For starters, the profile looks a lot more modern and polished than the current version. An image you can add as a banner dominates the visual impression, a nice and Twitter-like change from the dull sameness of the current version. There’s an updated 3-column layout, bringing more content above the fold and shifting the emphasis from the old, single-threaded feed to a more modular representation of your interests, tastes, and activities. Scanning the page gives you a sense of who someone is, not just what they’ve been up to. A secondary navigation in the right-most column even lets you follow the milestones in someone’s life from birth to the present. It’s pretty cool, actually, and I find myself looking forward to scanning the life histories of people I know only in the present.

Status options have been expanded to let you more easily indicate life events with just a few clicks, a clear effort to encourage habitual lurkers to jump in and participate. The music I listen to on Spotify now hits my profile directly, for example, neat until I was outed as a Barry Manilow fan by an attentive “friend.” Overall, the new profile embraces the lifestream concept in a much more tangible way, finally showing the fruit of Facebook’s FriendFeed acquisition back in August of 2009.

That was 2 years ago, though, and the word “lifestreaming” seems both pretentious and dated now. In the same way distinctions like Mobile and Location-based are ideas past their prime, lifestreaming is just life now. It’s all mobile, all local, all social… all the time.

So how does this new design change the game?

My take is that Twitter is becoming more and more about real-time attention, and Google Plus all about content sharing and distribution. A lot of people (including me) think G+ is actually a better platform for sharing content than Facebook ever was, and in a way Facebook may be ceding that ground to them to move in a more mass-market direction. Facebook may be moving beyond content, indicating with this interface that it really wants to be about people. Facebook seems to want to be about life itself, and the implications of that could be profound.

Imagine a world where you check in to a hotel, and learn that your parents had stayed in room 301 25 years earlier. Maybe you could browse their photos from that trip, or get their recommendations for restaurants in the area, as they wrote them then. Imagine pointing your phone at a menu and seeing an augmented reality overlay of what your closest friends had ordered and enjoyed there recently, or entering a car dealer and calling up a sentiment analysis of references made to the brand by anyone you know, in just a few clicks.

Imagine, on your wedding day, hitting a kind of real-world “easter egg” in the form of a shared reflection from a long passed grandmother, left in anticipation of a future she knew she would not see. Powerful stuff, all in the line Facebook has just established.

There’s a scene in one of the Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles where Lestat emerges into the modern world after a hundred-year rest. Hearing jazz alongside classical music, The Smiths and Wagner over the course of his first day in this strange new place, he marvels that in the 20th century, musical past and the present mingle and coexist in ways that are strange and magical to an 18th century vampire.

Reflecting on the new Facebook, I wonder if we might not see the same thing a hundred years from now… Not just for music, but for the very lives of of people we are and were connected to.

Heady stuff, indeed. But when 800 Million people are already addicted to your product, I guess the need to think big takes on a whole new meaning.

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Our own Mike Troaino reported early on that its Google + vs. Twitter, not Facebook, Jeremiah Owyang later agreed and provided 5 Ways Google + Can become Mainstream, only to be outdone by 6 Ways Google + is Winning and Losing. Then, only a month after launch we learn that Google + hit 25 million visitors, at which point we acknowledge having Social Media Fatigue or maybe just Circle Fatigue.

The core differentiator and value proposition of Google + is circles. The idea is that I don’t want to talk or listen to everyone in my social network at once, just specific circles of individuals at a time.

It sounds easy right, make some circles put the right people in the right circles and you are ready for “real life sharing.” Not so fast.

If you have ever participated or better yet led the Information Architecture (IA) phase of a website redesign project, you will understand that defining what content goes where today is difficult. Planning for tomorrow, requires professionals. Taking from those experiences, here are a few ways to think about circles:

• + add new circles as new things come along does not require any planning but will eventually result in dozens of redundant and overlapping circles. Google already responded to this problem by adding a new feature.

• + create a circle for each of the groups in you life is easy to align to the real world today; work, friends, family, etc., but managing the overlap of the individuals within these groups will be difficult going forward.

• + create a circle for each type of content you want to share is a better approach because it is less important that I play soccer with a group, than it is that I want to share “personal” content with some individuals and “soccer” content with others.

• + limit Google + to a specific group or content type is the most common approach I have heard, probably because we have all been trained by bad Facebook experiences. It will keep things tidy, but using Google + for just a specific group or content misses the point.

There is no question that leading with circles is a big idea, but only time will tell if Google + is a revolutionary platform or just another social network.

How are you managing your Google + circles? Share your tips below.

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Here’s my thinking.

Before Google Plus, Facebook was mostly for personal, LinkedIn was mostly for professional, and Twitter was in the middle:

I think G+ will make people focus Facebook all the more on their personal lives, and LinkedIn all the more on their professional ones. I’m already considering de-friending all of my professional contacts on Facebook, so I can post family and political stuff there without having to master the Byzantine administrivia of Facebook’s “privacy controls.”

