What Happens When Social Media Gets Forced Upon You? The Google Experiment

Love it or loath it Google plus is about to start coming at us from pretty much every angle. I personally don’t like nor want another social network no matter how snazzy their features are, but increasingly it is being thrust in my face to a point where I can no longer ignore it.

Most of this comes down to the fact that I use Google products on a daily basis (Gmail, Reader, Analytics, Feedburner, Youtube Adsense, Adwords etc) and if you are like most of the internet using population who do the same then you better get used to Google+. What started out as a self contained social network is slowly spreading its tentacles to every part of the Google empire and trying slowly to suck you in and force you to start using the social network in some shape or form.

Force Feeding Users

Google have decided that the best way to get us to start using their social network is to ram it into pretty much every single product that they have and make it so obvious that we are forced to click into it. Every time you log in to Gmail it is there…

Even when watching videos on Youtube it gives the billions of viewers the chance to either +1 the video or to start watching it with their friends in a Google hangout.

Google have even shown that they are not scared of messing with products like Google reader which has not had an update for years but only yesterday was fully integrated with new +1 features encouraging people to share.

Hit Us Where It Hurts

Google are already starting to incorporate lots of their Plus data into search results and even though this is a big risk around their core product, it’s one that they think is worth taking. You can already see with publishers that people who are active on Google+ are getting better organic rankings and better click throughs because of thumbnails within search results. The next step for Google will be getting businesses and brands to rank based on how many +1s they have because that will mean yet more visibility for their social networking efforts.

You Can’t Force Social On Anybody

It’s pretty obvious that Google are trying to force a social network onto us all by layering it across their various products. In fairness to them, it is what they said they would do from the very start. From my point of view, just because it is within the products I already use doesn’t make me want to start using it and I think the vast majority of people will be the same.

The only way it will have some success is if publishers and businesses depend on it and the only way of getting up the Google rankings is by being active on Plus. It may even morph into some other sort of human powered search engine, but it certainly won’t be a social network in the same genre as a Facebook. Sorry Google but you just can’t force social onto people.