Google's social strategy
It is widely believed that Facebook presents a significant competitive threat to Google. Google itself seems to believe this - Larry Page recently said that all employees would have their bonuses tied to the success of Google's social strategy.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google’s social ambitions have been a recurring strategic question since its early concern about Facebook, with coverage in 2010 examining both Google’s approach to social and planned social-network additions.
Larry Page’s return as CEO coincides with an unusually broad management signal: social performance is being made part of every employee’s compensation, rather than residing with a discrete product group.
First-order effects
- Google employees across product and business functions have a financial incentive to prioritize the company’s social strategy, making its success an explicit company-wide operating goal.
- Facebook faces a Google whose leadership is treating social competition as a core performance issue rather than a peripheral feature effort.
Second-order effects
- Google’s internal teams will need to align product decisions and execution around social outcomes, increasing pressure on managers to demonstrate how their work advances that strategy.
- The compensation linkage raises the cost to Google of fragmented social efforts: inconsistent execution would affect incentives across the organization, not only a specialist team.
Third-order effects
- The move points toward social features becoming a strategic layer across Google’s services, with competitive advantage increasingly tied to whether large platforms can coordinate user participation across their products.
The trend: Large internet platforms are elevating social engagement from a standalone product category to a company-wide strategic priority backed by executive accountability and employee incentives.