Will Marlow

This post could also have been named, "Why Twitter is the Ultimate Tool for Personal Branding." 

I've been on Google+ since it's early beta days, and I like the social network very much.  It's a fantastic system for sharing information, and connecting with people.  I am being followed by 2,400 people on G+, and although I'm being followed by 7,200+ on Twitter, it took me a lot longer to reach that level of influence on Twitter (I've been on Twitter since 2006).

In my opinion, Twitter is enormously valuable for personal branding because it is optimized for delivering crucial information after a brief glance, in under ten seconds.  This is why Twitter can serve as a "living resume" that constantly keeps people updated on your real priorities.  Google+ fails at this.  And it fails badly.  But all hope isn't lost.  G+ is still useful, and if you're interested in this topic, you should read this to the end, and I'll make sure to explain why Google+ can help you accomplish some key branding and communications goals in the last paragraph.

Here are the three reasons why Twitter is better than Google Plus for personal branding:

1. Twitter allows only one type of posting.  You post to your timeline on Twitter, and it doesn't matter if you're responding to someone else's post, or if you want to make a comment on something you've already posted.  You can only post to YOUR timeline on Twitter, and you can only do so in reverse chronological order.  On Google+ it is very different.  You can post on your feed, or you can make a comment on a post that you've already made, or you can make a comment on someone else's feed.  This means that a quick glance at your Google Plus profile doesn't reveal much about you.  It doesn't tell someone how often you post, or how often you interact with others, and it doesn't reveal what's most important to you.  Twitter, due to its rigid, top-line posting format, immediately reveals what you care about.  Chris Brogan cares about talking to people.  Guy Kawasaki cares about posting interesting things.
2. Google+ let's you hide key information about third party validation.  On Google+, you can hide how many people you've added to circles.  You can also hide how many people have added you to circles.  You can't do either of those things on Twitter, which means that a quick glance at  a Twitter profile will reveal how much third-party validation the person has, based on how many people are following them.  **In fact, the only third party validation that is automatically available on G+ is the number of times people have +1'd your posts, and the number of times people have commented on your posts.  Coupled with the first point I made above about the ability to make non-top-level comments on G+, this actually creates a perverse incentive for people on Google+ to prolong stupid conversations to boost the number of comments that are made on their posts.  This incentive is absent on Twitter.
3. On Google+, you can selectively hide your posts.  This creates a huge amount of uncertainty for anyone who takes a quick glance at your profile.  Unlike on Twitter, Google+ reveals nothing about a person's priorities after a quick glance.  On Twitter, you can make ALL your posts private, or ALL your posts public, but there is no uncertainty about a users posting habits, because private accounts are clearly marked.

The power of Twitter is that you can get a lot of value out of it in a short amount of time, and by spending more time, you can get more and more value out of it.  This means that people have an incentive to find and follow new people on Twitter, because they feel like they can rapidly AND accurately assess a new Twitter user.  (Contrast this to the pre-Twitter world: no one wanted to sign up for E-Newsletters because they were afraid that they would be inundated by spam from the company.  The perceived cost of taking a chance on receiving information from an unknown company was much higher.)

So what's so good about Google+?  Google+ is optimized for allowing you to share rich experiences with people, like photographs and videos, and long-format comments.  This means that Google+ can be a great supplementary social media profile.  After people get to know you elsewhere, like on Twitter, you may benefit tremendously from giving them the option to engage with you on G+, just like photographers often give people the option to engage with them on Flickr.

But don't expect G+ to perform the revolutionary role that Twitter has performed since its creation, which is its role as the ultimate tool in personal branding.

Will Marlow is a PR specialist, blogger, and amateur photographer who lives in Northern Virginia. The dog in the photograph above does not need your pillow, just his paw.  You should follow Will Marlow on Twitter. 

Most people have heard about Google+ by now, which is Google's latest attempt at launching a social network.  Whenever a major new social media product is launched, I publish a guide explaining the most important eight things you need to know about it.  I did this for Google Buzz, and I did it for Facebook's Open Graph, and those were two of my most popular posts.  Now that I've had about a month to get to know G+, I wanted to share the Eight Things You Need to Know About Google Plus, and I hope it's helpful to you.

