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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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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PostRank says that 80% of audience engagement with online content now happens somewhere other than the site on which that content originates.

The slide deck:

Measuring Engagement of the Social Web: 2007-2009

80-freaking-percent. That’s just incredible to me. And yet somehow obvious.

Don’t put your content on an island and hope for the best, folks. Build a system that fishes where the fish are, what we call a Content Hub.

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The key to this is creating something we call a “content hub.” A content hub is more than just a standalone site or application, it’s both the heart of a distributed network of information, and a destination for those that share the interest it supports.

Rather than explain the theory of a content hub in detail, it’s best to just build a quick-and-dirty one, and use it. Here’s the process I’d recommend to do exactly that:

1. If you don’t have a GMail account, create one, say acme@gmail.com. You’ll need this e-mail for all the logins, might as well use the same one.
2. Associate your logo with that e-mail in Gravatar.com; this will also come in handy later.
3. Create a YouTube account associated with the same Google ID.
4. Create a Flickr account. You may need a Yahoo e-mail account for this. Just create one.
5. Create a Twitter account, and customize the profile page to reflect your brand identity. Add an image, and a short bio line, for God’s sake.
6. Create a Facebook Page. You can do this from your personal Facebook account. If you don’t have one, you’ll need to create one.
7. Create a Posterous account, and activate the Group Profile feature to make it easier for others to post to the account. Connect your YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook pages to Posterous so that any content you send to Posterous bounces into the other accounts automagically.
8. Create a simple listening station in Google Reader. You’ll have access to Google Reader automatically having set up the GMail account above. Lots of smart people have described how to do this; just do what they say. Once you get the basics down, you’ll be able to pull any RSS feed into Reader, which I promise will come in handy at some point.
9. Click the Reader “Settings” at upper right, then the rightmost tab, which is “Send To.” Configure Reader to send content to the destination sites you created above.
10. Use the damn thing.

The “hub” of the system is your new GMail account. If you log into that each morning, you’ll have access to everything you need.

To distribute original content through the system, just use the Posterous account. This is dirt-simple straightforward… You can post everywhere by sending e-mail to post@posterous.com from your GMail address. Send images and they’ll go to Flickr as well. Send video and they’ll post to YouTube automatically, etc. Links to everything you create will appear on your new Posterous blog, and go out to your Twitter followers and Facebook fans, automatically.

“Curating” content is even easier. Whatever is in Reader can be sent through the system by clicking the “Send To” button. When you do that a drop-down appears with Twitter, Facebook, and Posterous as options (remember, choosing “Posterous” sends it everywhere). Begin to poke around in the local blogs and start raising your visibility. Leave short comments on others’ blogs to draw traffic to your own, and create the personal connection you need to deliver on the brand promise. (Gravatar is already set up if you followed the above, so wherever you log in to comment on someone else’s blog and use your GMail address, your icon will also appear and give you some exposure.)

You can also access your brand “listening station” in Google Reader. Just click “Reader” at the upper left of Gmail, and you’ll pretty much be able monitor any appearance of the brand online. You should add some influential local bloggers to the feeds there as well, and create folders for whatever else you like to read on the web.

So what happens now?

Start posting. Share the content you find interesting in Reader. Build some relationships. Get to know folks. Help people, and watch them help you back.

If you need something more industrial strength, please give us a call. But for 90% of the businesses out there, the truth is this is enough to get started building the relationships that will help build your business.

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Between handy iPhone apps and my whole work and personal world being organized on Google; paper calendars, address books, to-do lists, and even sticky notes seem to be items from the past. I even use my iPhone for my grocery list and am also using it to write and post this blog right now.

I love technology and find it amazing how fast it changes, and how much has changed in the past 10 years.

Can’t wait for what’s in store for 2010!

Sent from my iPhone

Posted via email from holland-mark posterous

We completed our migration to Google Apps yesterday. It was easy and inexpensive. Our outsourced IT provider took care of the behind-the-scenes stuff and prepared some user documentation. We held a couple of internal meetings before the event to establish the motivation and define the process; and a couple of internals after to provide basic training and answer questions. The IT folks started their work on Friday at 2 pm and we’re 97% complete as of Tuesday at 4 pm. Our email was never interrupted and we were able to be productive every step of the way. Not so ironically, when we did run into unanticipated challenges, we were able to resolve them quickly — with a Google search that turned up the answer.

As Mark Twain once said, “I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” Well, I am glad to report that while I am exhausted, none of the terrible things happened. Thank you, Google.

————-

Ed. Note: Great job, Rob! Thanks from all of us.

Today Holland-Mark adopted Google Apps. I appreciate Don’s optimistic view of the future of Google – granted he works there . . . but of course we share it cause we’re heading for the cloud now too…

In the course of discussing the transition today I realized, as a small business, how difficult managing and syncing email and calendar has been. Years ago we suffered along with Now Up To Date. Even within the walls of the organization it never really worked. I could manage my own schedule but couldn’t effectively connect with co-workers to schedule group meetings — and there was zero connectivity to my handheld or with the outside world. Then we migrated to iCal. I love Apple and the system worked for a while. But slowly we overwhelmed our server. And we never had success importing invite files from clients. It worked OK inside the biz but not with those outside.

Over the past few months we’ve been half-assing it with Google. Every employee used a personal Gmail account to create a shared business calendar. Then we linked our existing Holland-Mark email account to the personal Gmail account with the hope that we could continue using our Apple Mail browser and our current email hosting service alongside Google calendar. It worked kinda sometimes. For those of us that began to use the Google interface to grab our email (instead of Apple Mail), it worked better than kinda sometimes but not awesome always. Friday we transition to Google Apps as we seek awesome always.

Here’s awesome always defined, and why we are making the move to Google:
• Seamless email and calendar integration
• Real time, built-in, communications (chat, video)
• Access and mobility: anywhere, any device
• Secure & stable platform, no hardware or support headaches
• New features regularly — no need to wait for new releases or software upgrades

We are excited. We believe we’ll save money, save time and be far more productive. We’ll keep you posted as to what we learn along the way.

In the meantime, if your organization has made the move to Google Apps, please let us know what worked and what didn’t. Any and all advice is appreciated.

Posted via email from holland-mark posterous