Last week, yet another social media solution was announced. This time, it came from the Internet giant Google, and it is called Google Buzz. In my opinion, Google Buzz is a mixture of FriendFeed, Facebook, and Twitter. It resembles FriendFeed in the sense that it can aggregate your activities across multiple social networks and display those to your followers in one place. It resembles Facebook in the sense that it has a status update and commenting function similar to Facebook status update. And it resembles Twitter in terms of its follower structure and also its status update functionality. The one key difference with Google Buzz, however, is its integration with email, where you see all the buzzes within your Gmail account.
Frankly, I am not impressed. With so many social media solutions already out to “revolutionize” the way we communicate, I am starting to feel indifferent. Just count the sheer number of social networks out there, and we see how fragmented online social networking has become. While I am a strong believer in the value of social media, the number of competing solutions is suggesting that this market is getting to a more mature stage. Just like the hundreds of car brands in the earlier part of the last century, we are bound to see a shakeup of this marketplace, and the ones that eventually survive will be the ones that offer differentiation that appeal to a large enough network of consumers.
So with this idea of differentiation, I thought of doing an exercise. In market research, there is a technique called brand personification which is used to explore in-depth a brand’s meaning to consumers. The technique asks consumers to imagine a brand as a person and to describe what this person would be like. Here I took the liberty and brand personifies some of the best known or “buzzed” social networks we see today.
- Facebook: A child prodigy who won the heart of America almost overnight. But now at a mature adult age, he has not quite found who he is and who he wants to be. As a result, he does face lift or nip/tuck every so often, and he is hopelessly addicted to Farmville, Cafe World, Happy Aquarium, and the like.
- Twitter: A geek with an entrepreneurial soul. He is fun loving, quick to act, and can get really passionate about a topic. But because of interest in a large number of topics, he also shows symptoms of ADD and can have a fairly short attention span.
- LinkedIn: A businessman dressed in a suit and tie. He is ready to do a sales pitch at any time, and he always carries with him a briefcase no matter where he goes. In that briefcase, he never forgets to bring with him a copy of his resume in case some better job becomes available.
- foursquare: An overly social person who thrives on attention to such an extent that he literally lives in the public’s eyes. His smartphone is his prized possession that indulges his need for constant connection to the outer world.
- Google Buzz: Someone in his 40’s or possibly 50’s. He has gotten onto the Internet late, after his son, daughter, and friends have enjoyed it for quite a while. Once online, he cautiously explores around and finds email as a safe haven for staying connected. He hangs out with @mashable often, who admires him for his infinite wisdom.
Not hard to see that I am a little cynical in almost all of these. Perhaps we haven’t found the winning formula yet? Or perhaps I am just an outlier in the sample. If I were to pick one from this list as my friend, I would choose the geeky Twitter, which is also the service that I find myself gravitate toward the most nowadays. What would your choice be?
