Google+ Launches: Claim Your Name, Keep Your Powder Dry

Google launched a social network on June 28. Its most serious attempt yet, after earlier false starts. The early growth is remarkable. Google+ is reportedly adding users faster than any network in history. Ten million within its first weeks, while still invitation-only.

The strategic setup writes its own headlines. The company that runs search, mail, and the world’s most popular browser now has a social layer, and every marketing meeting in America has added the question to its agenda. Our answer runs against the season’s enthusiasm, so let’s establish the facts before the advice. The facts, for organizations, are unusually clear this time.

What’s actually launched and what pointedly isn’t

The product, briefly: profiles, a stream, and one genuinely fresh idea called Circles. Circles makes choosing your audience the first step of sharing rather than an afterthought. You place people in circles (colleagues, family, that conference crowd) and share to circles. That answers the collapsed-context problem every network’s users complain about and none had designed for.

Hangouts, the group-video feature, is the other standout. Polished, useful, and already being borrowed by our own distributed meetings. The design thinking throughout is real, and worth respecting on the merits.

Now the fact that governs everything for our readership: there are no organizational accounts. Not ‘not yet documented.’ Actively prohibited. Google has stated that business profiles are coming later, and is meanwhile removing brand accounts that jump the queue, prominent ones included.

The company is asking organizations, in effect, to wait for a proper door rather than climbing through the personal-profile window. Whatever else is uncertain, this much is not. Any vendor currently pitching your organization a Google+ presence strategy is pitching a violation of the platform’s stated terms, this month. That fact alone sorts the advice market usefully.

The two questions worth actual attention

• The search question. The +1 button, Google’s like-equivalent, now appearing across the web and in results, creates the obvious speculation: will +1 activity influence rankings? Our social-signals coverage from December applies word for word. The engines have confirmed social data as a minor, identity-weighted input. Google building its own identity layer makes the trend worth watching with real attention. A first-party signal beats licensed firehoses on every count the engines care about. Nothing is confirmed. Nothing merits strategy changes. The watch is officially on. This is the genuinely interesting question, and it is a 2012 story.

• The survival question. Fast starts prove curiosity, not staying power. This industry’s graveyard is furnished with networks that grew brilliantly for a season, some of them Google’s. The tell to watch is not signup counts but return behavior once novelty fades. Does the network find a daily use distinct from the incumbent it will be measured against? Facebook at seven hundred million users owns the social-graph default. Google+ needs a reason to exist beside it, and ‘Facebook, but Google’ has failed before. Circles is a real candidate reason. The verdict is quarters away.

Our advice, itemized

What we are actually advising, by action.

Individuals: join freely. Personal-account fluency is cheap, informative, and where every platform judgment should start. The practitioners on our team are all in, taking notes.

Organizations: prepare the name-reservation plan for the business-pages launch. Whoever manages your social presences should watch for the announcement, with the naming and ownership questions decided in advance. That is the account-governance lesson our crisis-planning coverage keeps teaching. Otherwise: patience.

Budgets: untouched. No reallocation, no Google+ strategist, no pilot beyond personal familiarity, until the doors officially open and the audience-fit evidence arrives.

The standing framework from five years of platform launches governs. Audience presence, not platform novelty, decides where finite attention goes. And audience presence is exactly what cannot be judged three weeks into an invite-only trial. Google’s distribution muscle earns Google+ a first-tier watchlist slot, reviewed quarterly. That is the whole commitment.

What Circles teaches even non-adopters

One design observation worth keeping whatever the network’s fate, because it touches every communications strategy we serve. Circles is a bet that choosing your audience is the first step of sharing. People want different messages for different relationships, and the network that makes that choosing effortless wins the sharing.

Sound familiar? It is the email-segmentation argument we have made since 2007, applied to social. Relevance is respect. Broadcast is the failure mode. The tools that make targeting natural beat the tools that make it an afterthought.

If Google+ succeeds, it will partly be because people are exhausted by the everyone-sees-everything broadcast that current social defaults enforce. If it fails, the diagnosis it made remains correct, and the incumbents will absorb the idea. Watch for it.

For communicators, the transferable question does not wait for the platform verdict. Does our current social presence speak to everyone the same way, and is that a choice or a default? The network that asked the question earns a little respect whether or not it survives its own answer.

What we are watching

We will note what makes this launch different from the parade of also-rans. Google can wire its network into properties billions already use daily. The ordinary cold-start physics may not apply. Dismissing it on base rates alone would be its own mistake.

Watchlists exist for exactly this profile: plausible enough to watch, unproven enough to wait. Watchlists are cheap. Commitments are not. We will report when the organizational doors open, when the search evidence firms, or when the return-behavior data starts voting. Whichever comes first. Until then, the powder stays dry, and the quarterly review has its newest line.

This is the same approach we took on Facebook in 2007 and the iPad in 2010. Early familiarity, measured commitment, audience evidence as the trigger.

The only genuinely new variable this launch adds is the search-identity question, a network owned by the engine itself. That question, not the social features, is why we sit in the first tier of the watchlist rather than the second. Watch the identity layer, not the stream.