According to the Financial Times, Google is set to challenge social networking giant Facebook and “at stake is nothing less than the future of advertising on the internet”.

David Gelles and Richard Waters write that ‘Buzz’, Google’s previous attempt to construct a social network around the approximately 200million people who use its gmail service, failed largely because it lacked the games and applications found on its rival networks. Consequently their latest push ‘signals a strategic shift for Google’. It seems their focus will now be on “building a destination for social games and applications, and hoping the social network will coalesce around it”.

To this end Google have gone on a “shopping spree. On Friday it bought Jambool, a company that runs virtual currency systems for social games, including those played on Facebook. This month Google paid about $200m for Slide, a major developer of Facebook applications with a wealth of talented engineers. And shortly before that it invested $100m in Zynga, the largest maker of social games”.

Google’s desire to successfully jump on the social media bandwagon is fuelled by the incredible advertising power platforms like Facebook have proven themselves capable of in a short space of time. “Google is still the undisputed champion of this field, serving up the vast majority of search advertising and hauling in $23.5bn last year. But Facebook is hot on its tail. Just six years old, Facebook is expected to make between $1bn and $2bn this year, thanks to its vast user base and its highly targeted ads”.

Credible brands are utilizing social media to reach customers and to build or maintain reputation. Sometimes referred to as viral advertising, this kind of marketing is an extension of the word-of-mouth concept. Now these promotions can take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, 'advergames', 'ebooks', brandable software, images, or even text messages. The goal of marketers interested in creating successful viral marketing programs is to identify individuals with high Social Networking Potential and create viral messages that appeal to this segment of the population and therefore have a high probability of being widely circulated, or spread, much like a pathological virus, by the users themselves. As social media continue to grow, the ability to reach more consumers globally has also increased.

Another major factor which has contributed to the success of advertising through the social media platforms is their inherent ability to draw people back again and again. Blogger Adam Rifkin likens Google and social network users to pandas and lobsters respectively: While Google has been highly successful in the creation of applications for search, maps, news and email, these encourage users to search for something, consume, and move on to the next thing, much like a panda in the pursuit of bamboo. They have not excelled at making “applications that are by their nature for lingering and luxuriating – the so called social applications”. These act instead like lobster traps which use our friend s as bait; they are “designed to lure us back and make us never want to leave”.

With this mind, perhaps Google’s new focus on social applications will give them the required edge. However, with Facebook’s membership at 500million and counting, they have their work cut out for them.

References:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/fd9b57ac-a879-11df-86dd-00144feabdc0.html http://ifindkarma.posterous.com/pandas-and-lobsters-why-google-cannot-build-s

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