Google+ Is Right for the Enterprise
Call me a fan boy. Call me a bandwagon jumper. Call me whatever you want, but also call me a lover ofGoogle+. And not just for my personal life -- Google+ is ready for primetime in the enterprise.
Google+, for those who don’t know, is Google’s latest jump into social networking. It is easy to dismiss it as a Facebook clone. You make a profile, you invite some friends, you post some pictures, you chat, and you post your status. It is the same stuff, yet oh so much more. Google+ makes Facebook look like Mark Zuckerberg’s 8th grade project, both in design and productivity.
The most obvious differentiator is the concept of “circles.” Circles allow you to sort your contacts by how you know them -- friends, family, colleagues, etc. Facebook has had similar functionality for quite some time, but nothing this elegant. Circles really are the heart of what makes Google+ the place for your enterprise to be. Essentially, this type of customization allows Google+ to be Facebook when you want it, LinkedIn when you want it, and Twitter when you want it, too, though I don’t know why anyone would want it to be Twitter.
By organizing your news feeds, status updates, and friends, you can send messages to customized groups of people, read only what is interesting to you at the moment by only reading posts from certain circles, and you can hook it all up to all the other Google apps you might be already using at work (including Docs, Gmail, Maps, Search, and Chat).
For instance, you can set up a circle for all of your work colleagues, a smaller circle for your department, and another for your team. If you have a team meeting at 2 p.m., you can let the team know without disturbing anyone else. At the same time, you can send a status update to all of your friends complaining about your meeting at 2 p.m. without worrying about anyone from work reading it. And of course, there are multiple collaboration tools you can use in the meeting, including “hangouts.”
This isn’t merely about unifying social media. (Though wouldn’t we all like to go from 10 or so social media profiles to one?) This is also about perfecting social media. One of the major problems with social networks for the enterprise has been privacy. Google+ has highly customizable, highly intuitive privacy settings that allow you to open information to the public (like Twitter) but keep other parts of your profile entirely locked down (like no other social network I know of). Google+ even allows you to see your profile from the point of view of another person to see if it looks the way you want it to look.
Productivity and privacy are two words that are probably attracting you, but that is about the personal value of Google+ to your workers. As an enterprise, you’re probably more interested in learning how to make money with Google+. For now, it depends on how popular it will end up. But with at least 5 million members in just a few weeks, and more waiting to get on as the beta opens to more people, it looks as if Google+ might be valuable to the enterprise in many of the same ways other social media platforms already are. Combine that with the power of Google ads, and you potentially have a more powerful combination than any we’ve seen so far. For those who are interested, Google is already accepting Beta applications for Google+ Entities, which allow you to have your company and brand represented on Google+.
Of course, social networking wouldn’t be social networking if we didn’t get social. So the editors here at E2 will be hosting a hangout on Google+ today. In a hangout, 20 people are allowed to video-conference at once, share media (among other things, you can all watch YouTube together), and presumably get a lot of great work done. We’ll use it to test the potential of the product and also discuss the value (and flaws) of Google+ and social networking in the enterprise.
Come see whether this is the kind of tool your team needs and join our chat at 4 p.m. Eastern this afternoon. You need to be in our circle to join (Curt Franklin is hosting), so email editors@enterpriseefficiency.com and we'll add you to our E2 circle or send you a Google+ invite if you need one. If you can’t make the hangout, but you want to join our circle so you can keep in touch with us in the future, you can email us anytime, and we’d be happy to hook you up. Hope to see you at the hangout!
Source
Reply With Quote
Social Networking Bookmarks