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Google made a lot of mistakes while launching its previous social networks- Google Wave and Google Buzz. Google Wave was not easy to use and Google Buzz… well, suffice to say that it’s not really buzzing.

Google tried to quickly grow Google Buzz by automatically enrolling everyone who has gmail account into this program. It backfired. People don’t want to be included in any group without giving prior consent. Just look at Facebook Groups. It’s one of the least popular features on Facebook so far.

As a result, there were a lot of negative reactions throughout blogosphere and social space about privacy invasion, the freedom of choice, etc. And though Google tried to rectify the situation, damage was already done. Some mistakes you could recover from, others are fatal. It looks like for Google Buzz quick non-volunteer enrollment was the latter.

It’s safe to say that Google learned its lessons. Its newest social network, Google+ is on a roll. There are many reasons why it’s growing so fast.
But in my opinion the most important are:

• Exclusivity
• Influence on SERPs rankings
• Google Circles

Let’s take a closer look at each factor that helped to skyrocket Google+ growth.

Google+ Exclusivity
Learning from Google Buzz mistake, when launching Google + Google decided to go an opposite direction –instead of inviting everyone, give this newest social network a sense of exclusivity, make sure people want to join.

You can become the member of Google+ only through private invitation. In other words, one of your friends should already be a part of this network, and should send you an invitation, otherwise you can’t get in. (Yes, sure, you can go to Google+ and ask for the invitation directly, but I am not sure how long will it take to actually receive this invitation. My guess is you would have to wait at least several months).

I applaud to whoever came up with this brilliant social media strategy, my hat is off to bright Google minds.
People were fighting to get an invitation, Google+ was featured everywhere, in every even slightly important blog or social network.

Not surprisingly, Google + grew to 20 million members in a record time.

Google+ Influences Google SERPs results
Though Google introduced its equivalent of Facebook “like” button (which is called “+1” button) a while ago it was not really that popular. Then Google made it abundantly clear that the number of “+1” you get for your posts actually affects your Google rankings. Google provided a channel to harvest those “+1” from your social buddies. Do you want to guess what is this channel called? Good guess. Yes, it’s a Google+.

The more posts (your own and from people you respect) you share and “+1”, the better would be your rankings on Google SERPs. There is only one little problem (or actually, it is a big one).

You have to manually go to Google+ in order to share your posts or the posts of your friends. There is no way to post from some other social network and get it automatically distributed to Google+ (or at least I haven’t found one). I don’t see any option to embed custom RSS feeds in the Google + either, hence no luck with distributing content directly from your blogs through RSS.

In comparison, I can post to blogs and get the content automatically distributed to Twitter, Facebook and hundreds of other social networks in a matter of seconds but Google+ demands a lot of extra time. And if you jump to Google+, you probably won’t have as much time to stay on Facebook either.

I seriously doubt that inability to embed custom RSS feeds in G+ sream is just Google’s oversight. More likely it’s a crucial part of Google strategy to get most tech-savvy social networkers from Facebook into G+. Which brings us to the last significant element of initial success for Google+:

Google Circles
Google recognized that Facebook’s friends structure is very rigid. Yes, you can add them to lists but this doesn’t give you the ability to effectively sort your social friends. In Google Circles, you can easily sort people based on any criteria – you can put friends in one circle, family members in another one, and your social friends in a third one. You can then be as granular as you want sorting those friends by their interests. And you can add them to more than 1 circle. For example, your social friend could also be your client – then place him in both circles.

And when sharing a post or image, you now can share it not with a whole group of your social friends, but with ones that you know for sure are interested in this topic. So you can send message to a very refined group who will be glad to receive it. Of course the ability to provide video conferences between the members of the circle doesn’t hurt either.
So do you choose Google+ and the ability to influence Google rankings through increased “+1” or Facebook, its 700 million members and the ability of mass-distribution through other social networks?

The decision is yours but obviously it will depend on your audience and your goals.
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Opening image from pvantees on Flickr, used under Creative Commons license.

If you use social media for business rather than a leisure chat with your social friends you should follow certain unwritten rules of social conduct.

Many of those rules are “unwritten” simply due to the nature of social media marketing as an industry – it’s very young and has a long way to go until it matures. So the rules I am talking about are derived from my daily practice as the director of digital marketing for social media firm where we help businesses to develop social media strategies and grow their presence in various social media networks.

Earlier I wrote about the right mindset that would help you to expand your business through social networks and to avoid some serious mistakes that could be deadly for your online reputation:

Today we’ll look at online reputation from a different angle.

