Google plus might be a minus for your F&B/Coffee Business

by chee Leng (on coffee makers)
(Singapore)

If you own a coffee or F&b business, then you would agree that marketing and promotion is key to generating more revenue for your products/services.

And, most of us celebrate the fact that digital and social media marketing has drastically lower the cost for marketing.

Prior to that, if we want to communicate to the world, it would have to be TV/Newspaper which is very expensive.

Enter the digital marketing realm and for a couple of bucks per day, we can market to hundreds and thousands of people.

But, this Google plus world that has the whole tech world buzzing and angry about this last week, might change that.

More information about the Google plus world can be found in this article: Article by Ken Evoy

Generally, it meant that Google is using their search engine to favor their own results (Google Plus profile) instead of the best results.

When that happens, folks that are eager to be in the search results would of course create a Google plus account.

If it gathers momentum, and more people join the Google plus, Google would have both the social media and the search part of internet.

You can say that they would own the internet.

To us, business owners, this would mean higher cost of advertising and marketing.

Do you still remember how TV/Newspaper used to dictate the format and design, interestingly you are paying for it but they need to approve it!

That was because they have the monopoly of the whole industry! If you have done an ad recently, you would see how accommodating they are these days.

Here is my $0.02

It is good for business folks like us if Facebook owns social media and Google owns the search. When, there is competition, there is innovation and there is some pricing relief.

We get better products to reach our customers at a lower rate.

When a company has monopoly, they tend to be complacent and mis-use and abuse their monopoly.

In fact, if what is going around is true, Google in a way is already abusing their might with their search engine.

I do not know if and when that would happen. But, they are all saying that we can help just by using Bing (I tried which is a great search engine too) would help in preventing this, so that is what I did.

I guess, if more and more people do that, maybe the folks that are lobbying for this not to take place would have more clout.

So, try using Bing more for your search and maybe Google plus would minus our coffee or F&B business...