1. Why is Google Plus important?  It's important for lots of reasons, but here's the most significant: Google is directly tying its new social media platform to its search results, and Google search is the most important search engine in the world.  Google Plus influences search results in two important ways: (1) it lets Google deliver more personalized results to people who use G+, and (2) it influences aggregate search results delivered to users everywhere by helping Google understand which websites are spammy and which ones are popular and relevant.  If you have NOT created a Google Plus account, you can see an example of the first point right now.  When you are logged into Google (not Google Plus, but just regular Google), you'll see a +1 next to all search results in the Google results page.  When you click the plus one, this is basically like casting a vote in favor of the page, and Google will use that vote as part of its famous algorithm for delivering search results and advertisements.  So right off the bat, forget the significance of Google+ as a social network.  Think of Google+ as a key component of the Google search product that drives $20 billion a year in advertising revenue.
2. Is Google Plus REALLY that important, or is it just marketing hype?  As a trained marketer myself, I DO admire the excellent job that the Google team has done in selling this social network to the public. But don't be cynical: it IS important.  Here is the proof: Google is like Warren Buffett, the third wealthiest person in the world, with $50 billion in personal wealth.   Warren Buffett's biggest challenge at this point is identifying opportunities that are worth his time.  This is also Google's biggest challenge.  A $100 million opportunity isn't worth his sweat, and it's not worth Google's sweat either.  They can't waste their time on small potatoes.  And Google Plus is driving A LOT of energy of Googlers.  It's huge.  They are investing their brand, their engineering talent and time, and their marketing dollars in pushing this product.  That means that they see a big opportunity.  Now, they might be wrong, like they were with Google Buzz, which is probably NOT a multi-billion dollar asset, but for now, marketers and PR folks like you and me need to take this seriously, because Google is taking it seriously.  
3. So how do you use Google Plus?  This is where Google Plus is winning a lot of praise.  Using Google Plus is pretty easy.  You create an account, and you add people to different circles that you want to receive information from, and you can easily switch between multiple streams to see information on different topics.  G+ provides very few restrictions on how you share content and information.  This post is NOT a tutorial on using Google Plus, so look elsewhere for that -- the focus here is on WHY Google Plus is important.  Point number three is simply that Google Plus is important because it's intuitive, easy and fairly enjoyable to use, and this is driving a lot of its usage right now.
4. How Is Google Plus Different from Facebook?  I love this topic, but I know a lot of people disagree with me here.  In my last post I wrote that Google Plus is an information-centric social network, whereas Facebook is a relationship-centric social network.  Think about it: with Facebook, you get zero value until someone acknowledges and agrees to have a relationship with you.  You need reciprocal friendships on Facebook. But on Google Plus, you can get value without a relationship with someone.  I can add people to circles without their approval.  To me, this is the defining difference between Facebook and Google Plus, and I think it's the reason that Google Plus doesn't compete directly with Facebook.  I think that this difference is Facebook's defining attribute, and key strength.  The growth of a reciprocal network like Facebook is going to be slowed by the very fact that connections are made in two steps: (step 1 = friend request and step 2 = friend acceptance).  Google Plus grows through a one-step process: friend request.   Asynchronous networks like Twitter and Google Plus are trying to compete on different terms: they want to be the best places to curate useful information, and to deliver useful information to tribes of followers (my apologies to Seth Godin, for borrowing his term). 
5. So who does Google Plus compete with?  See point #4, but I think that Google Plus competes directly with any asynchronous social network, primarily Twitter.  Google Plus is in the information business, and I am surprised that so many people disagree with me on this, because Google itself has a global mission of organizing the world's information.  So why wouldn't they create an information-centric social network?  Google Plus sees a multi-billion dollar opportunity to do two things: (a) create a great social network that people spend lots of time on, and (b) protect the integrity and value of their search engine results.  Both of these goals are key to Google's motivation here.  Killing Facebook is not on Google's mind, and if it were to happen it would be a secondary benefit.
6. Why do people want to USE Google Plus?  This is a complicated question.  Different people want to use it for different things. A professional "search engine optimizer" wants to use it to influence search results for clients.  Most PR pros want to use it the same way they use Twitter, to share information with their personal network, and to expand their personal network.  (On that note, you should add me to your circles on G+.) Casual users want to share photos, videos, and long-form writing.  The casual user is the greatest mystery in the world to me, because I am not one of them.  I use social media platforms for targeted purposes, like driving traffic to websites, creating sales leads, establishing new relationships, strengthening existing relationships, and for deepening my understanding of best practices when creating new web experiences on my own. 
7. How is Google Plus different from LinkedIn?  Simple: LinkedIn (and Facebook) requires a reciprocal relationships before you get ANY value.  Stop right there.  This is the only difference that really matters, because it defines how you use LinkedIn, as well as Facebook, and thus it also defines how you use Google Plus.
8. How is Google Plus different from Twitter?  Both Twitter and Google Plus are asynchronous social networks, which means you don't need a reciprocal relationship to follow someone on Twitter or Google Plus.  To me, this is the defining similarity between Google Plus and Twitter.  Following this similarity, there is ONE KEY DIFFERENCE between Google Plus and Twitter, which is that with Twitter, everything you say is chronological, and all posts on Twitter are equal.  If I want to make a comment on someone else's Tweet, I need to make a new Tweet myself.  That is to say, the concept of a sub-level comment or a second-tier comment does not exist in Twitter.  There is a democracy of posting in Twitter, because before I post anything I need to ask myself whether it is something that I want EVERYONE to see.  Google Plus, on the other hand, let's you comment on someone else's post without adding anything to your own G+ stream.  Huge difference there.  Following this key difference, you need to look at differences at the feature level, like this: Twitter has follow limits, which Google Plus currently does NOT.  Twitter has character limitations of 140 characters, which Google Plus does not. Twitter has much more severe limitations on how "rich media" like videos and images are displayed, and Google Plus tries to outdo Twitter here by presenting media in a more intuitive, richer way.  I'm not here to make predictions about whether G+ will last or not, but I will say that people CLAIM that they don't like limitations on social media, but I think the built-in limitations of Twitter are a strength, and help explain why it has been such a powerful communications tool.

