On the face of it, it is just another ‘me too’ program to join the plethora of similar programs already available and which are discussed in a Wikipedia article. There has been an immediate ‘rush to judgment’ by the technology journalists and so far the reaction has been a case of ‘not bad, some good developments, but is it really different’ – in fact, is it other than a redundant derivative of Facebook and Twitter. In the UK, Dan Grabham of TechRadar posted his take on the msn tech & gadgets blog while Greg Sterling of Search Engine Land provided a US view. In the mean time, Paul Anthony enthused on the Webdistortion blog that “Google have nailed it when they realised that Facebook’s weakness was privacy” – but they might have nailed it as the problem but have they provided a real solution.

Other than a different approach to how and with whom you can share your online posts and an ability to interact with other Google products, what does Google+ bring to Google in terms of competitive advantage? The most obvious objective must be to cash in on the huge and growing social media marketing boom that is generating millions of pounds, dollars and euros for the SM providers and not a lot of measurable ROI for the advertisers. That is an understandable business objective and it fits well with Google’s focus within its other product offerings.

Let’s not make any mistake about it, Google is not altruistic, it is not providing users with free search engine facilities (or email, or maps, and now SM) because it believes in freedom of speech, making knowledge available and in the good of mankind – no, it is providing these services so that advertisers can get their ‘ads’ in front of a carefully targeted online audience on a regular and consistent basis and that makes good sense to the advertisers and they are willing to pay well for the privilege – and, in turn, that makes Google a lot of money. In fact, Google makes more than just a lot of money: in 2010, the net revenue was around $8.44 billion on a turnover of around $30 billion. But if one digs around a bit, then figures released for the 1^stQ 2011 suggests that the Google earnings trend is broadly flat (even if it’s still a lot of money) and so it makes sense to see if this flattening trend can be turned upwards through new products.

The problem is that Google+ is not a new product, but a ‘me too’ offering and the people who will use it are almost certainly already on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. Perhaps the younger end of the SM market, those addicted to free email (think gmail, Google’s email offering) and with a highly ambivalent attitude towards personal privacy, will like the idea of integrating their Google products, but the serious networker using SM programs for business and professional use should be highly wary of any attempt by Google to take more of the market.

From a security and privacy point of view, Google is potentially dangerous. To make their targeted advertising platform work efficiently, they have to know a great deal about their users: where they search and visit online, what they write in emails, what they watch (remember, Google owns YouTube), and now who they network with and what they post. Google does this by monitoring usage and searching for keywords and, given the volume of material, this is obviously done by a sophisticated and highly crafted algorithm-based program. Although this is a technological process and is, one hopes, currently only used in this way, it is, none-the-less, still ‘reading other people’s’ mail’ so to speak and it is only a small step (and a lot of computing power) to a full scale monitoring of users’ communications in a way that is currently only associated with places like the GCHQ (in the UK) and the National Security Agency (in the US). For a business or professional user, this could be placing their commercial and intellectual property in jeopardy.

What Google relies on is the benign appearance they present as an altruistic provider of free and extremely useful services and the fact that online users, especially the younger end of their client-base, are extremely ambivalent about personal privacy: they are not concerned about who knows what about them but they are concerned by what use other people make of that information.

On the whole, I believe SM programs are a ‘good thing’: they encourage and facilitate communication and interaction and they certainly make networking easier. But with 640 million registered users on Facebook (around 29% of all internet users in the world), and with none of the other SM programs coming close, the most likely place from which Google+ will get is registered users is by attracting members from the plethora of small programs and it seems unlikely that Google+ will come anywhere near challenging Facebook in the foreseeable future. Now, since Google+ is a ‘me too’ with a few new ideas (but almost no real innovations), the competitive advantage it hopes to achieve is very difficult to see, and if there is no real competitive advantage, it is unlikely to attract users and it will fail in the same way as Buzz failed.