Online Reputation Management

Whether you’re aware or not, your social activity affects not only you and your business, it reflects on your social friends as well. It’s a two-way street. Your social connections play an active role in a growth and perceived value of your social networks and at the same time you influence their online reputation.

Let’s illustrate this statement by a few examples.

When your social friends say something good about you and your business on a social site, this message could be seen by any of their friends, and these friends might want to check you out too and then tell their own social connections about you, and so on.

The same is true when you post positive messages about your friends. Your mentions will help them in their social media campaigns.

More subtle example would be helping your friends by mentioning them in different lists and liking their social profiles, fan pages, etc.

Each time you list a twitterer, her/his profile will be seen by tweeps who follow this particular list, plus any of your friends can click the link to the list anytime, and see who you placed there.

And if you have over 60,000 friends (like I do), placing in one of your lists could result in a substantial exposure.
You can create lists on Twitter manually or you can automate the process based on various criteria using various social media applications such as Formulist.

On Formulist you can list people who mention or retweet you the most, who are the most liked by your fans or followers, lists of tweeps who are similar to you, etc.

I like to reward people who often retweets my messages. So one of my lists automatically add tweeps who retweet me the most often.

With Facebook you can do a similar trick – if you “like” somebody’s profile or fan page, it will be seen by all your friends.

Those are example of positive influence.

Sure, you can use the same tools to create negative lists and mentions (about tweeps who suck, for example), but in most cases you probably wouldn’t want to do this to your social friends, wouldn’t you? Negativity won’t get you too far in a social game.

Unfortunately, you can hurt your social friends unintentionally jeopardizing your social relationships. And I would be glad to show you how to avoid this costly mistake.

Social Media Applications

You’re familiar with social media applications, right? Those little games you play on Facebook, Hi5, MySpace and other social sites. Those mobile apps you use to update status, share pictures and browse social outlets through your smart phones.

All of them require certain privileges to access and update your profile.

The majority of users who like certain social media application just give all required permissions without a second thought.

Whereas it’s up to you whether to grant a permission to retrieve your contact information or publish on your wall, there are other privileges that you have no morale right to grant.

A few days ago I was approached by a marketer who suggested me to download a certain social application. Application looked promising and seemed to provide a valuable functionality. Yet, before it could be used, I was required to grant it certain permissions.

Here are the permissions I was supposed to grant:

• Access my basic information (Includes name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID, list of friends, and any other information I’ve shared with everyone)
• Send me email (the application may email me directly at my contact email)
• Post to my Wall (the application may post status messages, notes, photos, and videos to my Wall)
• Access my data any time (the application may access my data when I’m not using it)
• Access my profile information (Birthday, Current City and Website)
• Access my contact information (Online Presence)
• Access my photos and videos (Photos Uploaded by Me)
• Access my friends’ information (Birthdays, Current Cities, Online Presence, Websites and Photos)

Whether you allow an app to retrieve your location and birthday, send you email and post at your wall wherever it wants, this decision is obviously up to you.

Yet you have absolutely no right to share the private information about your friends. Your friends trusted you with this information, it doesn’t mean you can share it with the entire world ((unless you asked them all and they gave you permission to do so, which is unlikely).

Among my social friends there are public figures (politicians, celebrities and business leaders) and I know for sure that they wouldn’t appreciate me sharing the details about their private lives.

So be very careful with social media applications. If you give too many privileges, you violate the privacy of your social friends.

It’s not only unethical, it can very well backfire and hinder your social relationships. Not mentioning your online reputation.

Another potential threat worth mentioning is when users share links to “free prizes” and similar applications thus serving as an unwitting “social virus”.

Facebook implemented WOT reputation ratings to protect users from scams and malware.

Summary: Social media networks can not only help you to grow your social media presence and increase your brand awareness, they can also hurt your social and business relationships if used without proper care.

Opening image from Intersection Consulting on Flickr, used under Creative Commons license.

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More information on reputation management and social media as a business:

6 Ways to Manage Your Online Reputation

Social business vs. social media

What is social media management?

Image via Wikipedia

The answer depends on which type of social media management you are talking about. There are two types -amateurish management and professional social media management.

Virtually everyone who has account on Twitter, Facebook or other social networks is already involved in this process. People post updates to social networks once in a while or interact with their friends, read inbox/direct messages from friends, post something on the walls, grade pictures, post comments, send friend requests and accept new friends, etc.

Unfortunately, the majority of the users are doing it all wrong. So it would be more appropriate to call what they are doing a ”lousy social media management” or “what-not-to-do-in-social-media-management”.

