You see, Google+ is a social network and they don’t really want it to be exclusive, but they are trying to generate false scarcity to get the type of early adopter upon whom the early success of Google+ depends excited and invested in the product.

The people who got the early invites, whether directly from Google or in several degrees from these first invites, are going to feel special. It’s a natural reaction when you are part of an exclusive club.

Also the fact that you have to put in some effort to get an invite means that the early adopters will be more invested in the product than they would if it were easier to join Google+.

In essence, they are using an involvement device to make the early adopters more committed to the social network.

The classic example of an involvement device is the stamps in the old Publishers’ Clearing House bulk mail. Each catalogue came with a set of stamps that were meant to be pasted on select locations within the catalogue.

It may seem like quite innocent and silly, but by getting the catalogue recipients more invested in the catalogue, Publishers’ Clearing House increased conversions and became a classic case study for copywriters and marketers.

Doubters might point out that Google frequently soft-launches products to a limited user base. But Google+ is a social network and you’re going to need a committed group of users sharing on the network.

And who better than the heaviest web users?

As for the actual Google+ service…I like the ability to choose which circle you communicate with which is great for keeping friends and work separate. I like the privacy controls. But I’m not sure I want Google to know more about me.

Google+ Launch Strategy Features Classic Persuasion Techniques by SEO on Tap

Next to some Google News stories you now get a “Shared By” link that you can follow to see some of the people who have shared a particular story.

If you’ve spent any time looking at these results, then you know that they don’t show accounts for all of the tweets, but you can still find the ones Google considers worth sharing by adding &tbs=mbl:1 to a Google link query.

Here’s the query for the Search Engine Journal post that first alerted me to the changes.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&tbs=mbl:1&q=link:http://searchengineland.com/google-web-search-gets-more-social-53255

The neat thing is that you can do this with any page in the search results, it doesn’t have to be in the Google News system. So if you want to find who are the most important social influencers for the latest post from Cracked (disclaimer: I haven’t actually checked that cracked.com is not actually in the Google News system), then all you have to do is enter the following query.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&tbs=mbl:1&q=link:http://www.cracked.com/article_18792_the-7-most-unintentionally-creepy-places-internet.html

All you need to do is take the following query string and add the URL you want to look up to the end.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&tbs=mbl:1&q=link:

I’m sure there are a bunch of ways to use this that I have never considered, but I know I’m planning on finding the biggest evangelists for my clients’ competitors and making sure they get extra incentive to switch loyalties.

Image credit Luc Legay.

Twitter Citations According to Google? There’s a Query String for That by SEO on Tap

Satirical look at the perils and pointlessness of automated follower building?

I started writing a post to go with this image, but realized the words were superfluous.

Twitter Botnet

Totally unrelated and unintended, but did you notice the optical illusion where the grey square between the corners of four avatars looks brown?

Twitter Botnet by SEO on Tap