I'm not one of the digital marketing community who likes to bash Google+. I actually like Google+. Always have and I feel my loyalty to the platform, and time spent on it, is being rewarded as it is evolving in the right direction.
On Google+ I find myself among strong gamer communtities and popping in and out of craft and photograph communities too. It might be funny to joke that Google+ is just populated by SEOs and Social Media heads but it is wrong.
One of the claims that bug me when people report on Google+ is the one that suggests people aren't posting - that it's a ghost town.
This strikes me as a failure to understand what Google+ is offering.
Google+ is offering you a way to share content with your friends in such a way that a stranger can't come along, check out your profile and work out whether you're using Google+ or not.
Or am I just being defensive?
One way to find out is to pop into my Google+ stream and count the number of posts in the space of 180 seconds. I want to see what percentage of them are public compared to limited. How much of Google+ is protected by the privacy that Circles offer.
This test excludes comments on posts. The 3 minutes run for this test happned to occur between 16:10 and 16:13.
Fine, okay... This micro survey doesn't manage to kick anyone in the head but it surely suggests that a percentage of Google+ content isn't available for public scrutiny. In my 3 minute test 50% of posts lived behind Circle shares only.
I also think eight posts in only 3 minutes isn't too bad either!
I use Blogger.com for this blog too - I use Blogger's custom domain option to stick the arhg.net in there for better branding and ease of leaving the platform. I get hundreds of emails very day, so may have missed it but do not recall getting an email alert from Google to tell me that Blogger and BlogSpot would act like this.
Why does it matter?
It matters because bloggers often have to register their domains - especially with advertisers. It means if BlogSpot users are running affiliate banners, for example, that they might be losing out on sales because the networks are discounting traffic coming from the unregistered domain.
Equally, the enforced domain redirection could be messing with analytics scripts.
Update
Google has written about this - on this help page. I'm still not sure how/if they alerted people.
In summary it's been done for censorship.
I thought this comment was telling;
Q: Will this affect search engine optimization on my blog?
A: After this change, crawlers will find Blogspot content on many different domains. Hosting duplicate content on different domains can affect search results. We are making every effort to minimize any negative consequences of hosting Blogspot content on multiple domains.
I thought it was going to be too late to blog about the Facebook IPO – no matter how interesting it is. However, today, we can read up on the discovery that Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs (the underwriters) decided to downgrade their view on Facebook and cautioned their investors on the social network’s lack of mobile monetization on the 9th of May.
This isn’t illegal. It’s just crumbled cookies to everyone else.
The Facebook public offering has been called a giant technology IPO. In stock market terms Facebook does count as a technology stock.
I’ve been calling it an audience IPO.
I treat the Facebook IPO as an audience IPO because investors are essentially tapping into the huge walled garden (fed by the Facebook platform) filled with the social networks’ mammoth user numbers and betting on that. They’re betting that this audience will make Facebook money.
I think there can be little doubt that Facebook is able to make some money from the audience via the desktop experience.
A reporter challenged me as to whether Facebook had reached its peak when it comes to monetization. I disagreed. I think Facebook can earn more from the desktop experience and I see opportunity, rather than challenges, in the other two significant digital channels; mobile and connected TV.
A trivial way in which Facebook could make significant extra revenue from the desktop without interrupting the user experience at all would be add the Google VC backed VigLink to the site. Facebook could earn from purchases inspired by the network. If they didn’t want to support the Google venture then Skimlinks, as once tested by Pinterest, could be used instead. Facebook could even conditionally turn the affiliate tracking on and off depending on whether brands were spending.
Alternatively, Facebook could introduce its own pre-roll on video content or ads overlays. YouTube has taught the web to accept this on videos. Facebook could move on the back of that acceptance. Facebook could even do that to YouTube videos in a way similar to Coull.
So what about the mobile and connected TV audiences? The connected TV audiences do feel like an issue for the future but it is not that much of a stretch to imagine causal gaming on the platform and Facebook’s potential roll in that.
The mobile app already includes “trending stories” and that is an easy route to monetization. The Karma app deal is another very obvious but clever step towards more mobile money.
This post isn’t to defend the IPO price. We will have to see whether it was talked up and then almost secretly cut by the insiders before the rest of the market could react.
This post is to say that Facebook’s ability to connect to an audience across desktop, mobile and connect TV is where I believe the value in the company sits. I think the social platform has plenty of growth left in all three of the digital channels when it comes to this audience.
Today, I took part in Commchat. I'm sorry to say I hadn't encountered the hour long Twitter debate before. I will, however, tune in again. It's a collection of communication brains (PR mainly) debating the topic of the week.
Half way through I decided I'd capture the chat. I've just started.
30 seconds - open Storify, select Twitter, deselect retweets and search for #commschat.
15 seconds - to write the above
45 seconds - click "More" on the 20 tweet selection default to go back an hour and collect 180 results - pressing "add them all"
15 seconds - oh, Chrome browser wobble time...
I caught this video over the weekend and made the mental note to share it.
Better late than never... but really, how hard was it for me to have shared the video earlier? A simple tweet would have done it and with that tweetI would have helped promote the cause. That's worth something. Right?
There are other concerns, though, and one of the most humourous is the creativity coming out of China. I think the following images make my point. (P.S. Blogger needs better image gallery functions)
I'm based in Edinburgh, Scotland but spend as much time as possible on the internet. Thankfully wi-fi zones in airports and trains are common these days!
My Google profile should point you at my social circles.
Andrew Girdwood is "digital marketing, search, gaming geek". Aren't you? Why not?
He works for a successful search engine optimisation and digital marketing agency and they have nothing at all to do with his blogging. Everything here is personal opinion.
Andrew has lots of opinions. Even when people don't want Andrew to have opinions - he still has opinions. Andrew doesn't expect everyone to agree with him and therefore welcomes constructive criticisms in his blog comments as much as he appreciates valuable insights and observations.