I’ve already started to interact more with my professional contacts over on G+, which has become the default among the digerati crowd with remarkable speed. But while the Circles feature is brilliant, simple, and useful in clustering groups, I’m not going to get my Aunt Lala to dump Facebook and master G+  at this point, so home base for family etc. will stay in Facebook.

G+ is actually more about Twitter’s franchise, in the great middle of indiscriminate social networking. But while the feature set in G+ is much more robust than that of Twitter, in the end Twitter works because it’s simple, and it will win the shootout for the center because of two other important factors in this dialogue: Apple and Microsoft.

Apple has already embraced Twitter in it’s new OS, and I predict Microsoft will make a few more lame attempts at a consumer social net before realizing it’s franchise is in Office and setting it’s sights on LinkedIn by acquiring Slideshare. With that said, the OS wars will keep Google at bay, and ensure Twitter’s franchise as the mass market social medium of choice.

The result will be this:

That’s my take, anyway. What’s yours?

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We chose “Social Media for CEOs” as the topic for our first event, and Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith opened the festivities with a few personal thoughts on the need to overcome one’s own cynicism and continually “Innovate Yourself.” Scott was also kind enough to share the story of personal growth that came from his successful bout with cancer many years ago, and it set just the right tone in getting an initially skeptical crowd to open up to some new ideas.

After that we started through the deck below, though we never made it through given the steady stream of questions, anecdotes, and other personal insights from the audience. In the end we were glad to stimulate that kind of dialog among a group of smart people just trying to figure this stuff out, and taking comfort in the fact other smart people were still struggling to do the same.

Anyway you can see the slides yourself here, please consider sharing them with you CEO if he’s someone you’re trying to get on board with the program.

Be sure and subscribe to the blog at upper right… I’ll be posting a special eBook we made for the event later, title “7 Habits of Highly Effective CEO Tweeters.”

So why do monopolies inevitably die and/or lose their dominant position?

Because they end up believing that they are above the realities of the marketplace and the need to evolve, to wholly innovate and constantly re-invent themselves. Their first to market position convinces them that their brand position and value proposition is permanently secure. They stop listening to the market, they over-extend their offering, they take on initiatives that are motivated more by ego and largess than by practical consideration of what would serve their customers (or citizens) best. They lose focus on what is relevant and what really drives sustainable value. They ignore the competition. A monopolistic position creates a false sense of competency, alarming forms of “strategic laziness” and a reluctance to take on what I call essential risk.

So is monopolistic aspiration the wrong intention? I think not. The way to avoid the downside of the upside is not to eschew the desire to “own the market” but to eschew ego, to be laser focused about what really matters to the people you serve and to look the truth about it all directly in the eye and act on what you see. Clarity. Humility. Practicality. Candor. Bravery. Ardor.

All key to winning the game again and again.

Hence the need for a kind of “minimum protocol” for Facebook marketing, a clear and specific list of the absolute bare minimum you’re going to need to do within the Facebook ecosystem to have a Facebook fan page that does more than check the box in terms of accessibility to your target audience.

Let’s start with the basics… it’s important to get your Facebook profile right and promote your page once you’ve launched it. These issues are pretty well covered on the links above.

As for the protocol itself, here’s what we’ve come up with so far:

I’d like to give props to Michelle McCormack and eMarketer, both of whom helped shaped our thinking on this.

We’re having pretty good luck with this approach so far…what’s your take? What would you add, and what would you take away?

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A buddy of mine Steve Schlaffman turned me on to Instagram a couple months ago. For a while I didn’t use it much, not really needing something else to do between tweets and posts.

Then I saw a Biography on my man Jeff Bridges. Jeff was given a Widelux camera by a friend a long time ago, and since then has been using it to chronicle the little moments and experiences that define the movie-making experience for people who actually make movies. At the end of a movie he’d often give a book of these images to his co-stars, and these books have become so coveted in Hollywood a publisher approached him about turning them into a coffee table book.

On this Biography Jeff was explaining why he took the time to do all this, and he said something like it plugs him in to what’s happening, that it was a way to squeeze some art into the artless moments that characterize 80% of the time you spend making a movie.

That idea really struck me. I could use more art-making opportunity in the artless moments of my life, maybe you could too.

Not having a Widelux camera, I did the next best thing, and starting using Instagram. The results so far are here.

If you’re Instagram, and you’re reading this, please don’t destroy your company with the money you just raised. Don’t think of yourself as another app, or as twitter for pictures, or as a cheap way to get access to filters that make hack photographers like me look good. Think of yourself as a tool to help us notice and share more of what we find beautiful in the world. And you’ll put that money to good use.

And if you’re not Instagram… what’s the role your product plays in the lives of the people who love it? How can focusing on that make it all the more imperative to them?

