I’m so puzzled by Google+. I understand the value of having a social media community that’s automatically plugged into the largest search engine in the world. Users’ content will be completely searchable/findable between Google and Google+, and that’s a major asset for online marketers, web developers, and businesses. It’s also incredible that when using the mobile application for Google+ any images you take with your smart phone will automatically be uploaded to Google+ so you can share them easily.

One of the most revered assets of Google+ is the application of circles. Now, instead of posting pictures, status updates, and articles to ALL your followers, you can organize followers into categories and share information only with specific circles (friends, family, etc). If you have a work related article to promote, share it exclusively with your clients. Similarly, if you’ve uploaded a picture of your wild bachelor weekend, you can share it with the circle holding your friends’ profiles so your co-workers and family members won’t see it.

This new feature does make social sharing more private for those who are worried about sharing too much with the wrong people. On the other hand, if you’re worried about what certain people will think about what you share, do you have any business sharing it in the first place? In other words, if you’re worried about who is reading what you’re sharing, you’re not practicing safe sharing.

Google+ makes safe sharing possible, but it negates a powerful piece of social etiquette. If you’re not comfortable with everyone reading what you’re sharing, then you probably shouldn’t share it. I foresee millions of Google+ mishaps where the wrong information is shared with the wrong circles. Is this the worst thing in the world? No. But by separating social circles, Google is allowing irresponsible sharing to happen all across it’s social community.

Google+ is taking the social world by storm, and it will be interesting to see where the road leads. Despite the ability to share with certain people, I hope the networking world continues to leave its social doors open.

Did you know that Google has given everyone the ability to create their own profile? Now it has become that much easier to tell the world what you’re about. In an age where we can never truly get rid of things said about us, we can now have at least some control over what’s out there.

This can be a really crucial act of self promotion and online reputation management. Think about it. You cannot control what people say about you on Facebook. Neither can you on Twitter, LinkedIn or any other social media site. However, with Google Profiles, the first thing people see when they search your name can be your Google profile. The one that you created and filled out yourself. You can explain your core values and standards in your own words. Don’t underestimate how valuable this can be to prospective clients or employers.

Online reputation management is becoming crucial these days. You can no longer afford to keep your head in the sand. Take control of the things that you can.

I’m a regular reader of Techdirt, a blog that deals with many issues facing us in the digital age. Mike Masnick, the author, poses an interesting point in a post from last Thursday: Has anyone noticed that sites don’t have to rely on Google so much for traffic anymore? Now, remember, the key words in that sentence are so much. There is no doubt that for now and the foreseeable future, Google is the dominant player in search, and you’ll want to be seen there.

However, more and more people are finding that their traffic is coming from a variety of places. Facebook is definitely a great place to find new things. Also, don’t forget about Twitter, Reddit, StumbleUpon and other places like them. These are great networks to find new people, places and content. I find my most timely news comes from Twitter. I’ve found some of the most interesting analysis of current events on Reddit. There is one caveat, however. You do need to have good content that people actually want to read and share.

Google can be a tough nut to crack. You don’t want to put all of your “eggs” in one basket, so I suggest you find your place somewhere in the social media-sphere. You’ll find there are many to choose from that provide the perfect platform for your unique voice.

Smart businesses are adding Facebook pages in order further their company message. The even smarter businesses are actually engaging page visitors. It’s great to have a page on Facebook, but if you don’t engage the people that visit your page, you are missing out on potential web traffic for your business. Here are 5 applications you need to have on your businesses Facebook page.

1. Polls – One of the most popular poll applications is Polldaddy. These applications give you the ability to engage your customer, and gauge their interest in things that you are planning. Plus it’s a great way to see how popular your FB page is.
2. Networked Blogs - If you maintain a blog on your business website, why not use this application to increase your readership? Every time you add a new post to your business blog, your FB page will be updated.
3. YouTube - Gone are the days where only large companies could afford to have marketing videos produced. YouTube has been the great playing-field leveler. Add videos to your businesses YouTube account, and the YouTube for Pages application can post them to your Facebook page.
4. Promotions - The Promotions application enables you to offer special perks to those that visit your Facebook page. There is no doubt about the loyalty this will engender in your page followers.
5. RSS Feed - One useful way to keep fresh content on your Facebook page is to use your company blog’s RSS feed. While it is certainly better to add fresh, organic content to the page, importing your blog’s RSS feed will lighten the content creation load.

