

Google Enters The Social Enterprise With Public Debut Of Google+ For Businesses - sparshgupta
http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/29/google-enters-the-social-enterprise-with-public-debut-of-google-for-businesses-free-through-2013/

======
mindcrime
So, supposedly VCs like to ask entrepreneurs "what would you do if Google
enters your space?" Have you ever wondered what you would _actually_ do in
that case?

Some entrepreneurs talk about those "vomit moments" when something happens
that makes you want to vomit.

Well... I won't be losing any sleep over it, but Google just "entered our
space" (in a manner of speaking). We've been working on "Enterprise 2.0"
stuff, heavily involving social-networking (ala, G+ or Facebook) but for
enterprise use.

So, what _do_ you do when Google does that? Well, I always imagined my answer
to a VC, to that hypothetical question, would be something like:

"We'd stay the course, continue to innovate and become even more hyperfocused.
Google has never shown a tremendous affinity for enterprise plays, and it's
not their strength. They're a formidable competitor because of their size and
resources, but this isn't what they _do_. It _is_ what we _do_."

So, how does Fogbeam Labs react to this? We stay the course and keep
developing our products and solutions, and become even more hyper-focused, of
course. If this means anything to me, it means we have to be even better at
interacting with our customers, understanding their problems, and working with
them as a partner, not just a vendor.

We expect we'll still have a lot of advantages over "G+ for the Enterprise" in
a number of areas, for some time to come. Not the least of which is because of
our focus on deep integration into business activities and workflows and
integration with other apps.. as opposed to simply being a very superficial
communication channel that is basically just a complement to / replacement
for, email.

Aside: None of this was unexpected. Google does have _some_ enterprise
presence, and them doing G+ for the Enterprise is hardly a surprise. We've
only been wondering "when," not "if." Them actually doing it doesn't really
change anything from our perspective.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Kind of depends on how well Google executes. If they really get it and execute
well, then you have a real challenge. If they don't then you've had your
market validated which is a positive.

I read the announcement and thought, "Wow, that puts David Sack's (Yammer CEO)
comments on the valley in perspective." Sounds like David had a heads up this
was coming and ducked out of the way into the waiting arms of Microsoft.

Microsoft has shown that you can throw huge amounts of money at something and
not make a very good business out of it (Search is my current favorite
example), Google has similar issues when it comes to being 'lean' (too easy to
build a product that costs $1m/day in OpEx to run from day one.)

So you need to solve the problem better, be more responsive, and be more cost
effective.

------
timothya
Other thread here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4448395>

------
k3n
All I want is a "-1" button.

~~~
sparshgupta
If theoretically there is a -1 button, where exactly are you going to use it
:)

~~~
k3n
Anywhere that it's appropriate.

To expand: the paradigm of only offering +1 and not -1 is, to me, akin to the
whole "everybody's a winner" problem; if I go to a product page, and all it
has is a +1 button, and the 'score' is 0, then there's absolutely no context
to justify the score.

Is it that the product is brand-new (and/or just added the +1 button), or
conversely, is it that the product is horrible and though the +1 button has
been there a year, nobody has clicked it?

Whereas if I were to visit and I could see that the score was -1000, then that
would give me a very good indication that the product (or some aspect of it)
sucks.

Then of course there'd likely be situations where there'd be a mix, and so
it'd be good to see a representation that took all votes into account, e.g.
[+1000/-500]; with that, I could see that the sample size is moderately
sufficient (1500), and that _most_ people approve -- but that it's not without
detractors.

Mostly, though, I'm tired of "everybody's a winner".

~~~
mirsadm
Unless you look at things like app reviews. Where users are much more likely
to complain than to leave positive reviews. I think the same applies for other
+1/-1 options. People that don't like things run around jumping and yelling
how much they hate it. Most of the ones that have positive things to say don't
unless you put it right in front of their face.

~~~
stephengillie
_\- A dissatisfied customer will tell 9-15 people about it. And approximately
13% of your dissatisfied customers will tell more than 20 people about their
problem. Source: the White House Office of Consumer Affairs, Washington, DC.

\- Happy customers who have their problems resolved will tell 4-6 people about
their positive experience. Source: the White House Office of Consumer Affairs,
Washington, DC._

[http://www.customerservicemanager.com/customer-service-
facts...](http://www.customerservicemanager.com/customer-service-facts.htm)

~~~
mryan
It would be interesting to see an updated version of the study on which these
statistics are based, which takes in to account social media.

------
joshu
If google had shipped Buzz for Domains, it would have crushed Yammer.

~~~
mdwrigh2
Buzz was used a lot internally at Google, and was pretty handy.

------
sp332
You still can't make a profile with the name of your business. And I could be
wrong but I checked this morning and I didn't see any way to add a "Google for
business" account to my existing G+ account, so I would need to create and
manage two profiles with the same name: my old one for "personal" stuff and a
new one for the new G+ for Business features.

~~~
TomAnthony
You've been able to make business pages for a while now, example:

<https://plus.google.com/106626622878120060227/posts>

I think this new 'Google+ for business' is only available to paying Google
apps members, it seems.

However, Google apps members can already use Google hangouts, can setup
circles for internal sharing, and so its mostly the convenience of the
defaults etc. that are new value. I wonder how much Google plan to charge for
that.

~~~
sp332
My page can't follow people until they follow me first. I can't build a useful
news feed for my page to follow. I can't view normal people's posts as my
page, which means I can't leave comments either, which means I can't get my
page any visibility, which means people probably will never add my page to
their circles.

~~~
ehutch79
as a person who doesn't want to be associated with random companies, i hope
this stays that way.

Your business is not a person, and shouldn't be behaving that way. If you want
people to follow your page, perhaps you should put out some high quality
content that makes it worthwile to follow your page.

~~~
sp332
How will people see my content if they're not following my page?

~~~
eropple
I hear there's this thing called "Hacker News" where interesting stuff
sometimes gets posted. =)

------
stephenhuey
According to Google's official blog, their recent Wildfire acquisition just
closed a couple of weeks ago, and I'm interested to see which ways they'll
leverage Wildfire's tools to make Google+ the first stop on the route to
managing a brand's interactions on all the various social media platforms.

