Pinterest is popping up all over the place. Is it just noise of some early adopter freaks? No it is not.

Pinterest is a super fast growing content sharing platform that competes with Flickr, Picasa and the likes. Now recently Pinterest is coming very close to the traffic rank level of Flickr and as Pinterest was growing Flickr's traffic is declining. 

Here is what makes Pinterest so strong and moves it into a position that will outperform the 800 pound gorilla – Flickr

1) Pinterest is social from the get go

Flickr is simply a photo sharing platform that never developed any further. You can't even like a photo. Comments is the best you can do. In contrast on Pinterest you have a decent vanity URL see a persons profile, and you can follow selected or all so called "boards" – you may call it sets, groups of content etc. Obviously you can like images, comment on them and more

2) Pinterest is a community

As you follow users on Pinterest you build a sense of community. You see what's new and coming and you see it right in your list of users you follow. All this is either not possible or too complicated in Flickr. 

3) Pinterest Re-pin feature

One of the other killer features is repining photos. This is where the rubber meets the road. It is super easy to basically pin whatever you liked and add it to your own board. You may create a super interesting collection of things or just because you liked one thing. What about IP (Intellectual Property)? If this is your concern, don't go there for the other billion this is not an issue because we are here to share not to own. Obviously giving credits is a must and it is actually automatic on Pinterest as soon as you repin an image.

4) A social time line

Social is probably the one major difference over all. And as such Pinterest has a social timeline sharing what I liked, uploaded, re-pinned and so forth. Again it becomes a community and not just a pixel graveyard. 

5) Shared Contribution

And again – social. Pinterest offeres the ability that others can actually contribute to a board. For instance if you use Pinterest as a business you may want your entire team contribute. Or if you have a fan club you want the whole club be able to contribute. Needless to say that all this is light years ahead of Flickr and it is hard to imagine that a company like Yahoo that has just no social DNA will ever be able to catch up.

6) Following, Linkes, Social Integration

Pinterest supports the key engagement features with buttons and links to build a following similar to Twitter. And as people continue to upload photos, images, screenshots, box shots you create a social engagement for both you personal friends or your business friends (I purposely use the term business friends instead of "target audience".

Obviously you find all the traditional photo sharing stuff including use of tags inside Pinterest. When I googled "tips for Pinterest" today – I got 60 Million findings. Not bad for a startup. RIP Flickr.

There is no doubt in my mind that Flickr will be half of Pinterest in less than 12 month. Even if Yahoo is investing big time to catch up – it will only be catch up and Pinterest will continue to innovate and lead – simply because of its social foundation. And that social foundation is not just a set of engineering hours but a mind set. 

Axel

http://XeeMe.com/AxelS

Social media spans the whole gamut from marketing, PR, support, product management and sales through the entire organization. Social Media became the new way for higher integration with the market. It offers marketing departments a whole new opportunity to interact with the entire organization.

CIO or CMO?

In many of the larger organizations the CIO (Chief Information Officer) is busy taking care of network infrastructure, computing power, security, ERP systems and much more. And so it is actually the CMO who is weaving the network for the market interaction model that has just expanded like the big bang over the universe of a business. In other words the new CMO will gain significantly more influence and watch the business as a whole – no longer just from a promotional perspective.

What is the new CMO up to?

She or he is re-engineering their respective marketing organization. While in the past it was mainly about advertising, events, collateral material, brand development and PR a new very strategic function is entering the CMO office: Social Media Services for the entire organization.

Social Media Monitoring

Instead of just doing the nice charts from a brand point of view, why not providing all departments with the most up to date voice of customer. Providing insights for support, product management, sales, logistics, finance and whoever else is in touch with customers and prospects. Creating networked escalation procedures to fulfill an immediate response promise.