This is my early analysis of Google Plus, and I hope you found it useful as you try to get value from Google's new social network.

By the way, as a bonus tidbit, if I were smarter about SEO, I would have formatted this post differently.  You see, the web "likes" short content for search engine optimization purposes.  The reason why academic websites and newspapers get killed in SEO by websites like About.com and Wikipedia, is that Google wants to deliver the EXACT answer to a searcher's question, it doesn't want to give someone a ten page article that may or may not contain the right information buried inside for the individual to sift through and discover. 

So, if I were trying to optimize my blog for search engine optimization, it would have been a better choice for me to publish eight different posts that each focused on eight different things you need to know about Google Plus, instead of firing off all eight in a single post.  My outlook on this, however, is that you can break the SEO rules as long as you KNOW the rules.  In this case, I'm breaking the rules because I think this topic holds together much more strongly as a single, cohesive post, rather than eight separate posts.  In this case, I choose to "write for humans" rather than writing for Google, which is important to do, even if you care about SEO.

Will Marlow is a PR specialist, blogger, and amateur photographer who lives in Northern Virginia. The photograph above is a hand-held shot at the WWII Memorial in DC, and it's part of a series he's doing on the monuments, memorials, buildings, and historic places in and around the District of Columbia. You should follow Will Marlow on Twitter.

Whenever a new social networking product is launched, the question of whether it will KILL its rivals always comes up. 

But for those of you who are loyal to Facebook, never fear.  Google+ will NOT kill Facebook.

Here's why.  Google+ is not in the business of being the virtual glue that holds together your real world relationships.  That's Facebook's mission.  Facebook wants to make your real world relationships richer by letting you share, chat, and interact in a safe place online.

Google+ doesn't do that.  It doesn't even TRY to do that.  Instead, Google+ wants to be the catapult that helps you launch your message/product/company/idea to greater and greater numbers of people more effectively.  It also wants to be the net that you use to pull in the best information from the people you respect.  That is Twitter's business, and my guess is that Google has a weakened Twitter (there are no full-time founders left at Twitter day-to-day) in its crosshairs right now, but most people are missing that story.

