Media Platform : Google ups the ante with Buzz

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Google Buzz has arrived, with 9 million users in the first two days it is a matter of time that it will swamp others with its footfalls. For many years Google has been serving as a highway in the communication business but never as a destination of social media.

When Google started monetizing its search engine business a decade ago, they created a set of Advertising tools that showed you how to build a site that was optimized for revenue generation models namely Ad Sense, Ad Words and the Google APIs . In short Google was not only using its search and g mail service for providing you a communication highway, but placing a few vendors and service providers on the high way, with whom you could interact and do business too. Some of these would become destinations of social media in the long run, big enough to earn comparable sums from individual revenue streams including monetization.

In short, if you were the seller of a product or a service and had a website, then you could be part of Google's highway network in every way and profit. You were asked to load the website and put enough content on it worth viewing. The metrics of the website traffic, soon attracted a different set of entrepreneurs called SEO specialists, who showed content owners, how to optimize search engine queries with the goods and services offered.

Advise on proven ways to measure web success helped Google's monetization effort. This included driving traffic to the site, optimizing it for search engine positioning making money with affiliate programs, and CPC ( cost per click )advertising. They helped you understand the syntax of a Google query, the analytics of ad performance and ad sense They showed you how to use ad words, create and improve ad campaign and benefit from ad groups. Ad words reporting, conversion and tracking, programming the ad word API, and using Keyword analytics became very important if you wanted to grow and monetize your product in the cyberspace.

By using the primary form of predictive analytics, tracking keywords from the conversation monitored at your webpage, they selectively placed their ads from vendors who had their services linked to these keywords. The vendor too was offered a win- win deal where he could set up shop at zero cost, and would be asked to pay a nominal sum innovatively termed as CPC or cost per click, meaning he would pay every time a customer stopped to look at his product range.


When millions of viewers started moving through the Google's communication highway, some innovative entrepreneurs including MySpace and Face book started building new destinations like recreation parks. Soon the web had thousands of weary travelers moving in from the speeding highways, to rest
and relax, and social media was born. They initially came in to chat and create friends, but soon found wholesome activity assisted by innovative applications, that had them forming their exclusive clubs and networks of recreation, entertainment and even work, and soon social media became a destination.

But the social media needed a touch of class. A special place for the creators, the glib communicators, who were leaders of the social networks. A opera house to stage opinions, art and skills, A media platform for the people who mattered, the opinion builders who had the power to change the world, by the strength of their words or art or the power of their creations, or simply by magnetism and charisma of large followings or fan base.


In came the simple but challenging format to hold the media by a tweet. This innovative method restricted you to just 140 letters, ensuring that only powerful communicators who could say so much in so little, had a place in this exclusive world. Despite this exclusivity, twitter created history with its 10 billionth tweet last week. Other networks to display skills, documents, slideshows and videos also arrived like Slide Share, Scribd, You tube, Vimeo , Metcafe and Yahoo groups all specialized media platforms , evolved with time with millions of viewers and power to garner ad revenue.

With a host of applications and powerful media presence Google increased its hold on media as well as its user base till face book started integrating all the applications and taking away a sizable amount footfalls and even broadcasting media footage. With future trends of mobile users expecting to hold sway on the market growth dynamics , Google decided to enter social networking with its own offering the Google buzz.

Last year face book mobile application users grew by 112% and twitter grew by 347% which shows that if the consumer trend moves from the desktop to mobile, Google may simply loose out top billings unless it creates its own destination centers of social networking or the ultimate media platform. With phone companies like Docomo setting up their own social networks buddy net, the challenge to Google's ad revenues could be serious unless it had its own offering as the mobile segment could add a digit extra to the pc user segment.


Today Google’s communication highway G Mail page can have Google search, Google buzz, as its features besides twitter and face book additionally added as gadgets. With many more gadgets in the beta phase, soon the G mail page or a Yahoo page will look as a complete web world itself with mail, search, social media and media platforms. Challenges from facebooks weaning away the broadcast feeds or the mobile user advertisers will be then a thing of past.