Community

Online communities are not only good for support issues but all kinds of customers who want to exchange best practices with other customers and build the ideal foundation for advocacy and market integrated social selling or social commerce. A well designed community strategy touches support, product management, sales and possibly other areas in an organization

News exchange and syndication

The old email news letter is on its way out – instant news communication via Twitter, blogs and social network status updates are coming in fast. Also here marketing will be tweeting as well as support team members, product managers and sales in a supportive way. Blog post syndication with customer blogs amplify the strength of the relationship and brand position.

Market Engagement Strategies

Marketing strategy, go to market strategy and social media strategy may fuse into a corporate wide market engagement strategy. [I will report more about it any soon]. In essence the "Market Engagement Strategy" outlines how the business and all market facing business units will interact and engage with its market. At this point it is as close to the overall business plan as it gets. Yet somebody needs to create it and take over this new and expanded responsibility. 

These are just a few examples to illustrate the new diversity of a redesigned marketing department. Those new CMOs are much more influential and strategic than ever before. I will share a first case study in the next few weeks.

Axel
http://XeeMe.com/AxelS

The presidential campaign in 2008 was a milestone in Social Media history. Where does it go in 2012? As of now President Obama is the clear leader in the race for president in 2012 when we read the emotions of the American people.

In accordance to Overdrive Interactive who managed to accumulate all the data points in the social web, Barack Obama has a higher rank in the US population than all other candidates together. So far so good but what does this really mean?

Influence is a complex and complicated beast. And social media is an interesting way to learn more about influence than we ever could in the past. One thing is for sure: Extroverted and highly exposed people who made up their mind and publicly state what they think have a higher degree of influence than those who wait and see and wonder.

It is no coincidence that those natural influencers are using the social web to continue making their mark. But with the "Democratization Of Influence" pretty much everybody has at least an opportunity to become an influencer too. More so – it is getting much harder to influence the masses with the old tools of mass media. And as such extroverted social media user are now outperforming traditional media in reach and amplitude.

As the presidential campaigns are progressing more and more people will make up their mind and also publish their opinion. Likes and follows seem to be a trivial vote – but actually not much different than the check mark on the ballot paper – isn't it?

Balance of Interests. It will be very interesting to watch how social media will be used by the candidates to gain attraction and influence the public – and in the same time how the American people will leverage social media to ensure that their opinion is reflected in the result of the presidential election on Nov 6, 2012.

Axel
http://xeeme.com/AxelS

Only people who care stand up and argue, defend, fight or otherwise make their position very clear. Interesting enough – the more disappointing a situation gets, the louder the conversation and the bigger the impact for a brand. An age old saying goes: "The worst thing to be talked about – is not to be talked about". A few companies are actually learning from the show business how this all works.
 

Scandals and disappointments – strategic tools

If there is no scandal – create one. Hollywood: Whether you love your partner or not – get divorced. "Shocking the nation does more to your image than being a nice guy – being Mr.Niceguy is of no value". There are at least two companies in the social web that are leveraging and mastering that technique: Twitter and Klout. Both in their very own way.
 

Twitter Fail

The world knows and everybody within Twitter that their technology is absurdly bad. With a few hundred million on the bank it would be absolutely no problem at all to fix it. But that would be worst. Failing is an art. And Twitter knows to master it. Let it crash and everybody is talking about it. The next big crash at Twitter will be extremely well prepared and timed. It will happen so that all News Media will talk about it without having an advantage like "Twitter is down but here is the news from us". That would be bad – and guess what – that never happened. Coincidence? Not at all – because failure is part of the promotional schema – carefully planned and built into the brand reputation mechanism. Scarcity is a strategic tool in creating demand and even value. Crashes provide an additional level of scarcity into the daily operation – in this case of Twitter. The only risk: A Twitter competitor comes in with an equally cool – yet more reliable system. But that is not in sight – and even if one could be identified in a far distance. Hey just stop the crashes and find a new way to create drama.
 

