Google+ for Business is Coming

Google recommends businesses hold off creating Google+ accounts now, as a business-focused version is coming.

Why Google Circles Will Succeed

Google's Google+ might succeed, in part, for reasons that have nothing to do with features. Google has created the opportunity for people to get a social network "do over."

Where on Facebook a user has to "de-friend" a contact, something people might be reluctant to do, Google+ handles such actions gracefully.

Unlike Facebook, LinkedIn, or most other social networks, there's no such thing as a "friend request," in one sense.  


Users can create groups of friends, called Circles, including both other Google+ users and nonusers who receive status updates by e-mail rather than from the site. But that's not the key feature.



As a Google+ user, you never are in the awkward situation of receiving a friend request from someone you don't really want to be Google+ friends with.

Nor will you have to face the awkward decision of whether or not to de-friend a former contact. Just remove them from your circles, which are never revealed to other users. Other than that, Google+ looks and behaves a lot like Facebook.

Read more.

Mobile Execs Move to Banks

Omar Khan, head of strategy and product management, is joining Citigroup. Khan, who was the head of products and technology for Samsung's U.S. mobile division, will help develop Citigroup's global mobile services.

In 2010, Dan Schulman, who previously ran Virgin Mobile, moved to run American Express' mobile business. If you wanted more evidence that the mobile business and banking are "converging" at an important level, both moves are illustrative data points.

Samsung loses key mobile executive to Citigroup

Why Tech Companies Don't Want to be Called "Media" Companies

Advertisers and other publishers have pointed out for years now that assembling audiences, and selling advertising against them, makes some significant "technology" companies media businesses. Google, for example, constantly says it is a technology company, not a media company, despite the fact that its revenue stream is overwhelmingly based on advertising revenue.

Some might suggest that hesitance to embrace the "media" appellation is more than a cultural issue. One might argue that engineers and software developers just prefer to think of themselves as technologists, not publishers. It might be more simple than that.

Valuations of media companies are not as rich as those of technology companies. That alone would be reason to emphasize "technology leadership," rather than media operations.

Why Silicon Valley Can't Sell | Adweek

Smart Phone Sensor Apps Will be Key for Marketing

Mobile phones are sensors. Today that is true mostly for location apps. In the future, there will be other ways to use the sensor functions, Forrester Research believes.

"When a phone knows where you are, what you're doing, your identity and history, and even potentially your attitudes, based on what you've done in the past year and the past five minutes, it can help predict and deliver what you want right now," says Josh Bernoff, Forrester Research analyst.  "This is the context that makes mobile devices more intimate and completely different from traditional Web experiences."

Google Launching Huge Data Exchange to Target Ads?

Google might be just weeks away from unveiling an advertising data exchange that would create a liquid market for the data used to target display advertising, Ad Age reports. Executives familiar with Google's plans have described the initiative as one of the most ambitious in Google's march to become a brand advertising giant.

Under the plan, publishers and third-party providers would be able to feed their data into the market and advertisers could dip in and buy audience segments, such as people shopping for refrigerators, planning a trip, or demographic or psychographic segments.

The scale of the initiative, and the fact that it will contain Google's own data, plus online and offline data from third parties will provide both unprecedented richness of targeting data and represent a competitive threat to other would-be providers of such services.

Online publishers using Google's DoubleClick would be able to sell data on their audiences in the exchange as easily as they might sell ad space.

Google might have chosen some other path, if it had more display inventory to sell. But, faced with a limited ability to sell avails on its own properties, Google apparently has decided it would fare better as a provider of targeting data.

One debate internally has been over whether to charge a percentage to use the service, as it does with Invite Media (which charges advertisers for services) and DoubleClick (which charges publishers), or make it free to use so Google would reap the benefits of more effective ad campaigns, and presumably, more spending.

Read more here.

NFC Apps for Google+ on Androids

Google+ apparently supports use of near field communications, and it appears that some applications using the feature are under development. "Google Check-ins" is a feature of the "Stream" feature of Google+, for example.

Users then might  be able to "check in" using NFC, creating an automatic post directly to their stream on Google+, also limiting its visibility by Circle category (groups). A user might want "friends" to see the check in, but not business associates or other family members or more-casual acquaintances. Read more here.

Business pages, the Google equivalent to Facebook Pages, have also been promised in Google Plus, says Mike Blumenthal, Google VP of Local and Commerce. It also might make sense to use NFC support for Business pages as well, essentially replacing the function of a quick response code, for example. Retailers will have to think about this, though.

It means putting NFC access points at the entrances to stores, or at other locations. The check in function could be handled at an NFC point of sale terminal as the customer leaves, but that doesn't create value while the customer is in the store, still shopping.

There are at least two different ways to look at NFC-supported social apps, from a retailer point of view. There is the indirect value of a check in as well as the direct value of stimulating incremental purchases while the customer is on the premises. There also is the possible value of an NFC-based payment capability, though even there, many of us would argue that the greater upside is the marketing platform created by NFC, not the actual payment.