Preparing Advertisers for Google+

A little while ago, Clout’s Patsy Lebel (LinkedIn, Google+) gave our clients and readers the low-down on Google+ and her first impressions of it here.

Since, we’ve been excitedly waiting for insight as to how and where brands will live on the search giant’s amazing new social network.

At present, Google has a policy of only allowing real users, with real user names, to take part in the service. Brands have, for the most part, been asked to wait until there new home on the network is made available: users signing up under a nom de plum, stage name or brand name have been systematically removed from the space in the days since (in the hopes of establishing a user base of legitimate people who are discussing and promoting legitimate things).

Currently, Ford and GM have been testing using Google+ profiles with/for their brands.

In the meantime, Google has made some in-roads for marketers into the space which we are frequently discussing with our clients and followers. Here is a run-down of where we are at to date.

As you have likely seen Google has integrated it’s “+1″ voting scheme throughout many of its products, namely in your search results. However, starting this month, Google will be adding the feature to their display advertising.

Further to their adding “+1′s” to search results and search ads, advertising now being unrolled on Google’s Display Ad Network are having a “+1″ button/bar integrated into advertisements. This will allow users to add their digital endorsement to the ad/brand, evangelizing it those they are connected with on Google+.

Clicking that you are giving an ad “+1″ votes triggers your profile picture to be added to the ad’s footer and displayed to your Google+ connections. After ten seconds, the profile photos in the ad will fade away.

The goal is to harness data that can be parlayed into results for we marketers; it aims to make the advertisements more engaging, interesting and personalized.

Social ads will be competed-for via Google’s ad exchange. Users, advertisers and publishers will have the means to opt-out of using the feature (your preference will be stored in a cookie that lives on the DoubleClick advertising server).

With this new landscape of social data, marketers like Clout often face questions about privacy, intrusiveness and overkill.

Brand activity in the social landscape has become so rampant that, as one recent report found, more than half of Facebook’s 700+ million users have Liked at least one brand. In the case of Facebook, that Like is converted into a means to show display ads to the user as well as “Sponsored Stories” to the users Facebook friends.

Google intends to do something similar with their scheme but take it a step further, across its huge search user-base and, perhaps, into its other products.

This is happening in concert with Google+ being prepared for a the invasion of brand pages, similar to Facebook’s. In the coming weeks, brands on Google+ will be allowed to create “Circles” similar to individual users do now.

However, marketers will have means to use their Circles to create different streams of messaging for different markets (something no other network currently offers).