Sometimes, keeping up with the rapidly-changing world of social media can be overwhelming for public relations professionals. That’s why we plan on presenting quick, timely guides to various topics in the world of online PR. So we’re proud to present “Google Buzz – Everything You Absolutely Need to Know.”
Hear that sound? Buzz doesn’t just describe the name of Google’s latest platform for social networking. “Buzz” also describes the angry, bee-like sound of a swarm of privacy complaints, a class-action lawsuit and the frantic revisions made by Google since the platform’s launch. But what is Buzz, why did Google release it and what does it mean for PR pros?
What is it?
Buzz is a social network tightly integrated with Google’s Gmail Web-based e-mail service. It provides the commenting, sharing and conversation-hosting features that have become commonplace on many social networks over the last two years. It also has a strong emphasis on mobile, location-aware features.
In order to understand Google Buzz in relation to other social networks, it helps to understand another site, FriendFeed. FriendFeed is a social network/aggregator with a strong emphasis on real-time results, search and hosting conversations around content from the Web. Buzz’s functionality very closely resembles FriendFeed (which was incidentally launched by two ex-Googlers and acquired by Facebook in August 2009). You can easily pull content from other Web properties such as your Twitter, Picasa, Google Reader and Flickr accounts so they are displayed in your Buzz feed. Your followers on Buzz can then comment or like the content, just like on Facebook, Friendfeed, etc. The site now includes @Replies, made famous by Twitter and incorporated into Facebook earlier this year.
What’s different about Buzz from previous social networks is that it benefits from Gmail’s massive user base and allows users to leverage their Google Contacts (launched in May of last year) and Google Profile (launched in 2007) to engage in a social experience not previously possible on any of Google’s Web platforms.
This isn’t the company’s first foray into social networking the company previously acquired Jaiku (a Twitter competitor) and Dodgeball (a location-aware social network in the vein of Foursquare) years ago. Those services were left to die quiet deaths, but the company still has Orkut, the biggest social network Brazil. Social features like IM were added to Gmail way back in 2005 and services such as Google Reader, YouTube and Google Docs have incorporated social features for years now. In fact, you could argue that most of Google’s online properties (even search) incorporate some form of social interaction.
How they screwed up.
Despite all of these exciting features, the response to Buzz has been a litany of concerns, critcisms, general backlash, bugs and lawsuits aimed at the service. These problems were unanticipated by Google, but should have been. It appears the company ignored the historical concerns which have long accompanied social networking Web sites.
Social networks run into their biggest PR problems whenever they make a change to their site, whether it is a change to privacy settings, features or even just a general redesign of how the site looks. Site redesigns are a fundamental PR headache for every social network or social communication platform out there, from Facebook to Twitter. What’s worse, some of these other sites provide good models of what works and what doesn’t. Many of the proposed ways to fix Google Buzz on the Google Moderator page are simply suggestions that Google adopt the same functionality found in these social networks.
Google also failed to learn from past criticism. When you’re one of the world’s biggest companies that collects user data on hundreds of millions of people every day, people get worried about how you will protect their privacy. Google CEO Eric Schmidt was criticized in December for saying that privacy didn’t really exist online. Unfortunately, the company badly misjudged the public’s privacy concerns again with the launch of Buzz. When the network launched, Buzz automatically followed everyone in the user’s Google Contacts list. It also made this list public. This is very bad, when users expect this information to remain private. E-mail information is protected under the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, in some cases. If they had launched Buzz as a standalone product, much of their problems could have been avoided.
Another possible problem may have come from the company’s internal testing. Google Buzz was tested internally, with no feedback from outside users. This was extremely odd, because many of Google’s best services or features have gone through the familiar, opt-in vetting that Google Labs provides. By relying on internal stakeholders only to vet their products rather than exposing to a subset of their public user base, the company missed an opportunity to avoid many of the problems they are now having.
What you need to know.
If you haven’t used Buzz yet, go here for a quick feature overview and how to get started.
Buzz has immediate implications for reputation management and media monitoring. Buzz’s content is very searchable, and you can begin using it immediately as a supplement for daily monitoring tasks. Google Operating System shows how you can save Buzz searches to make the process easier. Buzz content is already incorporated into the Google Trends real-time search results feature. Radian6 and Viralheat have both added Buzz results to their respective analytics platforms.
As you can imagine, building a Google Profile for your brand might be a good idea, right about now.
But Buzz doesn’t have the same mature feature ecosystem for brands that Facebook does. It doesn’t have the history of rapid-reaction corporate response that you find on Twitter. It appears to be very under-utilized by Gmail users. It will not be the “next big thing” in corporate social media PR (for at least a few months).
The Google Buzz story is really the story of several long-term Web trends coming to a head. Just as Google has slowly added social features to all of its Web properties (including search), social networks continue to add “traditional” e-mail and IM features to their services, if they do not already have them. This makes sense, because e-mail is a social network. We already have MySpace e-mail, and we will soon have Facebook mail. Even Microsoft’s Outlook will soon incorporate basic social networking tools. With all this sharing, privacy concerns will continue to be a major headache for all of the above companies. Features like @Replies and “likes” will become standardized across platforms, which will lead to commoditization of microblogging services such as those provided by Twitter. Buzz is built on a framework for distributed social messaging, which will lead to less-centralized social networks and more fragmented audiences. This will magnify the need for better research and monitoring capabilities in public relations. It will also make it more difficult to cut through the noise and connect with your target audience.
We hope you’ve liked this guide to Google Buzz. Feel free to leave your feedback in the comments.