Our Thoughts

Google+ has released a raft of new features to it’s hangouts platform, providing the ability to participate from your Android phone, live broadcast your hangout, share your screen, edit documents and draw pictures! The masters of search have finally added it to Google+, allowing you to find personalised content. In the search results you will see your friends comments and posts if they are relevant to the search, as well as traditional search results from the web. But the big news is that the invite-only field trial is over, Google+ has finally opened it’s doors to the public. It will be interesting to see how many people make the move over in the coming months.

Nike was at the forefront of the Social Media movement, from harnessing the power of YouTube and viral videos to engaging with fans on one of the largest brand communities at the time. Nike was one of the first brands to use a viral video with the Ronaldinho cross bar video, the video took advantage of our desire to share things with our friends. The focused their initial strategies on growing users interested in Football, creating various localised communities for fans. This saw them leap to 23 million consumers across their platforms. After expanding to other sports they have active communties around the world with nearly 50 million consumers. Read about their latest campaigns over at Mashable.

Google has introduced +1 buttons for display ads across the web. If a friend has +1’ed the ad, a recommendation will appear next to the button, alongside the users profile picture. This is similar to Facebook, who allow you to ‘Like’ an ad. This move puts more emphasis on social ads that are used to varying degrees by Facebook, Reddit and Steam already. Perhaps the most important aspect of Google’s new social ads is the impact on SEM, friends are more likely to see the ad because recommendations figure high in Google’s search algorithms. As expected, advertisers can opt out of the program, as can consumers and publishers.