9 things about being Google+, plus being smarter & truly social.
Posted: July 14th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Social Media Platforms | Tags: Google | 2 Comments »1 The Google brand says the opposite of “privacy”. Think ads served to Gmail based on the content of your email. Google indexes.
1.5 Disinterested in investigating privacy settings, I’m taking the Twitter approach & writing everything like it’s 100% public. See above.
2 No mobile app for iPhone? What, do you hate early adopters? (It’s under review by Apple right now, but it’s sure slowing me down to have to use a computer).
2.5 Without alerts, I’m a little less tied to my phone. I don’t put it on my desk while I work as often. Liberating behaviour after like a week, eh?
3 Owned media is more important than ever. Instead of linking to people’s (possibly anachronistic) Twitter handles, I’m linking to their blogs from now on.
3.5 Prediction: The blog will make a resurgence as an anchor in a sea of transient social networks.
4 The ability to edit something after you’ve said it is solid gold. It respects the user.
4.5 Ditto the ability to style your text. It’s just funner.
5 Duplicating what you post on Google+ & Twitter or Facebook wastes everyone’s time. Your brand needs some variety. Be a variation of yourself. Imagine a new audience.
- Facebook: family & photos.
- Twitter: professional.
- Google+: inspired & possible truly social?
6 Early adopters like shiny new things. Marketers follow, being afraid to miss an emerging market. To validate their effort, marketers oversell the space to advertisers.
6.5 I’m really enjoying the fresh air of the new, marketing-free (for a limited time only!) frontier.
7 Social platform success is about more than social graph lockin. Facebook has your family & friends, and there’s a place for that. There’s also a place to be someone else. Do you stay home all the time?
8 The quality of discourse on Google+ is on brand. Smart guys made a place for smart conversation.
Do it up right.
Christina Trapolino is using Google+ the right way (& writes well about it—encircle her):
Interact with content created by users you don’t know personally. If you don’t follow people you don’t already know, you’re going to get bored, and not just because your friends aren’t all here yet. You’ll get bored even after they’ve all arrived.
I’m already 50x more social on G+. Trained by Twitter to comment to people I don’t know, I’m adding freely to a lot of conversations (and actually meeting people).
Because those conversations are threaded on G+ (like Facebook), people are able to post interesting content & talk about it with all kinds of people meaningfully, as opposed to Twitter where it’s lost pretty quickly.
There are shades of grey, damn it.
Though he took a lot of heat for it, I agreed with Bill Keller’s characterization in the Twitter Trap of the (often) low-quality discourse in Twitter conversation.
Eavesdrop on a conversation as it surges through the digital crowd, and more often than not it is reductive and redundant.
As a function of the character limit, the transience, the speed & the unthreadedness of Twitter’s dialogue, it’s hard to convey anything other than black and white statements. That Storify exists is a testament to that fundamental mental chaos; a product had to be developed to string thoughts together, for goodness’ sake. Bill again:
Almost everyone who had anything profound to say in response to my little provocation chose to say it outside Twitter. In an actual discussion, the marshaling of information is cumulative, complication is acknowledged, sometimes persuasion occurs. In a Twitter discussion, opinions and our tolerance for others’ opinions are stunted. Whether or not Twitter makes you stupid, it certainly makes some smart people sound stupid.
