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Google Friend Connect - A Social Marketing Wet Dream

By Todd | May 26, 2008

Social network and bookmarking sites are great for bringing like minded people together, and wherever like minded people congregate is where online marketers want to be so as a marketer I’m always looking for ways to interact in these communities in a way more conducive to making friends as opposed to enemies. This is where Google Friend Connect is going to create some serious waves and usher in a new way for marketers to grow traffic like never before.

Google recently released a preview of Google Friend Connect which is set of tools that work with the OpenSocial framework and will allow you to “socialize” your website. Basically add membership services, connect with other social networks and add a whole host of other social networking features to your site in a simple cut and past fashion. No programming required!

The possibilities are endless. One possibility I like in particular is the potential for social marketers to participate in the great social networking sphere while being less intrusive in other’s social experience.

Google Friend Connect handles the underlying plumbing required for you to integrate the social networks your visitors use often while at the same time giving the user of the site all the power regarding how their profile and information is shared across social sites.

Giving the visitor control of how a social marketer will interact in their social networking time and space may be just what is needed for social marketing to be more openly accepted in the social communities, and in turn open more doors for us as marketers.

With Friend Connect almost anyone will be able to integrate their website into the great social sphere, and for marketers this means not just reaching more people, but the right people, your people, your website members, and doing it all with less effort.

Although Google has just released a preview of Friend Connect, they are taking requests for their preview release program.

Below is a great introduction video to Google Friend Connect. The speaker takes you through the very simple process of adding Friend Connect to a website and essentially bringing the website into the social networking sphere.

clipped from www.google.com

Google Friend Connect lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. With just a few snippets of code, you get more people engaging more deeply with your site.

Attract more visitors. Visitors bring along friends from social networks like Facebook, orkut, and others to interact on your site.

Enrich your site with social features. Choose engaging social features from a catalog of gadgets provided by Google and the OpenSocial developer community.

No programming whatsoever. Just copy and paste snippets of code into your site, and Google Friend Connect does the rest.

Here are some additional links to the Google Friend Connect campfire video series. These videos go a little deeper in to what’s possible as well as what some of the big social networking sites, like Orkut and LinkedIn, are already doing with Google Friend Connect. More than enough to get your wheels turning.