On July 19th, I posted my longest blog post ever completely rethinking the path forward for Twitter. I’d read eulogies and heard bloggers predicting its demise and I wanted to contribute a verse.
Today, I want to resurrect Google+ into a legitimate competitor
The first question you’re probably wondering is: Why? What is worth saving?
For one, someone has to take a stand against laziness and complacency. Someone has to say it’s ok to not be in first place so long as you are doing something meaningful. And someone has to stand for the original heart and soul of social media.
The easy thing to do is to declare a winner and let that sole winner pump out mediocrity without competition. The easy thing to do is to declare something a failure because popular opinion believes it to be.
That is much easier than listening to all of the people who actually find Google+ useful or who see that there is more than one way for social media to look and feel.
Buckle up, because this is going to be another long one.
The untimely “death of Google+”
I don’t think Google+ will die (like so many sources have claimed) but it certainly never lived like it could’ve. It was not in the wrong place at the wrong time, as the Facebook backlash was palpable when G+ came out. It just failed to do the right things at the right time.
I’m honestly tired; tired of the zero sum game. It’s always winner take all. There is no tolerance for second place, or more importantly, the idea that something can be useful even if it’s not the most popular or the largest.
I read too many articles about the death of, of the ____-killer, or how, again, Wall Street is disappointed. Newsflash, Wall St is ALWAYS disappointed because it’s an endless pit of greed. Growth and profit, instead of utility rule to roost on Wall Street. So I say F- them and let’s just build something extraordinary and useful because rarely do we hear of investors who actually CARE about the product, instead we hear about the institutional investor that wants to milk an extra percentage point for another 2 quarters before dismantling the company and selling off the assets.
I’ve always thought Google+ was a good product. In many ways, the features beat Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. They seemed to get so many things right.
So why was it so widely panned?
The most important feature of any social network is…the network.I was a big advocate for the network early on but there was one big thing missing: my friends.
While Google could build a substantial base of users through force built on the back of the success of Gmail and YouTube, they didn’t have the “it” factor to replace anything. The “it” was, “it” didn’t solve a problem other than “Google needs to be in social.”
They never sold us (the “normals” not the early adopters and techies) on the “WHY?”
At this point however, unless the company doubles down, the company will have missed the opportunity and along with it, shut itself out of social media in the future by giving up…yet again.
But fear not friends and those I’ve circled, I know how to save it. If you want someone to step up to challenge Facebook, keep reading, because I’ve got the solutions…
It ALL STARTS With LEADERSHIP
Let’s be clear about one thing, the current demise of Google+ has almost everything to do with two things:
- Vic leaving
- Google leadership’s noticeable absence from the platform.
Vic Gundotra
Vic was the heart and soul of the platform and when he left, the community that he had helped to build felt lost. The move signaled a change, a BIG change. When Apple lost its leader in Steve Jobs, people wondered if it could survive, but Apple had been around for decades. Google+ was brand new, and the person widely considered the leader of Google+ had left. If Zuckerberg suddenly left Facebook, you can be sure the company would struggle without a strong leader coming in to take over.
Google+ needs a strong, vocal leader that grabs this platform by the balls and let’s us know it’s here to stay.
If leadership doesn’t use it, why should we?
The second problem is related to the first. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, along with countless other Googlers stopped using the platform, or barely used it to begin with. This only really matters in the absence of a strong leader for the platform. So long as there is a strong leader at the helm advocating and building a platform for users instead of Wall St, the platform can succeed.
Here’s the leadership that is needed
Google+ needs two things.
- A strong, vocal and competitive leader
- Financial and cultural backing to WIN!
Google+ needs someone who is 110% in on making this product succeed. That means someone who will not rest until this thing takes off. They must be strategic, and they must be tactical. They must be ruthless and demand results, but also someone that gets the most out of people by being a leader and putting themselves out there.
They must have the balls to tell Wall St to “fuck off.” Why? Because that is precisely what every successful CEO does. Facebook routinely tells Wall St that it doesn’t give a crap about what it wants. Zuck has a plan and that is the plan that is going to get executed. Instagram and Whatsapp cost Facebook a combined $20B and there is still almost no monetization for either platform! Imagine if Google sunk $20B into Google+ (more on this later).
Furthermore, when is the last time Facebook gave two shits about what users want either? They don’t ask permission before making a change, and they don’t let a relatively minor backlash stop them. They move forward, taking users with them into the future of the platform. Let’s not forget that the single biggest backlash in Facebook’s history was over the newsfeed…the only innovation that has ever made them money!