Klout's Growth with Anti Reputation

Klout is another brand with a masterful organized drama strategy. There are people who claim to find jobs because of their Klout and others who loose it because it went down. Making some changes without any communication and let the folks out there stand up and argue how bad Klout is. A perfect promotion. Klout would never have such a noise level in the market if not for their strategically planned chaos. Some of the leading social media influencer just quite Klout because of that – rather quietly without doing them the favor of being vocal about it. And this is another thing Klout learned. Passive aggression – like leaving without noise – is not hearting the image even if many of the top gun social media are no longer "klouting around". The voice of the masses took over and do the job for them.
 

Why do people care?

Because measuring and valuing influence is in interesting aspect of social media. Those who never had any significant influence obviously find it very interesting to be at least seen in or slightly above average. As such Klout can easily play with those users and whether the leading influencers stay with it or leave, actually makes no difference. Liz Strauss said to me recently "You can never measure influence – no matter how hard you try" and I think this hits the inner core of Klout's problem – you just can't measure it. But what you can do is create a ton of noise and continue to give those who are covered by the masses at least something to hold on to it and people continue to care.
 

The art of brand reputation

The real art is to let the noise go on for a while and then fix it in a way that the masses are ok with it. YES, this looks like diametrically opposed to the influence model – but it actually isn't. Influence has many faces and masses have influence just as such. That means even if the top guns leave Klout or Twitter for that matter – the masses will continue to join in numbers that are hundred or thousand times as big as those who leave. In a year from now the current noise around Klout will be faint background noise and the number of users may have doubled. The remainder of the brand reputation may be – "Boy they have grown a lot". In the mean time Klout has enough time to develop a "real brand reputation".
 

What can we learn?

In both cases a very counter intuitive brand strategy is leading to success. It is a risky undertaking but with careful planning maybe more successful than just a plain vanilla brand strategy. We also learn dealing with mistakes, whether carefully planned or happening by accident has strategic importance as it inherits a huge opportunity for a dialog with the respective market.

Axel
http://XeeMe.com/AxelS

Kingdoms ruled the world for the past thousand years. People either lived in one of those kingdoms or were essentially outlaws or gypsies. Those who belonged to any of the kingdoms had to obey their rules or needed to leave to find a new place. That was very hard as you had to leave friends and family behind. When I hear from friends they are in twitter jail or even worst their account were blocked it reminds me on those kingdoms where the king decided the rules and their guard just executed whatever they felt is not right. One of my contacts tried for 3 month to get his Twitter account back and then finally created a new one – without knowing why. I had such a situation 3 years ago. Our Social Media Academy account was erased by Twitter and I had no way of knowing, getting in touch or getting an answer.

You know I'm running XeeMe and we are getting into a similar situation. Users tamper with their accounts, try to cheat with XeeScore or put up content or images that are considered inappropriate by most users. Now should be we as rigorous as others and just block it? I actually think this is too much and rather invest more time to think about democratic measures to deal with the differences between right and right. What maybe ok for one maybe totally inappropriate for somebody else. 

Hiring people to get the XeeScore up or trying other methods to do so is certainly not right – regardless of somebody's believe system. But even though – blocking or erasing an account is too much penalty. XeeMe want their users to be sure that XeeMe is the one place they always can trust even if they are not trustful themselves. May sound strange but again the lines between right or wrong aren't that crystal clear as they should be.

So rather being a kingdom XeeMe wants to be a democracy. They want their users to have a saying in the rules definition in a more democratic manner. They want to make sure that a user NEVER looses their XeeMe account and can always trust that the user's contacts find them under that address with the content that is considered appropriate for what thet call the "XeeMe Society"

I would love to hear from you – what do you think is appropriate, or inappropriate and how a network owner – whether it's XeeMe, Twitter, LinkedIn or whoever should deal with rules definition and rules enforcement.

Axel
http://XeeMe.com/AxelS
 

After three years educating applied social media for business we decided to make some important enhancements to our certifications and classes going forward. The adjustments are reflecting  attendee feedback, evolving market requirements and to homogenize graduation terminology.