Don’t get me wrong. If you want to use social media sites to communicate with your family and friends, it’s totally fine, and you don’t have to have any strategy for such type of networking.

You can post an update once-in-a-blue-moon and share what you eat, when you go to sleep, what you are doing at this very moment, etc. And it’s OK.

Just don’t think that this type of social media “activities” will also work for your business. It won’t.

If you want to use social media for business, you will need a drastically different approach.

Here is a bitter truth. 99% of users are doing it wrong. And by “users” I mean not only individual accounts, but also business accounts of big corporations.

It amazes me that these corporations spend millions dollars on branding strategies yet manage to completely neglect their social media accounts. In a best scenario, they post some info to their accounts from time to time. And maybe they respond to aggravated client once in a while. But that’s basically it.

There is no social media strategy whatsoever. They don’t know what to do with their social media accounts, and they certainly have no idea how to make sure their social media presence strengthens their brand, serve as effective customer service and online reputation management tool.

• What are your short term and long term goals in social media?
• What is the most effective way of utilizing social management procedures for your business growth?
• Have you identified the preferred type of conversion for your social media channels?
  Did you create a funnel for your business?
• Did you test all the elements of this funnel?
• Did you find what’s working for your particular business and which elements should be changed?
• Do you know what programs to use to monitor your progress in social media?
• What is your strategy for managing brand reputation in social media?
• Did you find which social media channels produce better results for your industry and for your business?

All those questions and many more should be answered if you want social media to work for your business.

And if you don’t know how to answer these questions, take a look at our social media management and consulting services, and let us help you make social media work for your business.

For some odd reason Twitter doesn’t offer its own in-house advertising program (unlike Facebook or MySpace).  Combine this fact with Twitter’s  easy-to-use APi , and you’ll understand  the demand for the  whole slew of third party applications enhancing Twitter functionality.

In particular, we see more and more Twitter in-stream ad brokerage companies appearing out of thin air each and every month. Since Twitter advertising is potentially a very lucrative business, it’s no surprise that this type of start-up companies spring out everywhere. They serve as a middleman between twitterers and advertisers.

Despite all the negative comments from the social networking purists regarding the pollution of Twitter stream with commercial advertisement, in-stream twitter ads are here to stay. They bring considerable financial benefits to both publishers and advertisers. Advertisers can have access to the real-time conversations of laser-targeted segment of the market, and publishers could be rewarded for their twitting activity with nice income.

Which is especially important in this trying economy, when many people lost their jobs. For them  payment for Twitter advertisement could serve as a means to stay afloat.

I am not talking here about twitterers who only publish personal status updates that are pretty much  useless to a general public.

I’m talking about twitterers who spend time researching content relevant to their topic of interest, and who regularly post thoughtful and helpful tweets.

Numerous twitter publishers provide high-quality content in their tweets, and they should be rewarded for their work the same way as writers, journalists, and other content producers are rewarded for theirs.

Of course, if you publish too many ads in your Twitter stream, you risk losing a sizable part of your followers. So use moderation.

Here is a good news. All the in-stream ad programs that I discuss further in this post have a limit of 1 ad per day, so you won’t over-bear your twitter audience with commercial intent.

The common sense also dictates that you only publish ads that are related to the main topic of your Twitter stream. In other words, if you tweet about gadgets, display ads about newest gadgets. If your twitter account provides tips from pickup artist then publish ads from dating sites, etc. You got the idea.

And all ads should be definitely disclosed. You don’t want to trick your twitter followers into thinking they are clicking on a link to an interesting article while in fact they are redirected to a sales offer.
First of all, it’s unethical. Second, it’s a bad move strictly from a practical point of view. Such tactic will piss off your followers and you’ll lose them.

The newest Twitter privacy policy requires all the ads to be manually approved, which is a good thing -  you will know for sure that you only publish targeted ads.

It’s better this way for everybody. Since you’re displaying targeted ads, they will seamlessly mix in a flow of your twitter stream, and might be much better accepted by your followers. This in turn will lead to a higher click-through rate of your ads, and happier advertisers. And this means more business for you.  Full circle is complete.

It seems that new profession is developing before our very eyes – social media publisher. For now you can be paid only for publishing ads in Twitter stream and Facebook status updates (not all the programs will pay you for publishing in Facebook updates, but some will).

I am sure it won’t be long before other social networks follow this trend.

Until recently, the only way to make a living with social networks was either to become a social media marketer or social media consultant.

