To all those Google Buzz naysayers, here are some thoughts which may or may not come to pass.

Today Google officially announced their answer to Facebook and Twitter, it is called Google Buzz.
Currently Google Buzz is receiving generally bad user reviews.

But to all the naysayers out there, may I remind you that Google Chrome was extremely lame in the first few days, weeks, months, it was made public. However now Google is starting to get deals together to package computers with Chrome set as the default browser! Think about this, what’s to not stop Google from dominating this area of social media with just a few more “default” settings in chrome for new computer users?

Sure the product is lame, but remember, it’s only a few hours old!!!
Yesterday I was pondering a notion inspired here that “If social media is so mainstream, then why was it not featured or cross marketed very prominently during the super bowl?”
So, some have proposed that social media is still a baby, and that is why there was limited cross marketing of social media within expensive Super bowl ads. And some might suggest that social media is so much more effective that companies in the know have decided not spend any money on TV ads during the super bowl because given this economic environment it is more efficient to allocate those dollars to social media instead and other online marketing instead.

Therefore, I ask you, do you think social media (and today that means Google Buzz) is still too new to be able to justify investing in it now, and perhaps you think you should wait until it shows more potential for traffic and ROI?

To those of you who think social media is too new.. You are right? Hey for Google it begins today.
For those of you who want to wait to make data driven decisions about whether or not to invest time in Google Buzz or other social media, I commend you for taking this approach, but here is something also to consider.

After you have determined whether or not social media appropriate for your target audience and you have defined your success metrics, and analyzed whether or not they are realistic and attainable, then ask yourself what if you don’t invest some time in social media?
With SEO it is easy to measure success you can see if you are ranking #1 for all the best keywords, and if you really have your ducks in a row you can tie that back to ROI.

With social media it is also easy, instead of checking whether or not you are ranking #1, you can still see whether or not people are talking about you in social media venues, whether it is Twitter, Facebook, Google, or all of the above. And you can also measure how many more sales are driven as result of conversation started in social media venues.

If you don’t get an established presence in social media early on, and this appears to apply to Google too, then in the future you may get drowned in the sea of noise, or the social media equivalent of ranking on page 3+ in Google.

In any case, I would argue that it is STILL early on!!!. if you work to build a strong presence in the early stages of social media development then later, when it becomes even more mainstream than it already is, then it will not be impossible to be visible or heard in the best social media venues, and

Google Buzz could well be one of them!

One final thought,
Question: Based on the chart below who is the clear market leader for establishing a venue for sharing content viraly?
Answer: What is Google share of this when you aggregate email, and factor in Google Buzz?

Consider what I have said. It seems to me that there is still room for a large player like Google to eat up market share like it always does. And for that reason and the points above, I will start to at least invest a little time getting frustrated over why the Google Buzz logo still isn’t showing up in Gmail for me??

Warren Lee.