Google Buzz: What's All The Fuzz?

With the launch of its Buzz social networking initiative Tuesday, Google underlined its lofty ambitions for mobile expansion. The new social platform is deeply integrated on the mobile side, across Google's mobile home page, Gmail, Google Maps, and Place Pages as well as Buzz apps for Android phones and the iPhone. With Buzz, Google is specifically stepping more squarely into the burgeoning social location space, essentially giving users the ability to check in via mobile device from local venues as they can on services like Fousquare, Loopt and Yelp. During Tuesday's event announcing Buzz, Google executives kept shrugging at suggestions that they were competing directly with Facebook and Twitter, and presented their new product as an evolution for Google and an attempt to manage personal social data streams. Sure, that's spin to some extent, but it's also surely Google's attitude toward development of the product. It seems likely that down the road, Buzz -- if it takes off -- will interact with and augment those other so-oft-mentioned social platforms. Google Buzz doesn't take aim at killing Facebook. Now, would Google mind if its product rendered Facebook and Twitter irrelevant? Of course not. But it's not counting on that. And unlike Twitter, Google makes its money by selling ads. Its base for these ads in Gmail had been on a steady upward trajectory for years. It's likely that this was flattening out, as the company ran out of new people to sign up. Blogger Tim O’Reilly writes: There are many of us for whom email is still our core information console, and our most powerful and reliable vehicle for sharing ideas, links, pictures, and conversations with the people who constitute our real social network. But up till now, we could only share with explicitly specified individuals or groups. Now, we can post messages to be read by anyone. Sergey Brin said that Buzz gives the ability "to post a message without a 'to' line." That's exactly right - something that in retrospect is so brilliantly obvious that it will soon no doubt be emulated by every other cloud-based email system. Buzz items can be shared directly in Gmail, but are also pulled in from other social sharing sites, including Twitter, Picasa, YouTube, and Flickr. What's particularly cool is that the people you "follow" are auto-generated for you out of your email-based social network. If you communicate with them, they are the seed for your buzz cloud. Over time, as you like or dislike buzz entries from that network, the buzz cloud adapts. A day after Google debuted Buzz -- integrating a slew of social and local features into Gmail -- early reviews and analysis continue to roll in. On the news, The Times concludes that Google and Facebook are on nothing less than a "collision course in the increasingly competitive market for social networking services." Rather than a "me too" social media product, O'Reilly believes that Google "has taken the social media lessons of Twitter and applied them to their own core products." "At the high level, this is a strong move for Google," writes blogger Jeremiah Owyang. "They continue to aggregate other people's social content, and become the intermediary ... This helps them to suck in Twitter, Flickr, and any-other-data type as the APIs open up, giving them more to 'organize'." Meanwhile, "Yahoo has got to be fuming, if it has any more fumes left, that is," snipes Federated Media's John Battelle. In his opinion, initial industry response was "somewhat positive -- mainly due to the huge installed base that Gmail brings to the party." Yet, he questions Buzz's long-term viability because, for one, it doesn't "publish out" to Twitter or Facebook -- which therefore requires users to build a distribution network from scratch. "Integration with existing social networks are critical for Buzz's success -- especially Facebook," seconds Mashable. "I don't believe Buzz can enjoy significant success without Facebook integration." According to ReadWriteWeb: "Google Buzz seems to involve an asymmetric follower/friend model, but we're not completely sure how friendships and shared posts will work." Needless to say, the fact that the experts at ReadWriteWeb are confused by Buzz doesn't bode well for its broader adoption. You can read more about the functionality behind Buzz at O'Reilly Answers: "Google Buzz: 5 Things You Need to Know." There's a real lesson here for anyone who wants to enter a crowded market: play to your strengths. Think through what job that hot new startup does for its users. Don't copy what they look like. Apply what they've taught you to your own business.