But with emergence of social media advertisement the door is now open for everybody. You can be passionate about music or movies or paintings or martial arts or anything else, and now you can make a living out of it!

Open accounts in Twitter and Facebook, provide really good content on your topic, grow your following, and with time you can have a decent living just doing what you love and sharing your thoughts about it.

If you want to monetize your twitter account, here is a list of a few ad-brokerage twitter programs to get you going:

Sponsored Tweets
Ad.ly
MyLikes
RevTwt

It doesn’t cost anything to signup, and each of these programs bring you a potential of earning healthy income in time (your ad rate depends on the number of your followers and some other parameters, so the bigger your twitter account the higher is your earning potential). When your twitter account will grow, the earning potential for your account will grow too.

All those programs have slightly different rules, some offer twitter pay-per-click, others offer twitter pay-per-view, one even offer paying for displaying a picture. 

One thing is common. They all let you earn money for doing what you’re doing already – sharing your thoughts and good content with your social friends.

Not long ago twitter introduced a new feature – ability to classify people you follow by categories. But instead of making pre-defined categories, they let users to create them, calling them “lists”.

I was invited to beta-test this feature before it was released to the general public, and share my feedback. Now I’m sharing my thoughts about twitter lists with you.

Categorization is very important for any established network, especially social network. Yet the correct dichotomy of complex category trees and the optimal definition of tree nodes are not trivial matters at all. So instead of making up artificial categories, twitter essentially created a social poll letting people “vote” for their favorite categories.

Each list (or category) created by individual twitter could count as one vote. So the more people create lists with the same name, the more weight this name will probably carry as the candidate for particular node definition.

Twitter harnesses the collective brain power of its users to build complete modern schema of social flow. All they need now is a relatively simple program to conduct statistic analysis of node’s relations and relevancy. Brilliant!

This is only one of possible applications for twitter lists.

Another application is also pertained to voting, but in different way. Before twitter introduced twitter lists, the only voting mechanism available on twitter was related to RTs (re-tweets). I discussed the actual role of twitter RTs in the previous article.

Yet, many social networks have at least 2 different voting modules. In Facebook, for example, you can “like” somebody’s post, you can write a comment, and you can become a fan of friend’s page or community, essentially voting for it, since all your friends see that you joined that micro-community.

So, with introduction of twitter lists, twitter created a second voting option. Twitter user can place up to 500 people on the list, and create up to 20 different lists. If you follow more than 10000 tweeple, you can easily miss the updates from tweeps that (in your opinion) have the most knowledgeable/interesting/provocative tweets on that topic of interest.

Twitter lists allow to tone-down all that noise and clutter of general twitter communications, and really follow the updates of people that you think are worthy of special attention.

How is this relevant to voting? Well, if tweeple placed someone on the list, they essentially voted for that person. They voted that s/he has something to say, and is valuable for the community.

The more people placed you on the list, the higher is your weight in the community.

I’m pretty sure that search engines will soon add this parameter to their authority calculation algorithms and will pay attention to it when defining the SERP rankings of a particular record (notice, I said record, not web page, since now there are many different formats of indexed information, and “page” can be applied to only a few of them) . Of course, this new parameter should only be used in combination with others.

Here is the third application for twitter lists. (This one could be short-lived since many SEO specialists will soon use it to their advantage, and probably abuse it to death).

For now, you can estimate the value of your own twitter account by looking at the number of lists that you’re in (not financial value, the value of your information.) It should not be estimated as the constant. Information-wise, the account listed on thousands of lists may be less valuable then the account listed on only 10 lists or so. When defining the information value of my different twitter accounts, I use the following formula. You should be listed on the number of lists equal or more than 0.1% of the number of your followers.

Hence, if you have 10000 followers, you should be listed at least on 10 lists. If you’re not, then your account probably doesn’t provide enough value for your followers. You’re not helping your community, and you should quickly do something about it.

Review your tweets. I personally hate useless “bathroom break”-kind of tweets. Yet maybe you’re a part of the community that likes them. Even if this is the case, low listing ratio signals that you might need to deviate from your current tweeting pattern.

Of course the three list applications mentioned above is only a tip of the iceberg. The main point of this article is not only to show you the usefulness of this new twitter feature, but also to demonstrate that for many new features in social networks there are possibly hundreds of possible applications that nobody thought of. Use those applications to promote your brand, establish your authority, and help your social network communities.

P.S. I hope you find this post useful for your SEO and social marketing. If you want more up-to date SEO and Social Media info, signup for Social Media Secrets Newsletter using the signup form at the top right part of this blog, or go to www.web-feed.com .