Monthly Archives: September 2011

We’re probably going to be talking quite a bit about Brew Day in the weeks and months ahead, so I thought I’d go ahead and define the concept for posterity.

In a nutshell, Brew Day is about innovation.

Yes, it’s a play on our agency’s name, Bottlecap, but the “brew” really has more to do with new ideas, refinements and experimentation with all things that relate to our business. It might be sexy (augmented reality) or subtle (internal process revisions), but at the end of each Brew Day it’s our goal to have our entire team inspired about what it is we do for a living.

As of now, our typical Brew Day looks something like this:

Brew Day at Bottlecap: Innovation on Tap

• 9:30a | Team members pitch their Brew Day ideas to the office and project teams begin to form
• 10a – 1p | Teams work on their projects, defining roles, responsibilities, requirements and more on the fly
• 1 – 2p | Lunch. We may try to bring in people from other local shops to educate and inspire the team during an interactive lunch-and-learn. In August we talked about the potential of Microsoft Kinect with the awesome team from The SuperGroup.
• 2 – 4p | People re-form their teams and wrap up their projects
• 4 – 4:30p | Show & Tell. Project teams reveal what they’ve been working on all day

And that’s it; one day dedicated to investigating things, revisiting things, and trying a bunch of new things in between.

Not all of these projects will stick – but that’s not the point. We’re in an industry that requires us to think strategically and creatively every day. It’s our job to keep testing our digital mettle to ensure we’re ready when our clients come calling.

And if we end each of these innovative sessions at a location that lives up to the Brew Day name, well, that’s OK, too.

Now that we’re almost three months into the Google+ era, we should have permission to evaluate with a critical eye. Welcome to the third and final entry for our Google+ 101 series as we look at the new social network by the numbers and draw our own conclusions.

Part 3 of 3: Our Conclusion

Launched on June 27, Google+ already is home to over 25M registered users. A far cry from Facebook’s 750M members, but a solid adoption rate in just a few months since rollout. Below is a comparison of the Google+ member base to that of other popular social media properties:

• Facebook: 750M
• Twitter: 200M
• LinkedIn: 100M+
• Google+: 25M
• Foursquare: 10M+

During the first few weeks of Google+’s existence, two tracking websites, SocialStatistics.com and FindPeopleOnPlus.com, had men accounting for 88 and 74 per cent of the website’s users, respectively. Although these rates have since declined, SocialStatistics.com still claims that 66% of the Google+ universe is male. For Comparison:

• ESPN viewers – 72% male
• Readers of Esquire magazine – 74% male
• U.S. Senate – 83% male
• Facebook – 45% male

Interestingly enough, an inactive Mark Zuckerberg is the most popular Google+ member with over 500k followers. Here are the top five Google+ users according to follower count (as of 9.14):

• Mark Zuckerberg (502k)
• Larry Page (301k)
• Sergey Brin (208k)
• Pete Cashmore (179k)
• Vic Gundotra (138k)

Given its initial adoption rates, with daily new member registration peaking at 2M in the first few weeks, Google+ had the attention of digital enthusiasts and online marketers across the US soon after its launch. Adoption and overall engagement, however, have since begun to wane and many pundits are debating its staying power and purpose. There’s no denying that the Google platform provides the reach and firepower necessary to catapult a social network into the same category as Facebook; however, the biggest question remains, “will the average social media user see enough value in the usability of the network and its’ targeted content sharing capabilities to adopt the tool and eventually replace other social networks with Google+?”

For marketers there is little to do with Google+ at this point and more to observe. Until the rollout of company/brand pages within Google+, brands will not be able to establish a presence. Instead, now is an opportunity to learn the tool, its capabilities (especially features like Hangouts and Sparks), and begin preparing to put these into action.

When it’s all said and done a social network is about its users, and Google+ is playing on the same court as Facebook and Twitter. Google will surely continue to invest heavily into Google+ with new features and integration points, but the network must find its identity and role in the lives of consumers in order to stick. And until it does so, Google+ will keep playing third fiddle to its’ social network brethren Facebook and Twitter.

This concludes our three-part Google+ series but please stay tuned for future digital trends entries as the Bottlecap team continues to unpack the latest and greatest in the digital world.