Google Brazil: Sexy Samba Or Painful Split?

If you tend to call Google+ a social network, Brazil could be an interesting market to watch. Google’s Orkut is the leading social network in Brazil with 51.7 million monthly UV’s (comScore June 2011). Google+ is rising there too. But Facebook should be the #1 in Brazil mid 2012. My question: What would Google do?

If you were a head coach Google Gymnastics at the Brazilian Open, would you go for the gold with Orkut or Google+? And would you as coach push your team in the final match to show a risky but sexy samba solo? Or would you direct your team to watch out for a possible but painful split?

Knowing from your intel and stats, that Facebook historically hits a tipping point where other networks fade quickly. Head coaches have witnessed this dynamic across numerous international markets, ranging from Latin America and Asia to Canada…

Orkut might be off-brand for Google in the future. And the July 2011 migration of Picasa and Blogger to “Google Photos” and “Google Blogs”, in what appears to be an effort to build strength around the Google+ framework, seems to need a strategic master move from Google.

This final battle at the Brazilian Open would be a tremendous strategic marketing exam. In a global branding effort and with their global war on Facebook, Google would need to lead the market in Brazil. Here the Orkut brand seems to become a struggle.

Google and YouTube are definitely making many efforts to become the #1 global marketing platform. One that should help the CMOs of global leading consumer brands to reach and engage their targets worldwide – preferably by one campaign – across one global platform.

Global advertisers today are unlikely to entertain Orkut as a marketing vehicle for anything but a local market ad spend, leading most advertisers to place their focus and ad dollars on Facebook as opposed to Orkut.

This strategic but ‘vicious’ circle further accelerates the market share gains and losses as marketers promote their Facebook URL in offline media and spend ad dollars driving traffic to Facebook to boost their number of Facebook Fans.

So if Google does not act accordingly, Facebook will probably win the Brazilian Open 2012. But could Google take the risk to fade out Orkut and to promote Google+? But what if that migration fails? The Facebook would grab the gold.

So with all your collective wisdom, tell us: What should Google do in Brazil?

Let me know here or on Twitter @igorbeuker

Source: AdAge Digital