If your company is on Facebook, try some of these applications. You’ll find your brand loyalty increase exponentially.

I’ve been talking a lot about the positive aspects of promoting your business on websites like Yelp, Citysearch and Facebook. As I’ve said before, it really helps you engage your customers. However, I’ve got an example of how not to respond to negative reviews.

Essentially, a couple was kicked out of a hotel because the manager accused them of writing a bad review on tripadvisor.com. The manager even went so far as to call the police. Naturally the police declined to arrest them as it was clearly a civil matter. However, the real question to ask is why the manager thought his business would be helped by persecuting someone who may or may not have written a bad review. These sites, including tripadvisor.com, offer the chance to respond to criticism. In many cases a problem can be diffused simply by engaging the customer proactively. The manager of that hotel decided to respond to criticism in an adversarial way. Again, not the way to go.

By and large, your customers are going to be reasonable. You never know what is going on in their life that day. Maybe they’re just having a bad day. Being defensive about criticism will only exacerbate the problem. You’d be better served by responding in a positive tone with an offer to help. You’ll be amazed at how much goodwill this will generate.

There are copious amounts of social networks in existence. We all know the big two: Twitter and Facebook. There are also several popular niche networks like Classmates.com and LinkedIn. Millions of people worldwide are using these services to connect with new people, and reconnect with people they’ve lost touch with.

As these ways of interacting with one another started to take off, some people had a “sky is falling” reaction. “It’s the end of human interaction! People will never leave their computers,” they said. Of course this hasn’t actually happened. On the contrary, we are interacting with each other even more. These social networks help us stay connected when it would be difficult any other way.

My Twitter feed has become an endless supply of news and information that I wouldn’t know about otherwise. My dad has used Facebook to keep in touch with old friends from high school. Even my wife, who tends to be disinterested in technology, has become a social networking fan. How do you socially network? Has it improved your connections with people? I would guess that it has, and will continue to do so as these networks further embed themselves into our lives…and that’s not a bad thing.

Mobile phones have definitely changed the way we communicate. Beyond the actual voice calls, we text, email and interact online from our phones. With smart phones now the norm (even my wife has one), people have access to information at all times. How does this affect your business?

Now business owners have to contend with customers being able to spread the word instantly. Naturally, this is a double-edged sword. If you give a customer a great service, the world will find out in a second. The same applies if the customer has the opposite experience. It’s an important thing to think about when marketing your business, because  you want to take advantage of the customer’s ability the spread the good news quickly. Even if you get a bad review, often times you can turn that into a positive by directly addressing the situation.

Mobile phone applications like Foursquare, Yelp and even Facebook offer check-in functions. People can check-in once they’ve arrived at your business and make comments. It not only informs their friends of their location, but it’s also free advertising for your business. Many businesses offer specials to “regulars” who check-in.

Check-in’s and other types of location based apps are prevalent on mobile platforms. If you want to grow your business, you must learn to harness this technology. Because, like it or not, people will continue to rely on their mobile phones to guide them through the world around them.

For those who would like to follow along with the notes (there won’t be any slideshow for this one) you can download the PDF here.

So in an attempt to cram it into a nutshell for my upcoming audience, I was comparing and contrasting the ways in which the two networks build connections. The starting point for a connection can often be quite revealing about what sorts of conversations will be able to emerge as mutual participation and engagement ensues. If I meet someone in the context of  being “a friend of the family”, I am likely to explore radically different topics of discussion than if I met the same person in the context of “having the same interests”.

