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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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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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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Anyhoo…

1. Get into the right frame of mind. Read this. I wrote it a while ago, but it was (and is) my best attempt to explain to people why Twitter is worth the effort. I’d also recommend you take a look at this, and this, from the people who taught me about Twitter. Ready? Good.
2. Create An Account. Go here. Enter your real info, and pick a username people can both remember and spell easily. You can skip the “suggestions,” but definitely look for your “friends.” If you use Outlook I’d strongly suggest exporting your contacts to a GMail account so you can check for them in the system, but if that freaks you out just skip it. If there are specific people you’d like to add you can do so in the “anyone” screen, but you can always do that later as well.
3. Confirm your account. Check your e-mail for a note from Twitter, and click the link to confirm your e-mail.
4. Personalize your account. You wouldn’t go to a cocktail party with a bag on your head, would you? For God’s sake… Click “settings” in the upper right, then “profile.” Upload a picture of yourself. Nothing too formal, but a head shot you can live with. Add your location, your site or blog, and a 2- or 3-line bio. If you’d like to spruce your page up a bit, click here, then click the “login to twitter” button, and “Allow” when the Auth confirmation screen appears next.
5. Follow some smart people and news sources. I created a Twitter List of good accounts to start with. Just go here, and follow it.
6. Find and follow some other stuff you’re interested in. You a Patriot fan? Have a favorite celebrity chef? NASCAR driver? Politician? Celebrity? Go here, and find some folks to follow. Odds are they’re already here, and getting a little closer to them can be cool.
7. Get Tweetdeck. Twitter on the web is for dorks. Seriously, dude. Download and install Tweetdeck. It’s awesome. It will help you use Twitter as a tool, you can even feed your LinkedIn and Facebook feeds into it if you have accounts there.
8. Add a few search columns in Tweetdeck, to track whatever you’re interested in. Follow the people you like, unfollow the people you don’t.
9. Reply to a few people, or just retweet them. Figure out how to reply to a tweet you like (just roll over an icon in Tweetdeck, and click the back arrow. That will create a tweet with that person’s name preceded by an “@” sign. That tweet will appear in their replies list, and they’re likely to see it.) Huzzah. Retweeting is similar… just use the forward arrow. This sends the tweet through your account, a way of amplifying stuff you like, so it’s easy for more people to find. It’s a good thing for the community, kind of a service we do for each other. Welcome.
10. Start tweeting yourself. Now you’re ready. What do you have to say? What’s the most interesting thing you came across today? What were you thinking about in the car just now? Just react to the world around you. Be sincere, be genuine. Contribute.

That’s it. Give it a whirl. Let me know how it goes.

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Live TV : UstreamMike will deliver the keynote at noon.

You can participate in the social network activity around the event live here:

What is social media?

How do marketers really feel about social media?

What is the power of social media?

Thanks to everyone!

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Among the implications, is that to do great work, you need great clients.

So what makes a great client? Here’s my list of client attributes that help me to do my best work…

1. A single decision-maker, empowered with final decision-making authority
2. A personal relationship, with trust and respect in both directions
3. A focus on clear articulation of the problem and/or business objective
4. The courage to face the truth and deal with it
5. Crisp and direct feedback, whether positive or negative
6. On-time payment
7. The sincere belief that marketing is important
8. A personal experience where great marketing changed the game
9. A sense of humor
10. High standards and expectations

What’s on your list?

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At a party like that you get to talk to people you work with about stuff that has nothing to do with work. One of our clients has an 18-year-old son, and is struggling with his impending departure from home. We had a great conversation about what that’s like, something I’ve been thinking about now that our oldest is 11. I met the spouses of several folks I’ve known for a while, which somehow always sheds new light on people (my Mom, Dad, and wife came to the event; I’m sure others felt the same). With others I talked politics, song lyrics, the terrorist fiasco in my hometown of Sudbury, cooking, travel, old times, women (with men), men (with women), and football.

The Two Yous

Most of us are more than the roles we play at work, on a team, or in a single project. Moving past the cardboard cutout and getting to know the complete person makes work and life in general more interesting, with the added side bonus of making teams stronger and more effective.

Adding Social Media

Embracing this is the key to engaging effectively in social media. You should approach Twitter in the same state-of-mind you do a cocktail party like last night — sharing yourself authentically, getting to know each person you meet for the interest of it, building a network of relationships, and letting the mutual benefits emerge naturally.

Last night I met someone new who went out of her way to tell me so-and-so from her office said hello. “So-and-so” was a guy I met in person once, but who I felt I’d really gotten to know on facebook over the last two years. He and I have shared thoughts on digital media, but I’ve also seen him react honestly to job changes, watched his kids grow, witnessed his trials and triumphs from afar. He’d apparently done the same for me, and felt he knew me in the way I knew him. That’s powerful ju-ju, I think. If there’s magic in social media, that’s it.

This morning I got a YouTube video from another client, featuring her CEO horsing around in an on-camera skit. He’s the kind of person you instantly know is more than his title when you meet him; a warm and open wit, and a personality that fills the room. Seeing that video validates and enriches my understanding of him as a person, and makes me want to see him succeed.

“Younification”

The blurring of the “professional” you and the “personal” you that happens on the web – younification – is decried in some circles, and I respect that. My wife would say my work life creeps into my home life a little too much, and, if I were wired differently, one or another of my digitally immortalized indiscretions might be embarrassing. But I’ve always thought good business is personal. And social media at its best really just boils down to that.

It gets us all a little closer to the truth. And in the long run, that can only be a good thing.

That’s how I see it, anyway. But this is a tricky one, and I welcome your thoughts.

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Whatever you call them, I think this is the future of marketing…