I love the way that Google+ is an even bigger reason to login and give Google a token to link together all my other interactions with Google products. Each of which tells Google a little bit about what I’m interested in.
Google products are not there to get customers to use the web, they’re there to watch customers use it. I work with loyalty card and customer data firms and Google’s array of products give a much better cumulative view of each customer’s interests than any single big retailer’s loyalty scheme, even those of Tesco Clubcard or Boots Advantage Card in the UK.
Think about those lines of small radio telescopes that you see in the desert. Astronomers combine the data from each of the perspectives of the individual dishes into one big view – and the wider the telescopes are spaced out then the broader the perspectives have access to and the more insight they can gain.
In digital marketing and ecommerce insights are about ‘who’ is interested in ‘what’ products and services, ‘when’ and ‘where’ – even if they do not know it themselves.
Loyalty programmes do a great job of helping to figure this out but their insights are limited by the actual transactions and the relationship that generate the data. For example, an insurance company knows a lot about a customer’s ‘insurance life’ but that’s just like looking through a key hole at the rest of the customer’s life.
Supermarket chains get much broader perspectives than insurance companies because they sell customers things that help them in more diverse parts of their lives. But even that is a small part of their whole lives. Truly indispensible, personal and timely suggestions need to be in the context of large parts of who each customer is and what they do (and what they want to do). Especially if they do not know themselves.
Sure, you could buy-in data but bought-in data is generally more indirect and aggregated than the data that comes from your own relationship with that customer. The more removed from the particular relationship that you want to influence then the less relevant and understandable it is – bespoke always fits better than off the shelf.
Helen Taylor’s post on Econsultancy got me thinking about how Google has developed a very broad array of perspectives on each customer’s life and how it is using Google+ to glue them together and to dig deeper. The +1 button is the simplest way to tell Google what is interesting. But all of Google+’s features help to generate deeper insights and each one gives a subtly different perspective on customers’ interests:
Streams – tells Google different things that the member might be interested in. On timeline to enable insights about trends at the person and group levels.
Circles – tells Google which members might be interested in these different things. Members can segment by some preset categories (Friends,Family,Acquaintances, Following) and define more categories themselves. Analysis of these user-defined categories will give valuable insights into how members thing about their different interests in terms of interest-to-interest associations and higher level groupings of interests (like analysing the category structures of folksonomies and socially generated tag clouds).
Brands can segment by global versus local because its useful for them. So brand partners can also signal to Google what type of members interest them.
Hangouts – helps Google to get the sort of deep insights that only come from closely monitoring small groups of people talking openly. As Helen said, these are panel sessions. The Hangouts On-Air feature enables panel session content to be broadcast, stored and edited. The members and brand partners who choose to view this content are telling Google about their own interests.
The other features of Google+ (and other Google products) are designed to cumulatively generate live and updating ‘process Interest Graphs’, i.e. very wide arrays of perspectives on each member’s life.
Each perspective is a key hole on a person’s life and together they give much more diverse, and deeper, insights for Google’s brand partners than a loyalty programme can – maybe more than Hunch or Gravity can as well. So Google can partner with more brands and do so in more actionable ways.
Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have very different ‘arrays of telescopes’ to Google and these give them very different arrays of perspectives to look at their members’ interests from. First, each of these social networks focuses its arrays on different general aspects of their member’s lives. Although they do overlap – and Google+ seems to overlap the most:
Facebook – entertainment and social life, short-term issues, life curation
LinkedIn – work life, short-term issues and long-term projects, network curation
Twitter – all your life, immediate issues, bare bones content
Facebook and LinkedIn have much tighter feedback loops between members – in terms of more levels of connection (ways to directly exchange content) and some features that enable actual two-way conversations.
Twitter is a bare bones way to connect with people who you think might have interesting things to say. Mostly its about broadcasting with some ability for loose two-way communications.
Second, each of these social networks uses different features to get the data that gives them their arrays of perspectives. Google use product-based features outside of their social network, as well as inside like the others.
The bottom line is that they all try to be really useful in their chosen aspect of their member’s lives because they know that being really useful help requires clarification and clarification leads to much deeper customer knowledge than bare transaction data.
Update: Facebook is looking at combining information across its other services here.
Duncan R Shaw - The qualitative data scientist 