The Social Customer Manifesto

My Google+ vs. Twitter Click-Through Experiment

I was fortunate enough to luck into a few Spotify invitations earlier today, so I decided to try a little experiment in checking out click-through rates on Google+ vs. Twitter. I put similar offers up on Twitter and Google+ at the same time (7:38am PDT on a Thursday), and checked to see what drove traffic over to the blog. (I turned off comments on the Google+ offer, so folks could only go to the blog and to not split the sample.)

Twitter Offer

 Google+ Offer

 
To give a little more context, here are the relative sizes of those two groups. Not exacty the same size, but close:

• Twitter: 5,352 followers
• Google+: 4,010 people have me in Circles

I then grabbed my referrer data to that post on the blog over the period of a few hours after these both went up.

Over that time, I had about 60 clicks recorded in the logs. I was surprised to find the raw number of click-throughs from Google+ was about 4x what it was from Twitter, even though the followship was a little smaller. (There's also a big group with "no referrer," that could have come from clients or other sources.)

Number of click throughs, by source

 
So, it's a small sample size, but it's still notable, I think. I'll be interested to see what kinds of experiences others have as they try similar experiments. Thoughts?

Update: Tac Anderson notes in the comments that "you can pretty much count 90% of those no referrer directly to Twitter clients." So, if that's the case, we're at about parity on the click-through rate between Twitter and Google+, with Twitter being slightly higher in aggregate between the traffic explictly attributed to Twitter and adding in the 'no referrer' traffic that likely came from Twitter clients.

Three Spotify Invites Available

I received three Spotify invites. If you'd like one, leave a comment with your email addy. First three get them.

Disclosure: I'm not being compensated or anything like that

Disclosure 2: I really do love the service; it's replaced the iPod feature on my iPhone home page.

 

 

Flexible 'Paperphone' Created - (cool, and perhaps overly complex) [video]

I love this...and I think we're going to get to "gesture fatigue" pretty quickly here. We all had to learn a whole bunch of new things when smartphones (and the iPhone in particular) came out ... "pinch-to-zoom" and the like. And now OS X Lion is introducing a whole new set of gesture-based interface items. Now on the horizon are "bending" gestures and such.

Link: Thin-film flexible 'paperphone' created

Ok, it all looked cool in the movies when Tom Cruise did this kind of stuff the first time. And it does make new capabilities easily accessible, if you know all the gestures. So, what about you...does this Cambrian explosion of interface capabilities make things easier for you to interact with your devices, and the world? Or does it make things overly complex?

Monkeys Don't Do Fair Use (via @techdirt)

Remember the photos of those macacques that took pictures of themselves that were making the rounds last week?

Mike Masnick at TechDirt asks the big question: Do the monkeys hold the copyright to those photos, since the owner of the camera clearly stated he didn't take the snaps? A must-read.

Link: Monkeys Don't Do Fair Use; News Agency Tells Techdirt To Remove Photos

The "7 Rules of Viral Videos" (via @fastcompany)

I strongly dislike the viral video term (you create something and it may"go viral," but you can't create a "viral video," IMHO). That said, some interesting thoughts in here from Tim Washer at Cisco who has had lightning strike multiple times. Here's the link, via Fast Company.

 

How the Enterprise Can Use Google+

For the past few days, I've been neck-deep in Google+. There's a lot of potential here for business. Some thoughts, by enterprise function.

Marketing
There's going to be plenty of punditry by the social media echo chamber over the coming days and weeks that will mirror the things we saw regarding Facebook ca. 2007-2009 or so. The summary: the same folks who are doing things to promote their schtick using Facebook will do the same thing on Google+. There will be brand pages and the like, someone will figure out how to do contests, there will be a host of activity metrics ("how many people have added your brand to their Circles?") and the like. While this area is going to get the most noise out of the gate, this is _not_ where the value is going to be found.

Demand Generation / Leadgen
Here things start to get interesting. Google Analytics already has brilliant tools for tracking things from "first interaction" all the way through the time someone engages in a transaction. That's the state of the art today. With tweaks in a couple of directions, G+ and Analytics start to get very compelling. First off, being able to track posts and their resulting activities in G+ and have those show up in Google Analytics is a no-brainer. Secondly, this starts to really be a graceful foray toward the enterprise side of Social CRM. Today, an organization's lead generation metrics might stop at "conversions," where a prospect turns into a customer. With an integration between G+ and Analytics, however, that historical funnel (which oftentimes ends at the transaction) can actually turn into a way to understand the long-term interactions with an individual, all the way from first contact (she +1'd a post or left a comment), through a host of conversations over days, weeks or months, through a transaction, and then *beyond* into ongoing conversations that take place _after_ the transaction. There's a lot of potential here.

HR
If you're an HR pro, especially on the recruiting side, the opportunity to set up Circles is a means to connect up with the individuals with whom you'd like to develop a closer relationship is a great opportunity. If you have a number of open positions, you could even set up a Circle for each one, and, as you identify potential candidates for each position, include those individuals in the appropriate Circles as a means by which to start to get to know them better.

Design and Innovation
This is a place where I think Sparks may come in to play, as well as Circles. If there are topics of interest that may spark (see what I did there?) expanded thinking in an area, setting up a Spark for that topic to get an evergreen feed of ideas and inspiration. More tactically, you can set up as wide or as targeted a group of counselors/advisors/folks-to-bounce-ideas-off-of as needed that contains folks from both within and outside the organization. Then, when you have a few candidate ideas to solve a design problem, share the options with that Circle to get feedback.

Sales
This one is a no-brainer. Set up a Circle with your customers and prospective customers and partners in it. Call it "Customers." Check it at least once a day to keep a true pulse of when the individuals who are most important to you are saying. Engage in conversations.

General internal collaboration
I think this is going to be a killer app for the organizations that have the foresight to use G+ in this way. Set up a Circle that just contains the members of your team, or (depending on organization size) perhaps your entire organization. Keep a Hangout open for that Circle for serendipity. Share items and links of _internal_ value that you've found externally with that Circle. 

Additionally, you can always choose to _only_ share a post with a single individual, as well as easily fire up a chat session. In this mode, G+ becomes a very viable means of setting up an IM session between members of the organization.

Bottom line
I think there's a lot here for the enterprise beyond social media marketing. So what did I miss? How else might enterprises use the G+ capabilities as they progress further along the social engagement journey?

UPDATE (7/5/11):

Two related posts:

GigaOm: Why Google+ Could Find A Home in the Workplace

Forbes: GooglePlus, Consumerization of IT, and Crossing The Chasm For Enterprise Social Business