Emma SherlockNews, Technology
Try it (Google+, not the crisps, yet). Obviously (it is Google after all) it comes up top of the organic search results. However, somewhere on page 1 there will be one or more articles about the problems/failure/disaster that is Google+. A recent (2nd August), major piece on Mashable was headlined, “Inside the failure of Google+, a very expensive attempt to unseat Facebook”.
You’ll probably also find in your Google search for Google+ that a number of links came up that reported on the launch of Google+ and how it was going to become (as Wired magazine told us in 2011) “a major force in social networking”. Now, it’s clearly being slowly removed from Googleland, although ironically, it still (in theory) gets to lots of people.
In fact, on the same page that Mashable reported the ‘failure’ of Google+, you can see the numbers following Mashable on its various social platforms. As shown here, the numbers for Google+ (7M) are far higher than for Facebook (2.4M), Twitter (5.6M) et al. So what’s the problem?
It’s quite simple really. People just haven’t taken to Google+. Sure, the Hangouts are quite cool, but in general it’s a bit like Tudor Crisps attempt to come up with a revolutionary new flavour. They ‘devised’ the flavour, managed to get it ‘into’ the crisps, marketed it in the obvious part of the country (Glasgow, in Scotland) but it bombed. Even the deep-fried Mars Bar-eating nation didn’t want chocolate flavoured crisps. And despite Google’s dominance of the search engine world, they couldn’t make their customers like Google+.
It’s almost as good as official.
Google+ is the chocolate-flavoured crisp of the social media world.
Emma Sherlock, Marketing and Communications Manager, Nine Twenty