While we were initially focusing on social media consultants who basically were able to participate full time in the 8 week highly intensive crash course class, we are now getting a significant amount of attendees from corporations who need to go through the program while working in their respective jobs. At the same time we want to prepare attendees for the growing demand in social media strategy work and needed to add more content and intensify group collaboration and project work.

As a result we restructured the program as following:

1) Social Media Basics – An all new class

After 8 years of social media it is obviously much harder to start and become successful than just 2 years ago. This class shall help people who need to learn all the basics and ramifications of social media for business. Attendees learn about the general purpose and objectives using social media for business, opportunities and risks, tools and networks, behavioral aspects, how it can help build a better customer experience, better customer support, better product management, improve marketing and reduce cost across all departments. Attendees learn to setup their own social presence and realize the differences between personal and business use.

* No entrance exam required.
* 4 weeks online lessons and workshops.
* English or German language classes available
* Classes are held 3 times a year or more
* Company specific classes available

2) Certified Social Media Manager – More Knowledge, more practice

This class combines the previous Social Media Manager and large parts of the Social Media Strategist class to reflect current market needs. Requirements to be a Social Media manager have grown significantly in the past year and the new class reflects that demand. The Certified Social Media Manager not only learns to execute a social media strategy but also to be part of the strategy development, be part of a social media audit and support the resource planning and budget process. In addition a Social Media Academy Certified Social Media Manager need to earn the certificate by being part of a complete social media project from strategy creation to program execution, budget planning and resource allocation. A certified social media manager is trained to take a social media strategy in a mid size or larger corporation and executes such a strategy in the most professional way. The new program provides additional know how on social media monitoring and social media crisis handling.

* Entrance exam is required.
* 8 weeks online lessons, collaborative project work and workshops.
* English or German language classes available
* Classes are help three times a year
* Company specific classes available

3) Social Media Strategist – More advanced, more project work

This class is an advanced class, requiring the knowledge and methodologies learned in the Social Media Manager Class and actually being able to create a enterprise level social media strategy. This class has the remaining components of the "old" strategist class including HR, Human Talent Development, creating a social media strategy practice within a consultant organization or an enterprise as well as more intensive workshops with real life projects to be worked on in a collaborative manner. The strategist class also includes advanced lessons on social media analytics, social media crisis management and social media strategy variations in B2B versus B2C. The Social Media Strategist class is now a 6 month education program.

* Social Media Manager certificate or an intensive entrance exam is required.
* 6 month online lessons, extensive project collaboration and workshops.
* English only
* Classes are help once a year

4) Social Media Team Associate – Training the executing work force

Also this is an all new class and addresses the need for businesses who have well educated social media manager or social media strategists and need to train team mates in Product Management, Sales, Support, Marketing or PR. Attendees of this class will be from companies with a defined social media strategy using the SMACAD strategy framework. Attendees learn to develop programs which are defined by the Strategy Hexagon and are based on the Four Quadrant Assessment model as well as the NCP model. Attendees will learn to create social selling initiatives, customer experience improvements, crowd sourcing programs, social marketing initiatives, social media augmented service and support programs to be used in a cross functional social media engagement. It is highly recommended that attendees with no social media background will take the social media basics class before joining the Social Media Team Associate class.

* Entrance exam is required.
* 4 weeks online lessons and workshops.
* English or German language classes available
* Classes are help twice a year
* Company specific classes available

5) Social Business Master – The new leadership program

This class is currently in preparation and will be available starting in Fall 2012. The SBM program will take 2 Years / 4 semester including all aspects of social media for business. The goal is to educate future business executives to lead an organization strategically into the social business era including more effective go to market strategies, more successful sales engagements, market integrated product planning and development, customer integrated support strategies, partner integrated social media engagements and more. The SBM will learn to apply methods, models and frameworks in strategy development as well as hands on exercises to know what it takes to create and execute the measures leading to a successful engagement.

