Can Google+ Become a Daily Habit?

By Brian Morrissey • August 4, 2011 •

The Google+ Habit: Now that the initial wave of hysteria over Google+ has subsided, there are some more sober-minded analyses of the new social network. The overriding question comes down to whether or not a lot of people will make it a regular part of their lives. That’s sometimes lost in the eye-popping user numbers — Google+ now has 20 million — but is pretty fundamental. Shiv Singh, global head of digital for PepsiCo Beverages, picks up on this theme in a mostly optimistic early assessment of Google+. He finds it promising, yet still can’t help but wonder if it can barge into people’s already busy digital routines. Facebook, for better or worse, is a daily habit. It’s ironic that Google is now in that situation, since its search competitors for years complained how hard it was to break people from the Googling habit.

Apps Aren’t Enough: The great app debate is whether they’re going to kill the Web or are just a halfway point until Web presentation technology catches up. Count Forrester Research analyst Nate Elliott in the app skeptic camp. He sees too many marketers relying on apps as a shortcut. Marketers’ target audiences don’t care nearly as much about branded applications as the marketers themselves do,” he writes. This is true, although the same could be said for pretty much any marketing, app or otherwise. Elliott goes on to point out that apps, for all the hype around them, are decidedly niche. Instead of going the sexy route, marketers should offer consumers a variety of ways to get involved with the brand, including stodgy methods like text message.

For Finance Guy to Entrepreneur: It’s not exactly zero to hero, but Vin Vacanti, founder of deal aggregator Yippit, has a nice yarn about how he went from yet another guy in a suit working in finance to the CEO of a startup in a hot space. Vacanti turned his back on a stable, extremely lucrative career moving money in order to build something new.

Stat of the Day: In just nine months, Instagram users of loaded 150 million photos. It took Flickr two years to get to 100 million.

The Bloomberg Terminal for Marketing: It used to be that people in the digital ad industry all talked about “the dashboard” that brought together all the different marketing systems. Nowadays, with data all the rage, the talk is of the Bloomberg Terminal for marketing. Darren Herman, the chief digital media officer of The Media Kitchen and president of KBS+P Ventures, explains the need for a terminal. In his view, it comes down to the fact that data is on its way to informing nearly all marketing decisions. That means marketers (and publishers) need a way to make sense of it all immediately.

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