Just look at the reviews of Google+.  My hero Thomas Hawk wrote a great analysis of why Google+ is great for promoting photography.  He's mostly correct in what he says, but the very fact that Google+ is great for photographers is evidence that it is NOT competing in an area that Facebook cares about.

By the way, if anyone wants an invite to Google+, just let me know in the comments below, by email, or send up smoke signals.

For one thing, they have a policy of only showing advertising that is "relevant," and you can't think about relevancy until someone types in a search query.  For example, if I type in the search, "Dogwalker rates in Washington DC," Google may decide to show me an ad that links to a local dogwalking company.  But until I type something into the Google search bar, Google doesn't know enough about me.

But another reason is that Google's brand is heavily wrapped up in its clean, ad-free homepage, and it probably doesn't want its homepage to turn into something like the image above (which would make Google feel like all the other search engines).

Did you like reading this blog post?  Sign up to get my new blog posts delivered by email by clicking here.  

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web 2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge.  Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

One huge myth is that if you use Twitter or Facebook to link to your website from your status updates, you'll increase your Google PageRank (in other words, your website will get pushed to the top of search results), because Google famously "counts the number of links" to your website to determine how "relevant" your website is.  Lots of links = great search engine optimization, right?  But you can think of the major Internet companies as co-conspirators in a plot to determine "relevancy," because back in 2005 they all decided that whenever someone links to a website in the "user generated content" area of another website, they would start inserting an invisible "nofollow" tag.  This means that ALL links in a Twitter feed have a hidden "nofollow" tag embedded in them (same with Facebook), and this makes them invisible to search engines.  To be clear, this means that the target of the link doesn't look any more attractive in the eyes of Google, Yahoo or Bing. 

Google launched Buzz 13 days ago, and after spending some time getting to know it better, I wanted to write a quick introduction for people who are still wondering (a) how it works, (b) how it's different from other social media platforms and (c) why they might want to use it.

In everyone's favorite list format, here are the answers to those questions:

1. Google Buzz works in the following way: you access your Google Buzz account through Gmail, and the service allows you to post "updates" which have no character limitation.  Your posts can include rich media like pictures and videos.  Gmail has over 200 million users, which means that the scope of Google Buzz is huge, because each Gmail user was given a default Buzz account along with followers from among their email contacts.  As you post updates, the people in your Buzz network can leave comments, register a "like," or send you a message.

2. Unlike Twitter, which has one feed that shows everything you say (whether you're writing your own original post, or commenting about someone else's post), Google Buzz let's you comment on someone else's feed without using your own feed to do it.  This means you can have conversations with thousands of people, while only updating your own feed at your own pace.

3. Unlike Twitter, there are no follow limits on Google Buzz.  This means you can follow thousands of people, and potentially earn lots of follow backs.  Buzz can get away with this for two reasons: (1) 13 days is not long enough for spammers to flood the system with noise, and (2) it is not yet open to third party apps the way Twitter is, so every time someone follows someone else on Buzz, they physically need to follow them.  This places a natural limitation on the amount of following that can be done, which itself is a protection against spam that doesn't exist on Twitter.

4. On the same topic of follower numbers, unlike Twitter (or Posterous), you don't need to display the names of the people who are following you OR the number of people who you are being followed by and are following.

5. If you comment on someone else's Buzz update, you'll start getting updates in your inbox when other people comment on that thread.  This is jarring at first.  It makes it look like you actually have email in your inbox.  However, it appears that Google simply wants to bring these updates to your attention separately from all the other Buzz noise, because if you've commented on it you've highlighted its importance.  This feature will definitely annoy some people, and I wouldn't be surprised if Google introduces filtering options.  Many people consider their inboxes to be sacred and don't want non-email to fill it up.  However, this aspect of Buzz underscores the fact that Buzz is really an "email-based" social media tool, which is where it derives a lot of its uniqueness.  Even if the hype that is surrounding Buzz right now dies away, it may have strong staying power due to its email roots.

