GoogleBuzz puts Gmail on the Social Network grid!
The lastest move from Google reinforces the rapidly evolving way we can now expect to engage online. Integrating Business, Personal and Social talk channels is where the buzz is – and where online presence drives traffic.
The revamping of email continues! Google’s e-mail service, Gmail, will now allow its regular users – currently around 170 million people – to post status updates, share content from other sites such as Twitter,YouTube, Flickr and Picassa, and read and comment on posts.
Buzz is aimed directly against rival networks such as Facebook – which last week rolled out a new site design for easier message search and chat – and has amassed nearly 400 million users since its launch in 2004. Meanwhile, Yahoo already offers a service that allows people to see updates from sites such as Twitter and Flickr from inside their Yahoo Mail page.
For forward-thinking businesses, the opportunity to widen their online marketing capability into the social networking sphere is now more tempting than ever before. Planning a nicely targeted newsletter or email marketing campaign can easily incorporate direct audience involvement via instant feedback.
New features on Buzz are aimed at the mobile internet and the busy user on the move, a trend that is predicted to continue and grow in the forseeable future.
Highlighted with the Buzz symbol, messages are delivered directly into the Gmail inbox, with ‘private’ updates automatically added to a user’s profile page, whilst public updates will also be available to search engines.
Twitter-style elements, such as the ability to ‘follow’ people to share updates, and Facebook-type features such as the ability to ‘like’ content are featured.
Buzz will also recommend content from people that it thinks you may like to see and incorporate it directly into a user’s content stream.
Google has also integrated Buzz with its mapping service and has launched a mobile application for phones running its operating system, Android. Status updates sent from phones will record the location of the sender and add it to the message. Other users can then search public messages from their phone, so ‘…you can see what people in your neighbourhood are saying…’
Public updates will also be added to Google Places, a directory of businesses that include, for example, reviews of restaurants and theatres – and should attract the interest of those businesses, who to date, may not have considered using the new messaging channels as part of their marketing strategies.
Combined with the recently launched Google Wave, a tool that mixes e-mail, with instant messaging and the ability for several people to collaborate on documents in real time, the possibilities for optimising customer potential are greatly increased by ‘social’ driven business development.
Impressing potential customers with a show of progressive attitude by the embrace of latest social media apps can only boost a company’s online brand identity, leading to increased visitor traffic, interest and sales enquiries.
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I use both Picassa and Flickr for sharing photos over the internet but i use Flickr more often than Picassa.“:
Comment by Taylor Reid — May 9, 2010 @ 10:29 am