Google+ Marketing Effort Mistakingly Follows in Google Wallet’s Footsteps

Google has been gunning to compete with Facebook on the social-front, and their most recent attempt, Google+, appears to be their best effort so far. With over 40 million users to date, Google+ has been able to amass a large following in a short amount of time. Their recent launch of Google+ Pages—their version of Facebook for Business—is just another addition to their bag of social tricks.

Problem is, Facebook is approaching 1 billion users, 25-times that of Google+. To continue to grow their users, Google has taken a page from Facebook and has reached out to college students. From BGR:

As a new semester got underway at Ben Gurion University and Tel Aviv University in Israel, students were greeted by an unexpected surprise: a series of booths that served as recruiting stations for Google+. The manned booths offered passers-by a free gift bag packed with goodies if they were willing to sign up for the new social network on the spot, Ynet recently reported. Google’s hired hands helped users create their profiles on the spot, even offering to take playful profile pictures for the university students, which were also printed on stickers and given away for free.

This approach seems very similar to how Google Wallet has been marketed recently, and screams of desperation. As a Google+ user myself, I can think of many different aspects of the service that could convince new users to join, but giving out gift bags is not one of them. I wonder how many fake profiles are being created on campus just so the students can get the free goodies.