Christian Fictoor weblog

I’ve had an extremely busy week and it was special enough to share it with you!

Two cool moments in one week!

First of all I was featured in a article (by Jeroen Mirck) about GOOGLE+ in one of the leading Magazines for Marketing in the Netherlands; ADFORMATIE. As one of the early adaptors and actually implementing G+ for our clients within their marketingcommunication mix my opion was asked about the platform. The article is in Dutch (PDF) but has selectable text so could be translated through something like Google Translate.

LINK TO THE ADFORMATIE ARTICLE : http://www.adformatie.nl/images/uploads/adformatie-liken-of-plussen.pdf

In the same week I have been involved in preparations for the first ever Startup Weekend to be held in Enschede (for info check http://enschede.startupweekend.org ).
The event would be held in THE LOUNGE event-room in the ‘Spinnerij Oosterveld’ where my company Fictoor Wagelaar crossmedia marketing communication is also based. Our company was also one of the proud sponsors of the event.

Saturday I coached a couple of the teams working on their concept and that was energizing and inspirational.

You can check out a photo impression here Picasa Photo album Startup Weekend Enschede (a video will be added later).

CLAIM YOUR GOOGLE+ BUSINESS PAGE TODAY!
To complicated? To little time? Let us help! We’ll set up your business page for only € 150,- ! For info please send me an e-mail and I’ll get back to you ASAP.

GOOGLE has announced their next step into the social media realm by launching the long anticipated Google+ (Google plus) pages today.
Google+ pages will be available to companies and other organizations. The first pages have been launched today by some larger companies/organizations like Toyota, H&M, Burberry and … The Muppets (link: link to Muppets Google+ page).

So what are the pages all about? This is how Google+ explains it (video):

If you are lucky …. yes Google wouldn’t be Google if they are launching this thing in tranches (deciding which company / organizations deserve a page first) you can claim your own page via de following URL : plus.google.com/pages/create

And now the reason why I told frequent readers of my blog earlier that Google+ MIGHT (!) be a Facebook killer. Today they also announced (in the same post mind you …) that they will make the adding of Google+ pages to your circles extremely easy. In the search box (using Google search) you will just have to type +toyota and you will be sent to the TOYOTA Google+ page and you can add the brand directly to your circles. This might just be the next big marketing-peoples-wannahave. Letting people connect with a brand by just typing “+BRANDNAME” is very interesting (and still people are thinking that corporate websites have eternal life … wake up!).
Difficult to imagine how this all works and looks? Google thought of that! Here’s the video:

Want to know more or do you want to check out some Google+ pages already available? Check Google’s blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/google-pages-connect-with-all-things.html

Of course I’ll let you know when my company Fictoor Wagelaar will have created it’s own page but … I am in the waiting-queue

UPDATE november 8th: Created my first two pages!
Google+ business page Fictoor Wagelaar
Google+ business page IBIO afslanken

Christian Fictoor
B: http://www.christianfictoor.com
T: @chrisfictoor
G+: my Google+ account

Need a Google+ / Googleplus invite? Please e-mail me your gmail-adres and I’ll send an invite!

Google has tried and failed to strengthen its position as a major player in the realm of social media. Google Wave and Google Buzz were (sometimes clumsily) launched and failed to raise applause from social media users.

Now Google has launched the bèta version of Google+ and it looks that they have finally ‘got it right’

Can Google+ ‘win’ the battle against Facebook and Twitter (and other social media channels)? In the last few years they (Twitter and Facebook) have already gained an enormous user-base and have established a solid market-share and Google+ has yet to prove itself to the social media community.
So at this time it’s to early to answer the question if Google+ will win the battle against the current ‘social media giants’ but the signs are certainly there.
Basically Google took all the best elements of currently existing platforms and combined them into their new social media en-devour Google+.
But they did more. Especially the way to group contacts is extremely smart. You can put your contacts in ‘ circles ‘ grouping them by, for example “family”, “business contacts” and “friends”.

But there’s (much) more why I think that Google+ is an interesting new platform:

• you can add photos, QR codes, links and much more interesting rich-media information to your ‘about’ page
• you get unlimited storage on Picasa (Google’s photo and video sharing platform – should Flickr be worried?)
• search results (SEO) could be hugely impacted in the future by using Google+
• Google+ is seamlessly integrated with their mobile platform Android (Iphone/Ipad apps in the future?)
• the free live video-chat feature (possible with multiple users) makes Google+ stand out from Facebook and is a very interesting option
• the stream of posts from you and your Google+ friends looks a bit like a combination between Facebook and Twitter (best of both worlds)
• option to show posts per circle
• if you have location enabled on your mobile device Google+ can create circles ‘nearby’ (interesting feature for location based marketing)
• ‘sparks’ option; a (currently) small selection of topics showing you posts about the interest-field you’ve selected
• potential for growth is enormous because Google can easily expand their system with for example social bookmarks, a ‘quora-like’ Q&A feature and of course their own services like Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Music etc.
• the search engine let’s you find people easily and adding new friends to your circles is as easy as counting from 1 to 3

through implementation of Google’s “Google Wallet” payment system it could well become an interesting e-merce and/or crowd-funding platform

So there we have it. A long list of interesting Google+ features that should trigger other social media platform to better follow their new competitor very closely.

BUT Google+ is still in bèta… Only people invited by current Google+ users can join (if you need an invite please contact me). And even then you might be in for a wait because Google opens and closes the ‘doors’ to their new platform as they please.
Of course the staggering numbers of users that platforms like Facebook and Twitter have will not be reached by Google+ as long as the platform is still in bèta but in my opinion they just might have just finally struck ‘social media gold’ with this new platform.

As a social media marketeer I’ll keep experimenting with this new platform to try out the unique features of Google+ and see how they could be suitable for our clients. I think it is an interesting addition to the already (very) wide range of social media channels.
Keep in mind that social media channels come and go (sometimes very fast) but I think Google+ is here to stay.

If you are already on Google+ please connect with me (http://plus.google.com/104089034994416821424) or search for ” Christian Fictoor ” via the Google+ search option.
Hope to welcome you in one of my circles !

UPDATES BELOW :

UPDATES july 18th : Google+ reaches approx 20 million users. 33% of the Google+ users is female. You can now invite people to Google Plus more easily via the “Invite people to join Google+” link (bottom right of the home (after you logged in).

How to transfer your Facebook friends to Google+ all at once :

UPDATE july 11th: Google+ big succes, claims “Millions” of users already (audio interview with Eric Schmidt (Google), please turn up volume, audio quality is not that high …) :

Full article at : http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/09/eric-schmidt-on-gauging-googles-success

UPDATE july 11th : Infographic (thanks to : http://www.technobombs.com)

UPDATE july 8th : Google+ announced that it will launch company pages (somewhat like Facebook fanpages) in about two weeks, in the meantime G+ asks companies not to join Google+ under their company name.

UPDATE july 6th : I’ve added a video tour by Lifehacker.com below :

UPDATE juli 5th: Ford Europ runs first brand competition on Google+ (read the full article by @gordonmacmillan here).

Christian Fictoor
Fictoor Wagelaar crossmedia marketing communication
Christian Fictoor weblog
Twitter: @chrisfictoor | @fictoorwagelaar

Google+ statistics :