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It was good advice. Advice that taught generations of us to dig a little deeper and find out more about everything from books to jobs and people. And now that advice is bunk. It’s been thrown by the wayside with everything else that social media has massacred: traditional advertising, old school marketing, and human dignity and discretion.

These days, you judge a book by it’s Facebook page. And if you were thinking that recruiters and HR entities were turning a blind eye to the information so readily available via the interwebs, you would be mistaken.

In their new book, The Web 2.0 Job Finder, Brenda Greene and Coleen Byrne offer insights and recommendations from recruiters and HR departments on how to leverage social media to help find new opportunity, not kill it. They’ve called upon experts and insiders to give sage advice to those looking to navigate the market and build a fruitful network in this expressive and boundary-less new world.

And you’ll never guess which social media man they tapped… Our very own Mike Troiano.

Seeing as how Mike doesn’t even know where HR sits around here, he is able to bring a fresh and human perspective to the book:

“Invest some time in your profile. Upload a picture, for God’s sake. Add a bio. Create some content to give people a sense of who you are, what you can contribute, what you’ll be looking for. Then start to reach out to the people you know. Connect with them, and start the dialogue.”

It sounds so simple, but it seems that when creating our “professional” persona, we freeze up, certain that any modicum of personality or individualism will raise a red flag. But it’s our belief that now is the time that who you are and what you’re about is what gives you an edge. We’re marketing ourselves in an age of full disclosure. By providing too little, you’re polarizing. Too much and you’re a liability. You need to find a balance, and from there you need to leverage your online presence to build a network that brings opportunities to you, while starting conversations that leave a lingering impression on those with whom you’re connected. That’s just what this book is about.

The Web 2.0 Job Finder will be available April 15th. You can preorder from Amazon.com here.

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We see this re-focusing on product excellence at the core of more great brands these days, including the brand that most often emerges in the “Brand Envy” questionnaire we use to kick off our One Simple Thing™ workshops: Apple.

Here’s a recent video they produced for the latest MacBook Air. As you watch it, try to imagine something like this coming out of Dell, or any of the PC brands:

In our methodology, “Relevance of Offering” sets the stage for “Clarity of Message,” our One Simple Thing™ (or OST) process. Here’s the language we use to explain the need for OST to clients:

We live in a complex world.  Each of us is confronted daily with a fire hose of facts, claims, opinions and noise, by choice or not, at work and at home. The onslaught is relentless. Some of it is relevant, much of it is not, and a vast majority is beyond our ability to grasp or remember.

In our attempt to manage this complexity we subconsciously look for ways to distill each of the things (brands, products, people) we interact with down to a single, defining attribute. Not as the whole story but as a sort of “meta-tag” for our own mental search engine — a way to easily manage and categorize our association with that thing, whatever it is, over time.

Holland-Mark calls the result of that distillation a brand’s One Simple Thing™ or “OST.” It is the attribute of any entity that is most relevant and motivating to the target market, distinct from the competition, and true to the capability of the entity.

Here’s what The Maestro, Steve Jobs himself, had to say about the secret to Apple’s marketing success:

“For me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world, it’s a very noisy world. And, we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us, no company is. And so we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.”

If you’re a brand that envies what Apple is doing these days, shoot me a note.  We might be able to help you do more of what they seem to be doing exactly right.

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It’s a lose, lose, lose proposition. First, some people are inevitably duped into believing that BP loves animals / trash bags can be biodegradable / coal can be “clean” – all to the benefit of charlatans and scoundrels. Second, the environment suffers despite the best efforts of downstream buyers to express their will in supporting it. Third, opportunity costs build up on two fronts: Buyers become cynical and indifferent, and sellers fail to invest in technology that would render their products more sustainable versus the competition.

The same thing is starting to happen in social marketing. Prospective clients are asking about whether they can “outsource Twitter and Facebook” to us, meaning will we put some underpaid 22-year-old on TweetDeck and ask her to “@” anyone with the poor judgment to tweet that his girlfriend dumped him while coolly sipping a cold can of BrandX.

Why do they want this? Certainly not because it’s effective in building relationships, in driving incremental sales. They want it because access to such a resource would enable them to plaster Twitter and Facebook chicklets all over their web site (which almost never allows comments because “the legal folks won’t let us”).

Call it “Tweetwashing.” A shallow and gimmicky handle for a shallow and gimmicky practice.

Is that the promise of social media? Will it become just another channel for back-slapping bullshit?

For me, the dilemma is this: I don’t believe social media can be an effective branding or promotional medium if it’s not embraced – authentically – by real people from inside brands that want to engage with the truth. I just don’t believe it can be applied as some kind of glossy outer coating by an agency partner, or any third party, and be truly effective over the long haul.

But that seems to be what clients want. They aren’t focused on the opportunities presented by social media. They seem to want to make the social media problem go away, as cost effectively as possible.

So what should we do? What do you do?

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