* Entrance Exam is required
* 24 month online lessons, project work and workshops plus 4 class room days.
* English only
* Classes starting once a year in Fall

The most significant change in the market compared to 2008, when we started with the Social Media Academy is the level of engagement in the social web as well as the evolving behavior. The number of users has grown from roughly 200 Million to over 1 Billion. Twitter has grown from a few hundred thousand to over 200 Million. Tools like Quora, Foursquare, Google+ didn't exist or were barely known. Other tools made way to newer more innovative products. The demarcation between personal and business presences have become very blurry or resolved completely. Executives learned about the significance in cost reduction and increase in customer satisfaction and the "elite networking technique" became a commodity.

Microsoft is working on an internal research project exploring a new social network: SOCL.

It appears that the software giant is game to reinvent itself and create a social media solution. While Microsoft still has the money – the question is whether or not they can change their culture from a self centric technology super shop to a community thinking global network. If Socl will ever be launched is still a question. But the billion dollar investment in technology such as Azure needs to find a consumer – and if it is just Microsoft. The 8 Billion acquisition of Skype still needs some justification. But consider a merger of 600 Million Skype users with a Socl type social network and a billion dollar hosting farm – it actually has at least a theoretic chance.

(Image by Sueddeutsche Zeitung)

If Microsoft is actually going out with Socl – I would wonder how many minutes it may take to hear an announcement from Oracle taking it's internal community Mixx to the next level and turning it into a social network. Also Oracle amounted huge computing power with the SUN acquisition and would be able to drive a network for hundreds of millions of users. Well and SAP might be just around the corner. The old ties to IBM may come in very handy when it comes to building the infrastructure for a massive social network for – say a billion users. And if Microsoft, Oracle, SAP is entering the social sphere – Google may actually benefit from the run on social presence creation, connections and relationship building bonanzas. And one more time the connection power houses like Cisco or Avaya and others may even chime into this – with a lot of thrust – no different than in the .com days when it finally became apparent that the Internet will dominate the information exchange across the world.

Is it a good idea? Do we need more networks? Are we willing to be dependent on only a few?

I guess Joe Doe network user who finally learned to use Facebook may say "Absolutely not – let's have one network and be done with it" Very much like in the old days when everybody was backing Microsoft. The dilemma today: Our choice of operating systems is not that big. It is Windows, Windows or Windows. And I personally hope we learned from Communism that monolithic markets are not very competitive. But there are more reasons why we need more social networks. Let me share some:

1) Freedom Of Choice

Probably the most important reason for more networks is freedom of choice. There are people who love Facebook and some who just don't like it for whatever reason. There are people who miss either functionality or the audience they like to communicate with. And if there is a need or want – there is a market. That alone is a reason to see more networks.

2) General Business Networks

Now Facebook and Twitter are great networks to support business people as well, it just doesn't have the functionality nor the appeal to attract all business people on the planet to connect for and with a business reason. There is a huge market and right now no network that is really suitable for business networking. While LinkedIn is often seen as a business network – it is really more a directory then an actual network with engagement and collaboration functionality. The old mechanism of referral networks are still not well represented in the social web. Small and medium businesses will want a service that is dedicated to their needs. Those services do not exist today and both Google and Microsoft could take that market if they understand to fuse needs, wants, networking, social interaction models and openness into one solution.

3) Enterprise Networks

Similar to the general business networks there are different needs in the enterprise space. Just think of a energy provider who is working with approximately 10,000 vendors and in aggregate about 100,000 individuals from those vendors. Networking, communication, knowledge distribution and sharing as well as relationship building is just a bit different than in small business or consumer business. No no no – I'm not talking about an online community – I'm talking about a homogeneous B2B social network across the world that actually may contain communities but as a structure is a global network. However the need that already exists today has no solution to satisfy that need. Project collaboration with all kinds of partners, customers, experts, all not directly connected to a "company internal network" is only one of many requirements. Of course there are tens of thousands of communities, then there are a variety of providers who built one or the other network tool that could do the job – but non of the fortune 5,000 would probably bet their corporate relationship building on a 5 head startup. And here SAP and Oracle or even Salesforce.com have probably a good opportunity to create something of that magnitude. While SAP and Oracle may have the bigger pockets – SFDC is the more agile and serious contender in that field and are already involved in social media with the acquisition of Radian 6 and the early attempt to go social with Chatter.

