Although we have yet to see brand or business pages on Google+, we have certainly seen folks using the new social network in interesting ways. The latest? The band My Morning Jacket premiered the video for "Holdin On To Black Metal" on the service Monday night.
Since the group cannot yet have an official My Morning Jacket page, bassist Tom Blankenship and guitarist Carl Broemel posted the video to their own personal pages. And no one really seemed to notice -- mostly because Broemel only has one connection on the site (Blankenship), while merely 42 people have Blankenship in their Circles. (It probably doesn't help that Blankenship's profile photo is a childhood snap.) Blankenship's post yielded three plus ones, one comment and 12 shares.
While we applaud the band for hopping the early adopter train, the rather lukewarm Google+ reception shows that the platform isn't quite ready for primetime when it comes to this kind of promotion. Granted, some musicians have found some success with Google+ Hangouts, but most of those seem to be solo acts whose own names carry enough weight when it comes to recognition.
And there's the rub. The band cannot yet promote itself as a single entity on Google+, which is key for getting the kind of attention a video premiere deserves. By contrast, My Morning Jacket has around a quarter of a million fans on Facebook, and after posting the video an hour ago (at time of filing) it had 56 Likes and nearly 500 comments.