Google needs the entire team to buy into the vision of Google+ succeeding, and they need the leader that inspires them to believe it’s possible…then they need to build the platform so good that everyone in the company chooses to use it. Speaking of which…
Build something so damn useful people have to use it!
I think Google needs to remember their core mission: organize all of the world’s information.
Google is not a social company, it’s a search company, so even it’s social efforts should be largely influenced by and influential for search.
Talk to any marketing director and you’ll hear three letters on all of their lips: SEO.
By combining search and social, Google has the opportunity to consolidate a company’s spend on SEO, search advertising, and social advertising, while also delivering more relevant search results for everyone. Google already owns paid search…they could be a big player in social ads too!
Google largely failed to deliver on social search. Let’s explore how to fix it.
How to Win at Social + Search in 4 Steps
Google wins right now by being exceedingly useful. Type anything into a simple search box and get an answer in under a second. It’s amazing. I wonder how we lived before it.
Google has been able to monetize this utility extremely well.
But Google is not the only game in town now.
Our search behaviors have fragmented and more and more people are turning to their network for answers and recommendations instead of Google.
Facebook started to build Graph Search to solve this problem, and even though it hasn’t worked out so well, my guess it isn’t their last foray into search, especially with the number of Google engineers they have hired away.
The search engine will likely always remain an important utility for people, but the possibility of social data is still largely untapped, and who better to do it than Facebook Google. If I were Google, I’d crack this nut before Facebook gets the chance.
What Facebook has that Google+ does not, is the network. So, it only needs to do two things:
- Build a network
- Buy networks
The barrier between Google+ and Google needs to go away. Both are search engines. Google+ should be less of a social network and more of what we thought it’d be at the beginning: a social layer.
First step in the process is…
Step 1: Acquisitions!!
We’re in the time of social consolidation…expansion has ended.
Buying other networks allows Google to incorporate social data into it’s search results and social streams. Let’s not forget that Facebook is not JUST Facebook anymore. Facebook owns Instagram, WhatsApp, OculusRift and plenty of other technology companies. One of Google’s most widely used services, YouTube, was an acquisition. It’s time to start buying up some of these other companies that have value and bringing that data into the Googlesphere.
If Google wants to compete with Facebook, it has to go BIG. It also needs more data and it needs to build a social graph comparable to Facebook’s. The Facebook Newsfeed isn’t just Facebook…it’s a mashup of data coming in from hundreds and thousands of different sources.
And let’s be clear, Google has a Market cap over $400B, it can buy the following companies with what it has in petty cash if it wanted to. These acquisitions are for data, not monetization avenues. The goal is to let most of these companies continue to run and leverage that data making Google+ more valuable.
Acquisition 1: Buy Twitter
You probably didn’t see that coming did you? Yes, it’s true, I, Jeff Gibbard, one of Twitter’s biggest fans, thinks Google should buy it. And I’m not the only one who’s thought of this, it’s actually a theory that’s becoming quite popular.
But before this deal goes through I have some stipulations…then I’ll get to the value for Google.
Stipulation 1: Take Twitter off the public markets and stop worrying about Twitter’s profitability
Google has the money to let Twitter just BE. Google doesn’t need the few hundred million that Twitter is bringing in each quarter.
It needs Twitter to grow and get better.
Take some of the pressure off the team to make it profitable, and instead charge them with making it more awesome. (See Stipulation 3)
Stipulation 2: Leave the Twitter brand alone
This doesn’t become “Twitter by Google,” just like YouTube isn’t Google Video and Instagram isn’t Facebook Photos.
Stipulation 3: Do everything I said to do in my article about Twitter
I wrote an entire article recently about what Twitter needs to do to be more awesome.
The Value to Google of Buying Twitter
- Access to the Twitter firehose of data
- Periscope
- Vine
- Another ad opportunity in the future
Periscope could immediately plug into YouTube. So could Vine. Monetize both.
Twitter search has always been a fascinating way to catch a glimpse into what is happening RIGHT NOW. Bringing in Tweets , Vines, and Periscope live streams with Google+ posts would give a more interesting stream of content around topics.
Further, all of this content could enhance search engine results by showing people what their connections say on Twitter about a particular search query.
Acquisition 2: Buy Yelp
I hate Yelp. Lots of people hate Yelp. But Yelp is fairly useful, and it’s a decent platform. Maybe one day I’ll write a post on how to fix Yelp. But for now…
Google could buy Yelp, incorporate the reviews into the search results with its Zagat ratings.
It also provides another data set of how people are connected. Let’s not forget, part of these acquisitions is about building a social graph comparable to the one Facebook has.
Google could use both Twitter and Yelp data to rank business reviews with social data.