4) Vertical Networks

While the above options and the existing networks are good for large very horizontally oriented groups of people from around the world, there are more vertical needs like educational networks, governments and others who have special requirements in terms of functionality and content. Social media is accelerating our knowledge availability by an order of magnitude only comparable with the times when books and the printing press was developed. Knowledge distribution focused social networks can at best learn from Facebook but would need to provide very different services and massive amount of computing power to provide a top service around the world. On top of all it would require a business model that allows free knowledge distribution in a profitable manner.

5) Purpose Driven Networks

And like the above there are networks for a specific reason like a church, non profit organizations, sports engaged people across sports disciplines and countries.

We will see more social technology any soon

All of the above are not isolated specific networks or online communities but large scale global networks for hundreds of Millions of enterprise level employees, hundreds of millions SMB employees, hundreds of millions of sports people or church members and so forth.

SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce.com but also Citrix, VMware and more

Pretty much every technology powerhouse is a possible candidate to enter the social web. With currently 1.1 Billion Social Media users around the world – it's one of the largest markets of all. For none of the mentioned companies Social Media is even close to be considered their core competency – but that is something you can assemble in a rather short period of time :) The past 8 years social media was just a foreplay. Now is the time where it all goes mainstream.

Axel

http://XeeMe.com/AxelS

Yes you heard it right, and yes, it's me who said it: Social Media Experts. The bad word in social media. Why do I say so?

Joe doe Social Media Consultant hates the word. Why? Because he is not an expert but rather a situation driven self made social media consultant.

Social Media Has Grown Up

The argument "Social media is growing so fast no person can keep up with the speed" is approximately 5 years old. My first interaction on LinkedIn was in 2003 that is 8 years ago. And if we didn't learn anything in 8 years – heck we should just not discuss the topic in the first place.

It's true there are new and better tools coming in every week. But seriously if all there is are how to use tools, you talk to the wrong people. And if we, at least many of us, didn't become an expert in what we are doing, there are no experts at all. Social media, social interactions, social dynamics, behavior whatever cool term you pick from the word cloud isn't just trivial. But neuroscience, physics, brain research… isn't either.

No more social media rock stars

Here is one of the biggest obstacles for executive teams: While there are thousands and thousands of social media rock stars, social media hippies or whatever you want to call it, it is very hard to find social media expertise – hence no experts. And those who are – are terribly busy.

Putting up a fan page, sending out scheduled tweets from a robot pretending to be a brand pretending to be social is not social media but old style push marketing brute forced onto a new media hoping it works because so many say so. And indeed you don't need an expert to do that. Any average Joe social media consultant whether here in the US or one of the people in the Philippines who do that for $5 an hour can take over those jobs. Impact? None, ROI 'hehhh"? Benefits for the company and even the customer: zero.

Executives need experts not hippies

Consider this: You are a CEO of a company with 5,000 employees and your "social media strategist" is rambling about a fan page, more tweets, listen to your customers and all that old blah blah blah. What will you do? Nothing – and that is actually a wise decision. The next step: You ask your team to come up with some ideas. They will want to get some external expertise. Again rambling about fan pages, tweeting and adding value to the conversation is the same blah blah blah – just on the next lower level.

