Google’s latest foray into social networking, Google Plus, or Google+, which “aims to make sharing on the web more like sharing in real life” is now out of beta and as of last week you don’t need an invitation to join.

But do you need to join anyway?

Are you maybe one of those people saying right now “Oh no! Not another social networking platform?! What with Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and blogging and the rest of it, I can’t keep up!”

Which would be a perfectly understandable reaction.

Or are you on the other hand a bit of an early adopter, already there and wondering what time and energy – if any – you should dedicate to this new social platform, from a business viewpoint?

After all, given that Google+ is not yet open to businesses to establish their presence there, why would you want to give your time and attention to this latest new, new thing when you no doubt have plenty of other things to focus on?

I don’t have simple answers to these questions and having spent a large slab of time in recent days experimenting with the platform and reading the thoughts and opinions of various pundits, I don’t believe anyone has truly bankable answers either.

But I believe the development is very significant for business and I believe business owners and freelancers would be well advised to get in now and learn the practicalities of how the platform works, against the day when the doors are opened for business accounts.

Chris Brogan, a very knowledgeable and considered man, has no doubt it’s time to get aboard, open a personal account and learn how the platform works. In his post Why Google Plus Will be the Next Big Thing for Your Business he writes:

Simply put, it’s important to take action on Google+ right now. I saw the benefits of this when I joined Twitter in October 2006. If you get in, get familiar, start growing connections and learn how to curate and share, you’ll be ahead of the game. It’s not usually my thing to make predictions, but I’m sticking with this one.

Webinar tomorrow

So in short, while Google+ is not yet fully open for business, it is open for learning, practising and getting ourselves set for when the doors are open for businesses to establish their own presence there.

I’m focusing on Google+ in my webinar tomorrow in the ninth of my current 12 month series of free webinars on social media strategy.

How to sign up for Google+

By the way, I know that for people new to the world of online social networking even the process of signing up for a new platform can be off-putting, so I put together a brief slideshow to demonstrate how to sign up, including how to get a gmail.com account – a pre-requisite for opening a Google+ account.

Something to share?

If you are already on Google+, it would be great to hear your early impressions, whether positive or negative.

We need to talk about Friends, Fans, “Likers”, Connectors and Followers

I love networking on the social web, as I do in real life. And I love having lots of friends and connections. In both realms I get great personal satisfaction out of being able to facilitate connections between people.

But I must admit that, for all that I have been participating actively online, one way or another, and in various groups, for over fifteen years, I think I still know how it all works offline better than I know how it works online.

It’s partly a problem about language.

I blame Facebook

Before Facebook I used to know what a friend was and I used to have a pretty good sense of the gradations of friendship and how types and levels of friendships can change over time. With Facebook – and other social networking platforms – the word “friend” became totally debased. A “friend” came to equal a keystroke, accepting a request from someone you did not know, and if you met them in real life might not want to even know, let alone be friends with.

And my personal belief (which I am happy to have challenged) is that once we accepted that a “friend” on Facebook was not necessarily a “friend” in the sense we were used to, an expectation built up on the social web that anyone should be willing to connect with anyone else, unless, say, they had reason to believe the other might be an axe murderer or some other unsavory type.

But for the benefit of those folks who just came in, being able to operate effectively as a business person on the social web involves, when it comes to the notion of being a friend, something akin to what the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called a “willing suspension of disbelief” .

With other ways of connecting online – as a “fan”, as “liking” someone or their Facebook page, as a connector or follower – there is not such a semantic challenge, but there can be a cultural challenge and for business there is a strategic business challenge.

There are two short versions of this challenge, one negative, one positive:

a) Negative: “If I decline or ignore this invitation to connect, fan, like, follow or whatever, could that be construed as offensive or arrogant and could that be bad for business?”

b) Positive: “What should my approach be to building connections on the social web, whether through initiating or responding, so that it fits my business plan strategically?”

Experts disagree with me

There are many people on various networks, some of them apparently quite successful or even extremely successful in business, who accept all or most invitations, send many invitations and pride themselves on the number of connections they have made.

I’m more selective. I have been told often by some colleagues why I am mistaken, lacking in understanding of networking, or just plain wrong. I am unrepentant and unbowed.

I am consoled by statistics such as that, at this writing, my 635 first level connections on LinkedIn connect me to 12,951,796 people in the larger LinkedIn network: enough to keep me busy.

No short answer

I don’t believe there is a short answer to all this. I believe the right answer will be the one that fits the business strategy, so your right answer will almost certainly be different from the right answer for my business or even for the business of someone else in your industry.

There is no shortage of people who will offer to show you, whether gratuitously or for a price, how to do your social networking “the right way”. My aim as a social business mentor is to help businesses work out the right strategy for themselves and build their own capability to operate effectively in this space.

In this I am guided by the aphorism (with a bit of manipulation of the gender references):

“Give someone a fish and you feed them for a day: teach them how to fish and you feed them for a lifetime.” (Original author unknown)

Would you like more on this topic?

I want to do some more thinking and consider writing some more posts about this topic. If you have comments to make, want to agree, disagree, contradict, or share stories, I hope you will toss your contribution in the pot here to help me cook up something that can be useful to those of us who still, after all these years, are finding our way on the social web.

Image credit: “Good Friends, Béziers” Anne in Béziers photostream, Flickr, Creative Commons