6. So how is Google Buzz the same as Twitter and Facebook?  All three platforms occupy the same category: they are all outposts (to borrow Chris Brogan's term).  This means that Buzz is a great place to meet new people, have new conversations, and to develop a new traffic stream to your primary web base, which should be a blog or a website that you use to deliver real value and host your most important work.

7. So why would you want to use Google Buzz?  If you are interested in truly interacting with people, the features on Buzz are creating lots of rich interactions.  I have over 8,000 followers on Twitter, and far fewer followers on Buzz, but I can already see that my Buzz posts are generating as much or more engagement than my Twitter posts.  It is important to avoid fake success metrics like follower counts and fan lists when measuring success in online media.  It's much better to look at the number of comments, clickthrough numbers, re-posts, "favorites," "likes," and links.  These measures are much harder to fake, and right now the features on Buzz (and its early adopter user-base) have made for the most engaged/engaging platform around.

8. The final point I'd make about Buzz is that if you divide the world between Twitter and Facebook, you'd see Twitter as the best tool for "pushing" information to lots of people, and you'd see Facebook as the best tool for "pulling" information in from the people you choose to connect with.  In my opinion, the strength of Google Buzz is much more in its ability to let you "push" information out than pull it in, which makes it more of a threat to Twitter.  But it took more than 13 days to build Google Buzz, and it'll take longer than 13 days to reach a final verdict on where the platform is headed.  I hope this was a useful early analysis for you.

Did you like reading this blog post?  Sign up to get my new blog posts delivered by email by clicking here. 

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web 2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge.  Read more about Will Marlow here, or email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

Some people have a hard time understanding why Facebook is so valuable.  

Every so often, I do some quick keyword searches for my company, my clients, and my own name, to see how everyone is doing regarding search engine optimization. 

Two things are notable.

Number one, it looks like the black art of search engine optimization (SEO) is rapidly losing relevance, and it's being replaced by the much simpler art of social media optimization.  Which means, essentially, that search engines will now be able to find you largely by your own social media conversations on Twitter, Facebook, and on your blog.  You still need to make your content "search engine friendly" so that you don't make it hard for Google to find you, but the complicated voodoo is being replaced by activities that you do.

Number two, much to my surprise, when I entered the same search criteria in both Google and Bing, Bing told me something useful that Google did not.  Bing told me that someone had linked to my blog from Twitter without letting me know.  I was happy to find out so that I could thank the person, but the point is, Google didn't tell me about this and Bing did.  Now, it'll take A LOT more than this to win even 1% of my search loyalty, but I was surprised that given the same search criteria, Bing scored a point on Google on my scorecard.

PS - If you ever find yourself in a conversation with someone who tells you that Twitter or Facebook is a fad that could disappear because they don't do anything useful, and you don't know what to say to them, remember that people still pay big money for "search engine optimization."  Twitter and Facebook displace this costly marketing activity with a non-cash alternative.  In other words, rather than paying for SEO, smart businesses are using social media.  That's the opposite of useless.

I use Google Analytics (often) but on a regular basis I only use it for a few basic things.

If you feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data that Google Analytics presents you with, it can help for you to simply define what you want to know.  For example, here are some things I like to know:

1. How many people visit my web sites each day.  
2. How long the average visitor stays.
3. How many pages the average visitor views before leaving.
4. How many visitors stay longer than 3-5 minutes.
5. How many "New" visitors there are on a weekly basis.
6. I like to see where my traffic comes from (Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc.,)
7. Which pages are the most popular. 
8. If certain popular pages in particular get a high percentage of traffic from referral sites like Twitter.
9. How long people tend to stay on my most popular pages (and to compare that with the average for the site in general).
10.  Which times of day are the busiest.
11. And I am interested in tracking total unique visitors and page views recorded on AlumniFidelity's many donation portals, and I divide that number by the amount of donations recorded to get a "completion" statistic, and I periodically look for events that seem to move this statistic one direction or another.

The value of this data is pretty self-explanatory.  But you can do so much with programs like Google Analytics that I'm just beginning to scratch the surface.  Do you use Google Analytics more extensively?  Let me know if you'd like to discuss ways to draw more from the data.

And: if you could know anything at all about your web traffic and visitors, what would it be?