This week, a social media contact of mine tweeted a message saying that “Google+ is a ghost town.” I will admit 
that I use Google+ less frequently than other social media platforms, simply because most of my contacts are already on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. However, I do admire the platform for its intuitiveness and have read reviews from popular social media evangelists like Guy Kawasaki praising the platform for providing “a religious experience.” So, I have not yet ruled it out as a contender in the B2C social media universe.
Still, I think Google+ is missing out on a huge opportunity to capitalize on the enterprise market. An article written yesterday by Kim Davis on InternetEvolution.com suggested that many conversations and moments of deep engagement on Google+ happen in private – via hangouts and circles that not everyone else can see. Ironically, that is exactly what major corporations are seeking for their internal social networking platforms, as they work to foster internal and partner cloud collaboration – partly because their employees demand it and partly because that is the way that people now expect to work with each other. And you can’t do that on Facebook.
There are a number of enterprise products emerging in the market that offer custom-built social networking platforms for businesses. And Since Google+ is struggling to steal eyeballs in the consumer space from Facebook, they could consider this alternative. What would make Google+ even better than competitor enterprise social networking platforms is its potential to integrate with Google Docs, Picasa and Google Drive – creating a seamless team collaboration platform.
Google+ could be making a boat load of money from selling platform customization and per user logins via a private B2B tool. But will they? Can they turn their focus away from trying to eat Facebook’s lunch? What do you think? Please share your opinion in the comment section below.
Disclosure – I worked at Google in advertising sales prior to starting my own blog/company.