Facebook’s primary connection mode seems designed to bring together people who already know each other, or are very likely to know one another in an existing relational context, whether past or present. A slightly secondary mode is the locale-centric one, in which Facebook seeks to center activity and connections based on the reported location of its members. Both modes suppose an existing geographic or sociographic connection in order for the system to perform well in suggesting friends. And indeed, many if not most of the prompts and activities around which Facebook revolves suppose that the connections occurring within networks have some real-world mirror or context.  Nowhere is this more clear than in the memes and recurring quizzes, etc. that get passed around. Without already knowing something of the individuals participating in these activites, the answers and the exercises themselves would be of little interest, consequence or value to the group.

Twitter, on the other hand, with fewer guided activity options (and subsequently a LOT of general confusion about what Twitter really is) can be much like Facebook, in terms of mirroring confined and pre-existing real-world social connection graphs, but it isn’t designed to limit or promote only those social spheres. In fact, Twitter seems to be harder to use in that way than Facebook, because of the lack of recommendations and six-degrees-of-separation sort of ready-made connections. To find people to follow on Twitter, or to find followers, one would typically start with an interest or subject matter that mattered in their world. With little in the way of formal introduction or pre-existing awareness of an individual, connections can be made, based on little else than a mutual appreciation of a topic, interest or body of knowledge. In this way, Twitter tolerates more anonymity during interactions in the network, and thus can be an appealing place to be a genuine and transparent brand with a valuable voice in the conversations already occurring there. One does not have to know much about someone before choosing to follow them, because the value of the connection is not based on felt associations, but rather based upon a knowledge transaction.

In other words, Facebook networks are based upon WHO you know, and Twitter networks are based upon WHAT you know.

I am thrilled to have finally come up with a “10 words or less” comparison/explanation of the two services. But probably no more thrilled than my audience will be.

But it is because of the fast and wide-scale adoption of these platforms and technologies that we have a full and healthy dose of the Law of Unintended Consequences operating today. For every new break-away service that comes into the light, there are a crop of parallel (and some would say “parasitic”) technologies that emerge alongside. Given the popular trend of public data APIs, this sideline innovation is often where the bleeding edge is found, much to the chagrin of the original technologies’ founders.

I’ll give you a few examples of the unintended consequences I am talking about.

1. Search. Platforms like Twitter are poised to benefit from an emerging view about the data being batted about on any given day in the social web. Turns out that this data is valuable, and once it was made searchable and discoverable, it shines as a plausible replacement to search giant Google as an even more real-time search engine. Who would’ve thunk it? Certainly not the tops at Twitter, at least not from the beginning, and I’d bet money on that.
2. Marketing. Facebook knows something about the data it has in its system. It’s a freakin’ gold mine. And if it can ever transition the unrealistic expectations of its user base to accept a business model that allows Facebook to sell more of this data (anonymous or otherwise) Facebook will be worth triple the inflated numbers that were bandied about several months ago. Marketers are standing by with very long extension cords, just waiting for Facebook to tell them where the high-voltage power receptacles will be located. Because marketers instinctively understand that knowing what Facebook already knows about its users, based solely on their organic and voluntary use of the platform, will likely fuel a global economic recovery. But if Facebook had realized the full value to marketers from the start, I think they would have laid some ground rules that would have made it much easier to do business without sparking user-generated revolt.
3. CRM. How would you like to find out what people are saying about your brand, and quickly respond before an influential rogue micro-blogger can do real damage? The social web is already changing the way businesses manage customer relationships. But I am positive that blogs and microblogging platforms were not conceived out of that desire. It’s another beneficial yet unintended consequence, and it has incredible value to those interested in harvesting the data.

The real party-pooper in the above scenarios is the user and his/her expectations about the social web and the platforms that prop it up.  For now, the social web remains a Fortress of Free, and the expectation that the user-added data in these public systems will remain private and untargeted (ridiculous notions, by the way) are so strong that any wholesale moves toward marketing the vast data sets are met with rigid and unwavering protest. Yet another unintended consequence of making everything free from the start…