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. 

People who don't use Twitter sometimes ask me why I started using Twitter.  The reason is simple: I was the cofounder of a startup company, and all startup companies have zero credibility: they have no customers, no track record, no glossy sales materials, no industry relationships, and an untested product.  You improve those things slowly, which we have done.  But on day one, you need to do everything you can to demonstrate, among other things, that you are who you say you are. 

Twitter is a no brainer for that.  With Twitter, I can have a conversation with a customer, and later when that customer Googles me and my company, she can see that I think and write about the same issues that we talked about.  She can also see that I spend seven days a week thinking and writing about those same issues that she cares about.  And, over time, she can see that I've done that for a long time.  That's one source of credibility, and that's what drew me to Twitter in the first place.  But gradually, as my company grew, I began to interact with people and Twitter became more valuable as a source of new connections and relationships.  In my next post, I'm going to tell you why this has led me to create a brand new Twitter feed for myself, @willmarlowchats.

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Will Marlow is a digital strategist/online marketing consultant.  He's the co-creator of  AlumniFidelity, which is a Web 2.0 fundraising platform for colleges, nonprofits and secondary schools.   He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, and Bowling Green State University and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge.  He would love to help you market your business on the Internet, boost the fundraising numbers for your school or nonprofit, or sellout your next big event.  Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

A lot of people think that all the different social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc.) are more complicated than they really are.   Every social media platform, however, has one thing in common: they all make publishing possible.  That is the key to the social media revolution.

The enemy of a good social media plan is chatter.  Chatter is what gives ALL social media a bad name.  For example, if a major nonprofit or school were to update their Twitter account with a Tweet that said, "Isn't it a beautiful day out?"  That's borderline chatter, and I would never feel comfortable with that type of update.  

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.

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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.

A few years ago, it was very fashionable for schools to invest heavily in building custom social networks that were designed for their alums to use.  The upside of building your own social network is that you own all the data, and you make all the big decisions that determine what happens on the social network.  The downside of building your own social network, however, includes:

As this chart from Twitterholic shows, less than 24 hours after unfollowing 12,000 people, I was unfollowed by over 3,500 followers!