9 Ways a Start-Up Can Use Social Media to Market Itself

Edward Boches, Chief Creative Officer at Storied Advertising Agency, gives advice on how a start-up with a few employees and a tiny marketing and advertising budget can get its name out there: 1. Craft a brand position rooted in a customer benefit. An awful lot of young companies do a good job of describing a product's features rather than synthesizing them into a single benefit. A simple handle, either expressing what a brand stands for or declaring its point of difference, will serve you well in everything from appearing in search results to being remembered. 2. Take your message and content to your consumer. Engineer your presence. You may want a website where you fill orders, capture data, or simply demonstrate your product, but you shouldn't assume your customer will instantly come to you. Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, and YouTube are all basically free tools. You need to go where your consumer lives online. If your customers, prospects, and influencers are there, you should be there: listening, engaging, sharing, and helping them. 3. Find inventive ways to create or gather content. For starters, make your website into a blog. Fresh content, the ability to post comments, and pages that get linked to, will add to your online visibility. No doubt it’s challenging and time consuming to generate enough content to populate your network and blog, but there are smart ways to go about it. First, whatever you’re doing, write about it. Report on your progress. Second, come up with a daily question you'd want someone to ask and respond to it in a blog post or video. Third, save time by collecting content from others. Place your product or service, even in beta form, in front of people willing to blog, make videos, and tell stories about it. Aggregate this content to your blog or video channel. Fourth, conduct polls or ask questions about a related topic and turn these results into future posts as well as “news” you can release to both bloggers and press. 4. Get on Twitter and use it actively. It takes time to build a large Twitter following, but it’s a quick way to connect with industry influencers, bloggers, and press that might matter to you. No matter what you sell, someone on Twitter is having a conversation about it. It's your chance to listen, respond, and engage with potential enthusiasts. More importantly, on Twitter there’s a willingness to help each other that you just won’t find anywhere else. Perhaps it’s because re-tweeting information is virtually effortless, or that people practically vie to share new finds, or that users feel a sense of obligation to those who follow and promote them, but for whatever reason, you’re likely to find people who are willing to help promote your brand on Twitter, presuming you learn Twitter protocols and give more than you take. 5. Connect your customers and prospects to each other. One of the best things you can do as a young company is to foster word-of-mouth conversations among your earliest customers. Whether you do it on Facebook or on your own site, it's important to invite your customers to talk to each other and share ideas. Allow them to guide one another on how they use your product or service. Not only will you have the opportunity to learn what people like and don't like about your product, you may end up with a bunch of people you can ask to help you. 6. Develop relationships with the right bloggers. Every start-up in the world wants that article in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. But the fact is, the right bloggers might be more influential for a number of reasons. They have loyal readers. Their references or links to your site will drive up your search results. And these days, it’s more likely that ideas will bubble up from the blogosphere to the mainstream press than vice versa. 7. Start Crowdsourcing. There is no shortage of services - companies like crowdSpring (design) or Tongal (video) -- to help you source affordable content from designers, videographers, writers, and others. But there's an even better reason to crowdsource. You allow your customers to participate in the creation of your brand. If you want a great example, take a look at how HBO seeded True Blood. Instead of advertising, HBO shipped samples of synthetic blood to popular videographers and bloggers, who, of course, couldn't resist making videos or posting pieces about the mysterious liquid. You may not have anything as cool as fake blood, but you can still learn to think this way. 8. Give stuff away for free. Take a look at free tools (Twitter Grader and Website Grader); free webinars (How to use SEO, Blogging for Business); free eBooks (Facebook for Business, Getting Found Online). If you sell food, give away recipes. If you’ve invented a sleep monitor, offer free tips on better sleeping. Free content generates awareness, builds loyalty, creates newsworthy topics, and spreads word-of-mouth. Remember, in this day and age, what a brand does is far more important than what a brand says. 9. Make the time, build in the role, or hire the right partner. You can do all this yourself if you have the right time, energy and commitment. If you can’t muster that, give this role to one of your first hires. If you’re less than comfortable identifying that person within your own company, (hint: it’s not an intern or a kid right out of school; Digital Natives may know all the technology, but they often lack the strategic chops and the ability to create truly compelling content) retain the services of a public relations agency with real experience in social influence. In the past launching a brand was costly. You needed a significant marketing budget that covered an over-sized booth at a trade show, a direct sales force or a Super Bowl commercial, and a good chunk of your money went into advertising and promotion. Now you might be able to get away with a laptop, an Internet connection, and some well-focused social media.