Social Media Experts need to be able to re-assess a market from a holistic point of view considering the conversations of the customers – but think of some Millions of customers spread all over the planet. They needs to consider business partner integration, those people who actually "own" the customer relationships. And of course the company's own teams from executive to clerk and back. Those experts will need to develop a true strategy – not a list of cool tactical measures but a strategic model with a strategic objective, a well balanced benefits model for both company and market, resource planning, financial planning, ROI and so forth that will be the base for any consecutive action programs. The social media tools are at best a secondary side effect. Strategic models methods and frameworks are the heart and the core of a social engagement that can be introduced to 5,000 employees who in turn collaborate with maybe 50,000 partners and say 1 Million or more customers. You need to be an expert in that field to be able to construct, plan and execute such a social media strategy that will be carefully interwoven into a multi Billion $ business plan.

More executives than you may think are ready to take the challenge from a rapidly evolving society and its inherent changes in the way to do business – most consultants are not.

I wonder – if you are a social media consultant – are you able to help a CEO like mentioned above to get their strategy developed and embraced in their organization?

Axel
http://XeeMe.com/AxelS
(my social presence)

I started as one of the first Beta users of Google+ with great skepticism. The main reason for it was because of a) Google is not known to be a social business, b) Google is not known for having a great product marketing and c) the company is so focused on its advertising business that it maybe too difficult to create a sustainable social network arm within the company.

On July 8, I wrote my first review and in the following weeks I was surprised to see a well designed and well thought out concept of circles, a smart launch marketing initiative and a growing number of friends either joining it or asking for an invitation.

Now – 4 month later – the hype settled down and the social media reality ts catching up with Google+

The traffic analysis from Chitika may not represent the actual usage of the site but is a great reference and matches my own experience. The engagement on G+ is slowing down significantly and conversations go back to Twitter or Facebook – where they came from.

The biggest advantages with Google+

In my opinion, "Circles" was the most innovative concept in G+. As our networks grow enormously we need better tools to segment our networks. Circles was a great starting point. G+ is circles

The second most important innovation was Hangouts – I do one next Tuesday at 4pm (PST) 7PM (EST)
It allows people to hang out in a video conference. Even though just 10 people at the same time – but again a great start.

Other than that – the clean appearance maybe really liked by some people but mostly ignored and sometimes even make it to "cold". The rest is business as usual.

The most significant problems with Google+

Google+ was constructed by engineers – not social nerds. And that is one of the biggest issues and here are the consequences:

1) Dialogs & Conversations

Apparently nobody in the G+ product team has really gotten into the concept of conversations and dialogs. G+ has no dedicated functionality to have a conversation with another person. Well you can create that situation by having that particular person in the post and only that person – but this isn't very intuitive. More so the other person doesn't necessarily know that it was just a dialog. This was already a very confusing thing in Wave – and just extended here.

The next version of G+ need a two level communication stream that allows a dialog between one or multiple people in either a closed and clearly defined as such manner or the same discussion in an open way but understood by everybody else as a dialog or conversation of a dedicated group.

2) Group Dynamics

While circles is a great idea and had a great start it didn't evolve fast enough. Content is pumped into G+ and only earns a few comments and +1s . Discussions don't really fire up – with the exception of a few people who master to motivate masses to follow. What's missing is the support and sensitivity of group dynamics.

The next generation of G+ needs to have a much more sophisticated circle system that allows circles to be publicly shared and people to apply joining a circle with some detailed product strategy to provide mechanisms and levers to support concepts of group dynamics. Those new versions also need to consider customization of groups and a sense of openness as well as protection.

3) API & Integration

The API is just released but that was really last minute. Now – looking at the API structure inside Google one may find it very impressive because enormously rich. But Joe developer used to the Twitter API is hopelessly overwhelmed by the structure and complexity of the Google API world. Check this out: http://code.google.com/more/table/

The next generation G+ API need its own, easy to approach API section and provide more developer support than any competitor. Registering, asking for $100 fee and then explaining that it must comply with many other requirements is a real down turner.

