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On October 27, I joined communications pros on Bulldog Reporter’s webinar “An Advance Look at Hot, New Google+: How It Will Impact PR Pros, Social Media Strategy and Your Customers.” Co-panelists were Jennifer Lashua, Global Social Media Strategist from Intel; Vidar Brekke, Chief Product Officer from Converseon; and Mark Traphagen, Internet Marketing Manager from Virante.

A lot of our value-add from Ogilvy comes from helping clients anticipate which platforms will win.  There are a million ways to optimize your social media presence, and spending more time on yet another social network is something many social media pros are not wont to do.  That said, despite social media fatigue, and despite the enhancements on Facebook released in the last few months, I’ve become more convinced that time spent on G+ is well spent.  The panelist laid out a compelling case.

“My friends aren’t in G+” is no excuse. We should never forget that Zuckerberg made a decision in establishing the “real identity” and “know in real life” folkways of Facebook.  Google+ doesn’t share these; in fact, panelists said that much of the value of Google+ comes from meeting new people around interests in the platform and having meaningful, thoughtful conversations.

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Last week, Google+ announced changes 91-107 for the platform many of which are strong indicators of a site that is listening to its users and thinking thoughtfully about use cases. Unfortunately for a fledgling social media site, the very next day at f8, Facebook shared its latest and greatest rollouts with developers and the public.

Amid Andy Sandberg appearances, Spotify integration, and a sweeping UI change called Timeline (all of which are well recapped by my colleague, John Stauffer, in his post), it was tough for Google+’s more functional changes to stand out in conversation.

In fact, if you look at online conversation about the two, Facebook conversation eclipses Google+ conversation ten to one the last two weeks.

Volume of Social Media Conversation about Facebook and Google+ from 9/14/11-9/28/11

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Sunrise over Marathon, Greece.

Even after the jetlag has subsided and you’ve had a few days to reflect, it’s nearly impossible to justly capture the sense of creativity, openness, innovation and playfulness you experience at WPP Digital’s Stream 2011 ‘unconference’.

An avante-garde mix of WPP agencies (think Ogilvy, Mindshare, Hill & Knowlton, Blue State Digital) and clients (think Ford, IBM, Unilever, P&G, Coca-Cola), communications thought leaders (think Sir Martin Sorrell, Ze Frank, Rory Sutherland) and technological innovators (think Facebook, Google, Spotify, Yoni Bloch, Innovid), the event was a shorts-and-flip-flop discussion of everything ranging from the malpractice of Dr. Google to the miner (Chilean) Twitter parody.

I had the chance to meet folks from Facebook and Google and was pleased to hear that they’re not only thinking about how to work with marketers, but also how to work with marketers in ways that make sense to their customers. The major social platforms are now putting greater resources into collaborating with agencies who they see as partners in unleashing the full potential of their platforms - not just on the media side, but now on the creative design side.

As Facebook’s Patrick Harris and Sarah Personette expressed it, Facebook is primarily a technology company - not a content company. Thus, they see agencies as the “evangelists, designers and curators” of effective social media marketing and integration.

And as we all anticipate what the Google+ platform will offer brands, Chris DiBona says they’re structuring the platform for smart, sensible, segment-able marketing that makes sense to consumers. (I swear it was just a coincidence he used one of my favorite clients, Ford, as an example.)

And because I’d love to tell you more about Stream 2011, but don’t have the time or space, here are some great recaps:

• Five-part series in the Huffington Post penned by the likes WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell, txteagle’s Nathan Eagle, SoundCloud’s Caroline Drucker, Ford’s Alex Hultgren and Y&R’s David Sable.
• TechCrunch video interview with Sir Martin Sorrell on content valuation and the “dreadful mistakes” we’ve made in giving it away for free.
• H&K’s (and die-hard Stream-er) Candace Kuss’ amazing Storify curation of #stream11 tweets.
• WPP Stream’s YouTube channel. Especially check out the Ignite playlist. Everyone should try to do a presentation with 20 slides that advance every 15 seconds for a total of exactly 5 minutes. My favorite: Esther Dyson on paying attention.

Google + vs. Facebook: the debate has begun online and offline, both sides come armed with some pretty strong ammo. Google+ joined the social arena earlier this month with beta testers and changed the game, as some may say, of social networking permanently.

Google +’s features may seem similar to Facebook’s at first glance. With chat functionality, status updates, multimedia sharing and group collaboration capabilities, the two social networks appear pretty similar on paper. Upon further examination of tools and functions, we see distinct differences. continue reading

Chart by Leon Haland

After launching Wave and Buzz to poor reviews and little pick-up in user base, Google had a low bar to clear with Google+. Now that Google+ has acquired 10 million users in 16 days and is receiving accolades for user interface as well as high responsiveness from the Google+ engineering team on the platform itself, the social media community is asking itself “what does the future hold for Google+?” Moreover, as social network users, we each need to ask ourselves on what platforms we’ll share our information and content - and with whom.

If you are looking for a comprehensive overview of all aspects of Google+, I encourage you to check out the complete guide to the platform compiled by Ben Parr at Mashable. In this post, I’ll give you the very brief overview of key elements of Google+ and how you can get the most out of using them.

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