The launch of Google+ has gone as well as anyone at Google could have hoped. In its first few weeks it passed 10 million users (perhaps 18 million by now) and has a lot of positive buzz. In the news business, we can do more than just cover this as a tech story — we can learn from it.
The business strategy behind Google+ — and the way the company handled the launch — is an example for news organizations to follow. Google is not a news company, of course, and so the parallels I draw here are not perfect. But Google is an information company, and it is trying to building communities and launch new online products just as most news organizations are.
Here are five things Google got right that can translate to the news business.
Embrace personalization. Google was founded in 1998 with the mission “to organize the world’s information.” For years, that meant simply crawling the Web to index every possible page and ranking them by authority for any given keyword search. Everyone who searched for the same set of keywords got the same results. There was one Internet, indivisible, with SEO and PageRank for all.
After a while, that wasn’t good enough.
In 2005, Google began to personalize search results based on your Web browsing history. In 2010 it added social search, which showed some search results based on what your online friends have shared on social networks. And this year Google began testing its own Google+ social network and +1 button, which among many goals would give the company its strongest signals to recommend personalized Web content (and ads).
Contrast Google’s evolution with that of news websites, and you see that most are still stuck in the pre-2005 era of one Web for all. They do what Google used to do and newspapers have always done: Survey the community’s information and create one bundled authoritative synopsis.
In 2011, news sites need to act more like Google, using implicit signals (browsing history) and explicit signals (the social layer of likes and tweets) to learn what each user cares about and personalize the news results.
Disrupt yourself. Google draws about two-thirds of its total revenue from advertising in Google Search and its other smaller websites. It controls more than 80 percent of the search-advertising market. With such a dominant position, you might expect a company to entrench itself and focus on protecting that near-monopoly.
But Google didn’t do that. It didn’t stop at just doing the social tweak to its legacy search business. Google realized that to stay relevant on the social Web it needed to create an actual social network. And it tried and tried again until it built one that seems like it’s going to work.
For mainstream news organizations, their legacy business of print or broadcast is like Google’s search business — dominant within its market, and accounting for a great majority of the company’s revenue. The news companies that want to win a future will have to do something better than an online version of a newspaper or a paywall that protects the value of print subscriptions. They need digital strategies to aggressively create new forms of digital news.
Design matters. Design had never been a strength at Google, whose engineering-dominated culture traditionally focused on what a product could do, and later came up with the sparsest possible design. Give them credit for efficient minimalism, but not for ambition.
Google+ broke that mold. Even in its early trial phase, it’s clear that the design is part of the product, not just an afterthought. It uses color, texture and user-friendly interfaces that are un-Googley.
Steven Levy explained in a Wired magazine piece why this is so. Rather than design by committee or by engineers, Google put the entire product in the hands of senior vice president for social, Vic Gundotra, whose “philosophy of product design is to envision the demo he will eventually present at the launch event and work backwards from there,” Levy writes.
The result is a product that feels cohesive, fairly elegant, and even a little bit fun. Consider this the next time you sit down in a conference room full of people to plan a new news product — brainstorming is fine, but in the end, put the product in the hands of one person with vision and let her lead.
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- The stream post from one of Vic Gundotra’s recent Hangouts with Google+ users.
Listen to users. Gundotra regularly uses the Google+ Hangouts — a group video-chat — to hear feedback from users. He and many other Googlers, including four community managers, are actively engaging on the service and responding to questions and comments.
The benefits are clear: Google gets useful feedback and users feel appreciated. But also note that the entire Google+ team from the top down is available and listening to users — it’s a job too important to delegate or outsource.
News organizations should learn from this. Everyone from the top editor to the rookie reporter should be engaged with the audience, listening and learning.
Launch with a mobile strategy. Google+ had an Android app ready at launch, and an iPhone app that took a while to get Apple’s approval but is now available.
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- Google+ Huddle, a mobile-only group chat feature.
And the mobile apps don’t just duplicate the desktop Web features — they add new mobile features. The apps use a phone’s location data to automatically show Google+ posts near you. They also have “huddles” — group text chats for coordinating among a group of friends on the go, and the Android app’s “instant upload” technology can send a photo to your Google+ Web albums as soon as you take it, for sharing later.
That’s a good example for news organizations to follow: Develop the mobile strategy along with the Web strategy, and consider how your mobile product can be enhanced by unique features.
Google+ still has a long way to go in trying to become a mainstream social network. But the start has been strong, and the company seems willing to commit to its success and build the rest of its Web products around a social strategy. It’s worth continuing to watch and learn from Google’s successes and missteps.
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