Like 20M other people, I’ve dutifully got myself a Google+ account and I’m humming and hawing about how I might use it for business.
I’ve always thought that Facebook is a fantastic business tool as it catches friends and acquaintances ‘off guard’ in relation to Linked-in, where everyone tries to package themselves to potential recruiters. (Lets face it .. if i hang out with my close friends in person). On the other hand, Facebook allows you to see something of the reality behind the people who you do business with and to sometimes reach out to them. I had a boss once who told me he liked to see ’360 degrees’ of everyone he likes to hire; its kind of similar.
Facebook, Linked-in and good old search are a fantastic research tool for marketing, sales and customer service. As far as I can tell, no-one has ever removed me from Facebook from approaching them about potential business (if done in the right way). A few have ignored me but, hey, they probably would have done anyway.
I must admit however that I’m finding Google+ circles interesting but laborious to use in practice. I already have circles fatigue. I would much prefer to simply add someone as a friend or acquaintance .. then see what they write about and decide whether to limit our interaction over time. To remove them from my immediate ‘concentric’ circle like peeling an onion. For this, circles offers a much better way to decide on who you interact with over time than Facebook but thats not the way its structured at the moment.
On the other hand, hangouts is a killer video app which has come along at a time when Skype is really starting to annoy and Redmond promises only to make it less useful to non Windows users. We also maintain an Office 365 account for sharing documents in a Sharepoint environment with clients (even through I prefer Google docs for inter company documents) but they simply, don’t .. what can I say ‘get’ the network at a basic level. Given a choice Microsoft will try to add user functionality rather than network connectivity functions.
On the other hand, I’m very very excited by the prospect of switching to Google+ if it links together doc editing, collaboration and presentation with hangouts (with screen sharing), email, chat and voice. Apple will no doubt come up with a killer cloud offering in the fall but it will be I’m sure very consumer and digital media (e.g iTunes) oriented. Google on the other hand has a potential ‘bundle’ of functions in its hands that millions of Office and iWork and OpenOffice users will I believe jump at: the true virtual office. I can’t wait to see what they do with this.