Acquisition 3: Buy Foursquare (and Swarm)
Foursquare has struggled to find it’s identity. While it has raised a little over $160m, it has struggled to find any real revenue streams and its user growth has stalled even after splitting Foursquare into two separate apps: Foursquare (Recommendations, Tips and Lists) and Swarm (Check-ins).
By acquiring Foursquare, Google can instantly capture more social graph data, check-in data, and venue location data that rivals (beats the pants off of) Google’s own.
If Google owned Foursquare and Yelp and Twitter, it would have the most powerful sets of location data and social business recommendations on the web.
Acquisition 4: Buy SocialMention
Probably cheap enough to buy, Social Mention is a useful social search engine that Google could absorb into it’s own social search results in Google+.
Acquisition 5: Quora
Ask a question? Get an answer from Quora, just like how Wikipedia results have been factored into search results.
And again, there’s another added benefit. Quora will help to capture even more data about people’s social connections.
Acquisition 6: Path
Path, a once promising idea, has long outlived what anyone thought it could do. It was a cute idea originally, but then it lost it’s original niche and became “just another…”
So, why buy Path?
Simple, the app is gorgeous. The UI could be stripped and used for other apps in the Google-verse or the recently acquired Twitter-verse.
Added bonus, the acquisition will likely be cheap. The leadership of Path has to know that the app is not long for this world.
Step 2: Build a competing Identity Service
One of Facebook’s most important assets is our data. They monetize our interests, our brand affinity, and our social connections. They know what apps we use, and often get data from those apps as well. So what can Google do to compete?
- Beat Facebook by using Facebook
- Make Google+ the identity service that Facebook Connect is
It took Facebook years to capture all this data. Well, between the acquisitions listed above, and letting people build their profile by logging in with Facebook Connect, Google could grow exponentially faster than Facebook ever could by grabbing as much data as the Facebook API would allow.
The problem is, no one is challenging Facebook Connect. I personally don’t want to login with Facebook, but I’d rather do that than enter my email and create another password to remember. Whenever possible I login with Twitter or Google over Facebook. But Facebook has become to best option, and for good reason. Make it easier for developers to implement another option.
Once Google has this data, it needs to use it to make relevant streams in Google+ and more relevant searches in Google search results.
Step 3: Simplify
Google+ was too complex. There were too many features. More needs to be done to make it easy and accessible.
Here’s how to do it…
Split out apps
Google+ was packed to the brim with features..it was too much. And if you look at Facebook’s successful mobile strategy, they are making splitting their single app, into multiple apps.
Splitting out streams and photos was a smart move. But further, it should split out “Communities” similar to how Facebook launched the Groups app. Google should also take the “Collections” function and give it an app.
The Utility of Streams
The streams in Google+ were good, but the Facebook newsfeed algorithm had it beat from the start because of the amount of data it had access to. Google+ was stingy with its API from the start and they still are. Without Instagram and every other app feeding data into the stream, the Google+ streams became something that most people referred to as “a Ghost Town.”
But having just acquired 6 companies, and splitting out a few features into individual apps, there is plenty that Google+ could do with the streams.
Imagine if the G+ streams pulled in YouTube uploads, YouTube favorites, Twitter status updates, Vine videos, Periscope live streams, Medium posts, updates from Google Currents, Foursquare recommendations, and Yelp reviews,…all along side the G+ updates. It could be amazing.
Further, they could do some very cool things with how those streams are organized. They could make streams for people, for brands, for photos only, and even app specific streams…like YouTube or Twitter.
Eliminate Google redundancies
With Google+, Google introduced a new way to organize our contacts called Circles…there’s only one problem, we’ve still got Google Contacts. Why?
Why do I have all of these different places to organize my contacts: G+, Hangouts, Gmail, Google contacts. Google needs one way to organize people.
I suggest:
- Friends
- Follow
- Brands
This would make a unified social graph organization across all Google properties.
Unified Ads
Once Google had all of these properties and all of these apps, it would have plenty of places to get in front of eyeballs, and for the ad buying community, what better place to buy ads than from the leader in search and display advertising, that now has packages that include social properties as well?
Step 4: Go on the Offensive
Google played it too conservative the first time around. Meanwhile, Facebook wasn’t playing around. In fact, they even launched an anti-G+ public relations campaign.
This time around, Google needs a ballsy bold claim to get people excited, and then they need to deliver. They aren’t here to play the game, they are here to win the game, and their best bet is to play up everything that Facebook has gotten wrong and talk about how they are going to get it right. Now is not the time to retreat, now is the time to double down and show strength. Because I don’t want to live in a world where Social Media, just means Facebook.