This then begs the question of why Google is launching their SM offering at all – it does not seem to have a competitive advantage, it is operating in a near saturated market, it is unlikely to challenge the market leader, and unless it attracts significant membership, it will not generate advertising revenue. Is this a matter of hubris, of poor strategic thinking, of a lack of innovative thinking, or simply a lack of vision? Google has for some time been engaged in a sustained business war with Microsoft and seems to believe it can avoid the disasters that the latter has suffered as users and governments have turned against them and their domineering and anti-competitive business strategies. But Google is already being targeted for similar behaviour and it would be wise to have a strategic re-think before something ‘expensive’ happens.

Google, like Microsoft, is an aging member of the internet and ICT community and it needs to concentrate on its core activities rather than getting involved in potentially costly distractions.

I started this series by saying that I had been sent a link to a website entitled How to use Twitter for marketing and PR, a hot topic if ever there was one that, from its title, sounded like an interesting read. Frankly, it was both more prescient and a great deal more full of insight than one can imagine – it simply said ‘Don’t’. But is this true? And that is a very good question.

At one level, the users of social networking tools such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn proclaim that these tools are for ‘social’ networking and not marketing but this begs the question: isn’t networking also a form of marketing? According to many practitioners the most effective marketing is word-of-mouth and with the rise of the interconnected, fully networked life, word-of-mouth is being replaced by word-of-mouse. Social networks are a place where people talk about what interests them, things they have found to be good and those they have found to be not so good and, as with the vocal word-of-mouth, this ‘conversation’ has ‘influence’ on those who ‘hear’ it (or read it). Marketing professionals have long been aware that a consumer’s purchasing decisions are heavily influenced by the information that the consumer receives from those whose opinions they value (and, I might add, they are uninfluenced by those whose opinions are not considered valid). Opinion leaders and opinion formers are, therefore, critical to the purchasing decision.

To have influence as an opinion leader or opinion former is something that many people set out to achieve by forcing their opinions on anyone and everyone who can be persuaded to listen (or read). Critics abound and to find two who agree on any subject is often a real challenge and so the consumer is left to make their own decisions as to who to listen to. But for a critic, commentator, or anyone else to be seen as an opinion leader or opinion former it is necessary for them to be seen as having ‘authority’ on the subject because everyone seems to have an opinion on everything but whether that opinion is of value is dependent on the person expressing the opinion having valid experience in the field, having access to the relevant information and having the knowledge necessary to interpret that information (and even then it remains just an opinion).

Assuming the consumer can find an opinion leader or opinion former whose opinions they trust as being valid, then the opinions expressed (by whatever means) will have influence. The danger with social networking applications is that they allow even the extremely uninformed and the painfully ignorant to express their opinion on everything and to do so frequently, vehemently, and widely. Simply by the frequency of posts these people can become influencers (the assumption being that ‘if they have so much to say, they must know what they are talking about’) despite their often evident biases, prejudices, and ignorance. Unfortunately, if such people are challenged, they frequently become abusive, adopt high-and-mighty tones and, occasionally, start ‘flame-wars’ in which they bombard the participants in the conversation with posts – and this has become one of the major ‘downsides’ of the social networking and Enterprise 2.0 scene.

And this is not confined to just social networking sites, it also all too frequently happens on websites that encourage users to post their comments in the form of forums, blogs and wikis. For example, a recent check on a well-regarded book review website revealed that two commentators operating under the names of ‘Blob’ and ‘Squid’ had taken it upon themselves to be unpleasantly negative about a book and to post comments (never a review) that were totally at odds with all other reviews of that book. This might have been a valid contribution to the discussion about the book had the writers had the courtesy and self-confidence to use their real names – when book buyers were asked for their opinion about these two commentators, they were dismissive and observed that Blob and Squid were clearly not to be taken seriously because they lacked authority – demonstrated by their use of avatars (assumed names/characters for use in cyber space) – and where thus dismissed as unreliable.

This points up two important points: if you wish to influence the ‘conversation’ you need to be a trusted contributor and that takes time to achieve, and secondly, it is essential that those hoping to use Enterprise 2.0 for marketing communications of any sort need to monitor the cyber world on a consistent, frequent, periodic, and committed manner – it is vital to know what is being said about your product or service at all times so that you can reinforce and positively influence the ‘conversation’ and counteract negative or misinformed comment.

If you would like to engage in a discussion with Alasdair White on this subject, then please feel free to email him.

