of them work in a similar industry to me, follow other similar people etc. Google tools are great, but they are used by a niche set of people. And getting recommendations from a group of people in that niche is only marginally more useful than from just one person in that niche.
The issue is Google never really scaled beyond search. A handle of people have accounts for YouTube, even fewer for Gmail. How many of your friends have a Google account that they are signed into when using Google. Now compare that to how many of your friends have a Facebook or Twitter account. Big difference.
For services like +1 to be useful they have to both be used by a large chunk of your network, and have different types of people from within your network recommending. Otherwise it just becomes noise. Google needs to encourage more users to sign up for accounts, and sadly, this service won’t do that. Google should be encouraging users to sign up when they download chrome, which people have been doing in their millions.
Having said all that, it is very reassuring to see Google launch a tool that I am actually considering using. What do you think? Will you use it?