4) The team eating its own dog food

One of the other issues is that the Google team isn't enough in love with its own product to use it internally. Coming back to the starting point: The Google culture needs a remarkable culture shift to actually become a social (not a socialistic) company. Only then the love for the product, the product's functionality and its evolution can find a solid base to grow from.

There are a bunch of other social dynamic flaws in G+ but those aren't as significant as the above four.

Why Bother?

The social media landscape needs diversity and needs to support freedom of choice. If we only support a momentary leader we will end up like the software industry with one operating system, one database vendor, one CRM system… or the automobile industry which collapsed from 26 world class car makers competing for the best to a two company industry loosing not only it's world leadership but even it's local competitiveness.

OK – Only time will tell if G+ is getting into line with Buzz, Wave and many other less promoted shut downs or not.

Axel
http://XeeMe.com/AxelS

Virtual events offer huge advantages over physical events

Here are a series of tips to consider when attending an event as exhibitor.

Conversations

In a way virtual events are no different than your day to day conversations in Twitter, Facebook or any of the other social networks and communities. The only difference – it happens during a few hours with people you may have usually no access to.

Break the "silence" by opening a chat

Visitors entering a booth don't see any "physical product" and may walk away within as few moments. But if you engage your visitor in a chat – with a friendly hello – we learned that most enjoy it and we had many good conversations.

Multi Tasking

People visiting the virtual booth may do that and get a phone call or when at home need to take care of a baby in that very  moment. The communication dynamics change. I talked to a VP Marketing and after a few minutes he had to leave and came back. He was just passing security at the airport. Then he continued after he found a wall plug for his laptop while waiting for his plane. As an exhibitor you will get used to those kind of interruptions.

Body Language

We noticed how important 5 years of work in the social web is when it comes to digital body language. Obviously we don't see the other person face to face but we recognize based on the way they chat, how they ask questions, how to find people on LinkedIn and Facebook while chatting to get a better idea who we actually talk to. Those extra social senses only get developed over time :)

Personal Profiles

Like I mentioned above – we looked up our visitors profiles  while we chatted. That means we had a much better idea how we could help, what kind of business they are in, what kind of challenges they may face. Unlike on a physical event where people neither have the patience to introduce their entire life to us nor can we say – hang on, let me facebook you -but in the virtual world we can.

Leverage the public meeting points

While the team remained on the booth all time I was "wandering around" and had discussions on the show floor. It was great – like on a physical event but just online. I chatted with an event marketing lady from a large tech company. After a few minutes she outed herself – she said "believe it or not but I'm still in my PJ". Anybody embarrassed? No -  not at all. So those online comics became reality.

Efficiency

Like in real life, talk to the people. But since we didn't have any audio, we had to use the  chat . After 20 minutes we actually began to appreciate chat over audio. Marita and Gee had up to 8 chats open simultaneously. With an audio system you can talk only to one person – but in a chat room you can do several talks simultaneously. We still would like audio support – but maybe keep both running. And we learned that some visitors actually prefer chat over phone or headset.

Fun

There is enough boredom out there -  so instead of doing a video clip about us we showed a funny video clip about the divorce between a customer and a marketer. And we had hot coffee for everybody – virtual but still coffee ;)

Lead Quality

We discovered a very interesting side effect from virtual trade shoes: Lead Quality. People who are online savvy and agile are typically working for an equally agile company. Those companies are typically doing very well and invest or run a healthy business. Those are the people you want as lead. To the contrary, those who are more old world, require face to face to do business and are not so well connected as the online guild,  are usually not in a position to invest and therefore not the kind of lead one is looking for. In other words online events have an inherited lead qualification mechanism. I guess it is hard to compete with our last years success: working 5 hours highly focused and generate over 500 new leads.

VUE 2011- A Whole New Ballgame
Please join us on Thursday, Nov. 17 at 8am Pacific / 11pm Eastern for the VUE2011

You’ll learn about leading virtual event solutions and tips for marketing in the cloud.

Marita
http://xeeme.com/MaritaR