Leo Laporte is Wrong: Geeks WILL Make or Break Google+
I love Leo Laporte like I love most hardworking geeks, but unfortunately many of “us” including Leo are downplaying our role in the emergence of a new social network called Google+. While most geeks think they aren’t important for a web service like Google+ to become mainstream, in my opinion the truth is actually very different: geeks will in fact make or break Google+, and Vic Gundotra knows it!
The argument that geeks aren’t important stems from looking at the success of popular web services as they are today: popular. Your mom uses Facebook and Katy Perry tweets. Its obvious that “normal” people, companies and celebrities made the services what they are today, isn’t it? Why they did make them more popular, they didn’t “build” the foundation of a phenomenon.
The product/market fit of Google+
Sean Ellis, the man who helped Dropbox become the popular company they are today, likes to talk about product/market fit and how creating the right product for a market is essential for being able to market it. Dropbox and Evernote could have marketed themselves as anything, but through testing and user feedback they discovered what their users really wanted.
So lets say we want to build a social network whose ultimate goal is to make people spend lots of time on it, interact, talk etc. Copying won’t work. There are more than enough social networks out there that show that building a public Facebook or a Twitter with more space to write in doesn’t really work.
Building the Google+ Culture
Its the culture of the network, the little things that make us use Twitter because its just 140 characters or browse Facebook because everyone uses it. Twitter didn’t invent RT and Facebook didn’t get to their final newsfeed look based just on hacking, but on breaking the system on the backs of their users. In the beginning they were geeks, and I’m not talking just about hardcode hackers but also a client of mine who can edit httaccess files in a pinch or my girlfriend who is a true little geekete.
What Google+ needs to succeed is not features, but the right benefits that stem from its initial users knowing what to say to their friends. It has to be obvious: why would you use Google+? Is it privacy? Is it fun? You can find tech news? We’re talking about common interests and values that inherently make up any true social group. Facebook had its students and Twitter had its early adopters. They made the rules, not the companies that make the social network.
Currently, no one knows the true benefit of Google+. For any geek on the network, its something different, something that Google has to understand in order to promote. They are a data driven company, remember? They don’t take guesses, they start experiments.
So while there isn’t an obvious reason to use Google+, geeks get mad when Techcrunch publishes that the traffic is falling (by 3%) or that their favorite media brands and personalities like Dr. Kiki are being penalized. Guess what, geeks care and that’s all that matters. The people who use Google+ aren’t an aggregate any more, a group of people just browsing the same space, but a true set of users that care about the social network.
While we might think we’re different because we’re geeks, in the end we’re more diverse than we think. Or at least diverse enough to create a focus group bigger than anything Twitter or Facebook ever had. Sorry geeks, you’re just so mainstream you’re going to make or break Google+.
