Google Buzz launches: 5 first look tips for PR and marketing practitioners

This evening Google announced its newest social media service, called Google Buzz. 

The much talked about new system takes your Google email, address book and instant messenger and gives them social features such as those found in Twitter. On its blog post announcing the launch of Google Buzz, it is described as "a way to start conversations about the things you find interesting and share updates, photos, videos and more." 

Reactions from watchers have been varied. Some are saying it will be the Twitter/Facebook/Foursquare/Friendfeed killer. Others say it's Google's play on reorganising the world of email. Some say it will be bridge a gap to Googe Wave. 

I'm thinking some initial thoughts and key issues though for PR and marketing practitioners who may want to have a top line view on what this new launch means and how much time to invest in looking at how it should be treated. Here are five first takes from me whilst I devour the launch 'buzz' and have a play with the service myself: 

1. Google Buzz will integrate very nicely with mobile phones and maps. So this will further impact mobile social networking and online communities on the go. This could affect events PR and marketing quickly
2. It will be easy to use (where many say Twitter isn't). Google Buzz has already been described as something so simple 'your mother' would use it, according to one watcher I'm following
3. Search engines will find content much more easily than with content on Twitter. For brands this is a reputation management issue
4. For PR people, the address book has always been valuable. Whatever your current email address book is, exporting it into Gmail as well will create an instant social network
5. There will be an 'enterprise' version of Google Buzz coming soon. This will change the way internal communications works as well (and might thwn also create the Yammer.com killer)

Comments

[Amy Jordan]

So few businesses use an e-mail address with a gmail domain. How can businesses take advantage? Maybe I'm misunderstanding the entire thing? Thanks for any clarification.

[Drew B]

@Amy - I think this would be aimed at giving business that use Gmail for their business email accounts a way of using internal 'Buzz' as a comms tool (I know only a handful, but there are many)

[TaraL]

Interesting. However it sounds like someone who does not already use Gmail and keeps media contacts in Excel (not an address book) would have a lot of set-up to do before this becomes useful.

[Steve Haweeli]

So if one has a personal yahoo account (me), but a corporate email account (me) - and these are the two that I use the most by far - am I to now (because of the great GoogleBuzz) supposed to drop my personal yahoo, swap everything to gmail (yes, I do have a gmail account I sometimes use)?

But meanwhile, I'm well-connected on Twitter AND FB. So WHY would I make this swap?

[Andrew Barber]

Drew - your point: "Search engines will find content much more easily than with content on Twitter" is very valid.

I checked out the HTML for our Buzz and Google Profile and ran a quick spider simulation over it. (I have "Buzzed" about it if you want to read more detail) The important thing is that there dose not appear to be any "no follow" tags within the code. On Twitter these tags exist and prevent search engines crawling any links (except on Twitter Mobile).

This is a big difference when comparing Buzz & Twitter and looking at SEO/online PR issues.

Also - by using Buzz to republish your Tweets - the "no follow" tag seems to be taken out (at least I can't see any - but I'm no programmer).

If you are interested in building links to improve your own or a client's search engine rankings - this has got to be a bonus as you are effectively creating relevant content and links.

The question is whether Google will start considering that some Buzz content is being used unfairly in this way?

I guess they will have an algorithm up their sleeves!

Keep buzzing/tweeting/feeding friends.

Andrew