It seems that the management response to social network applications and other collaborative tools falls into two categories: ‘how can we use this to promote the business’, and ‘employees shouldn’t be accessing these sites during working hours’.

Using Enterprise 2.0 to assist in the promotional strategy is the subject of the final post on this subject and I’d like to try and deal with the myths and misconceptions that have grown up about employees having access to social networking sites during working hours. Based on some research down by my students, the vast majority of companies that allow or require their employees to have access to the internet for their work also ban them from accessing certain websites – usually the social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, the video and photo sharing sites (YouTube and Flikr) and the microblogging sites (Twitter). The justification for this generalized ban on networking sites of one sort or another is that the employees will spend too much time on the sites when they should be working and this is to the detriment of their performance.

When asked whether they have evidence of this, managers usually respond with a variation of the statement “it’s obvious that’s what they would do, that’s why we ban it”. When specifically asked whether they have (a) allowed employees free access to networking sites, (b) have monitored their performance before offering the access and then after allowing access, and (c) then monitored performance after the access was disallowed, the answer is almost always ‘no’ to all three – usually followed by some justification along the lines of “why should we waste time checking something so obvious”.

Of course, their behaviour and actions are based firmly on an unchecked assumption for which there is not a shred of evidence. I suspect they would be shocked to discover that there is strong behavioural evidence that the ban is almost certainly having an adverse effect on the performance of their people. In fact, I don’t think they could bring themselves to accept they are wrong. Now, I am not so rash as to claim that they are provably wrong as I have not done the necessary ‘controlled’ research but the available empirical evidence does suggest that the hypothesis that ‘access to social networks actually boosts performance of employees’ could well be right.

This hypothesis is based upon a simple, well known and well understood principle of performance management – one that is used for enhancing performance of athletes, performers, actors, musicians, students and many others but one that the business world has failed to grasp: that increasing the levels of performance is based on repetition of the performance interspersed with periods of rest and recuperation and that it is these periods of R&R that enable the lessons learned to become embedded and reproducible. We all know that sustained high performance is both physically and mentally impossible for very good physiological and psychological reasons.

If this is then applied to the performance of employees, it becomes obvious that if we want long-term high performance it is essential that employees be allowed (even encouraged) to take a break from their current activity to allow the brain to process the activity just completed and to ‘re-charge’. I suspect that if performance was tracked correctly during the working day then it would form what Charles Handy called a sigmoid curve with clear peaks and troughs and it is during these troughs that employees need a ‘change’ from what they are doing. Currently, they are likely to use the time to go for a ‘natural break’ or grab a cup of coffee, and only when the brain has processed the previous period’s activity will they start again. So, in fact no one delivers a steady performance and to provide a needed ‘change’ to encourage them to take a break and then get back on track is enlightened self-interest.

Frankly, the wisdom of crowds on this (or is that herd instinct) is wrong on whether allowing access to social networking sites will damage performance and they could be equally wrong on another aspect: that if access is granted, employees will spend too much time on non-productive activity. I have to say that when access if first allowed, this is probably true but after a short while the employees will self-limit their usage and there will be minimal disruption.

In addition, by granting access to social networks, the company would be demonstrating their trust in their employees and it would give the employees a feeling of empowerment and this is, in the longer term, the foundation for a vastly improved performance. The problem is that it is longer-term and it does mean that managers will have to trust and empower their employees and not just pay lip service to the notion.

Finally, there is empirical evidence that enterprises should adopt their own social network application and use it as the interface between the employee and the intranet. This is a powerful tool for increasing collaboration and communication within the company and becomes a useful tool for accessing the tacit information that is embedded in the brains of the employees.

Frankly, it appears to be enlightened self-interest for enterprises to adopt social network programs and to allow access to social networking sites. And unless there is valid and reliable evidence and proof to the contrary, claiming it would damage performance seems like hearsay rather than reality and is more a reflection of management funk than careful thought. What is for certain, however, is that engaging with Enterprise 2.0 tools is going to require a whole new management paradigm!!

If you would like to engage in a discussion with Alasdair White on this subject, then please feel free to email him. In the mean time, a final post on this subject will look at the dangers and realities of using social networking tools for the delivery of marketing communications.