Will Marlow

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.

The social media landscape is a pretty messy place.  Your job, as a social media manager or digital PR pro (or whatever you call yourself) is to organize things, and clean them up.  How do you do that?  You make lists, lists, lists, and more lists. 

Lists are something that come naturally to PR pros, and they need to start coming naturally to social media marketers.  Think of it like this: if there are 50 million people who post 5 million photos every day on Flickr, only 250,000 of them leave comments, write testimonials, or Fave the photos that they like.  And, of those 250,000, there are probably just a few thousand that care about the same things that you care about.  Just by realizing that, you have cleaned up the Flickr universe tremendously, reducing it from 50 million people to 250,000, to a few thousand, or preferably a number small enough to fit on your list.

Your job is to edit, edit, edit, until your lists are small, manageable, CLEAN, and powerful.  Before you can accomplish anything as a social media manager, you need to clean things up first.

Will Marlow is a PR specialist, blogger, and photographer who lives in Northern Virginia. The photograph of the Golden Retriever above will be featured as the lead photograph on the July 18th edition of the A-Town Dog Blog.  You should follow Will Marlow on Twitter.